reading refl

CONTENTS A Note on Method

Cast of Characters

Book One SHE MAKES AN ERRANT PATH THROUGH THE CITY

The Terrible Beauty of the Slum

A Minor Figure

An Unloved Woman

An Intimate History of Slavery and Freedom

Manual for General Housework

An Atlas of the Wayward

A Chronicle of Need and Want

In a Moment of Tenderness the Future Seems Possible

Book Two THE SEXUAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE BLACK BELT

1900. The Tenderloin. 241 West 41st Street

1909. 601 West 61st Street. A New Colony of Colored People, or Malindy in Little Africa

Mistah Beauty, the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Woman, Select Scenes from a Film Never Cast by Oscar Micheaux, Harlem, 1920s

Family Albums, Aborted Futures: A Disillusioned Wife Becomes an Artist, 1890 Seventh Avenue

Book Three BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

Revolution in a Minor Key

Wayward: A Short Entry on the Possible

The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner

The Arrested Life of Eva Perkins

Riot and Refrain

The Socialist Delivers a Lecture on Free Love

The Beauty of the Chorus

The Chorus Opens the Way

Acknowledgments

Notes

List of Illustrations

Index

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 the 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 perspective matters, 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 everyday 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 inseparable relation, so that the vision, language, and rhythms of the wayward shape and arrange the text. The italicized 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 monographs of sociologists; trial transcripts; slum photographs; reports of vice investigators, social workers, and parole officers; interviews 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, reckless, 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 wayward, 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 in dark bedrooms, and amplified 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 modernists, free lovers, radicals, and anarchists, or realized that the flapper was a pale 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 revolutionary ideals that animated ordinary lives. It explores the utopian longings and the promise of a future world that resided in waywardness and 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 unexpected story of the twentieth century emerges, one that offers an intimate chronicle of black radicalism, an aesthetical and riotous history of colored girls and their experiments with freedom—a revolution before Gatsby. For the most part, the history and the potentiality of their life-world has remained unthought because no one could conceive 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.

Book One

SHE MAKES AN ERRANT PATH THROUGH THE CITY

The Terrible Beauty of the Slum

You can find her in the group of beautiful thugs and too fast girls congregating on the corner and humming the latest rag, or lingering in front of Wanamaker’s and gazing lustfully at a pair of fine shoes displayed like jewels behind the plate- glass window. Watch her in the alley passing a pitcher of beer back and forth with her friends, brash and lovely in a cut-rate dress and silk ribbons; look in awe as she hangs halfway out of a tenement window, taking in the drama of the block and defying gravity’s downward pull. Step onto any of the paths that cross the sprawling city and you’ll encounter her as she roams. Outsiders call the streets and alleys that comprise her world the slum. For her, it is just the place where she stays. You’d never happen onto her block unless you lived there too, or had lost your way, or were out on an evening lark seeking the pleasures yielded by the other half. The voyeurs on their slumming expeditions feed on the lifeblood of the ghetto, long for it and loathe it. The social scientists and the reformers are no better with their cameras and their surveys, staring intently at all the strange specimens.

Her ward of the city is a labyrinth of foul alleys and gloomy courts. It is Africa town, the Negro quarter, the native zone. The Italians and Jews, engulfed by proximity, disappear. It is a world concealed behind the façade of the ordered metropolis. The not-yet-dilapidated buildings and decent homes that face the street hide the alley tenement where she lives. Entering the narrow passageway into the alley, one crosses the threshold into a raucous disorderly world, a place defined by tumult, vulgar collectivism, and anarchy. It is a human sewer populated by the worst elements. It is a realm of excess and fabulousness. It is a wretched environment. It is the plantation extended into the city. It is a social laboratory. The ghetto is a space of encounter. The sons and daughters of the rich come in search of meaning, vitality, and pleasure. The reformers and

sociologists come in search of the truly disadvantaged failing to see her and her friends as thinkers or planners, or to notice the beautiful experiments crafted by poor black girls.

The ward, the Bottom, the ghetto—is an urban commons where the poor assemble, improvise the forms of life, experiment with freedom, and refuse the menial existence scripted for them. It is a zone of extreme deprivation and scandalous waste. In the rows of tenements, the decent reside peacefully with the dissolute and the immoral. The Negro quarter is a place bereft of beauty and extravagant in its display of it. Moving in and moving on establish the rhythms of everyday life. Each wave of newcomers changes the place—how the slum looks and sounds and smells. No one ever settles here, only stays, waits for better, and passes through; at least, that is the hope. It is not yet the dark ghetto, but soon only the black folks will remain.

In the slum, everything is in short supply except sensation. The experience is too much. The terrible beauty is more than one could ever hope to assimilate, order, and explain. The reformers snap their pictures of the buildings, the kitchenettes, the clotheslines, and the outhouses. She escapes notice as she watches them from the third-floor window of the alley house where she stays, laughing at their stupidity. They take a picture of Lombard Street when hardly no one is there. She wonders what fascinates them about clotheslines and outhouses. They always take pictures of the same stuff. Are the undergarments of the rich so much better? Is cotton so different than silk and not as pretty draped like a banner across the streets?

The outsiders and the uplifters fail to capture it, to get it right. All they see is a typical Negro alley, blind to the relay of looks and the pangs of desire that unsettle their captions and hint at the possibility of a life bigger than poverty, at

the tumult and upheaval that can’t be arrested by the camera. They fail to discern the beauty and they see only the disorder, missing all the ways black folks create life and make bare need into an arena of elaboration. A half-dressed woman, wearing a housecoat over a delicate nightgown, leans against the doorway, hidden by the shadows of the foyer, as she gossips with her girlfriend standing at the threshold. Intimate life unfolds in the streets.

The journalists from Harper’s Weekly gush in print: “Above the Jews, in the same [tenement] houses, amid scenes of indescribable squalor and tawdry finery, dwell the negroes leading their light-hearted lives of pleasure, confusion, music, noise and fierce fights that make them a terror to white neighbors and landlords alike.” Aroused at the sight of elegantly clad domestics, janitors and stevedores, elevator boys in rakish hats preening on the corner, and aesthetical Negroes content to waste money on extravagance, ornament, and shine, the sociologist urges them to learn the value of a dollar from their Jewish and Italian neighbors. Negroes must abandon the lax moral habits, sensual indulgence, and careless excess that are the custom of slavery. The present-past of involuntary servitude unfolds in the street, and the home, which was broken up completely by the slave ship and the promiscuous herding of the . . . plantation, is now broken again, broken open in its embrace of strangers.

The senses are solicited and overwhelmed. Look over here. Let your eyes take it all in: the handsome thugs lining the courtyard like sentinels; the immoderate display of three lovely flowerpots arranged on the sill of a tenement window, the bed-sheets, monogrammed handkerchiefs, embroidered silk hose, and whore’s undergarments suspended on a line across the alley, broadcasting clandestine arrangements, wayward lives, carnal matters. Women, with packages tied in paper and string, flit by like shadows. The harsh light at their backs transforms them into silhouettes; abstracted dark forms take the place of who they really are.

The rag seller’s daughters idle on the steps that descend to their cellar flat. The eldest is resplendent, sitting amid the debris in her Sunday hat and soiled frock. The youngest remains mystery and blur. The sun pours down the stairwell, pressing against the girls and illuminating the entrance to the small dank room, which is filled with the father’s wares: rags, papers, cast-offs, piecework, and discarded objects salvaged for future use. He turns his back to the camera and eludes capture.

What you can hear if you listen: The guttural tones of Yiddish making English into a foreign tongue. The round open-mouthed sounds of North Carolina and Virginia bleeding into the hard-edged language of the city and transformed by the rhythm and cadence of northern streets. The eruption of laughter, the volley of curses, the shouts that make tenement walls vibrate and jar the floor. Yes, oooh, baby that’s so good!—the sweet music of an extended moan that hushes the ones listening, eavesdroppers wanting more, despite knowing they shouldn’t. The rush of impressions: the musky scent of tightly pressed bodies dancing in a basement saloon; the inadvertent brush of a stranger’s hand against yours as she moves across the courtyard; a glimpse of young lovers huddled in the deep shadows of a tenement hallway; the violent embrace of two men brawling; the acrid odor of bacon and hoe-cake frying on an open fire; the honeysuckle of a domestic’s toilet water; the maple smoke rising from an old man’s corncob pipe. A whole world is jammed into one short block crowded with black folks shut out from almost every opportunity the city affords, but still intoxicated with freedom. The air is alive with the possibilities of assembling, gathering, congregating. At any moment, the promise of

insurrection, the miracle of upheaval: small groups, people by theyselves, and strangers threaten to become an ensemble, to incite treason en masse.

