As Hartman worked on the book, she thought of her maternal grandmother, Berdie. She had gone to college to be a teacher, but became pregnant with Beryle, and her parents threw her out of the house, raising the child themselves.
Families like Beryle’s, striving for respectability in a racist world, would have been embarrassed to acknowledge women who had children out of wedlock—let alone those who did sex work or had female lovers. “There is a certain kind of uplift and progress narrative that was saying, ‘Oh, no, no, don’t waste any time thinking about the past. Move on. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps,’” Hartman said. In “Wayward Lives,” though, women like these are “sexual modernists, free lovers, radicals, and anarchists.” They are visionaries, imagining a different way of life.
Hartman’s rethinking of the archive has enormous appeal for readers hungry to see their identity—feminist, queer, gender-nonconforming—mirrored inthe past. Part of the book’s argument is that Black women originated a set of social arrangements that were once considered deviant and are now commonplace: expansive notions of family, generous intimacy and sociality, fluid romantic relationships. Black women, Hartman says, have often operated outside of gender norms, whether they wanted to or not. During slavery, they had little control over their children or their reproduction. Afterward, poverty and discrimination forced them to do things that few white women did: work for wages, lead households, and enter and leave marriages freely. If they could not meet expectations set by white men, that allowed them to conduct experiments in living. The poet and theorist Fred Moten told me, “Saidiya does the very crucial work of expanding our understanding of the Black radical tradition,” revealing that it is “fundamentally the work of working-class Black women and young Black girls.”
But the historian Annette Gordon-Reed, writing recently in the New York Review of Books, wondered if Hartman was projecting political aims onto people driven by necessity. She considered the case of Mattie Nelson, who, on the way to a sexual awakening, lost a baby in a teen-age pregnancy and was painfully abandoned by several male lovers. “If Nelson were given the choice between living a precarious life, depending upon men whom society prevented from realizing their potential, and being a wife and mother under circ*mstances available to white middle- and upper-class women, there is no reason to assume she would not have opted for the latter,” Gordon-Reed wrote. “We live after a sustained critique of bourgeois values and lifestyles, decades in the making. Nelson did not.” For Hartman, though, rebels don’t need to be motivated by ideology, or even to consider themselves revolutionaries. “Many of the people who have produced radical thought have not been imagined to be involved in the task of thinking at all,” she said.
In March, “Wayward Lives” won the National Book Critics Circle Award—for criticism, rather than for nonfiction or fiction. No one seemed sure how to categorize it. “The book has had a very complex reception,” Hartman told me. “I’ve been exploring the same set of critical questions since the beginning. But some people in the university world are, like, ‘“Scenes of Subjection” is the real thing. What are these other two books?’” Her publisher, W.W.Norton, had hoped for higher sales, and Hartman wondered if the book’s marketing was partly to blame. The U.S. edition was published with extensive endnotes, and the interplay of factual and speculative sections may have confused readers new to her work. Her British publisher, Profile Books, classified “Wayward Lives” as both literature and history; it cut the endnotes and put them online, allowing the book to be read as creative nonfiction rather than as scholarship. “Some people told me, ‘Oh, I like that novel,’” Hartman said, laughing. “I’m so unfaithful to genre, so it was fine.”
“The neighbor’s kids are playing one-on-one.” Cartoon by Drew Panckeri Link copied
But Hartman rejects the idea that her books should be understood as historical fiction. Instead, she calls her work a “history of the present”—writing that examines the past to show how it haunts our time. Many of her peers were engaged in the same project, she said; she points to the Canadian writer M.NourbeSe Philip’s “Zong,” a book of poems, extrapolated from legal documents, about a hundred and fifty Africans who were drowned on a British slave ship, so that the owners could collect an insurance payment.
For several decades, Black female scholars like Hortense Spillers, Sarah Haley, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Tera Hunter, Farah Griffin, and Deborah Gray White have been creatively reading the archive, reconstructing the experiences of Black women using such alternative sources as cleaning manuals, Black newspapers, musical productions, and buried correspondence. Hartman sees her work as “enabled” by these women. But, she says, “the people who I really felt provoked and solicited by have been creative writers, the novelists and poets who are making other kinds of stories.” Her inspirations include Caryl Phillips, Jamaica Kincaid, and, especially, Toni Morrison, whose novel “Beloved,” inspired by a single newspaper clipping, was a painstaking effort to deepen the archive.
In 1987, the year that “Beloved” was published, Morrison wrote of a process of “emotional memory” that aimed to find truth in the gaps of verifiable fact. “They straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places,” she wrote. “It is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that.”
