A 5 pages essay with MLA format

ALSO BY SAIDIYA HARTMAN

Lose Your Mother

Scenes of Subjection

WA y-w A R D L I V ES , BEAUTIFUL

·E X P E R I M E N TS

Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls,

Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

SAIDIYA HARTMAN

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Independent Publishers Since 1923

Copyright © 2019 by Saidiya Hartman

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First published as a Norton paperback 2020

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Names: Hartman, Saidiya V., aut~or.

Title: Wayward lives, beautiful experiments : intimate histories of social upheaval/

Saidiya Hartman.

Description: First edition. I New York: W.W. Norton & Company, [2019] J Includes bibliographical references anc;I index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018043n8 I ISBN 9780393285673 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: African American young women-Social conditions-19th century, I

African American young women-Social conditions-20th century. I African American young women-Sexual behavior-History, I Single women-United States-Social conditions-19th century. I Single women-United States-Social conditions-20th century, I Urban women-United States-Social conditions-19th century. I Urban women-United States-Social conditions-20th century. I Sex customs-United

States-History, I Prostitution-United States-History. I Man woman relationships. Classification: LCC E185.86 .H379 2019 I DDC 305.48/896073-dc23

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FOR BERYLE AND VIRGILIO HARTMAN

WHO I MISS EVERY DAY.

FOR HAZEL CARBY,

WHO OPENED THE DOOR.

'

She was, she knew, in a queer indefinite way, a disturbing factor.

-NELLA LARSEN, Quicksand

A NOTE ON METHOD

At the turn of the twentieth century, young black women were in open rebellion. They struggled to create autonomous and beautiful lives, to escape the new forms of servitude awaiting them, and to live as if they were free. This book recreates the radical imagination and wayward practices of these young women by describing the world through their eyes. It is a narrative written from nowhere, from the nowhere of th_e ghetto and the nowhere of utopia.

Every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose per­ spective m�.tters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor. In writing this account of the wayward, I have made use of a vast range of archival materials to represent the every­ day experience and restless character of life in the city, I recreate the voices and use the words of these young women when possible and inhabit the intimate dimensions of their lives. The aim is• to convey the sensory experience of the city and to capture the rich landscape of black social life. To this end, I employ a mode of close narration, a style which places the voice of narrator and character in insepara­ ble relation, so that tl/.e visio'n, language, and rhythms of the way-

xiv A NOTE ON METHOD

ward shape and arrange the text. The itali�ized phrases and lines are utterances from the chorus. This story is told from inside the circle.

All the characters and events found in this book are real; none are invented. What I know about the lives of these young women has been culled from the journals of rent collectors; surveys and mono­ graphs of sociologists; trial transcripts; slum photographs; reports of vice investigators, social workers, and parole officers; inter­ views with psychiatrists and psychologists; and prison case files, all of which represent them as a problem. (Some ,of the names have been changed to protect confidentiality and as required by the use of state archives.) I have crafted a counter-narrative liberated from the judgment and classification that subjected young black women to surveillance, arrest, punishment, and confinement, and offer an account that attends to beautiful experiments-to make living an art-undertaken by those often described as promiscuous, reck­ le�s, wild, and wayward. The endeavor is. to recover the insurgent ground of these lives; to .exhume open rebellion from the case file, to untether waywardness, refusal, mutual aid, and free love from their identification as deviance, criminality, and pathology; to affirm free motherhood (reproductive choice), intimacy outside the institution of marriage, and queer and outlaw passions; and to illuminate the radical imagination and everyday anarchy of ordinary colored girls, which has not only been overlooked, but is nearly unimaginable.

Wayward Lives elaborates, augments, transposes, and breaks open archival documents so they might yield a richer picture of the social upheaval that transformed black social life in the twentieth century. The goal is to understand and experience the world as these young women did, to learn from what they know. I prefer to think of this book as the fugitive text of the way�ard, and it is marked by the errantry that it describes. In this spirit, I have pressed at the limits of the case file and the document, speculated about what might have been, imagined the things whispered i� dark bedrooms, and ampli-

· A NOTE ON METHOD xv

fied moments of withholding, escape and possibility, moments when the vision and dreams of the wayward seemed possible.

Few, then or now, recognized young black women as sexual mod­ ernists, free lovers, radicals, and anarchists, or realized that the flap­ per was a pal� imitation of the ghetto girl. They have been credited with nothing: they remain surplus women of no significance, girls deemed unfit for history and destined to be minor figures. This book is informed by a different set of values and recognizes the revolution­ ary ideals that animated ordinary lives. It explores the utopian long­ ings and the promise of a future world that resided in waywardness �nd the refusal to be governed.

The album assembled here is an archive of the exorbitant, a dream book for existing otherwise. By attending to these lives, a very unex­ pected story of the twentieth century emerges, one that offers an inti­ mate chronicle of black radicalism, an aesthetic al and riotous history of colored girls and their experiments with freed�m-a revolution before Gatsby. For the most part, the history and the potentiality of their life-World has remained unthought because no one could con­ ceive of young black women as social visionaries and innovators in the world in which these acts took place. The decades between 1890 and 1935 were decisive in determining the course of black futures. A revolution in a minor key unfolded in the city and young black women were the vehicle. This upheaval or transformation of black intimate life was the consequence of economic exclusion, material deprivation, racial enclosure, and social dispossession; yet it, too, was fueled by the vision of a future world and what might be.

The wild idea that animates this book is that young black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise.

The Anarchy of Colored Girls

Assembled in a Riotous Manner

E sther Brown did not write a political tract on the refusal to be governed; or draft a plan for mutual aid· or outline a memoir

. of her sexual adv.entures. A �anifesto of the �ayward-Own Nothing. Refuse the Given. Live on What You Need and No More. Get

Ready to Be Free-was not found among the items in her case file. She didn't pen any song lines: My mama says I'm reckless, My daddy says I'm wild, I ain't good looking, but I'm somebody's angel child. She didn't commit to paper her ruminations on freedom: With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how

can we speak of potentialities? The cardboard placards for the tumult and upheaval she incited might have said: "Don't mess with me. I am not afraid to smash things up." But hers was a struggle without formal declarations of.policy, slogan, or cr_edo. It required no party platform or ten-point program. Walking through the streets of New York, she and Emma Goldman crossed paths but failed to recognize each other. When Hubert Harrison encountered her in the lobby of the ·Renaissance Casino after he delivered his lecture on "Mar-

. '

riage Versus Free Love" for the Socialist Club, he noticed only that she had a pretty face and a big ass. Esther never pulled a soapbox onto the corner of r35th Street and Lenox Avenue to make ,fl speech

230 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

about autonomy, the global reach of the color line, involuntary ser­ vitude, free motherhood, or the promise of a future world, but she well understood that the desire to move as she wanted was nothing short of treason. She knew first-hand that the offense most punished by the state was trying to live free. 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. Her way of living was nothing short of anarchy.

Had anyone ever found the rough notes for reconstruction jotted in the marginalia of her grocery list or correlated the numbers cir­ cled most often in her dog-eared dream book with routes of escape not to be found in McNally's atlas or seen the love letters written to her girlfriend about how they would live at the end of the world, the master philosophers and cardholding radicals, in all likelihood, would have said that her analysis was insufficient, dismissed her for f�iling to understand those key passages in the Grundrisse about the ex-slave's refusal to work.and emphasized the limits of black femi­ nist politics. They have ceased to be slaves, but not in order to become wage labourers, she had amen-ed in enthusiastic agreement at all the wrong places, content with producing only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption and embraced wholeheartedly indulgence and idleness as the real luxury good.

What did untested militants and smug ideolog�es know of Truth . and Tubman? Unlike unruly colored women, they failed to recognize that experience was capable of opening up new ways, yielding a thou­ sand new forms and improvisations. Could they ever understand the dreams of another world that didn't trouble the. distin�tion between state, law, settler, and master? Or recount the struggle against servi­ tude, captivity, property, and enclosure that began in the barracoon and continued on the ship, where some fought, some jumped, some refused to eat. Others set the plantation and the fields on fire, poi-· soned the master. They had never listened to Lucy Parsons; they had never read Ida B. Wells. Or envisioned th,e riot as a rally cry

i f; i I,,:;·, :,{'

1'!,' '

I\'·.