There are no visible signs on shop doors barring her entrance, just the brutal rebuff of “we don’t serve niggers.” If she feels brave, she will shout an insult or curse as she retreats from the shop under the hateful gaze of clerk and customers. She can sit anywhere she wants on streetcars and in theaters, even if people inch away as if she were contagious when she chooses the seat next to them, and she can go to the vaudeville show or the nickelodeon on the same day as the white folks, although it is more fun and she breathes easier when it is just colored and she knows she will not be insulted. Despite the liberties of the city, there is no better life here than in Virginia, no brighter future to grow into, no opportunities for colored girls besides the broom and the mop, or spread-eagle in really hard times. Everything essential—where she goes to school, the kind of job she can get, where she can live—is dictated by the color line, which places her on the bottom and everybody else on top. Being young, she tries to dream another life into existence, one in which her horizon isn’t limited to the maid’s uniform and a white woman’s dirty house. In this other life, she would not be required to take all the shit that no one else would accept and pretend to be grateful.

In this city of brotherly love, she has been confined to a squalid zone that no one else but the Jews would suffer. It isn’t the cradle of liberty or the free territory or even a temporary refuge, but a place where an Irish mob nearly beat her uncle to death for some other Negro’s alleged crime; where the police dragged her to jail for being riotous and disorderly when she told them go to hell, after they had grabbed her from the steps of her building and told her to move on. At Second and Bainbridge, she heard a white man shout, “Lynch him! Lynch him!” after a colored man, accused of stealing a loaf of bread from the corner grocer, ran past.

When she arrives in the Tenderloin, the riot erupts. At Forty-First and Eighth Avenue, the policeman said, “Black bitch, come out now!” Then dragged a woman from the hallway, pummeled her with his club, and arrested her for being riotous and disorderly.

Paul Laurence Dunbar caught sight of her on Seventh Avenue, and he feared for American civilization. Looking at the girl amidst the crowd of idle shiftless Negroes who thronged the avenue, he wondered, “What is to be done with them, what is to be done for them, if they are to be prevented from inoculating our civilization with the poison of their lives?” They are not anarchists; and yet in these seemingly careless, guffawing crowds resides a terrible menace to our institutions. Though she had not read God and the State or What Is Property? or The Conquest of Bread, the dangers she and others like her posed was as great as those damned Jews Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Everything in her environment tended to the blotting of the moral sense, every act engendered crime and encouraged open rebellion. Dunbar lamented: If only they could be prevented from flocking to the city, “if the metropolis could vomit them back again to the South, the whole matter would adjust.” Better for them and for us, the restrictions of the south, than a “seeming liberty which blossoms noxiously into license.” Better the fields and the shotgun houses and the dusty towns and the interminable cycle of credit and debt, better this than black anarchy.

Most days, the assault of the city eclipses its promise: When the water in the building has stopped running, when even in her best dress she cannot help but wonder if she smells like the outhouse or if it is obvious that her bloomers are tattered, when she is so hungry that the aroma of bean soup wafting from the settlement kitchen makes her mouth water, she takes to the streets, as if in search of the real city and not this poor imitation. The old black ladies perched in their windows shouted, “Girl, where you headed?” Each new deprivation raises doubts about when freedom is going to come; if the question pounding inside her head—Can I live?—is one to which she could ever give a certain answer, or only repeat in anticipation of something better than this, bear the pain of it and the hope of it, the beauty and the promise.

An Intimate History of Slavery and Freedom

Now it was Mattie’s chance. Traveling alone on the Old Dominion steamer from Virginia to New York was her first adventure. It seemed as if she had been waiting forever when her mother sent for her, although it had been only a year. Not until the ship was well beyond the James River could she really believe she was on her way. She had taken the smaller auxiliary from Hampton Roads to Norfolk, and, at last, she was heading north. Deep gulps of the salt air calmed the lurching hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. In nineteen hours, she would arrive at the West Side docks, Pier 26, North River, at the foot of Beach Street. Pier 26 echoed in her head like a refrain, like a rhythm competing with the crest and fall of the Atlantic, with the hiss and spit of the mammoth steam engine. It encouraged the reverie that engulfed Mattie the entire length of the journey and punctuated the list of things she was glad to say goodbye to—the oyster factory and the tobacco fields and the laundry baskets spilling over with soiled linens and dirty clothes. All the places that had once been filled with her father’s stories and lies and laughter were bereft, haunted, after Earl Nelson’s death. There were the things she would miss, the big porch of their house in Hampton. The smell of rose and crocus. What else? The people, she would miss Nana and her younger brother most. All the rest had been erased by anticipation and desire. She didn’t shout from the deck, “Damn you, Virginia,” but she was sure glad to be leaving.

Until this very moment, her life had been restricted to a radius of sixty-two miles, which encompassed the homehouse and the farm in Gloucester, the one- room schoolhouse and the small church that her family had attended, and their house in town. She hoped 294 nautical miles was sufficient distance to create a new life. Mattie wanted something else. It was as simple and elusive, as vague

and insistent as that. Something else was never listed as one of the reasons people left home, only the appalling and the verifiable—the boll weevil, lynching, the white mob, the chain gang, rape, servitude, debt peonage; yet the inchoate, what you wanted but couldn’t name, the resolute, stubborn desire for an elsewhere and an otherwise that had yet to emerge clearly, a notion of the possible whose outlines were fuzzy and amorphous, exerted a force no less powerful and tenacious. Why else pick up and head off to a place where you were a stranger, tolerated at best, but most often unwanted and reviled?

The wide open of the Atlantic made plain the restricted and dwarfed life Mattie was rushing away from, a life where her only possibilities were the same ones that had been imposed on her grandmother and mother. She, too, had been sentenced to servile labor, not trained for it or drawn to it. The house was no better than the fields; domestic work was as merciless and unsparing as shucking oysters and harvesting tobacco—the stench of fish, or hands sticky and yellow from nicotine, the headaches and the nausea; or the unwanted touch, the pressing and grabbing under her dress. Submit or risk a beating. Ass, hands, and

capacities owned by mistress and sir. Why pretend there was an opportunity to be found inside the house of white folks or lie about its dangers? Who didn’t hate domestic work? No colored woman would ever forget that it carried the taint of slavery. No need to pretend about its dangers. Everyone knew of a girl fired and sent away before she was too big with belly. The kitchen was the field and the brothel. No need to sugarcoat the fact: black women were still in the house of bondage. Neither Mattie nor her mother or her grandmother had chosen the kitchen or the washtub; they had been conscripted there. Aboard a steamer plowing the waters of the Eastern seaboard, Mattie was steadfast in the belief that moving on was the only way to make a better life, and flight the precursor to freedom.

Along with most of the colored passengers, Mattie was consigned to steerage, which they shared with dogs, goats, and chickens. (The few who could afford it occupied the staterooms on the aft side designated for Negroes.) But even the humiliation of the animals and the two dirty bathrooms reserved for them and the rope separating them from the rest of the deck could be suffered because she imagined that New York City promised a release from the color line and believed, willfully and blindly, that everything terrible was behind her now, as did the hundreds of other Negroes crowded around her, eager to disembark. She knew nothing of the riots that erupted in 1900 and 1905, but in 1915, she would experience the threat and the danger first-hand.

Her head was full of dreams. It was 1913 and anything seemed possible. She had done “the one thing which seemed to offer hope,” she had left home. She was one of thousands of young black folks rushing to New York from Virginia and elsewhere. Only later would these acts of flight be recognized as a general strike against slavery in its new guises, as a fugitive movement from life lived under the heel of white men. When Mattie Nelson landed at Pier 26, she was dreamy with thoughts of what the future would hold. In the crush of folks on the pier, she breathed comfortably inside her own skin, enjoying the self- forgetfulness that she had imagined was possible in a free territory.

