The Third Revolution

Abstract

As “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” endure as features of the black ordinary, widespread disillusionment with neoliberal statecraft has empowered white supremacist regimes across the West.1 Though its merits remain contested by many, Afro-pessimism—a theoretical and increasingly interdisciplinary conceptual intervention—indicts humanist scholars’ failure to account for the brutal imaginations that persist into the twenty-first century.2 This assertion of scholars David Marriott, Jared Sexton, Frank B. Wilderson III, and others—that social death is a defining, ontological characteristic of the black—builds on the interventions of Frantz Fanon, Lewis Gordon, Saidiya Hartman, Orlando Patterson, and Hortense Spillers, among others. Younger scholars such as Patrice Douglass and John Murillo III, whose intellectual trajectories have been radically influenced by the proposition that black social death is the metaphysical guarantor of modernity and the subject writ large, have emerged as preeminent innovators in black studies. While Afro-pessimism’s detractors are admittedly diverse in their disagreement, from cultural workers and political economists dismayed by the analytic decentralization of identity and labor to humanists spooked by the suggestion of an irresolvable antagonism, none can deny that what began as a “highly technical dispute in a small corner of the American academy,” per Jared Sexton, continues to problematize assumptions that have bolstered studies of political economics, philosophy, and race since the eighteenth century.3One voice among the growing chorus of activists, artists, organizers, and scholars throughout the black diaspora who insist that modernity depends on the prohibition of black self-possession, unsettling liberal fictions of progress and conservative nostalgia for the past alike, belongs to Christina Sharpe. In her 2016 work In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe suggests that black scholars of slavery and its afterlife are expected “to discard, discount, disregard, jettison, abandon, and measure” ways of knowing the world born “from and of the everyday” to produce work that is decidedly expository and legible, no matter what epistemic antiblackness this enacts.4 If one is to journey through the archives of slavery, to actively “sit in the room with history”5 without reproducing the terms of engagement that prohibit black freedom at all costs, she suggests: “We must become undisciplined.”6 The primary aim of the demand Sharpe notes—to forfeit the intimate, psychic, and social worlds of black people in approaching any study of the world—is not legible scholarship or progressive narratives of history, though these are certainly consequences. The most severe effect of this forfeiture is the incapacitation of the black imagination as it disrupts and provokes across time and space, discipline and practice. While forging new methods of researching, witnessing, and writing that understand black death to be “a predictable and constitutive aspect”7 of the United States and take for granted blackness as “the ground of terror’s possibility globally”8 will not resurrect the dead, raze prisons, or alone destroy our “cognitive schema”9 of captivity, the need to cultivate another world, one where suffering and proximity to death are not the (constitutively) sole promises of black life, is as critical as ever. A central question that scholars of black studies like Sharpe find themselves asking is, What constitutes a pedagogy and practice of bearing the baring of black life and death?The most recent evincement of this undisciplined rigor is Saidiya Hartman’s third monograph, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. Hartman’s first opus on black life in the twentieth century, Wayward Lives presents a revelatory history of young black women’s attempts to construct and sustain intimate lives in New York and Philadelphia at the beginning of the twentieth century. The text is unprecedented in its attention to the intimate post-Reconstruction worlds young black women created for themselves amid the influx of black people to northern US cities. Hartman argues that these women, in open rebellion against the reconfigured and respectable regime of antiblack terror that characterized the North, yearned to live a life unconstrained by the enduring threat of violence. Hartman shows how black women’s fashioning of something like a free life underneath and against the expanding carceral state at the turn of the century cannot be reduced to pitiful resignation, acquiescent daydreaming, sanguine scheming, or outright rebellion. Their responses to the yoke that marked this historical era of black life—a newfound responsibility for their bodies and reconfigured yet familiar brutality—were new forms of kinship and sociality that satiated their longing and kept alive their desires for a world