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 231

and refusal of fungible life. Only a misreading of the key texts of anarchism· could ever imci.gine a place for wayward colored girls. No, Kropotkin never described black women's mutual aid societies or the chorus in Mutual Aid, although he imagined animal social­ ity in its rich varieties and the forms of cooperation and �utuaHty

232 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

fol\nd among ants, monkeys, and ruminants. Impossible, recalci-

trant domestics weren't yet in his view or anyone else's. So Esther

Brown's minor history ofinsurrection went unnoted until she was

apprehended by the police. (It would be a decade and a half before

Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke wrote their essay, "The Bronx Slave

Market," and over two decades before Claudia Jones's "An End to

the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman.") The revolt of

black women against "the personal degradation of their work" and

"unjust labor conditions," expressed itself in militant refusals: msol- ·

diering,' sullenness, petty pilfering, unreliability, and fast and fruit-

less changes of masters." Yet it had no chronicler. None responded

to the call to write the great servant-girl noveL

It is not surprising that a Negress would be guilty of conflating idleness with resistance or exalting the struggle for mere survival or

confusing petty acts for insurrection or imagining that a minor fig-

ure might be cap~ble of some significant shit or mistaking laziness

and inefficiency for a gen~ral strike or recasting theft as a kind of

cheap socialism for too-fast girls and questionable women or esteem-

ing wild ideas as radical thought. At best, the case of Esther Brown

provides another example of the tendency to exaggeration and excess

that is common to the race (and further proof of the fanciful think-

ing that mistakes loafing and shirking for embodied protest and a

flock of black girls at rest for radical assembly). Nobody remembers

the evening she and her friends raised hell on 132nd Street or turned

out Edmond's Cellar or made such a beautiful noise during the riot

that their screams and shouts were improvised music, so that even

the tone-deaf journalists from the New York Times described the

black noise of disorderly women as a jazz chorus.

Esther Brown hated to work, the conditions of work as much as the

very idea of work. Her reasons for quitting said as much. Housework:

Wages too small. Laundry work: Too hard, ran away. General house-

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 233

work: Tired of work. Sewing buttons on shirts: Tired of work. Dish- washer: Tired of work. Housework: Man too cross. Live-in service: I might as well be a slave.

At age fifteen, when Esther left school, she experienced the vio-

lence endemic to domestic work and tired quickly of the demand to

care for others who didn't care for you. She ran the streets because

nowhere else in. the world was there anything for her. She stayed in

the streets to escape the suffocation of her mother's small apartment,

which was packed with lodgers, men who took up too much space

and who were too easy with their hands, men who might molest

a girl, then propose to marry her. She had been going around and

mixing it up for a few years, but only because she liked doing it. She

never went with men only for money. She was no prostitute. After

the disappointment of a short-lived marriage to a ~an who wasn't

her baby's father (he had offered to marry her, but she rejected his

'proposal), sh!:! went to live with her sister and grandmother, and they

helped raise her son. She had several lovers to whom she was bound by need and want, not by the law.

Esther's only luxury was idleness, and she was fond of saying to

her friends, "If you get up in the morning and feel tired, go back to sleep and then go to the theatre at night." With the support of

her sister and grandmother and help from friends, lovers, dates, and

consorts, she didn't need to work on a regular basis. She picked up

day work when she was in a pinch and endured a six-week stretch

of "Yes, Missus, I'll get to it" when coerced by need. So really, she

was doing fine and had nearly perfected the art ~f surviving without

having to scrape and bow .. She hated being a seryant, as did every

general house worker. Service carried the stigma of slavery; white

girls sought to avoid it for the same reason-it was nigger work, the

kind of hard, unskilled work no one else wanted the kind of work ' . that possessed the entire person, not just her labor-time but her life-

time. The servant in the house-the ubiquitous figure of the captive

maternal-was conscripted to be friend, hurse, ,confidan~e, nanny,

234 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

and bed-warmer. The insult was that she was expected to be grate-

ful, as if 'cooking and scrubbing w~re the colored woman's piano

day, as if her sole talents were the ability to "wash and iron until her

fingers bled and burned" and sacrificial devotion. Had her employers

suspected that the better the servant, the more severe the hatred of

th; mistress, Esther would not have been "entrusted to care for their

precious darlings."

Why should she toil in a kitchen or laundry in order to survive?

Why should she work herself to the bone? She preferred strolling

along Harlem's wide avenues to staying home and staring at four

walls, and enjoyed losing herself in cabarets and movie houses. The

streets offered .a display of talents and ambitions. An everyday cho-

reography of the possible unfolded in the collective movement, which

was headless and spilling out in all directions, strollers drifted en

masse, like a swarm or the swell of an ocean; it was a long poem of

black hunger and striving. It was the wild ru~h from house service on

the part of all who [could] scramble or run. It was. a manner of walking

that threatened to undo the city, steal back the body, break all the

windows. The people ambling through the block and passing time

on corners and hanging out on front steps were an assembly of the

· wretched and the visionary, the indolent and the dangerous. All the

modalities sing a part in this chorus, and the refrains were of infinite

variety. The rhythm and stride announced the possibilities, even if

most were fleeting and too often unrealized. The map of what might

be was not restricted f o the literal trail of Esther's footsteps or any- one else's, and this unregulated movement encouraged the belief that

something.great could happen despite everything you knew, despite

the ruin and the obstacles. What might be was unforeseen, and

improvisation was the art of reckoning with chance and accident. I .

Hers was an errant path cut through the heart of Harlem in search

of the open city, l'ouverture, inside the ghetto. Wandering and drift-

ing was bow she engaged the world and how she understood it; this

repertoire of practices composed her knowledge. Her thoughts were

THE ANARCHY OF COLORE.D GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 235

indistinguishable from the transirnt rush and flight of black folks in

this city-within-the-city. The flow of it carried everyone along, pro-

pelled and encouraged all to keep on moving,

.. As she drifted through the streets, a thous~nd ideas about who she

might be and what she might do rushed' into her head, but she was

uncertain what to make of them. Her thoughts were inchoate, frag-

mentary, wild. How they might become a blueprint for something

better was unclear. Esther was fiercely intelligent. She had a bright,

alert face and piercing eyes that announced her interest in the world.

This combined with a noticeabl~ pride made the seventeen-year-old

.appear substantial, a force in her own right. Even the white teachers

at the training school, who disliked her and were reluctant to give

a colored girl any undue praise, conceded that she was very smart,

although quick to anger because of too mu~h pride. She insisted on

being treated no differently from the white girls, so they said she had

a bad attitude. The problem was not her capacity; it was her attitude.

The brutality she experienced at the Hudson Training School for

Girls taught her to fight back, to strike out. The teachers told the

authorities that she had enjoyed too much freedom. It had ruined

her and made her into the kind of young woman who would not hes-

itate to smash things up. Freedom in her hands, if not a crime, was an

offense, and a threat to public order and moral decency. Excessive

liberty had ruined her. The social worker concurred, "With no soci~l

considerations to constrain her, she was ungovernable."

Esther Brown longed for another world. She was hungry f~r more,

for otherwise, for better. She was hungry for beauty. In her case,

the aesthetic wasn't a realm separate and distinct from the daily

· challenges of survival; rather, the aim was to make an art of sub-

sistence. She did not try to cr~ate a poem or song or painting. What

she created was Esther Brown. That was the offering, the bit of art,

that could not come from any other. She would polish and hone that. She

236 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

would celebrate that every day something had tried to kill her and failed. She would make a beautiful life. What is beauty, if not "the intense

sensation of being pulled toward the animating force of life?" Or the

yearning "to bring things into relation ... with a kind of urgency as

· though one's life depended upon it." Or the love of the black ordi-

nary? Or the capacity to make what we do and how we do it into sus- tenance and shield? What Negro doesn't know that a few verses of

song might be capable of stoking the hunger to live, might be the

knowledge of freedom that leads you out of the enclosur~? Brings

you back from the dead or kills you a second time? Who could fail to

understand seeking a way out, inhabiting a loophole of retreat, and

escaping the imposed life as anything else, anything but beautiful? To the eyes of the world, Esther's wild thoughts,, her dreams of

an otherwise, an elsewhere, her longing to escape from drudgery

were likely to lead to tumult and upheaval, to open rebellion. She

didn't need a husband or a daddy or a boss telling her what to do.

But a young woman who flitted from job to job and lover to lover

was considered immoral and likely to become a threat to the social

order, a menace to society. The police detective said as much when

he arrested Esther and her friends.

What the law designated as crime were the forms of life created by

young black women in the city. The modes of intimacy and affil-

iation being fashioned, the refusal to labor, the ordinary forms of

gathering and assembly, the practices of subsistence and making do

were under surveillance and targeted not only by the police but· also

by the sociologists and the reformers who gathered the information

and made the case against them, forging their lives into tragic biog-

raphies of crime and pathology. Subsistenc~-the art of scraping by

and getting over-entailed an ongoing struggle to live in a context in

which deprivation was taken for granted and domestic work or gen-

eral housework defined the only opportunity available to black girls

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 237

and worrien. The acts of the wayward-the wild thoughts, reckless

dreams, interminable protests, spontaneous strikes, riotous behavior,

nonparticipation, willfulness, and bold-faced refusal-redistributed

the balance of need and want and sought a line of escape from debt

and dui:y in the attempt to create a path elsewhere.