Had Mattie arrived in New York a decade earlier, Victoria Earle Matthews would have been waiting for her at the pier. I imagine the two of them meeting on that late fall morning when Mattie disembarked. With her gloved hand extended in a half-hearted welcome, Matthews would have introduced herself and then asked Mattie if a friend or relative was coming to meet her. The fate of

girls unescorted and left to make their own way was not kind. The Traffic in Souls, a silent melodrama, had etched indelibly a tragic picture of unsuspecting girls searching for a room or a job who were lured into prostitution. The girl abducted by the human trafficker bore no resemblance to Mattie, except in Victoria Matthews’s eye. (The only black woman in the film is the maid who cleans the rooms at the brothel and appears ignorant or indifferent about what happens behind closed doors.)

Victoria Matthews would have preferred not to welcome Mattie at all; such girls were ill-suited to life in the north and without certain prospects of employment; girls too easily tempted to trick or steal; girls whose movement could not be arrested and who threatened to do even more damage to the reputation of colored women. Had she the power, this upstanding woman and the founder of the White Rose Mission, a home for respectable young colored girls new to the city, would have stopped Mattie from landing on the dock. She would have turned her around, and all the other poor black girls like her, marched them back up the ramp and onto the steamer, and sentenced them forever to the dusty southern towns they had escaped. Matthews’s view was not contemptuous, unlike Paul Laurence Dunbar’s, who to her mind was too pessimistic about the conditions of the Negro in the north. He let white folks off the hook for the wretched conditions and lack of opportunity Negroes endured; but Matthews also would have preferred it if girls like Mattie never reached the city. It was better for them to starve in the south and “go home to God morally clean, than to helplessly drag out miserable lives of remorse and pain in Northern tenderloins.” Better for such girls had they no desire at all; better that they stayed in their place. Unable to deter them or turn them away, she met them at the docks and the railroad stations and offered greetings replete with an account of the hazards and dangers awaiting young women adrift in the city.

Mattie, noticing the reserve and caution of this welcome, might have responded with a shy smile and an eyebrow lifted in doubt. The warning would have been wasted. She had just escaped the shadow of General Armstrong, liberator of the slaves, champion of industrial education, and the iron fist of uplift. At Hampton Institute, bright young women and men were trained for servility. Every girl in the school received instruction in general housework. The idea of service was inculcated in every possible way. She had seen the broadsides about the dangers of life in the north, listened distractedly to the stories about frozen, half-starving migrants, and browsed the pamphlets with the before-and-after pictures of Negroes, vital and thriving at work on the farm reduced to shivering impoverished Negroes trapped in tenements, and it had made no difference at all.

Two black women—one barely recognizable as a Negro and the other unmistakable, two women who by outward appearances might seem like opposites, yet both straddling the fault lines of immorality and decency, violence and desire, an unspeakable past and a blank future. The older woman had been born during the Civil War and marked by a history of sexual shame, the lived experience of intimate violation, and the routine abjection of slavery. Her mother was a slave and her father a master. This history of “monstrous intimacy” and its perverse lines of descent were inscribed on the body, but not visible to the casual observer, who misread the long dark hair without the slightest hint of a wave or curl, and the pale skin for the unmarked category. Sometimes she allowed herself to be mistaken for white, but only when necessary, as when traveling in the south to investigate the savage crimes routinely committed against Negroes. Barring these extreme circumstances, she proudly called herself an Afro- American, rejecting the term colored because she believed it stood for nothing. To her mind, colored was the negation of her humanity and an injury that had been inflicted by centuries of slavery; now, it was being foisted upon her as an identity to exact even more damage.

In the spring of 1898, the year the race riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the Spanish-American War sounded the recurring death knell of Reconstruction and the promise of abolition democracy, two years after Plessy v. Ferguson decided that racial segregation was lawful and not a vestige of slavery, and the year Mattie Nelson was born, Victoria Matthews arrived at the pier to meet a girl migrating to the city from Jacksonville, Florida. The letter she received from Miss Morehouse provided the exact time of the ship’s arrival and noted that the girl, her student, would be wearing a red ribbon in the buttonhole of her jacket. Matthews arrived on time to meet the steamer, but too late to save the girl from the men lurking there who spotted her first. When Matthews found her several days later, after a diligent search that required the assistance of police detectives, an eager bright-eyed girl had been transformed into “a broken, disgraced young creature, from whom city life [had taken] every vestige of hope, every chance of innocent happiness.” This young woman’s ruin led Matthews to establish the White Rose Mission. What better symbol of sexual purity and virtue than a white rose? Week after week from spring to late fall Matthews went to the docks to meet girls arriving by the Southern Steamship Line and escorted them to safety.

The sharks and hustlers were waiting too, eager to pick off the fresh arrivals —the near-white quadroons, caramel-colored mulattoes (able to pass for Cuban or Syrian), gorgeous Negresses, and run-of-the-mill colored girls—the young women described as crops ripe for the harvesting. Mattie Nelson would have put Victoria Matthews in mind of this first girl, the one she had lost.

When Victoria Matthews first arrived in New York City, she entered the city empty-handed, and, like every other black woman, with no past to which she could appeal for anything. Slavery, she believed, had destroyed everything decent; the institution had made honor and virtue impossible. All a Negro woman could count on was the future. So she worked hard to define herself and to fend off all that had been put upon her. Like every other southern girl taking her chance in the city, she was treated as if a prostitute (or in her words, a woman of “the depraved class commonly met with on the streets”). She labored as a domestic during the day and studied at night, determined to be more than nothing. It mattered little that she eschewed things sensual and disreputable, that she never acted her color, and that she struggled mightily to fortify the degrees of rank and caste that separated the good and decent Negroes from the wayward and the not uncriminal. Two-and-a-half centuries of being used, taken, broken, and loved by white folks in whatever manner they decided and by whatever means that suited their fancy, with blows or lashes, with gifts of the mistress’s cast-offs or promises of manumission, with curses and sweet talk, with threats

and whispers of love in the night—this intimate history of slavery—had indelibly marked black women, and it had marked her too.

While she was determined to turn this shame inside out and to make of it pride; pride and dignity of this sort had at its core something rotten, something spoiled. A life devoted to repairing the damaged reputation of the colored woman did not release Matthews from the sexual stigma of slavery, but merely transformed her from someone tainted by a shameful past into someone who had succeeded in improving and overcoming this past, yet was still bound to it. The taint proved indelible regardless how faint. Stigma isn’t an attribute, it’s a relationship; one is normal against another person who is not. White women were respectable over and against the degradation of black women. Victoria Matthews and Mattie Nelson were the excluded ones who defined the norms of gender and the meaning of womanhood. The shadow of slavery, wounded kinship, rape, and concubinage had created her and decided the character of her struggle to achieve virtue and decency. But promoting these new ideals, new if only because impossible to achieve or maintain in the context of chattel slavery, produced its own kind of shame and deviance. Her decency also required someone to be respectable against.

It was still too early for the whores, sissies, and toughs who plied their trade at the docks. Families gathered awaiting daughters and brothers and cousins; thugs and gangsters lurked at the outskirts of the crowd on the lookout for naive young women in search of direction or in need of help with a heavy piece of luggage. When Mattie Nelson arrived in New York City, she was barely a woman at fifteen. She was a tall, thin, dark-skinned girl, the kind only a father would have ever described as lovely, and the kind white people labeled a Negress to make apparent their contempt and scorn. It would be a decade before the thick hair tamed in braids and pinned in a bun on the top of her head, prominent cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, and wide full lips would be compared to the beauty of an African mask. Even when dressed in her Sunday best, Mattie was decidedly unsophisticated. Yet despite the not-quite-polished picture the black, but comely, small-town girl presented, Mattie was determined to be more than nothing.

It was hard for Mattie to make a distinction between the city and freedom itself. Like those provincials and fools whom Paul Laurence Dunbar derided in The Sport of the Gods as intoxicated by “the subtle and insidious wine” of the

streets, who translated the Bowery into romance, made Broadway into lyric, and Central Park into a pastoral, and thereby failed to read the city as it really was, or apprehend it in a mode commensurate with its dangers, or properly adjust to its rhythms and demands, Mattie, looking past the cold facts and the risks, mistook the city for a place where she might thrive. “The real fever of love” would take hold of her, and the streets and the dance halls did become her best friends. All the sentimental causes for this rush and flight—the freedom to move, the want of liberty, the hunger for more and better, and the need of breathing room— explained her presence in New York. She too would fall prey to the pleasures and dangers of the city while trying to make a feast of its meager opportunities.