in excess of the one they had survived.Black women courted dapper hustlers and shapely dancers, raised children alone, retained permanent partners and transient lovers, and lived with friends, admirers, and spendy sponsors. They straddled the corner and one another. They fucked for pleasure, made love for money, and refused to placate the monied and moralist reformers who shamed them to hell for it. The insubordinate envisioning and fleeting actualization of this impossible living is the subject of Hartman’s inventive narration. The text is presented in three parts: book 1, “She Makes an Errant Path through the City”; book 2, “The Sexual Geography of the Black Belt”; and book 3, “Beautiful Experiments.” Each book is subdivided into sections (four in book 2, eight in books 1 and 3) ranging from dialogical imaginings of queer intimacy and sociological extraction in Philadelphia tenements to prosaic demonstrations of antiblackness’s atemporal and material force on the lives of black women in Harlem.“After the slave ship and the plantation, the third revolution of black intimate life unfolded in the city” (wl, 61). Historians have failed to properly recognize the young black women who lived in this era as “sexual modernists, free lovers, radicals, and anarchists” or to “realize that the flapper was a pale imitation of the ghetto girl.” Wayward Lives charts new ground in black studies and studies of twentieth-century US history by illuminating how “the revolutionary ideals that animated [the] ordinary lives” of black women permeated black urban life at the turn of the century (wl, xv). The putrid alley, the stifling tenement hallway, the simple and tidy bedroom, the lush and electric Savoy Ballroom: each geography was a laboratory for their experiments in living as if they were free. Hartman asserts that black women’s refusal to accept asterisked motherhood, civic disenfranchisement, domestic servitude, social scandalization, and the quotidian violence that sustained these projects was part of a larger social transformation that fueled white panic over the incursion of free blacks fleeing the South. These women did not arrive contagious or bloodthirsty; they were desperate to grasp hold of their bodies “emptied of self-interpretation,”10 not to redress slavery’s violence but to address the desires slavery sought to obliterate. Theirs, Hartman writes, “was a struggle without formal declarations of policy, slogan, or credo,” simply “to wander through the streets of Harlem, to want better than what she had, and to be propelled by her whims and desires was to be ungovernable” (wl, 230). While the text is primarily concerned with how intimate desire and the longing-to-be compelled these women to create unorthodox assemblages and lead renegade lives, this third revolution it presents is homonymous: revolution, the forcible overthrow of a government or social order; revolution, the movement of an object in a circular course. Black women arrived to the docks and depots of the North tender and eager to choose a lover and wild and afraid of touch. They arrived stately, demoralized, sober, smiling, alone, crying, pregnant, and patient, with few possessions and fewer plans. They arrived as ungeographic embodiments of “ontological terror.”11 Metaphysically promiscuous. Wayward and ready. “The first generation after slavery had been so in love with being free that few noticed or minded that they had been released to nothing at all,” Hartman writes. “They didn’t yet know that the price of the war was to be exacted from their flesh” (wl, 143).The text’s attention to the lifeworlds black women created for themselves—worlds whose archival traces are generally limited and varyingly contorted, obscured, sublimated, or altogether erased—has been described by Hartman as a “labor of regard.”12 “I have pressed at the limits of the case file and the document, speculated about what might have been, imagined the things whispered in dark bedrooms, and amplified moments of withholding, escape and possibility, moments when the vision and dreams of the wayward seemed possible” (wl, xv). The regard at the heart of this imaginative project is clear from the beginning, as the text opens with a note on method and subsequent “cast of characters,” mostly black women. The names of Mattie Jackson, “a fifteen-year-old newly arrived in New York from Hampton, Virginia,” and Mabel Hampton, “chorine, lesbian, working-class intellectual, and aspiring concert singer,” are recorded alongside those of Ella Baker, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, and white reformers Mary White Ovington and Helen Parrish (wl, xviii, xxi). Substantial archival research gives way to a discerning third-person limited narration, while Hartman’s cross-textual citation and curation of diary entries and found correspondence produces startlingly authentic and coherent voices, each one its own chorus fat with knowledge wrought