Mere s.urvival .was an achievement in a context so brutal. How

could one enhance life or speak of its potentialities when confined

in the ghetto, when subjected daily to racist assault and insult, and

conscripted to servitude? How can I live?-It was a question Esther reckoned with·every day. Survival required acts of collaboration and

genius, guessing at the unforeseen. Esther's imagination was geared

toward the clarification of life-'1what would sustain material life

and enhance it, something that entailed more than the reproduction

of physical existence." The mutuality and creativity necessary to sus-

tain living in the context of intermittent wages, controlled depletion,

•-· economic exclusion, coercion, and antiblack violence often bordered

on the extralegal and the criminal. Esther's beautiful, wayward ·

experiments entailed an "open rebellion" against the world.

She had been working for two· days as a live-in domestic on Long

Island when she decided to return to Harlem to see her baby and

have some fun. It was the summer and Harlem was alive. She visited

her son and grandmother, but stayed at her friend Josephine's place

because she always had a houseful drinking and carousing. Esther

had planned to return to her job the next day, but one day stretched

into several. People tended to lose track of time atJosephine's place.

5 West 134th Street had a reputation as a building for lovers' secret

assignations, house parties, and gambling. The apartment was in

the thick of it, right off Fifth Avenue in the blocks of Harlem sub-

ject to frequent police raids .and tightly packed with crowded tene-

ments, which offered refuge to runaway domestics and recalcitrant

black girls; with as many as eight to ten persons cro~ded iiJ two

238 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

rooms, they flocked together forming transient communes, pooling

their meager resources and sharing dreams. She was playing cards

when Rebecca arrived with Krause, who said he had a friend he ·

wanted Esther to meet. She didn't feel like going out, but they kept

pestering her, and Josephine encouraged her to give it a try. Why not

have some fun?

Do you want to have a good time? Brady asked. Rebecca gave him

the once-over. Esther didn't care one way or the other. A smile and

the promise of some fun was all the encouragement Rebecca needed.

Krause would go anywhere as long as he could get a drink. Rebecca

took Brady's arm and the others followed, aimless but determined

to have a good time. If a man half-looked at her she would light up. ·Rebecca's free-floating lust was not directed at any one person. She

liked company as much as Esther, maybe even more. When she was

in school, the teachers often discovered her hiding out in a closet

or hallway, locked in a tight embrace and kissing some boy. She

had been "going a1;ound''.since she was fourteen or fifteen. Others ·

might have called her a "charity girl," because she acc~pted presents

from her friends. All the girls did. She hardly ever asked for money,

although there was no clear line between desire and nec~ssity. Sex

wasn't cordoned off from the need to live, eat, have a roof over your

head and clothes for you and your baby; it explained why the names

of lovers and husbands and baby's fathers were not the same. More

than anything else, Rebecca loved going to moving picture shows

and the theater, and her friends supported such pleasures. Rebecca

had moved in with Josephine after her man Dink caught her at the

picture show with another man. He cut her, but still pleaded his love,

saying if she would do right, then he'd marry her. But she wasn't one

of those He beats me too, what can I do? Oh my man I love him so kind

of women. Nobody owned her. As quick as she could pack up her

things, she moved out of the rented room where they had been living

for the past six months and walked a few blocks up Madison Avenue

to Josephine's place.

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 239

Brady didn't want to go to Josephine's place and said anywhere

else would do. A tenement hallway was as good as any lounge. In the

dark passage, Brady snuggled up with Rebecca, while his friend tried

to pair up with Esther. Krause asked Brady for fifty cents to go buy

some liquor. That was when Brady said he was a detective. Krause

took off quick, as if he knew what was coming as soon as the man

opened his mouth. He would have gotten away if Brady hadn't shot him in the foot.

At the precinct, Detective Brady charged Krause with white slav-

ery (the.trafficking of women or girls for the purposes of prostitution

. or debauchery) and Esther and Rebecca with violation of the Tene-

ment House Law. They were taken from the precinct to the Women's

Court at the Jefferson Market Courthouse for arraignment. Because

they were seventeen years old and had no previous offenses, they

were sent to the Empire Friendly Shelter while they awaited trial,

rather than being confined in the prison cells adjoining the Jefferson

courthouse. At the shelter, they cut up, dancing lewdly, cursing at

the other girls,· shouting at the windows to the people passing by,

clowning folks, noting the virtues and defects of strangers, berating

someone if he or $he daredto look offended.

-Who you trying to be all dressed up like Mrs. Astor's horse?

-Hey you, yeah you, this ain't Virginia looking like a field · hand in those clodhoppers.

-Off-brand nigger.

-You could ~uy that one for a quarter.

...:_ Hey baby, you can haul my ashes.

-That dicty bitch thinks she cute.

-What the hell you looking at?-,

-Hey sweet poppa, I could put a hurtin' on you.

Esther ,was considered the worse of the two. As an unwed mother,

she was deemed an outlaw, a pariah for procreating outside ,marriage

240 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

and bringing a nameless bastard into the world. Her parents had

set a better example than this. They had been married, but after

her father died, her mother and grandmother were forced to work

as live-in domestics, so she and her sister were sent to the Colored

Orphan's Asylum for four years .. There were rules and codes regu- .

lating the conditions under which children should be conceived and

she had violated those codes. She had "thrown herself away" and

given birth to. a chance creature. Pregnancy could be made a status

offense. Maternal neglect and improper guardianship were the eas-

iest ways to "catch a case" at the Society for the Prevention of Cru-

elty to Children, and protection was the fast route to the reformatory

and the prison.

A week of observing Esther and Rebecca's wild conduct was

enough to convince the social worker, an avowed socialist, that the

two young women should be sent away to be rescued from a life in the

streets. They were waiting to appear before the judge when Krause

sent word he was free. The detective failed to appear in court, so the

charges against him were dismissed. Esther and Rebecca wouldn't

be so lucky. It was hard to call the cursory proceedings and routine

indifference at the Women's Court a hearing, bec~use the court had

no jury, produced no written re·cord of the events, required no evi-

dence but the police officer's word, and failed to consider the inten-

tions of the accused, or even to require committing a criminal act.

The likelihood of future criminality, rather than any violation of.the law, determined their sentence. The magistrate judge barely looked

at the two colored girls before sentencing them to three years at the

reformatory.

Until the night of July 17, 1917, Esther Brown had been lucky and

eluded the police, although all the while she had been under their

gaze. Harlem was swarming with vice investigators and undercover

detectives and do-gooders who were all intent on keeping young

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 241

black women off the streets, even if it meant arresting every last

· one of them. Being too loud or loitering in the hallway of your build-

ing or on the front stoop was a violation of the law; making a date

with someone you met at the club, or arranging a casual hook up, or

running the streets was prostitution. The mere willingness to have

a good time with a stranger was sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.

The court, like the police, discerned in this exercise of will "a strug-

gle to transform one's existence," to stand against or defy the norms

of social order, and anticipated that this non-compliance and disobe-

dience easily yielded to crime. "The history of disobedience," enacted

. in every gesture and claimed in the way Esther moved through the world, announced her willingness "to be ruined by standing against

what is instituted as right by law."

The only way to counter the presumption of criminality and estab-

lish innocence was to give a good account of oneself. Esther failed to

~do this, as did many yourtg women who passed through th,~ court.

They failed to realize that the readiness or inclination to have a good

tiine was evidence enough to find them guilty of prostitution. It didn't

_matter that Esther _had not solicited Krause or asked for or accepted

any money. She assumed she was innocent, but the Women's Court

found otherwise. Esther's inability to give an account th.at would

justify and explain how she lived, or atone for her failures and devi-

ations, ·was among the offenses levied against her. She readily admit-

ted that she hated to work, not bothering to distinguish between the

conditions of work available to her and some ideal of work that she

and none she knew had e~er experienced. She was convicted because

,she was unemployed and "leading the life of a prostitute." One could

lead the life of a prostitute without actually being one.

With no proof of employment, Esther was indicted for vagrancy

under the Tenement House Law. Vagrancy was an expa~sive and vir-

tually ail-encompassing category; like the manner of walking in Fer- guson, it was a ubiquitous charge that made it easy for the police to

arrest and prosecute young women with no evidence of crime or act

242 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

of lawbreaking. In the 19ros and 1920s, vagrancy statutes were used

primarily to target young women for prostitution. To be charged was

to be sentenced because nearly 80 percent of those who appeared

before the magistrate judge were sentenced to serve time; some years

the rate of conviction was as high as 89 percent. It didn't matter

if it was your first encounter with the law. Vagrancy statutes and

the Tenement House Law made ·young black women vulnerable to

arrest. What mattered was not what you had done, but the prophetic

power of the police to predict the future, and anticipate·the mug shot

in the bright eyes and intelligent face of Esther Brown.

The first vagrancy statute was passed in England in 1394. The

shortage of labor in the aftermath of the Black Death inspired the

law. Its aim was clear: to conscript those who refused to work. The

vagrarn;:y laws of England were adopted in the North American col-

onies and invigorated with. a new force and scope after Emancipation

and the demise of Reconstruction. They replaced the Black Codes,

· which had been deemed unconstitutional. Vagrancy laws resurrected

involuntary servitude in guises amenable to the principles of liberty

and equality. In ~he south, vagrancy laws became a surrogate for slavery, forc-

ing ex-slaves to remain on the plantation and radically restricting

their movement. In the north, vagrancy statutes were intended to

· compel the labor of the idle, and, more importantly, to control the

propertyless, by denying them the right to subsist and elude the con-

tract. Those without proof of employment were considered likely

to commit or be involved in vice and crime. Vagrancy statutes pro-

vided the legal means to master th~ newly masterless. The origins of

the workhouse and the house of correction can be traced to these

efforts to force the recalcitrant to labor, to manage and regulate the

ex-serf and ex-slave when lordship and bondage assumed a more

indirect form.