None of the factories, shops, or offices would hire colored girls, especially girls

as dark as Mattie. Housework and laundry were her only options. It is hard to say whether it was the disappointment at the lack of opportunity or the assault of the coldest winter she had ever experienced that landed her in bed, sick for more than a month, only a few weeks after she had arrived. When Mattie recovered her strength, she found a position as a domestic at a boarding house with twenty- three rooms where she was the sole maid. Washing, cleaning rooms, making beds, and trudging up and down the five flights of stairs in the boarding house wore her out. She hated the drudgery and boredom. But her mother said if she wasn’t going to school, she had to work. Most nights, she fell into bed exhausted, too tired to think about going to the moving pictures or the dance hall. When she wasn’t tired, she was lonely. The evenings were long and dull and not at all as she had imagined New York. After five weeks she quit the boarding house and found a new job at a Chinese laundry in Bayonne, New Jersey, which was different, but no better.

The days were still long and exhausting, but now spent doubled over, pressing clothes. Few white girls were willing to work for the Chinese. The sexual panic about the dangers of Chinese men reached a new height after the body of a young white woman was found in the trunk of a Chinatown bachelor. The daily papers fed the hysteria and fueled the idea of the yellow peril by regularly reporting stories of unsuspecting girls lured into opium dens and turned into drug-addled mistresses, or seduced by lonely bachelors at taxi-dance halls, or murdered by their lovers. The queer arrangements of Chinatown, the all-male households, were the result of immigration statutes that restricted the entry of Chinese women, and, as a consequence, the brothel or another man’s embrace were the most likely opportunities for intimacy, unless one looked for love across the color line. For Mattie, the Chinese laundry was just another job. Unlike black washerwomen who resented the washee washee men because they competed for the same clients, Mattie didn’t care. The job was just a way station until something better became available.

Herman Hawkins was her first friend in New York. He worked as a waiter in a boarding house not far from where she lived with her mother. At twenty-five years old, he appeared worldly to the not yet sixteen-year-old Mattie, who, by her own admission, knew nothing at all, but was eager to learn. Herman boasted that he would show her everything—the Tenderloin, Harlem, Coney Island. He was a recent migrant from Georgia, so no doubt he enjoyed showing Mattie his

city. Mattie looked forward to the evenings spent with her gentleman friend. They

would go to dance halls and parties where couples did the Slow Drag, Funky Butt, and Fish Tail to rags played on player pianos and the ditties and love-and- trouble songs the white world derisively called “coon songs.” One night after such a party, they were walking home through Allen Park, when Herman started talking about the things he wanted to do to her. Mattie did not know if he started talking this way because of how they had been dancing when the lights were dimmed (wrapped up so tight in each other, that the boundary between her body and his gave way to flesh), or if the seclusion of the park in the early hours after midnight encouraged him to speak to her like she was a woman, like she was his woman, like she was the kind of woman who enjoyed listening to that kind of talk. In hot pursuit of the virginal-but-curious Mattie, Herman described in explicit detail what a body could do and how it would make her feel. Mattie had never done any of those things before and she tried to picture the intimate acts he described and the sensations aroused by such acts, and wondered if she would be embarrassed with her bloomers down around her ankles, and what his body would feel like on top of hers, and if the bed-sheets would be clean, or if the cot would squeak when they made love (like her mother’s bed when she and Mr. Smith were going at it). It wasn’t right for Herman Hawkins to say such things. He had never spoken to her like this before, no one had. Mattie told him to stop, and yet, he continued to talk and she continued to listen. She knew what he was saying was bad, but it also sounded thrilling. He kept on talking as if she had not asked him to stop, and, instead of getting angry or upset, she just listened. Mattie was not aware that she was giving him an answer to his question and that she had said yes.

Shortly after that walk in Allen Park, he convinced Mattie to remove her camisole and bloomers. It is not difficult to imagine the things Herman Hawkins taught Mattie inside the rented room of a lodging house. There were so many lessons to teach a girl who knew nothing, so much for her to discover. What to do? How to hold him? How to not be embarrassed by her naked body or ashamed of her smells and the things she wanted to do? First she had to breathe deeply and let go of the body armored in anticipation of insult and attack, surrender in consequence of pleasure, allow the body to yield to another, to be entered, joined, and bridged, to risk all defense, yet not be made into the mule of

the world. If a tender lover, he might have lingered kissing her mouth, traced the length

of her back with his tongue, discovered the ways she liked to be held and the best ways to make her come. Had he been a selfish and demanding one, he would have trained her for his pleasure, instructing her how to move, what to say, when to keep her mouth shut. Did he force her to repeat words that humiliated and excited her, or plead with her to admit what she wanted most, but feared? Or perhaps they spoke no words at all, just hands fondling genitals, tongues thrust into ears, fingers exploring every orifice? Were they loud? Did they even care if the lodgers next door or the spying neighbors downstairs heard them? Would they have minded if a lonely bachelor caught a glimpse of flesh or an abandoned wife savored the moans escaping through the open window and made them her own? Or were they quiet and intent on denying others their sound? Did the men hanging out on the corner wink at Mattie as she made her way home or the women exchange knowing and hungry glances?

Mattie had no other person to compare him with, no scale to weigh his respective merits and weaknesses, talents and areas in need of improvement. Perhaps his skills were little more than the accumulated lessons he had acquired from the women he had been with, women his age and older, women capable of training and directing him, women unafraid to tell him to hush and get to it? Women who expected little else of him, because they also worked hard for meager wages and realized that although twenty-five, like most colored men in New York, he couldn’t afford to marry or support a family, even if he had wanted one. Had the boasts of other men prodded him to lie, as they did, about what he could do or had done and to be as adamant about what he would never do, that is, the kinds of habits one indulged occasionally, but never disclosed?

Perhaps, what mattered most to Mattie was that she had found the way to her own pleasure, had learned to enjoy the smell of herself on her hands and in his hair, found a way to lessen the boredom, and diminished the hours spent waiting and trying to find a way out. Whether her lover valued her as a prize or took advantage of a gullible young woman matters less than what Mattie discovered in that room—what she wanted might actually matter. Or that “I want that” becomes a way to cleanse the stench of “ain’t (got),” “can’t (get),” “don’t.”

It is possible that Mattie experienced this opening of her desire as a refusal of all that kept her fixed in place, stuck at the laundry, chained to an ironing board,

suffocating and without any possibility of change. An unremarkable act of coitus, a deed of no import, except to those involved, a routine practice not in any way to be confused with matters of significance, just an everyday act of fucking, a quasi-event, would not have been noticed had it not been part of a greater social upheaval. Intimate acts shared in rented rooms in boarding houses and tenements throughout the city fueled the social panic about wandering, dissolute young women and the great numbers of young black people rushing to New York. Mattie’s restiveness and longing and the free love practiced in a private bedroom rented by the week were part of a larger ensemble of intimate acts that were transforming social life and inaugurating the modern, which was characterized by the entrenchment and transformation of racism, emergent forms of dispossession, and the design of new enclosures, and by a fierce and expanded sense of what might be possible. Girls on the cusp of womanhood, young colored women like Mattie, were at the center of this revolution in a minor key. Despite the efforts of the state to contain it as pathology and as crime, it proved impossible to stave the tide of desires not bound by law, coupling and procreation outside the embrace of marriage, and the ardent longing to live as one wanted.

A small rented room was a laboratory for trying to live free in a world where freedom was thwarted, elusive, deferred, anticipated rather than actualized. Mattie was a hunger artist wasting away before the eyes of the world for lack of opportunity while everyone gawked and watched. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous. Mattie was desperate not to be a servant or drudge, but there was no ready blueprint for another life that she could follow besides the one she crafted, an inchoate plan and radical thought in deed were her resources. If she could feel deeply, she could be free. She knew that beauty was not a luxury, but like food and water, a requirement for living. She loved cashmere sweaters, not because they were expensive, but because the fabric felt so exquisite against her skin, like a thousand fingers caressing her arms, and the cool slip of silk undergarments against her flesh, smooth and releasing all that heat and fire, and the way a gold bracelet glinted and flashed in the sunlight and made the tone of her blue-black flesh so lush, as if right below the skin there were layers of indigo and ochre, a vortex of deep black in which you could lose yourself. Beauty and longing provided the essential architecture of her existence. Her genius was exhausted in trying to live.