by generations of black women artists, historians, organizers, and theoreticians.13“In the slum, everything is in short supply except sensation,” begins the first book, a sweeping survey of black women’s intimate lives and political imagining in New York and Philadelphia during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. This sensorial excess or felt surplus cannot be captured by the journalists that roam the alleyways hoping to steal a glimpse of the dark ghetto. Hartman critiques white reformists’ scopophilic representations of the black urban poor at the turn of the century. The neighborhoods young black women inhabited were imaged as barren waste worlds of concrete and excrement, clotheslines and crowded rooms. “These photographs extended an optic of visibility and surveillance that had its origins in slavery and the administered logic of the plantation” (wl, 21). Another image: a young black girl, no older than six or seven, nude on the couch of realist painter Thomas Eakins. “To do more than recount the violence that deposited these traces in the archive,”14 Hartman reprints the exposed body of the child, annotating over it. “It was not the kind of image I was looking for when I set out to tell the story of the social revolution and transformation of intimate life that unfolded in the black-city-within-the-city” (wl, 17). Rather than pivot away from the terrible meaning of this find, the text keeps vigil with the unnamed girl before the page is turned, the terror in her face a historic artifact, her future a mystery. “Her body was already marked by a history of sexual defilement, already branded as a commodity” (wl, 29).This experiment in “black annotation” begins Hartman’s reimagining.15 The availability of black girls and women to be abused, manipulated, and violated—and the violence that secured it—was not a geographic phenomenon. Intimate life in the black city was not an escape from the terror of the South but a competing vision, an experiment in the unceasing activity of fleeing that which follows you.16 W. E. B. Du Bois makes an appearance, arriving in 1896 to diagnose the body of black urbanity and ease the social malaise arising in Philadelphia before the Seventh Ward became a den of suffering. At the time of his famed research, the Negro quarter “was not yet a zone of racial enclosure characterized by extreme deprivation and regular violence. It was not yet a reserve for the dispossessed and those regulated as fungible, disposable, surplus, and not quite human. The ghetto was not yet a foregone conclusion” (wl, 94). This does not prevent Du Bois from writing off the social rearrangements black women commenced as erroneous depravity attributable to slavery. The pleasure that preempted the next disaster was palpable: a pair of young friends giddily window shopping whom Du Bois eyed on his walk home, a raucous card game tempered by the latest gossip and last night’s hangover. Du Bois’s brief but rich appearance in the first book finds him canvassing and coming up against black women distrustful of his tailored threads and nosy questions. He encounters a woman who asks: “Are we animals to be dissected by an unknown Negro at that?” He records her snub: “unwilling to respond” (wl, 100). The refusal Du Bois discovers in Philadelphia disappoints him, but the real-time reimagining of intimate life—unmarried lovers, breadwinning wives—terrifies him. “Looking at the trail of exhausted women plodding their way home, he feared for the future. The world had released these women to an awful fate. He trembled at the sight of them” (wl, 98).Equally incapable of registering the reckless appetite for another world that propelled black women through the cityscape alive and intent on living was wealthy Quaker reformer Helen Parrish, founder of Philadelphia’s Octavia Hill Association. Parrish struggled to wrangle the young women residing in the housing she had purchased to rent to black people. Hartman brings Parrish (and her antagonistic residents) to life on the page as they unrepentantly maintain numerous lovers and belligerently dismiss her appeals to collect rent. “I don’t care what the book say. We don’t owe nothing,” yells Franny Fisher, “a middle-aged woman who drinks herself to death.” Parrish responds by threatening to evict Fisher. To be depraved was one thing, but how dare a black woman be thankless? Their refusal to be possessed by one man, husband or not, outpaced and outwitted Parrish’s bleeding heart and the coercion seeping from it. “This was the trouble with Negroes—the law did not determine what was right and wrong in their eyes, as if they could live outside or oppose it. . . . [They] insist that no paper can decide if a thing is right or wrong, no paper can stall the matter of truth” (wl, 147). Though white people frequently expounded on black debts to whites, the nation, and themselves, Hartman images black women refusing to pay up (wl, 124). What