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 243

Vagrancy was a status, not a crime. It was not doing, withholding,

nonparticipation, the refusal to be settled or bound by contract to

employer (or husband). Common law defined the vagrant as "some-

one who wandered about witho~t visible means of support." William

Blackstone in his 1765 Commentaries on the Law of England defined

vagrants as those who "wake on the night and sleep in the day and

· haunt taverns and ale-houses and roust about; and no man knows

from where they came or whither they go." The statutes targeted

those who maintained excessive notions of freedom and imagined

that liberty included the right not to work. In short, vagrants were

· the deraci~ated-migrants, wanderers, fugitives, displaced persons,

a11:d strangers.

Status offenses were critical to the remaking of a racist order in

the aftermath of Emancipation and they accelerated the growing

disparity between black and white rates of incarceration in north-

ern cities at the beginning of the twentieth century. While the legal

transformation from slavery to freedom is most often narrated as

the shift fr.om status to race, from property to subject, from slave to

Negro, vagrancy statutes make apparent the continuities and entan-

glements between a diverse range of unfree states-from slave to ser-,, vant, from servant to vagrant, from domestic to prisoner, from idler

to. convict and felon. Involuntary servitude wasn't one condition-

chattel slavery-nor was it fixed in time and place; rather, it was an

ever-changing mode of exploitation, domination, accumulation (the

severing of will, the theft of capacity, the appropriation of life), and

confinement. Antiblack racisfll fundamentally shaped the develop-

ment of "status criminality." In turn, status criminality was tethered

ineradicably to blackness.

Esther Brown was confronted with a choice that was no choice at

all: Volunteer for servitude or be commanded by the law. Vagrancy

statutes were implemented and expanded to conscript youf\g colored

2,14 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

women to domestic work and regulate them in proper households-

most often white homes, or male-headed households, with a proper

he, not merely someone pretending to be a husband or merely outfit-

ted like a man, not lovers passing for sisters or a pretend Mrs. shack-

ing up with a boarder, not households comprised of three women and

a child. For state authorities, black homes were disorderly houses

because they were marked by the taint of promiscuity and illegality.

The domestic was the locus of prostitution and criminality. Is this

man your husband? Where is the father of your child? Why is your

child unattended? Such questions, if not answered properly, might

land you in the workhouse or reformatory. The discretionary power

granted the police in discerning future crime would have an enormous

impact on black social life and the making of a new racial order.

The letter her ex-husband sent didn't say if the article appeared in \

the metro column of the,Amsterqam News or the "New York City

Brief" in the Chicago Defender or the City News section 9f the New

York Herald, in which event only a few lines dedicated to the when,

where, and how would have appeared, just the cold, hard facts. It h

would not have been a showy or sensationalist headline like "Silks

and Lights Blamed for Harlem Girls' Delinquency" or "Lure for

Finery Lands Girl in Jail" or a lead story of moral crisis and sexual

panic manufactured by vice commissions and urban reformers. If the details were especially sordid, a column or two might be devoted to'

the particulars of a young woman's fall.

All her ex-husband said was that "a rush of sadness and disbe-

lief" had washed over him as he tried to figure out how his Esther,

his baby, had come to be involved in such trouble. He encouraged

her to be a good girl and he' promised to take care of her when she

was released, something he had failed to do in the few months they

lived together as husband and wife in her mother's home. Now that

it was too late, he was trying to be steady. The letter was posted on

THE ANA.RCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER. 245

•• .. · l Ori ACTlVESE.RVICE.WfTH ,·,·• Alt'IERICAtt/EXPEOITIONARY fORtt~ ...

U.S. Army stationery and it was filled with assurances about his love,

promises about trying to be a better man, and pleading that she try to

do better. You will not live happy, he cautioned, until [your] wild world

end. He hoped she had learned a long lost lesson in the wild world of fun

and pleasure. \

Esther's grandmother and sisters didn't know she had been

arrested until they saw her name in the daily paper. They were in

246 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

disbelief. It wasn't true. It couldn't be. Anyone in Harlem could tell

you that stool pigeons were paid to lie. Everyone knew Krause was

working for the cops. He would sell his own mama for a dollar: Sto-

ries appeared in the newspapers about stool pigeons framing inno-

cent young women and matrons, sometimes to extort money from

them or to be paid directly by the police for their service. Besides, if

anyone was to blame for Esther's trouble, her grandmother thought,

it was her mother, Rose. She was jealous of the girl, mostly because

of the attention paid to Esther by the men boarding in the rented

rooms of her flat. Rose was living with one of them as her husband,

although the relation, properly speaking, was outside the bounds

of the law.

When Rose heard the news of her daughter's arrest, it confirmed

what she believed: The girl was headed for trouble. Some time in the

country and not running the streets might steady her, she confided to

the social worker, tipping the hand that would decide her daughter's

fate. What passed for maternal concern was a long list of complaints

about Esther's manner of living. Rose told the colored probation

officer, Miss Grace Campbell, that her daughter had "never worked

more than six weeks at a time and usually stayed- in a place only a

couple of weeks." She just wouldn't stay put or keep a job. She had

a good husband and she left him. She was young and flighty and did

not want to be tied down to one husband, one man, any man. What

more· was there to say? Esther just wanted to have her own way.

The neighbors told a different story. The mother is the one wh~

needed to be sent away. Everyone ~new Rose Saunders consorted

with one of the men who lodged in her apartment. "What kind of

example is that for a girl? That's no straight road."

The letter from Esther's girlfriend was nothing like her husband's.

It didn't plead for her to be a good girl or beg her to leave the wild

world behind or caution her to take the straight road, but reminded

her instead of all the pleasures awaiting her when she received her

free pa~ers, not the least of these being Alice's love:

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 247

Dear Little Girl, Just a Jew lines to let you know that everything is o. k. I

suppose you think I was foolish to leave Peekskill but I could not stand the

work. {have not been used to working so hard when I leave Bedford and

why should I do so when I don't have to, you stay where you are as you

expect to live in New York when you are free . ... It will surprise you, I

am going to be married next month, not that I care much [for him] but

/or protection. I went to New York Sunday and seen quite a number of old

friends and heard all the scandal and then some .. .. New York is wide

open, plenty of white stuff & everything you want so cheer up there are

plenty of good tim,es in store /or you. So I must close with the same old love

. wishing you'well.

Within a few weeks of Esther's release, she and Alice reconnected

with their friend Harriet Powell. They crashed at her place until they

could find a place of their own. Harriet's mother welcomed both

girls, not caring that one of them was white. They enjoyed a wild

time in the city, making.up for the twenty-Jive months stolen, danc-

. ing until nearly dawn, going to the theatre and the movies, eating at

chop-suey joints, and keeping company with whoever they wanted,

at least until the parole officer found them. "Both w,ere free and nei-

ther good," Miss Murphy told their employer at the midtown hotel,

making sure that the head housekeeper knew exactly what kind of

girls they were. She began with the word dangerous.

Not quite two centuries after the conspiracy to burn down New

York was hatched at a black-and-tan dive called Hughson's Tav-

ern, the city's ruling elite still lived in fear of black assembly and

the threat of revolt. The state was no less intent on preventing the

dangers and consequences posed by Negroes assembled in a riotous

manner. In the eighteenth century, slaves and free blacks who gath-

ered in illegal assemblies were whipped. A 1731 "Law for Regulating

Negroes & Slaves in Night Time" prohibited Negro, Mulatto, or

248 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

'Indian slaves older than fourteen years old to be about at night with-

out a lantern or lighted candle so that they could be plainly seen.

No more than three slaves could meet together on penalty of being

whipped not more than forty lashes. For "playing or making any

hooting or disorderly noise" the penalty was twenty lashes. Every

social gathering provided an opportunity for potential conspiracy.

In the twentieth century, the unregulated movement and assem-

bly of black folks remained a matter of public safety. Gatherings

that were too loud or too unruly or too queer-or venues like hotels

and cabarets that welcomed black and white patrons; black-and-tan

dives frequented by Chinese men and white girls or black women

with Italian paramours or women who preferred dancing with each

other-were deemed disorderly, promiscuous, and morally depraved.

These forms of free association and open assembly threatened the .

public good by trangressing the color line and eschewing the dom-

inant mores. The governing elite, targeting this promiscuous soci-

ality, manufactured a moral panic to justify the extravagant use of-

police power.