What took place behind the closed doors of a rented room in a lodging house was a moment, an iteration of the revolution of black intimate life that was taking place in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago in the first decades of the twentieth century. It was part of the general unrest that came to define the age

and the New Negro. Experiment was everywhere. It was a ubiquitous term employed to describe a range of social projects—from the settlement house to a laboratory of sociology to a model tenement, from aesthetic and scientific innovations to radical designs for living. It was a term bandied about. There was nothing precious or unusual about seeking, venturing, testing, trying, speculating, discovering, exploring new avenues, breaking with traditions, defying law, and making it, except that hardly anyone imagined that young black women might be involved in this project too. Few guessed that Mattie was trying to make something of herself, however uncertain she was about what might be and however desperate to shake loose the expectations and demands of others, which always boiled down to drudge and whore. Better an errant path than the known world. Better loose than stuck.

If it is possible to imagine Mattie and other young black women as innovators and radical thinkers, then the transformations of sexuality, intimacy, affiliation, and kinship taking place in the black quarter of northern cities might be labeled the revolution before Gatsby. Before the queer men and lady lovers and pansies congregated at the Ubangi Club, or the Garden of Joy or the Clam House, before the Harlem Renaissance, before white folks journeyed uptown to get a taste of the other, before F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Radclyffe Hall and Henry Miller, before black communists and socialists preaching on Harlem street corners noticed girls like Mattie, eager as any to hear news of a future world—this reconstruction of intimate life commenced. After the slave ship and the plantation, the third revolution of black intimate life unfolded in the city. The hallway, bedroom, stoop, rooftop, airshaft, and kitchenette provided the space of experiment. The tenement and the rooming house furnished the social laboratory of the black working class and the poor. The bedroom was a domain of thought in deed and a site for enacting, exceeding, undoing, and remaking relations of power. Unfortunately, the police and the sociologists were there also, ready and waiting, for Mattie Nelson on the threshold of want.

Inside Herman Hawkins’s bedroom, a young laundress, an exhausted drudge, a clothesline muse, and reckless dreamer tried to unmake the colored girl scripted by the world. Two lovers huddled in a rented room engaged in chance acts of intimacy that might well be blamed on the promiscuity afforded by crowded city streets and by young women navigating the world on their own. The things experienced and explored surpassed the status crimes—the disorderly conduct,

moral depravity, vagrancy, and prostitution—for which black girls and young women were regularly convicted. The modern existence wrought by girls like her was apprehended as crime and ascribed to the backwardness of “plantation holdovers.” Mattie has been credited with nothing, deemed unfit for every role except servility, condemned in advance of wrongdoing, and destined to be a minor figure even in her own verified history. To esteem her acts, to regard rather than vilify Mattie’s restive longing, is to embrace the anarchy—the complete program of disorder, the abiding desire to change the world, the tumult, upheaval, open rebellion—attributed to wayward girls. It is to attend to other forms of social life, which cannot be reduced to transgression or to nothing at all, and which emerge in the world marked by negation, but exceed it.

To yield, to be undone and dispossessed by the force of her desire, and for no other reason than that she wanted to, made Mattie feel vital, untethered. And this freedom was sensual and palpable—like the taste of Herman Hawkins in her mouth, a force so arresting it could stop her in her tracks, make her ache in anticipation of what could happen. When he was inside her, when she was inside him, when he kissed her so hard that his teeth were bruising her lips, she left that other Mattie behind, the plain dark-skinned girl whom no one had ever described as pretty. The sweetness of bodies was stoked by self-forgetting. In that room she tried to slip away, elude the hold of the plantation and the police, and pry open time into an endless stretch of possibility.

At other moments, it was harder to discern the difference between something painful and something beautiful. Take all of me. Don’t lie to me. Use me. Hit it. Don’t hurt me. There was a thin line between loss and expenditure, between yielding and breakdown. The violence of it when he forced her to do things she didn’t want to do. How he might punish her. How he misused her. How he loved her. Trained her to want what she didn’t, as if every black woman’s life was destined to a blues, an autobiographical chronicle of love and disaster, or a secret history of pain and joy. How he loved her. A rough hand caught in Mattie’s hair, which unfurled and then drew up in tight curls in sweaty palms, and the light playing on dark bodies at dusk said what the world withheld—beauty. It was a practice of care and an offering of the self for the use of the other in the confines of enormous brutality. The beauty of things taken and things given by those living in defeat. Mattie wanted so much from the world and had been allowed so little—the force of all that want drove her to the small rented room. She was

moved by lust, which was not an exercise of her will, but the mere force of existing, a kind of submission that was insistent, an act that confused the doer and the deed. In the enfolding of flesh, in this most base and exalted act of entries and exits, Mattie threatened to disappear, the force of it exceeding her and erasing the boundaries of the discrete body, making her something less than she was and something more. To be undone, against her will and with her consent. A state that was neither autonomy nor capture. It broke her down, it made her nothing at all, it laid her low, it transformed her into anything else she longed to be: like a bird flying high or a thing vast and boundless, oceanic—not a person at all. In the reek and warmth of a rented room she was all flesh and sensation; she was hovering at the end of the world. And she welcomed it.

When her mother, Caroline, asked, “Who been messing with you?” she struggled hard to explain. The dislocation of desire and the pangs of lust were impossible for her to describe, except in the language provided by others. I went wrong with Herman Hawkins. I liked doing it. He forced me. I knew better. I wanted it. How could she communicate the exquisiteness of the unexalted or the lovely repose of bodies spent after the act? Or the courage entailed in refusing shame or risking it? Decency demanded omission; otherwise she would be forced to lie. She didn’t care about decency, or about respectability. Better words were needed to convey all that transpired in that room—the things taken and given. So Mattie offered only his name: Herman Hawkins. He’s the one been messing with me.

The baby girl was born dead. He never saw his daughter. He wanted nothing to do with the child or the mother. The dead baby girl should have been the end of the business with Herman Hawkins, but because Mattie was only fifteen years old when they became lovers, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children became involved and the social worker pressured Mattie to charge him with statutory rape. Mrs. Burns told Mattie that according to the law, a girl her age, even a Negress, was too young to consent to sexual relations, too young to know what she wanted. Mattie’s story defied the logic of right and wrong, wanting and being taken. Did she want something that she didn’t consent to or

desire something bad for her? Was yielding to a lover the moment when everything went wrong? So Mrs. Burns imposed a language. Clarity required blame or guilt, and wrongdoing, his or hers, lurked in every phrase and admission. For the social worker, consent was the way to shift the burden of criminality from her shoulders to his. It was the factor that determined the distribution of punishment and that underscored the danger of intimacy and all the ways it could put a young woman at risk.

After hearing the evidence in regard to statutory rape, the grand jury dismissed the charges against Herman Hawkins, and he walked out of the courthouse free and clear. (Mattie figured that because she was colored the court didn’t care. They believed she asked for it. After he abandoned her, it was hard to sort out the truth of what happened. It was difficult to believe that she had ever wanted him.) His only obligation was to pay for his daughter’s funeral.

For another kind of girl, the disappointment with Herman Hawkins might have crushed her, or induced her to make vows about never traveling down that road again, or convinced her that there was a moral lesson to be found in this experience or lead her to renounce her sexual adventure. For Mattie, the experience unleashed her. If she set out to make a new life after Herman Hawkins, then clearly she intended on one that was wild and wayward. At sixteen, she was still anticipating something better than the life she had. Like other young black women, she exercised her talents and ambitions in the streets and cabarets. Each day she struggled to acquire a bit more breathing room in a world becoming more and more restricted by the color line, more and more defined by the routine brutalities of racism. Mattie never stopped clutching at a way of life better than what she had. Everyone had an idea of who she should be and what she should do. It was clear that her own desires mattered to no one but herself. If she didn’t decide how she wanted to live, then the world would dictate, and it would always consign her to the bottom. Refusing this, Mattie carried on as if she were free, and in the eyes of the world that was no different from acting wild.

By the time Mattie met Carter Jackson, she had lost the veneer of a small-town

girl. Everything else was different too. For one thing, the first time they had sex, Carter promised to do right by her, unlike Herman Hawkins, who had preferred to risk prison rather than be tied to a wife, or, at least, bound to her. Carter seemed like the kind of man she might build some kind of life with. What kind of life was not certain? When Carter spoke, he made everything seem possible. He was hungry to exist on his own terms and establish the measure of his acts. It was hard to tell whether he was earnest or just better at talking shit than Herman Hawkins and the men she had known after him. For the time being, she was content to give Carter the benefit of the doubt. It didn’t matter that the outlines of what might be were vague, and if she was pressed about how and when, it all threatened to disappear.