good was financial solvency when one owed a debt that could never be paid? Might leaning into the illicit excess of their flesh yield an alternative vision of what they were truly due?In the second book Hartman explores how black women living in the aftermath of slavery maneuvered a “normative horizon” of sexual violence toward the fulfillment of their desires—in the process transforming everyday life in the city.17 The book begins with the fabulated love story of May Enoch and Arthur “Kid” Harris, spun from newspaper articles and court trial transcripts. May has left her “proper husband” in Philadelphia and arrived in New York with Kid, a Virginian by way of Jersey. “It was only their second week in New York, so she didn’t yet know what the city would hold. Did it have anything to offer her, something better than Philly, or Newark, or D.C., or just the same but at a price more dear?” (wl, 163). While she waits for Kid outside a saloon, a white man grabs her arm. “No matter where you were there was always some white man you had to tell to get his hands off you. . . . When you were lost in reverie about the good life in the city, these hands suddenly appeared, as if always waiting to snatch you; the moment you let your guard down, they did exactly that” (wl, 164). After Kid approaches the man and stabs him to death, May is horrified to learn that the dead man is a cop, incriminating them both. “Her crime was moving through the city and taking up public space; his was the belief that he had the right to defend them from a white man’s violence” (wl, 166). With Kid on the run, all colored people in the city have his face for four days. Black men are pulled out of streetcars and beat in the street. Black women are dragged out of their homes nearly naked, clubbed, punched, and spat on. “The police did more harm than the mob” (wl, 172). Feverish cries ring out in the dark. “Kill every damn one of those niggers!” Faced with their fungibility, May is wracked with anger and guilt. “Was she responsible in the end because he tried to protect her? Was the blood of every Negro battered . . . to be blamed on her?” (wl, 168).This anecdotal animation performed throughout the text shows how the strain of surviving, let alone dreaming, “in the lexical gap between black female and woman” assaulted the interiors of black women (wl, 184). Still, they continued to refuse hopelessness or house service. Examples include the famed actress Edna Thomas—Hartman artfully details Thomas’s unlikely success and love affair with the British socialite Olivia Wyndham—and Gladys Bentley, the opulently masculine lesbian musician cast in Hartman’s speculative “Film Never Cast by Oscar Micheaux,” Mistah Beauty, the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Woman. Hartman’s narration of these audacious experiments mimes the acts themselves: a chance encounter satiates unspoken desire, the daily struggle fails to materialize another horizon. In the portraits of black women’s intimate lives offered by Hartman, the choices were few: one could bear the criminalization of their revolutionary imagination or move to break the circuit of subjection and impossible living. While their “survival was an achievement in a context so brutal,” escape remained an absurdly inapplicable verb for black women (wl, 237).As World War I raged on, the Black Belt continued to buckle as migrants only two generations removed from the plantation continued to arrive. This menace would be met with the institutional regulation of black sexuality. “Those who dared refuse the gender norms and social conventions of sexual propriety—monogamy, heterosexuality, and marriage—or failed to abide [by] the script of female respectability were targeted as potential prostitutes, vagrants, deviants, and incorrigible children. Immorality and disorder and promiscuity and inversion and pathology were the terms imposed to target and eradicate these practices of intimacy and affiliation” (wl, 221). The introduction of New York’s Wayward Minor laws indicted premarital sex, sodomy, and sex work as morally depraved, making these refusals punishable offenses. “Serial lovers, a style of comportment, a lapse in judgement, a failure of restraint, an excess of desire—these were not crimes in and of themselves, but indications of impaired will and future crime” (wl, 222). From 1882 to 1925 young women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one were “subject to the discretion of the magistrate as to whether to suspend sentence, offer probation or commit the accused to the reformatory or other appropriate institutions” (wl, 222). Teenage black girls convicted under these statutes received indeterminate sentences of three years, while women convicted of prostitution were sentenced to a few months at the workhouse (wl, 223). On being arrested in a “disorderly house,” the jazz legend Billie Holiday lied about her age to secure a four-month workhouse