Wealthy private citizens endowed with the authority of the state

and directing the police, ruled the Committee of Fourteen (the vice

commission comprised of rich New Yorkers and reformers) and ran

the State Board of Charities and State Prison Commission. One

of their central goals, beyond dominating the propertyless, was

to impose racial segregation in the absence of legislative decree at

the state or city level. Segregation was seen as a way to maintain

the health and morality of the social body and police power was

critical to achieving this goal. In the most general terms, police

power endows -the state with the capacity to regulate behavior and

enforce order in the service of the public good. Policing blackness

was deemed essential to ensuring the health of the social body and

minimizing danger. In the eyes of the city's ruling elite, racial seg-

regation was synonymous with the public good, and the imposition

of the color line a means of controlling crime by funneling prostitu-

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 249

tion, gambling, drugs, and other vice into black neighborhoods and

containing it there. In 1912, the Committee of Fourteen refused to grant the Mar-

shall Hotel a liquor license. It was a gathering spot for progressive

intellectuals, artists, and musicians. Paul Laurence Dunbar resided

there. W; E. B. Du Bois and Mary White Ovington and other mem-

bers of .the NAACP gathered there for conversation, for drinks, for

planning to undo the color line. A letter from Du Bois stating that

it was a respectable meeting place and assuring the committee that

there was nothing illegal or unseemly about the interracial encoun-

. ters and m~etings hosted there failed to sway the committee. The

Marshall Hotel was one of the few decent establishments in the city

that welcomed ot tolerated a mixed crowd. Du Bois was not able to

convince the committee that the 1\farshall Hotel was not a haunt

for the degenerate. Interracial intimacy and friendship across the

;olor line, not prostitution; were the issues with which the com-

mittee was most concerned. As the executive secretary, Frederick

Whitten, explained in his reply: The Marshall Hotel encouraged

"the unfortunate mixing of the races which when individuals are of

the ordinary class, always means danger." When Du Bois objected to

this moral defense of the color line, especially as it violated the civil

rights laws of New York state, the secretary only affirmed the com-

mittee's position: "If we find that the association of the two races under certain conditions results in disorderly conditions and their

separation results in discrimination based on rai:;e or color, we must

choose between the horns of the dilemma .... Disorderly is worse than

discrimination."

The Tenement House Law was the chief legal i1;1.strument for the surveillance and arrest of young black women as vagrants and

prostitutes. The black interior fell squarely within the scope of the

police. Plainclothes officers and private investigators ~onitored

250 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

private life and domestic space, giving legal force to the notion

that the black household was the locus of crime, pathology, and

sexual deviance. The Tenement House Act (1901) was crafted by

Progressive reformers, official friends of the Negro, and the sons

and daughters of abolitionists intent on protecting the poor and

lessening the brutal effects of capitalism' with clean water closets,

hot water, steam heat, and fire escapes. From its inception, the

effort to protect tenement dwellers from decrepit and uninhab-

itable conditions was linked inextricably with eradicating crime

and social vice. The Act took for granted the criminality of the

poor and identified the diseased home as the incubator of crime.

Progressive· intellectuals and reformers believed that social evils

emanated from the slum rather than the structural conditions of

poverty, unemployment, racism1 and capitalism. While the Act was

designed to prevent th~ overcrowding that was the prolific source

of sexual immorality and to improve the housing conditions of the

poor-insufficiency of light and air due to narrow courts or air

shafts, dark hallways with no light or windows, overcrowding of

buildings on lots, fire hazards in design and use, lack of separate

water-closet and washing facilities, overcrowding, and foul cellars

and courts-the benefits and protection provided by the law wen~

overshadowed by the abuse and harassment that accompanied the

police presence inside private homes.

While the Act did little to improve fhe housing of the black poor

(with irregular enfoi:cement of building codes or legal prosecution of

landlords), it did consolidate the meaning of prostitution, and suture

blackness ahd criminality, by placing blaok domestic life under sur-

veillance. The specter of prostitution earlier attributed to the influx

of Jewish immigrants now became a Negro problem. In 1909, the

Tenement House Act was amended and revised into a series of laws

with a particular eye toward eradicating prostitution and with an

understanding of "the vagrant as the chrysalis of every criminal."

The new law defined the vagrant as:

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 251

.A 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, shall be deemed a vagrant, and upon

conviction thereof shall be committed to the county jail for a

term not exceeding six months from the date of commitment.

Any young woman residin$ in a tenement who invited a man into

· her home ~isked being charged with prostitution. The Tenement

House Law expanded the provisiol}s of the Criminal Code, making

vagrancy an elastic, indiscriminate, all-encompasing category.

By 1914, "the majority of prostitution charges were executed

through the vagrancy clause of the Tenement Hous_e Law." Thirty-

six percent of these convictions were of black women. They were

the largest single group prosecuted under this rubric. In the guise of

housing reform, the police were given great latitude in the surveil-

lance and arrest of black women and tenement residents. The bulk

of the arrests were justified less for what had been done than on the

suspicion of who these young women might become.

In 1915, the criminal code_ was amended again to "simplify" or

streamline the evidentiary requirements, making it easier to arrest

and prosecute young women on suspicion of prostitution. To secur~

conviction, all that was required was the officer's testimony. In the

,earlier statute, an overt act of prostitution was required-solicitation

and the exchange of cash. Now only the willingness to have sex or

engage in "lewdness" or appearing likely to do so was sufficient

for prosecution. Most of the women convicted of prostitution were

deemed vagrants.

. Juinp raids were commonplace. In a "jump raid," plainclothes offi-

cers, having identified a suspicious person and place, knocked at the

door of a private residence, and when it opened, they forced_ their way

252 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

across the threshold or they followed behind a woman as she entered

her apartment. It was common to see the doors of rented rooms and

apartments scarred, broken, and hanging off the hinges after the

police officers entered homes by force and without warrants.

In its innual report, the Committee of Fourteen endorsed the

jump raid as a reasonable response to the black presence in the

city. While ordinarily a police raid without a warrant would be a

"dangerous procedure" because it violated basic civil liberties, and

the "unrestricted use of this custom would probably lead to police

oppression," the Committee found these measures were warranted. ,

By their assessment, the police exercised good judgment in conduct-

ing raids in such manner because "the conditions found to exist in

the resorts ~o raided have fully justified the action taken." For those

under the surveillance of the police, there was no difference between

"good judgment" and police oppression.

. Black tenants were policed more intensely and violently than their

white neighbors, so it is not surprising that as a result of these regular

encounters with the law, the buildings in which they lived contained

more "disorderly houses" and "disorderly persons." The coordinated

efforts of social reformers and the police had a precipitous effect

on the formation of the black ghetto, since landlords who rented to

black tenants were more likely to be prosecuted for violation of the

Tenement House Law and fined as much as a thousand dollars. This

. contributed to the unwillingness of white landlords to rent to black

folks, and then only the worst and the most wretched housing at the

most exorbitant prices.

A police card illustrates the typical sweep of Harlem tenements,

and the routine arrests. Once police entered a flat, everybody they

encountered was subject to arrest. Billie Holliday was arrested in

one such sweep, where more than a 'dozen women were arrested

in a five-block radius. The irony was that Holiday's mother had

boarded her in Florence Johnson's home to keep her daughter out

of harm's way and to shield her from the danger of the streets.

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 253

254 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

Mother and daughter were both arrested, but they did not disclose

their relation to the police out of fear that it would invite harsher

punishment.

Women were arrested· on the .threshold of their homes and inside

their apartments, while exiting taxicabs, flirting at dance halls,

waiting for their husbands, walking home from the cabaret with

friends, enjoying an intimate act with a lover, being in the wrong

place at the wrong time. In short, anywhere and at any time a young

black woman encountered the police, she was at risk. Billie Holiday

described the 1920s as an awful decade for this reason: "Those were

rotten days. Women like Mom who worked as maids, cleaned office ·

buildings, were picked up on the street on their way home from, work

and charged with prostitution. If they could pay, they got off. If they couldn't they went to court, where it was the word of some dirty ·

grafting cop against theirs."

In 1922, Trixie Smith recorded her first song, "My Mari Rocks Me

with One Steady Roll," for Black SwaIJ. Records. Its lyrics celebrated

the sexual freedom of the age in explicit detail:

My man rocks me, with one steady roll

There's no slippin' when he wants t~ke hold

I looked at the clock, and the clock struck one

I said now, Daddy, ain't we got fun

Oh, he was rockin' me, with one steady roll

Smith had accompanied Fletcher Henderso_n at several notable

Harlem venues and recorded with him on Paramount Records, had

performed on Broadway, and was well on her way to becoming one

of the famous classic blues singers, when a police detective entered

her apartment and arrested her, along with her friend Nettie Berry,

a stage performer and film actor. The detective had been watching

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 255

Smith for several weeks. He had first encountered her in a Harlem

cabaret and then entered her home, accompanied by an acquain-

tance, a paid informant, who assisted him in "meeting women" and

had introduced the two. The undercover agent returned a week later.