Carter Jackson hadn’t seen much more of the world than Mattie had and knew less because he had not grown up with a father with a splendid education who filled his head with stories of the Philippines, Cuba, and Haiti. Her mother had traveled too, but in Caroline’s stories she always sounded like the same woman, and the world appeared little different from the one Mattie knew, a world familiar in its limits, a world that made her weary. Caroline recounted her journeys, as if traveling across the world hadn’t changed her at all, as if Cuba and Jerusalem were the same as New York, because housework was housework. If she remembered fondly the nights dancing in open-air bars, or the feeling of freedom or possibility that attended leaving everything you knew behind and moving as if nothing tethered you to a time or place, if she in any way enjoyed this sense of the big sea, she didn’t share it with Mattie, perhaps not wanting to encourage her daughter’s dreamy recklessness.

Her father had scrubbed and cooked and hauled his way around the globe, but Earl Nelson made it sound as if he were navigating the oceans for the first time. He had wanted his children to know how big the world was, as if knowing this would be enough to battle everyone and everything trying to confine colored folks to a six-by-nine-foot existence. Mattie had believed every word of her father’s. The way she told it, when he was alive, she had not wanted for anything. They lived in their own house in Hampton with a large back yard and garden. Her father had a successful business in town in addition to the farm in Gloucester, so when he died he left her and her brothers several hundred dollars each. Had she done anything bad when Earl Nelson was alive, he would have beaten the daylights out of her.

A daughter knows one man and a wife another. After Earl Nelson’s death, Caroline had vowed never to get married again. Nearly a decade later, she had remained faithful to that pledge. Her husband had saddled her with five children and then decided to spend most of his days at sea, shipping out for stretches that sometimes lasted more than a year. Despite earning good money, he sent home very little, ten or fifteen dollars folded inside a perfunctory note. Some men hurt a woman by the cruel things they do or say; Earl hurt Caroline by all things he withheld. He had deceived her. Midway through their marriage, she was convinced he no longer loved her. It seemed evident he cared little for his family. Why else had he decided to spend most of his days at sea? Caroline couldn’t even say whether he loved his children. He had hardly sent home enough to support them, forcing her to wash and clean for white folks.

The last letter was from the freight company. His vessel had been shipwrecked. He should have been dead in her heart by the time she read the words presumed dead. Lost at sea. Since that first crossing, the water had never stopped punishing Caroline’s family, inflicting new losses on each generation. When her grandmother was a girl in Bermuda, Virginia “traders” had kidnapped her and four brothers while they played on the shore. The white men lured them aboard, promising them safety from an approaching storm and then bound them below decks until the hold was packed and “a full complement of cargo” secured. The five stolen children were sold as slaves in Virginia. They never saw their mother again. Mother-dispossessed defined what it meant to be a slave. The stillborn baby girl died the same year as Mattie’s great-great-grandmother. Of this, Caroline was certain. She felt it in her bones.

Carter Jackson did not have a prosperous business or a large house that he had built with his own hands. No doubt, he knew better than anyone the distance between where he was and where he wanted to be, the gulf between what he had and what Earl Nelson had created for his family, according to Mattie’s elaborate stories. At twenty-six, Carter had not realized any of the grand things of which he dreamed, but when Mattie met him, he was not resigned to this. He was young, so he did not yet know the wonderful things or the awful things of which he was capable. He did not yet know whether he was a good man or a bad one because he hadn’t been tested.

Mattie believed Carter was a good man, but she would not be spared from witnessing what the world could do to a good man and the damage he would inflict as his sole line of defense. With this lover, she did not give permission without realizing it; she wanted Carter as much as he wanted her. She took him at his word. He would not bring a child into the world and then turn away from it. During her seventh month, Mattie started calling herself Mrs. Jackson and introducing Carter as her husband. Mrs. Carter Jackson—it rolled off her tongue as sweetly as if the words were honey. Caroline didn’t believe it for a minute. Mattie hoped like every would-be bride that the Mrs. would provide a sufficient foundation to secure the future, to keep her man and child together. Was this pretend marriage an attempt to make her child legitimate, or a rehearsal for the normal conjugal life that they failed to achieve but which they desired? Was Mrs. Jackson an exaggerated performance of what was expected or imposed? Was there another Mrs. Jackson somewhere with a legal right to the name? Who needed the law to decide what went on between them or to endow husband and wife with meaning?

Mattie might have suspected that the four weeks they shared in a rented room in a New Jersey lodging house in the eighth month of her pregnancy was as much of a marriage as they would ever have. She returned to her mother’s house in the last weeks before the baby was due. Carter stayed in New Jersey, although he visited regularly. When the baby was born, Carter was so tender with her that she never suspected that anything could go wrong, or that there was any reason to worry. In truth, he was drowning, but he filled her head with promises about all he would do and all they would have. Even if he never uttered the words, “You can count on me,” every gesture of love seemed to prove it. Even if he never said, “Girl, no need to worry,” she relied on him.

The baby, Scott, was just a month old when Carter disappeared. Caroline called the boarding house in Bayonne, but there was no trace of him to be found. He had moved out without leaving a forwarding address or telling any of his friends where he was headed. He quit his job and vanished.

Mattie grieved for her missing husband, not knowing whether he was dead or alive. No matter, he’s dead to you and your child, Caroline might have counseled. But she held her tongue. She knew that the same man dead to Mattie might now be another woman’s prize, another Negro resurrected through flight and the gift of an alias.

Probably drowned was the exact phrase used in the cargo company’s letter to Mrs. Earl Nelson. He was “presumed dead.” It was a cruel term that announced loss, but left open the door for unreasonable hopes, foolish expectations. Just last year, Caroline had received a letter from one of Earl’s friends informing her that

he had seen her dead husband walking through the streets of New York. She might have hired a detective to find him had she believed that Earl Nelson ever loved her or if anything rested on the distinction between dead and dead to her. What would be the point of catching him in this last and biggest lie? Caroline preferred to think of him as dead and continued to take comfort in being his widow. It was best for everyone that way and she never planned to tell Mattie any different.

Aurelia Bush recognized her undergarments. The new silk combination camisole-and-bloomers that had disappeared after the second washing were hanging on the hussy’s clothesline as if they rightfully belonged to her. She fumed at the thought of that low-down whore in her intimate apparel. She had never liked Mattie Jackson and would never be fooled about the kind of women she and her mother were because she knew the whole story. She knew about the dead baby girl and the bastard son and Herman Hawkins and the two husbands, and the white men who regularly came to the house. Aurelia wasn’t a fool. Mattie was living out of wedlock with Chester Jackson, a boarder inside her mother’s house, and still calling herself Mrs. Jackson, the name she had started using when she was pregnant with Carter Jackson’s baby. She was no better than her mother, Caroline Nelson, who was living with the boarder Smith and calling herself Mrs. Smith. There was no truth to none of it. Of this Aurelia Bush was dead certain. What most offended her were the Italian men who called at the house looking for Mattie. She watched them as they climbed the stairs and entered the back door. What decent colored woman entertained the company of white men? It explained why Mattie and her mother could afford to live better than everyone else.

The clothesline belonged to Mattie, but she allowed Aurelia, who lived downstairs, to hang her clothes there too. The missing undergarments could have been an innocent mistake, but it was also true that Mattie had little regard for private property. Mine, I own it, belongs to me—were terms that didn’t carry much weight with her. She treated possession as if it were conditional, rather than absolute, as if beautiful objects were intended to be shared, as if the loveliest things were rightly a communal luxury. Once she came home wearing a gold bracelet, which belonged to a woman whose clothes she laundered. When her mother asked about it, she said she found it. Another time, she came home from work draped in a cashmere sweater that was the favorite sweater of her

employer’s daughter. The next day she returned to work wearing it. As with Aurelia’s undergarments, Mattie made no attempt to hide these items. Her employer believed that Mattie was as honest as the average colored girl, but had not failed to note that she was somewhat careless with the property of others. She didn’t accuse Mattie of stealing because she didn’t hide the items but wore them openly. As far as she was concerned, Mattie did not deliberately take anything. It was the kind of cheap socialism commonplace among Negroes. When Mattie found a locket and chain belonging to one of the children and placed it around her neck, she wore it in plain view, as if indifferent to rightful ownership and innocent of the notion of theft. Beautiful objects solicited her and she yielded to them, not caring about who owned them, not believing that she had stolen anything.