sentence, as opposed to years at the “reformatory.”The opening of the New York State Reformatory for Women in Bedford Hills, where much of the text’s final book takes place, coincided with the Tenement Housing Act of 1901, reforms devised by progressives hoping to eradicate immorality by improving the housing conditions of the poor. Eight years later the act was amended to define a vagrant as any woman who “knowingly resides in a house of prostitution or assignation of any description in a tenement house or who commits prostitution or indecently exposes her person for the purpose of prostitution or who solicits any man or boy to enter a house of prostitution or a room in a tenement house for the purpose of prostitution” (quoted in wl, 251). In 1915 the only evidentiary requirement to make an arrest was an officer’s suspicion, rendering a woman’s perceived willingness to have sex at all a crime. In “Beautiful Experiments” Hartman considers how black women compromised and sabotaged “the mortification of the self” that prisons like Bedford Hills sought to engender (wl, 264). Close readings of mugshots and correspondence introduce a vivid imagining of the “noise strike” that the women of Bedford’s Lowell Cottage staged in December 1919, angry about the physical torture and harassment they experienced within its walls. The New York Tribune reported, “Almost every window of the cottage was crowded with Negro women who were shouting, angry and laughing hysterically” (quoted in wl, 279). Women threw mattresses and furniture, pounded on the walls, and set fires. They screamed and sang and wept. “For those within this circle, every groan and cry, curse and shout insisted slavery time was over. They were tired of being abused and confined: they wanted to be free” (wl, 285). Though this uprising was not unusual, it was unique in that word of it reached the outside world.In her article “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman asked, “What are the kinds of stories to be told by those and about those who live in such an intimate relationship with death?”18 A resounding tribute to “the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive” (wl, 228), Wayward Lives is an incredibly imaginative answer in content and form. The post-Reconstruction landscapes painstakingly reanimated and the stories therein offer singular glimpses at generations of black women commandeering their bodies in an effort to live antagonistically. If, as Sharpe writes, aspiration describes the violent and vital process of “putting and keeping breath in the black body,”19 then waywardness—“a practice of possibility at a time when all roads, except the ones created by smashing out, are foreclosed”—describes the dangerous project of remaining riotous, even at the expense of life and limb (wl, 228). Though the text uncovers the many ways that “pleasure warred with common sense, even self-preservation,” it also shows how any conception of black women’s sense and survival was predicated on normative terror (wl, 318). Accounting for the ambivalence attendant to this Hobson’s choice wherein violence faced the servile and seditious alike is no easy task. Kirkus Review remarked of Wayward Lives: “Sometimes Hartman’s rhetoric becomes a touch too high-flown, as if swept up in the exuberance of the fight for freedom, and interrogatives sometimes threaten to overwhelm declarative sentences.”20 Reconsidering Sharpe’s words on the expectation of black explication, I find this overwhelming of the declarative, where interrogatives articulate an irresolution that is equally sincere to the text’s author and characters, to be the pivotal success of the text.Wayward Lives is a history told from the hold of the ship so that we do not forget the stakes in asserting the archive of black women’s refusals to be denied all they could imagine.21 Those yearning for an absolution of the wayward or an indictment of black women who refused to fuck shit up in kind will be disappointed, as the text respects both the fiction of the archive and the historical interiority of black women, modeling what Jared Sexton imagines as a sensibility that does not “quest after the innocence which is denied me” but presumes it “because it’s truer than saying I’m innocent.”22 Theorizing from this lacuna or singularity where “there is disaster and possibility”23 might, Sexton suggests, induce a change of narrative or alter black people’s relation to the narrative we inherit. The unruly music and antichoreographic dancing that proceed from the window Hartman breaks open indict every spectator as a participant and provokes “a will to unsettle, destroy, and remake that is so forceful it takes your breath away, so palpable it makes you reel with pain” (wl, 348). After a career of inventively illuminating this world’s prohibition on black freedom dreams, Hartman has assembled a chorus that charges readers to decline or answer the call to end it.