On this visit, he asked for a glass of gin and then arrested Trixie Smith

and Nettie Berry. Smith was charged with renting a room for pros-

titution and Berry with being a prostitute. Trixie Smith's two small

children were home at the time wheri the alleged act was said to have

been committed; in this case it entailed the willingness to entertain

the plainclothes detective and offer him a drink. The two artists were

arraigned in Jefferson Market Court in the early hours of the morning.

The headline of the story, which appeared in the Afro-American a

few weeks later, read: "Race Actresses Said Framed by Gop." Only

256 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS .

the contracts displayed by their booking agent and community out- 1:age that two distinguished artists could be treated with, such blatant injustice resulted in the dismissal of the charges against them. They had been able to produce "witnesses to prove that they were both working at their professions and bore reputations as being respect­ able members of the community."

Prostitution was a charge levied to extract information, extort money, harass and abuse, and establish· the boundaries of what a black woman could and could not do. The New York Age and the Amsterdam News warned women about the dangers of corrupt police officers and stool pigeons, and advised them to avoid encounters with strangers. Chatting with men on the street or inviting them into your· homes posed great risks, as did accepting dates with stran'gers. The threat of punishment wasn't enough to deter young women from associating with "bad' company" or divert them from the errant p�th, even when the costs were great.

The afterlife of slavery unfolded in a tenement hallway and held Esther Brown in its grasp. She and her friends did not forget for a moment that the law was designed to keep them in place, but they refused to live in its clauses and parentheses. The problem of crime

· was the threat posed by the black presence in the northern city, the problem of crime was the wild experiment in black freedom, and the efforts to manage and regulate this crisis provided a means of reproducing the white-over-black order that defined urban space and everyday life. With incredible ferocity, state �urveillance and police power acted to shape and regulate intimate life. State violence, invol­ untary servitude, poverty and confinement defined the world that Esther Brown wanted to destroy. It made her the sort of girl w�o would not hesitate to smash things up.

392 NOTES

229

229

229

230

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS

ASSEMBLED. IN A RIOTOUS MANNER

somebody's angel child: Bessie Smith, vocalist, "Reckless Blues" by Fred

Langshaw and Jack Gee, recorded 1925, Columbia 14056D, rn-inch LP.

speak of potentialities: Emma Goldman, "Anarchism: What It Really

Stands For," in Anarchism and Other Essays, 2nd revised ed. (New York:

Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910).

Harrison encountered her in the lobby of the Renaissance Casino: On the

life and work of the Harlem radical, see Jeffrey Perry, Hubert Harrison: The

Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 (New York: Columbia University Press,

2010); and Shelley Streeby, Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence,

and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).

ex-slave's refusal to work: "The Quashees (the free blacks of Jamaica) con­

tent themselves with producing only what is strictly necessary for their own

qmsumption, and, alongside this 'use value,' regard loafing (indulgence and

idleness) as the real luxury good; how they do not care a damn for the sugar

and the fixed capital invested in the plantations, but rather observe the plant­

ers' impending bankruptcy with an ironic grin of malicious pleasure ... "

Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1939;

repr. London: Penguin, 2005), 325-27.

NOTES 393

230 real luxury good: Marx, Grundrisse, 325-27. 230 thousand new forms: Rosa Luxemburg, "The Russian Revolution," in Reform

or Revolution and Other Writings (New York: Dover Books, 2006), 215 . 231 cooperation and mutuality found among ants, monkeys, and ruminants:

Pyotr Kropotkin. Mutual Aid (1902; repr. Boston: Extending Horizons Books, 1955); Darlene Clark Hine, "Mutual Aid and Beneficial Association," in Black Women in America, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jacqui Malone, "African American Mutual Aid Societies," Stepping on

. �

the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1996), 167-86; Ron Sakolsky, "Mutual Acquiescence or Mutual Aid?" The Anarchist Library (November 2012), https://theanarchistlibrary .org/lib,rary/ron-sakolsky-mutual-acquiescence-or-mutual-aid; Avery Gor­ don, The Hawthorne Archive (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).

232 "Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman,": Ella Baker, The Cri­ . sis: A Record of the Darker Races (November 1935); Claudia Jones, 1 'An End to the Neglect of the Pi:oblems •of the Negro Woman!," Political Affairs 28 (June 1949): 51-67; Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

232 revolt against ... "unjust labor conditions": Du Bois, "The Servant in the House," in Darkwater, 90.

232 jazz chorus: "Girls on 'Noise' Strike," New York Times, January 25, 1920; "Vocal Hostilities of Bedford Girls Finally Halted," New York Times, January 27, 1920.

232 the very idea of work: Narrative drawn from. "Information concerning the Patient," August 12., 1917; and "Information concerning.the Patient," Sep­ tember 15, 1917; Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, Inmate case files, Series 14610-77B, Records of the Department of Correctional Services, New York State Archives, Albany, Bedford Hills Case Files #2507 and #2505. Also see Elizabeth Ross Haynes, "Negroes in Domestic Service," Journal of Negro History 8, no. 4 (October 1923), 396.

233

233

233

then propose to marry her: "See Harlem Elopers are Thrust in Cell," Afro- American, June 30, 1928. bound by need and want: "Stat�ment of the Girl, Work History," August u, 1917, Bedford Hills Case File#2507. Service carried the stigma of slavery: See Sophonisba Breckinridge, "The Legal Relation of Mistress and Maid, with Some Comment Thereon," Bul- letin of Household Research 1, no. 2 (1904): 7-8. Breckinridge understood the continuities between domestic work and slavery and detailed the fea-

394 NOTES

tures of involuntary servitude produced by the contract between mistress

and maid. "There is as yet no legislation defining hours, and providing for

humane treatment and sanitary conditions" of household workers. "There is

no law forbidding children to work in the kitchen; and in some jurisdictions,

delinquent children are habitually placed in household work by probation

officers. Legislation looking toward betterment of conditions in domestic

service is confined at present, to compelling payment of wage when earned."

See also Margaret Livingston Chanler, "Domestic Service," Bulletin of the

Inter-Municipal Committee on Household Research 1, no. 6 (April 1905): 7.

233 captive maternal: Joy James, "Captive Maternal Love: Octavia Butler and

Sci-Fi Family Values," in Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory,

ed. Robin Truth Goodman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2m5),

185-99. On black female surplus, see Rizvana Bradley, "Reinventing Capac-

ity: Black Femininity's Lyrical Surplus and the Cinematic Limits of 12 Years

A Slave," Black Camera 7, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 162-78.

234 colored woman's piano day: A general houseworker loved her washing so

much that she called Mondays her "piano day." See Mary White Ovington,

"The Colored Woman in Domestic Service in New York City," Bulletin 1,

no. 7 (May 1905), IO.

234 sacrificial devotion: R. R. Wright, "Negro Household Workers," Bulletin

of the Inter-Municipal Committee on Household Research 1, no. 7 (May 1905);

Miller, "Surplus Negro Women."

234 "care for their precious darlings": Hutchins Hapgood, An Anarchist Woman

(New York: Duffield, 1909), 40.

234 like a swarm 01· swell of an ocean: Du Bois described the collective action of

the general strike as a swarm or swell. See Black Reconstruction. In the chap-

ter "The General Strike," he uses the term swarm repeatedly to describe the

movement of the enslaved and the fugitive.

234 long poem of black hu'nger and striving: This line is a riff on de Cei:teau's ' i

long poem of walking. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), IOI.

234 the wild rush from house service: Du Bois, "The Servant in the House," in

Darkwater, 92.

234 All the modalities sing a part: Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 99.

234 The map of what might be: Saidiya Hartman, "Venus in Two Acts," Small

Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1_-14; Ula Taylor, "Street Strollers: Grounding the

Theory of Black Women Intellectuals," Afro-Americans in New York Life and

History 30, no. 2 (July 2006): 153-71; Sarah Cervenak, Wandering: Philo-

NOTES 395

sophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-

versity Press, 2015), 2; and Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on A Ruined Map:

Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

234 !'overture: L'overture is another way to think about tumult, upheaval, and the

radical practice of everyday life. It is also a reference to the revolutionary

p~actice of the enslaved.

235 to fight back, to strike out: On discrimination against black girls and seg-

regation at the Hudson Training School, see "Inquiry Board Hits Negro

Segregation," New York Times, November 20, 1936, 9; and "Hits Race Dis-

crimination," New York Times, August 7, 1936. See also Weekly Comment,

Chica,go De/ender, June 28, 1919; and "Demand Unabated in Child Welfare,"

New York Times, September 14, 1933. A former superintendent recalled that

when she took over charge of the Hudson Training School, "she made a bon-

fire of the manacles, restraini~g sheets and straitjackets which had been in

use in the institution."

235 to smash things up: "Notes .of the Staff Meeting," September 29, 1917, Bed-

ford Hills Case File#2507: "She is the sort of girl who would not hesitate to

smash out"; "the unruly who smash windows and furniture": State Com-

mission of Prisons, "Investigation and Inquiry into Allegations of Cruelty to

Prisoners in the New York State Reformatory for Women, Bedford Hills," in

Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the State Commission of Prisons /or the Year 1920,

March 12, 1921, 93; young women "smashing and yelling," State Commission

of Prisons, "Investigation and Inquiry into Allegations of Cruelty," 94. Also

see M. Fleming, "Ungovernability: The Unjustifiable Jurisdiction," Yale Law

Journal 83, no. 7 (June 1974): 1383-1409.