When Aurelia confronted her, Mattie apologized and offered her the $3.97 that she had paid for the underwear, but Aurelia Bush wanted more than an apology. She was the one who told the police detective about Carter and Chester, the two Mrs. Jacksons. Mattie Jackson was a low-down prostitute. Aurelia had repeated this accusation so often she was certain it was true. The field investigator never found any evidence to confirm this, but the accusation exacted its damage.

The sociological note appended to the case file stated: The maternal home was a poor environment. The mother did not appear to feel very keenly disgraced by daughter’s behavior. She is lax in supervising her daughter. Her immoral conduct has been repeated by her daughter. Probation officer did not believe her home would be a good place to send patient. She considered probation quite seriously because this is the girl’s first offense, but felt that the institution would be better than probation in this case. The staff agrees.

Had her mother been Mrs. Smith by law, had Mattie really been Mrs. Jackson, had she not given birth to two children out of wedlock, had the police detective been willing to drop the charges when Aurelia Bush had a change of heart, had the probation officer not disappeared halfway through Mattie’s trial, had the House of Mercy or the Magdalene Home been willing to accept colored girls, had the superintendent of the reformatory not believed the prison a better and more nurturing environment than the average Negro home, had the officers of the court not concluded that the lives of the two Mrs. Jacksons constituted moral depravity, had Mattie Jackson been white, it is unlikely that she would

have been confined to the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills for nearly three years.

The case against Mattie was the case against her mother. This maternal inheritance placed her at risk for arrest and confinement, marked her as pathological and immoral, if not criminal. Given her poor upbringing and broken home, it was not a surprise that the girl had gone wrong. It was another example of maternal neglect. In the deliberations about Mattie’s future, this maternal inheritance was far more important than Aurelia Bush’s missing undergarments. Caroline’s lack of shame regarding Mattie’s sexual behavior and bastard children proved that the young woman was in need of better supervision than what could be offered by a lax Negro mother. Despite attending church regularly, clearly Mrs. Caroline Nelson, also known as Mrs. Smith, had very poor moral standards and transmitted her own lawless conduct to her daughter. Without batting an eye, Caroline told the investigator that she vowed never to marry again, but clearly this didn’t exclude extramarital relations.

As damaging were Mattie’s own words. In “The Statement of the Girl,” she said: I liked doing it. I went wrong. He forced me. I knew better. I wanted it. Her remarks yielded no clear sense of guilt or regret. Nor did they convince anyone that she had learned her lesson after Herman or Carter. The Italian men raised the matter of prostitution, although there was no evidence of this. Her lack of remorse and her refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing turned the tide against her. Nothing she had done justified her arrest, let alone being incarcerated. By insisting that she had not done anything wrong, Mattie served to confirm her guilt in the eyes of the social worker and the psychologist.

Even if Caroline Nelson hadn’t heard Mattie screaming on the second Sunday in November of the second year of her imprisonment, in all likelihood, she had read in her daughter’s eyes that things were not well. When she visited with Mattie a guard was always present, so her daughter couldn’t say much. She was waiting for Mattie in the visitors’ room when the matron, Mrs. Engle, informed her that Mattie wouldn’t be allowed visitors. Caroline could hear Mattie screaming and so she kept asking, Mrs. Engle, what is wrong? What is wrong? I hear my daughter. Then she started shouting Mattie’s name, hoping her child might hear her. The matron demanded that Caroline stop shouting and insisted that everything was fine. The whole time Mattie was screaming in the background. Mrs. Engle escorted Caroline out of the visiting area and through

the front gates. On the train back to New York City, Caroline, distraught and afraid, questioned: What are they doing to my child? Mattie’s screams echoed in her head the entire ride.

Mattie wrote her mother twice a month, but the matrons read all the letters, so she would not have been able to say, Mama, they are hurting me. Please get me out of here. They have handcuffed me to the bars of my cell. They have locked me in the dungeon of the Disciplinary Building. They have denied me food and water. They have tied my wrists with a rope and suspended me from the ceiling of my cell. They have choked and beaten me. They have slapped my face. They have called me nigger and ugly black bitch. Mother, please get me out of here.

Had Mattie written any of this in one of the two letters she was allowed to send each month, the letters would have been seized and she would have been subjected to even greater punishment. (Soon the torture and abuse would be made public. But it would be decades before anyone questioned whether young women should be incarcerated for having children out of wedlock or staying out

overnight or having serial lovers or intimate relations across the color line.)

Caroline got off the train in Harlem. She was determined to track down two girls who had been friends with Mattie at Bedford. What they reported broke her and made her want to hurt somebody. Awful things had been done to her daughter, her flesh and blood. Caroline might have felt as her great-grandmother had when her children were kidnapped from Bermuda. What could she do? Not a damn thing. It might have reminded her of her grandmother, stolen and mother- dispossessed, or made her worry about her grandson, mother-dispossessed too. Wounded kinship repeated across generations. That evening, Caroline, determined to do something, wrote a letter to the superintendent of the prison:

November 26, 1919

Dear Miss Cobb Just a line or two to ask you what was the trouble with Mattie that she was screaming? Was you whipping her? I saw a woman and she say you all treat my daughter as if she was a dog. Why you do [so?] She was not in when I got there.

I was told twice after I leave there before the train came I heard Mattie crying my self that [was] why I was standing up when you came in. I heard her and I want to know was you whipping her [?] I was told by a girl that was in there that the two of you get on Mattie and beat her choke her.

If I had heard that before I came up on Sunday I would have told you about it, but on my way home I stop uptown and these girls was telling me about it. I am sorry to write to you but I have to because I want you to know it, for it made me sick to know such cruel people was up there. I can’t believe it. Will [you] give Mattie this note. You read it [to see] if I put anything in there [that] is not right, cross it out.

Please I will tell you more of the girls’ news to me Miss Cobb, if you allow me to. This is [all I] ask of you: when can I see [Mattie] or when can I see you? I will (sign) yours respectful

Mrs. Earl Nelson Pleas answer.

Mattie’s letters are missing from the case file, although she corresponded with her mother and wrote notes to her friends. On at least one occasion, she was punished for passing notes to a girl in another cottage. In the spring of 1918, she was sent to the Disciplinary Building for hiding stationery and stamps in her room. But there are no copies of the letters she drafted and hoped to smuggle out of the prison or of the notes that she passed to a girlfriend. What stories were shared in all the letters lost and disappeared, the things whispered, and never disclosed? Is it possible to conjure the sentences and paragraphs and poems contained in that lost archive? Or find a way to Mattie’s language of self- expression? Her desire to write was so great that she was willing to risk punishment. A note slipped under a door or a crumpled message passed from cell to cell, hand to hand is called a kite—words travel even when we can’t.

Did Mattie keep a journal or write love poems? Did she record her dreams? Did she write stories about stillborn babies or stolen children or ships lost at sea or missing fathers? In her letters home, did she remind her mother to sing Scotty a lullaby so he could fall asleep real easy? Did she think about her great-great- grandmother exiled in Bermuda and separated from her children? Did she regret what had happened with Herman Hawkins? Or accept how hard it was to divorce the things she wanted and the things that hurt her, or separate the beauty of what she had experienced from the violence of it? In her letters to Caroline, did she ask about her girlfriends in Harlem or if her mother had seen Chester lately? Mattie would not have dared ask about the Red Summer of riots. She would not have been able to tell her mother whether she loved a girl in a neighboring cottage or had joined her friends in the riot at the reformatory, turning over beds, setting curtains on fire, and destroying everything in reach; or explain that if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. If her mother read between the lines, would she have been able to discern what Mattie’s letter implied: she was struggling to get free.

Book Three

BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

Revolution in a Minor Key

It was past midnight and Harriet Powell was still on the dance floor. At first, she couldn’t make sense of what the police officer said. She was under arrest? For what? The music blaring in the background and the couples dancing around her offered no hint that she would spend the next few years in and out of prison and that a decade would pass before she received the gift of her free papers. Who would have expected that involuntary servitude was the price for two nights of love in a rented room in a Harlem tenement? Or that unregulated black movement was still a risk, a threat, and a crime? Or that the “rebellious flame” of her “nocturnal wanderings” and sexual variance made her a potential prostitute and vagrant? How had the state come to set its sights on a seventeen- year-old black girl and make her the target of its violence? Even after the police officer uttered the words: You are under arrest, she protested, insisting that she had done nothing wrong. How had living become a crime?