In “Wayward Lives,” a chorus girl at a Harlem night club finds herself in the luxurious apartment of A’Lelia Walker, the daughter of the Black hair-care entrepreneur MadamC.J. Walker. The girl, Mabel Hampton, sees men and women—“voyeurs, exhibitionists, the merely curious, queers, the polyamorous, and the catholic”—stretched out on silk pillows. They are drinking champagne, eating caviar, and smoking marijuana; to Hampton’s surprise, they are also having sex out in the open.
Walker—who, Hartman writes, “drank excessively, played cards with her intimates, gorged on rich food”—arrives late but makes an impression:
She conversed with her guests, wearing a little silk short set, but it might as well have been an ermine coat; she had the bearing of a queen, and wore the flimsy little outfit with a stately air. Even without her infamous riding crop, there remained something forbidding and dangerous about her.
The scene is rooted in archival fact; historians agree that Walker had queer friends, threw decadent parties, and hosted salons during the Harlem Renaissance. In an interview in 1983, Hampton recalled attending a sex party in the early twenties. “There was men and women, women and women, and men and men,” she said. “And everyone did whatever they wanted to do.” But the vivid specificity of Hartman’s portrayal drew criticism.
“I’m uncomfortable with people making claims and drawing conclusions,” A’Lelia Bundles, a journalist who is Walker’s great-granddaughter, told me, “just because they want to project something onto her.” Bundles, who has published several books about Walker andis working on a new biography, said that Hartman had not consulted her or examined Walker’s letters. She disputedthe detail of the riding crop, which suggested that Walker was interested in S&M; in Bundles’s photographic archive of Walker, she never carried a crop. A private sex party “would have not been impossible,” Bundles said. But her research made it seem unlikely that Walker would have led such a visibly queer life.
Hartman said that she never interviews her subjects’ relatives, and pointed out that the crop appeared in earlier historians’ work. She believes that the pushback revealed “an anxiety around queerness.” Her goal, she said, is “not about trying to pin down an identity, but thinking about the queer networks of love and friendship, and depending on the ephemera and rumors when the archive refuses to document these lives. So much of queer life could only survive without being detected.”
The historian and artist Nell Painter saw value in Hartman’s interrogation of the archive: “She can raise questions for historians to do historical work that they might not have thought of.” But, she told me, “her work is not history—it’s literature. She has a lot to say to history, but historians do something that’s somewhat different. We can’t make up an archive that doesn’t exist or read into the archive what we want to find.” Painter believes that there is still more evidence to be found about the history of Black life. “The past changes according to what questions we ask,” she said. “The archive is a living, moving thing. The sources we can put our eyes on are changing as we speak.”
All historians make imaginative leaps, but filling in blanks with precise details makes some uneasy. A fellow-academic and admirer of Hartman told me, “When it comes to specific people who lived real lives, I think fiction is the only place where we should speculate.”
Hartman tends to be less interested in honoring the archive than in considering “the way in which language and narrative and plot are entangled in the mechanisms of power.” She argues that much of what the archive contains about enslaved people was left by people whose views were so compromised as to be effectively made-up. “Fact is simply fiction endorsed with state power... to maintain a fidelity to a certain set of archival limits,” she said, at the Hammer Museum. “Are we going to be consigned forever to tell the same kinds of stories? Given the violence and power that has engendered this limit, why should I be faithful to that limit? Why should I respect that?”
As the coronavirus forced New York into lockdown, I visited Hartman’s corner office at Columbia, where she had begun teaching a seminar remotely. A framed print of Lorna Simpson’s photograph “Two Sisters and Two Tongues” leaned against a bookcase; outside, students in graduation gowns posed for distanced photos on the steps.
The university sprawls along the southern edge of Harlem, where Hartman once lived, in a housing project with her film-school boyfriend. (“My family was mortified,” she recalled.) I asked if she ever felt nostalgic when she went uptown. Looking out the window, she said, “It feels like a museum. All I see on the streets is private capital and rapaciousness, moving people of color out of New York.”
A few days later, Hartman and her family left for Massachusetts, where they have a home. When I spoke to her recently, she had been at her desk, working on a project that she prefers to keep secret. “I’m very superstitious about that,” she said, laughing. She would say only that it has to do with chronicling the history of the world from the perspective of Black women. She had also been gardening, rereading Morrison and Claudia Rankine, and watching “Greenleaf,” a TV melodrama about a Southern Black church, with her daughter.