235 That was the offering: Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha: A Novel (New

York: Harper and Row, 1953; repr. Chicago: Third World Press, 1993), 22.

236 tried to kill her and failed: Lucille Clifton, "Won't you celebrate with me,"

Collected'Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-20ro (New York: BOA Editions; 2012).

. 236 "to bring things into relation": Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 30.

236 Subsistence: Karl Marx on forms and modes of life, see German Ideology

(New York: International Publishers, 1970) and Economic and Philosophic

Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International Publishers, 1964).

237 survival was an achievement: Saidiya Hartman, "Belly of the World," Souls:

A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 18, no. 1 (January/ March 2016): 166-173.

396 NOTES

237 "reproduction of physical existence": Roderick Ferguson, "The Erotic

Life of Diaspora: Black Queer Formations in the History of Neoliberalism,"

unpublished talk, Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality,

Columbia University, New York, 2m3.

237 subject to frequent police raids: Stephen Robertson, "Disorderly Houses:

Residences, Privacy, and th~ Surveillance of Sexuality in 192o's Harlem,"

Journal of the History of Sexuality 2i, ·no. 3 (September 2012): 457. See Carby,

"Policing the Black Body in an Urban Context," Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4

(Summer 1992): 738-55. •

238 "charity girl": Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements (Philadelphia: Temple Uni- versity Press, 1986), no-12.

238 no clear line between desire and necessity: On the survival strategies of

young black women, see Aimee Cox, Shapeshi/ters (Durham, NC: Duke Uni- versity Press; 2015), 17r.

238 then he'd marry her: This account is based upon "Statement of th~ Girl,"

August ro, 1917, Bedford File#2505.

238 Oh my man I love him so: Billie Holiday, "My Man," The Billie Holiday So~g- book (New York: Verse, 1986). ·

240 she had violated those codes: See Ruth Reed, Negro Illegitimacy in New York

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1926), 48, 68.

240 require the commitment of a criminal act: George E. Worthington and

Ruth Topping, Specialized Courts Dealing with Sex Delinquency: A Study of

the Procedure in Chicago,' Boston, Philadelphia, and New York (New York:

Frederick Hitchcock Publisher, 1925); Christopher Tiedeman, A Treatise on

*e Limitations of Police Power in the United States (St. Louis: F. H. Thomas

Law Book Company, 1886); Saidiya Ha·rtman, Scenes of Subjection, 63, 69,

186-206; Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

i.41 running the streets: In the case of status offenses, it is status and not conduct

that determines whether an act is a transgression of the law. See Cynthia Godsoe,

"Contempt, Status, and the Crimihalization of Non-Conforming Girls," Car-

dozo Law Review 35, no. 3 (February 2014): ro91-n6; "Ungovernability: The

Unjustifiable Jurisdiction," Yale Law Journal 83, no. 7 (June 1974): 1383-409. 241 "a struggle to transform one's existence": Willfulness is a struggle to exist

or to transform an existence. See Ahmed, "Willfulness as a Style of Pblitics,"

in Willful Subjects, 133.

241 "The history of disobedience": Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 137.

241 "Leading the life of a prostitute": See George J. Kneeland, Commercial-

NOTES 397

ized Prostitution in New York City (New York: Century Co., 1913). Of the 647

cases examined in the study of the Bedford Hills Reformatory, Katherine

Bement Davis writes: "not all of them were convicted for prostitution but all

were leading the lives of prostitutes" in "A Study of Prostitutes Committed

from New York City to the State Reformatory at Bedford Hills," appendix

to Kneeland, Commercialized Prostitution in New York City, 190.

241 ·the manner of walking: Civil Rights Division, United States Department of

Civil Rights Division and Theodore M. 1 Shaw, The Ferguson Report, Depart-

ment of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (New York: New

Press, June 2015).

242 target young women for prostitution: By 1917, vagrancy statutes and Ten-

eme~t House Laws were the primary vehicles for arresting and indicting

young women as prostitutes.

242 rate of conviction: Worthington and Topping, Specialized Courts Dealing

with Sex Delinquency, 217-18, 245, 274, 276, 287, 397-403, 418-19; Fred-

'erick Whitin, "The Women's Night Court in New York City," Annals of the

American Academy of Political and Social Science 52 (March 1914): 183.

242 predict the future: .The anticipation of future criminality was at the heart of

anti-vagrancy statutes and the overwriting of blackness as criminality.

242 refused to work: Girls between fourteen and twenty-one, but sometimes·as

young as twelve, were sentenced to reformatories for being in a house with

a bad reputation or suspected of prostitution, or having friends or neighbors

who were thieves or prostitutes, or associating with lowlifes and criminals,

or being promiscuous. See Hicks, Talk to You Like A Woman, 184.

243 "without visible means of support": William J Chambliss, "A Sociological

Analysis of the Law of Vagrancy," Social Problems 12, no. l (Summer 1964):

66-77,

243 "no man knows from where they came": Tiedeman, Treatise on the Limita-

tions of Police Power, n8.

243 from idler to convict and felon: Tiedeman, Treatise on the Limitations of

Police Power, 117.

244 "Silks and Lights: "Silks and Lights Blamed for Harlem Girls' Delinquency,"

Baltimore Afro-American, May 19, 1928; "Lure for Finery Lands Girl in Jail,"

New York Amsterdam News, August 14, 1926.

245 the wild world of fun and pleasure: See letter from husband to Esther Brown,

Bedford Hills Case File#2507.

246 paid direc~ly by the police: "Frame-up and Blackmail," New York Age, Jan-

uary 7, 1928; "Be Careful Girls," Amsterdam News, May 14, 1920.

398 NOTES

246 "That's no straight road": Mrs. Scott, an elderly woman who took care of

Esther's son, blamed what happened to Esther on her mother and told the

caseworker that Rose Saunders "consorted with one of the men who lodged

in her apartment."

247 old love wishing you well: Letter in Bedford Hills Case File #2507.

247 assembled in a riotous manner: The governor of New York, Lord Cornford

(who was Queen Anne's cousin), issued a scathing proclamation to "take

all methods for the seizing and apprehending of all such Negroes found to

be assembled and if any of them refuse to submit then fire upon them, kill

or destroy them, if they otherwise cannot be taken .... Several Negroes in

Kings County have assembled themselves in a riotous manner, which if not

prevented may prove of ill consequence." As a precaution against conspir-

acy, the assembly of slaves was severely restricted. When not engaged in

their master's service, no more than three slaves could meet together on a

penalty of being whipped not more than forty lashes. No more than twelve

slaves, in addition to the coffin bearers and gravediggers, could assemble at

any funeral on pain of public whipping. Another prohibited the gathering of

slaves after nightfall. See Roi Ottley and William J. Weatherby (eds.), The

Negro in New York: An Informal Social History, 1626-1940 (New York: New

York Public Library, 1967), 22. Slave codes in colonial New York targeted

black assembly. See Edwin Olson. "The Slave Code in Colonial New York,"

journal of Negro History, 29, no. 2 (April. 1944): 147-65;,Ira Berlin and Les-

lie Harris, Slavery in New York (New York: New York Historical Society,

2005). ~ee Simone Browne, Dark Matters (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2015).

248 whipped not more than 40 lashes: See Colonial Laws of New York, i, 520,.

cited in Olson, "The Slave Code in.Colonial New York." See also Berlin and

Harris, Slavery in New York.

248 Board of Charities: On the role of philanthropy and charity in produc-

ing a racialized order see Alice O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Sci-

ence, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton,·

NJ: Princeton University Press, 20.01); Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and the

Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Unive'rsity

Press, 1992); Ralph Luker, Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial

Reform, 1885-1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991);

David Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: the Asylum and its Alternatives

in Progressive America (Boston: Little Brown, 1980); Michael McGerr, A

Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America

NOTES 399

(New York: Free Press, 2003); Richard Hoftstadter, Age of Reform (New

York: Vintage Books, 1955). Robert Allen, .Reluctant Reformers: Racism and

Social Reform Movements (Washington, DC: Howard University Press,

. 1974).

249 "Disorderly is worse than discrimination": Frederick Whittin to Du Bois,

ro October 1912, box II (Du Bois 19rr,-1912) folder, W. E. B. Du Bois Corre-

spondence. Frederick Whittin to Du Bois, 10 October 1912, box 2 (General

Correspondence) folder, W. E. B. Du Bois Correspondence 1912 October

rr-20. For a study of the committee's work in New York City, see Jennifer

Fronc, New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (Chi-

cago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

249 vagrants and prostitutes: See William Fryer, Tenement House Law of the City

of Ne,; York (New York: The Record and Guide, 1901); Robert de Forest and

Lawrence Veiller (eds.), The Tenement House Problem (London: Macmillan,

1903); and The Tenement House Law of the State of New York and Chap-

ter XIXa of the Greater New York Charter (New York: Tenement House

Department, 1912),

250 incubator of crime: The law also established guidelines for the· improve-

ment of extant houses and the building of new tenements; however, rein-

forcement of the law proved difficult. Many social reformers believed that

social problems were determined by poor environmental conditions, so that

i~proving housing conditions would improve the morality and life chances

of the poor by transforming the ecology of the slum. "The Tenement Law

of the City of New York" Section 141, "Vagrnncy"; William John Fryer,

ed., The Tenement House Law of the City of New York (New York: Clinton W.

Sweet, 1901).

250 overcrowding that was the prolific source of sexual immorality: Commit-

tee of Fifteen, The Social Evil: With Special Reference to Conditions Existing in

the City of New York (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1902), 173-174.

250 consolidate the meaning of prostitution: See Mumford, fnterzones; Prone,

New York Undercover; Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitu-

tion, and the Commercialization of Sex I790-1920 (New York: W.W. Norton,

1992); and Jessica R. Pliley, Policing Sex Districts: The Mann Act and the Mak-

ing of the FBI (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Waterman,

Prostitution and Its Repression in New York City, 39.

250 "the vagrant as the chrysalis of every criminal": Tiedeman, Treatise on the

Limitations of Police Power, 117.

251 "vagrancy clause of the Tenement House Law": 1,099 persons were

400 NOTES

arrested for this violation. Committee of Fourteen, Committee of Fourteen

Annual Report 1914 (New York, 1914).

251 Thirty-six percent of these convictions were of black women: Commit-

tee of Fourteen, Committee of Fourteen Annual Report 1914, 32-33; Val Marie

Johnson, "Defining Social Evil: Moral Citizenship and Governance in New

York City, 1890-1920" (PhD diss., The New School for Social Research,

New York, New York, 2002), 396-397, fn. 121. The Tenement House Com- mittee and the Committee of Fourteen targeted landlords whose primary

tenants were African Americans. In 1910, black women comprised 1.9 per-

cent of the city population, 8 percent of those charged with prostitution, and

7.6 percent of those charged with disorderly conduct. In 1914, the vast major-

ity of women charged with prostitution was through the vagrancy clause of

the Tenement House Law. Although African American women comprised

little more than 2 percent of the population of the city, they were 36 per-

cent of those arrested for violation of the Tenement House Law. Foreign-

born women were 24 percent of those arrested, although they were 40.8

percent of the city. Because of the segregated labor market, black women

were frequently employed in sex venues, but in non-sex-work as housekeeep-

ers, maids and washerwomen. By 1928, there were four times more Negro

women than white women in court. By 1930, there was a dramatic increase

in rates of arrest. Three Negro women were arrested for every two white

women,. even where there was one Negro woman to eight white women liv-

ing in New York City. The "policing relation" had everything to do with this

disparity. See Sophia Robison, An Inquiry into the Present Functioning of the

Women's Court in Relation to the Problem of Prostitution in New York City (Wel-

fare Council of New York, Research Bureau, May 1935),

251 arrest of black women and tenement residents: "There has been an

increase, as compared with 1913-1914, of cases from tenements on the East

Side and in Harlem, while decreases.were noticed in the central part of the

city, which includes the ... Tenderloin. This latter decrease, as well as the

increase in the Harlem district,·is probably explained by the movement of

the negroes from one section to the other." Kneeland, Commercialized Pros-

titution in New York City, 165; also see Committee of Fourteen, New York City

Annual Report, 1915-1916, pp. 32, 42, 55, 58.

251 willingness to have sex or engage in "lewdness": Criminal Code, Section

887, defined the vagrant as follows: "Any person (a) who offers to commit

prostitution; or (b) who offers or offers to secure a female person for the

purpose of prostitution, or for any other lewd or indecent act; or (c) who

NOTES 401

loiters in or near any thoroughfare or public or private place for the purpose

of inducing, enticing, or procuring another to commit lewdness, fornication,

unlawful sexual intercourse or any other indecent act; or (d) who in any

manner induces, entices or procures a person who is in any thoroughfare

or pµblic or private place to commit any such acts is a vagrant." In 1921, the

definition was again expanded in People v. Breitung, although the first item

was unchanged since the fourteenth century: "A person wh~ not having vis-

ible means to maintain herself, lives without e~ployment."

N.Y. PEN. LAW§ 240.20: NY Code-Section 240.20: Disorderly con-

duct:-A person is guilty of disorderly conduct when, with intent to cause

public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk

th~reof: I. (S)He engages in fighting or in violent, tumultuous or threat-

' ening behavior; or 2. (S)He makes unreasonable noise; or 3. In a public

place, (s)he uses abusive or obscene language, or makes an obscene ges-

ture; or 4. Without lawful authority, (s)he disturbs any lawful assembly or

meeting of persons; or 5. (S)He obstructs vehicular or pedestrian traffic;

or 6. (S)He congregates with other persons in a public place and refuses

to comply with a lawful order of the police to disperse; or 7. (S)He creates

a hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act which serves no

legitimate purpose.

Disorderly _House, Penal Law, Section n46: A person or person who

keeps a house of ill-fame or assignation of any description, or a house or

place for persons to visit for unlawful sexual intercourse, or for any lewd,

, obscene or indecent purpose, or disorderly house, or a house commonly

known as a stale beer dive, or any place of public resort by which the

peace, comfort, or decency of a neighborhood is habitually disturbed, or

who requests, advises or procures any female to become an inmate of any

such house or place, or who as agent or owner, lets a building or any por-

tion, knowing that it is intended to be used for any person specified in this

section, or who permits a building or portion of a building to be so used,

is guilty of a misdemeanor. This section shall be construed to apply to any

part or parts of a house used for the purposes herein specified,

Disorderly Person. Code of Criminal Procedure, Sections 899, 9n.

4• Keeps of bawdy houses or houses for the resort of prostitution,

drunkards, tipplers, gamesters, habitual criminals, or other disorderly

persons, (Disorderly persons overlap with the meaning of the vagrant.)

Section 9n Court may also commit [her] to prison; nature and dura~

402 NQTES

tion of imprisonment. The court may also in its discretion, order a person . convicted as a disorderly person, to be kept in the county jail, or in the City of New York, in the city prison or penitentiary of that city, for a term not exceeding six months of hard labor.

Public Nuisance, Penal Law, Sections 1530 and 1532: Section 1530: A public nuisance is a crime against the order and econ­

omy of the State and consists in unlawfully doing an act, or omitting to perform a duty, which act or omission:

1) Annoys, injures or endangers the comfort, repose, health or safety of any considerable number of persons; or,

2) Offends public decency; or 3) (Actually Point 4) In any way renders a considerable number of persons

insecure in life1 or the use of property.

Section 1532. Maintaining a nµisante. A person who commits or main­ tains a public nuisance, the punishment for which is not specially pre­ scribed, or who willfully omits or refuses to perform any legal duty relating to the removal of such a public nuisance, is guilty of misdemeanor.

252 by force and without warrants: See Grace Campbell, "Tragedy of Colored Girl in Court," New York Age, April 25, 1925; "Women Offenders and the Day Court," New York Age, April 18, 1925. See Campbell quoted in "Harlem Love Girls Get 25 cents, Whites $5," A/ro-American,January 29, 1938.

252 police raid without a warrant: Committee of Fourteen, Annual Repor_t of the Committee of Fourteen 1915-1916.

254 being in the wrong place at the wrong time: Pat James and many other women were·arrested for prostitution in taxicabs. She left a club at 1:30 a.m. Two men entered the cab after she did. She started screaming and fighting with them, fearing that they would rob her, but instead she was arrested for prostitution. Bedford Hills Case File#3489; Nancy Lacewell was arrested in a hallway. The officers first charged her with robbery and then changed the charge to prostitution. Bedford Hills Case File#3501. Henrietta Dawson was arrested for prostitution after agreeing to a date with a man she had met at a Harlem club. Her mixed-race child convinced the court that she had been living the life of a prostitute, Bedf�rd Hills Case File#3499,

254 "it was the word of some dirty grafting cop against theirs": Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues (1956; repr. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 27.

NOTES 403

254 rockin' me, with one steady roll: Trixie Smith, 1922, "My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)," Black Swan Records, 14127-B .

256 "respectable members of the com_munity": "Race Actresses Said Framed by Cop." Baltimore Afro-American. December 26, 1925, 5.

256 to live in its clauses and pare"ntheses: Anne Winters, "MacDougal Street, Old Law Tenement," The Displaced of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

256 the �roblem of crime was the threat posed: See Christopher Muller, "Northern Migration and the Rise of Racial Disparity in American Incarcer­ ation," American Journal of Sociology n8, no. 2 (September 2012), 281-326; Muhammed, Condemnation of Blackness; Brya1;1 Wagner, Disturbing the Peace; and Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2012),