Everyone was talking about freedom and democracy. One year, six months and twelve days of war hadn’t produced any agreement about what the war meant and what it would bring. The police didn’t give a damn if a Negro was wearing a uniform. Move on nigger. But even the dissenters, the radical Negroes who opposed transforming young men into cannon fodder for capitalism and who condemned the war as a crime and an extension of the color line on a global scale, expected something decisive at the outcome. Would the colored people of the world be united in the fight against imperialism? The hopes of revolutionary change ignited by 1917 reached deep into the heart of the Black Belt. The New Negro has no fear—was the declaration that echoed through the crowd. The spirit of Bolshevism was palpable in the streets of Harlem. Would a better world unfold in its wake? In editorials in the New York Age, the Amsterdam News, the Chicago Defender, and the Afro-American, everyone was asking when, if ever,

the Negro would be free. But no one had Harriet Powell in mind or the war waged against her. Walking with the “conscious sway of invitation,” gathering and assembling at the cabaret, and engaging in the very ordinary everyday practice of defiance were incommensurate with the political idiom of adjustment, betterment, and reward, the holy grail of self-appointed race leaders and friends of the Negro, and, as well, beneath the scrutiny of black socialists and street-corner radicals. Harriet’s beautiful lack of restraint, her spectacular refusal to aspire to a better job or a decent life, and her radiant lust solicited only the attention of the police and the sociologist.

Charlie Hudson wasn’t a soldier, unlike many of the young men Harriet knew who were lingering and tormented in the south and desperate to get to France. Theirs was not a romance stoked by the passions of war or the imminent threat of separation. If they became involved too quickly and made their way from the dance floor to the bedroom in a week, their only excuse was pleasure. On the Tuesday evening when Harriet left home to meet him, she told her parents she would return home shortly. Her father didn’t believe it for a minute. He complained that the girl made no pretense of listening. She was always running the street. After work, she came home only long enough to change her clothes before rushing off to a dance or a movie and did not return until well after midnight. Why shouldn’t I go out sometimes if I work? she challenged. He said he wouldn’t stand for it in his house. It wasn’t fair, she countered; she worked like an adult, so why shouldn’t she be treated like one?

The rented room was just a few blocks from the Palace Casino, where she first met Charlie. It was in the fast part of Harlem, filled with lodging houses, cabarets, clubs, and saloons, and it was where the police focused their raids. Harriet had been intimate with others, mostly boys her own age, kissing and groping in dark hallways and on rooftops. The first time she did it was with an Italian she met at the park. He took her home and raped her. Few were the girls who consented the first time. It was different with Charlie Hudson. He was not brutal. He didn’t force her, nor did he want her to hustle. For two days and nights, they lay idling in bed in a furnished room indistinguishable from hundreds of others, which had been carved out of lovely row houses now amputated and transformed into the tenements and rooming houses that lined 134th Street. In the tiny but glorious world of the rented room, she did whatever she wanted to do, not what others expected her to do, and it made her feel grown. When she and Charlie finally ventured outside, they made their way back to the dance hall.

On the floor of the Palace Casino, Harriet savored the joy of losing herself in the crowd. She absorbed the waves of heat emanating from all the bodies

shimmying and shaking and grinding and it made all the pleasure of the past forty-eight hours even sweeter. Only when Officer Johnson grabbed her arm as she moved across the dance floor did it come to an end.

The growing black presence in New York exaggerated the menace of colored women and the sexual dangers posed by young black folks rushing to the city. Each decade the population had doubled. It was impossible to walk through the streets of the Tenderloin or San Juan Hill or Harlem without encountering rambunctious girls, street waifs, baby-faced whores. They were the daughters of day laborers, Southern migrants, and West Indian immigrants flooding the city. The bohemians called them chippies, anarchists, lady lovers, sporting girls, bull daggers, and wild women.

Social reformers and yellow journalists sounded the alarm: The seduction of “unprotected” girls had reached epidemic proportions, so extreme measures were required. White slavery incited the moral panic and the national movement to protect young women from sexual predators. Rumors circulated about white slavery conspiracies, Jewish slave trafficking networks, Negro predators, and Chinatown opium dens, and the utter lack of evidence did little to dampen the fear and hysteria. Common sense held that black girls were the most vulnerable because of the corrupt employment agencies recruiting them from the south, the lack of decent job opportunities, and, most important, the centuries-long habit of consorting with white men, which had been their training in slavery. “Black women yielded more easily to the temptations of the city than any other girls,” explained Jane Addams, because Negroes as a group, as “a colony of colored people,” had not been brought under social control. Policy makers and reformers insisted they were “several generations behind the Anglo-Saxon race in civilizing agencies and processes.” For this reason, they were in need of greater regulation. Slavery was the source of black women’s immorality, observed the criminologist Frances Kellor, because “Negro women [were] expected to be immoral and [had] few inducements to be otherwise.” Even W. E. B. Du Bois lamented, “Without a doubt the point where the Negro American is furthest behind modern civilization is in his [or her] sexual mores.”

Moving about the city as they pleased and associating freely with strangers, young women risked harassment, arrest, and confinement. Wayward minor laws made them vulnerable to arrest and transformed sexual acts, even consensual ones with no cash exchanging hands, into criminal offenses. Phrases like “potential prostitute,” “failed adjustment,” and “danger of becoming morally depraved” licensed the dragnet. Casual sexual encounters and serial relationships were branded as “moral depravity,” an offense punishable with a prison sentence. All colored women were vulnerable to being seized at random by the

police; those who worked late hours, or returned home after the saloon closed or the lights were extinguished at the dance hall, might be arrested and charged with soliciting. If she had a sexually transmitted disease or children outside of wedlock or mixed-race children, her conviction was nearly guaranteed. Young women between fourteen and twenty-one, but sometimes girls as young as twelve, were sentenced to reformatories for visiting or residing in a house with a bad reputation or suspected of prostitution, or associating with lowlifes and criminals, or being promiscuous, or not working. Those who dared refuse the gender norms and social conventions of sexual propriety—monogamy, heterosexuality, and marriage—or failed to abide the script of female respectability were targeted as potential prostitutes, vagrants, deviants, and incorrigible children. Immorality and disorder and promiscuity and inversion and pathology were the terms imposed to target and eradicate these practices of intimacy and affiliation.

It was one’s status that determined whether an intimate act, an evening spent with a stranger, or a proclivity to run the streets was a punishable offense. A status offense was a form of behavior deemed illegal only for a particular group of persons. These offenses fell within the jurisdiction of magistrate courts, and judges had great latitude in deciding a young woman’s fate. Subjective evaluations of “behavior and conduct” produced dire outcomes. The Women’s Court was created to address matters of sexual delinquency and it had the highest rate of conviction of all New York City courts. Not surprisingly, black women made up a significant percentage of those convicted.

Sex wasn’t a crime, yet some forms of intimacy were unlawful and immoral —premarital sex, sex with a girl or boy under the age of consent, sodomy, sex in exchange for gifts or money rather than a marriage proposal. A wayward minor, as defined by the Code of Criminal Procedure, was: “Any person between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one who (1) ‘habitually associates with dissolute persons,’ or (2) ‘is found of his or her own free will and knowledge in a house of prostitution, assignation, or ill-fame, or habitually associates with thieves, prostitutes, pimps or procurers, or disorderly persons,’ or (3) ‘is willfully disobedient to the reasonable and lawful commands of parent, guardian or other custodian and is morally depraved or is in danger of becoming morally depraved,’ or (4) ‘. . . without just cause and without the consent of parents, guardians, or other custodians, deserts his or her home or place of abode, and is morally depraved or is in danger of becoming morally depraved,’ or (5) ‘. . . so deports himself or herself as to willfully injure or endanger the morals of herself and others.’ ”

Only young women were adjudged wayward under these statutes (between

the years 1882–1925). The intent of the legislation was to police and regulate sexual offenses without the “stigma of the conviction of crime.” Young women’s sexual activity, it was believed, led “directly to the entrance of the minor upon a career of prostitution.” Yet such “protective measures” served only to criminalize young black women and make them even more vulnerable to state violence.

Serial lovers, a style of comportment, a lapse in judgement, a failure of restraint, an excess of desire—these were not crimes in and of themselves, but indications of impaired will and future crime. Those charged were not technically guilty of breaking the law or having commited a crime, so as a result, they were not protected by regular forms of due process, but subject to the discretion of the magistrate as to whether to suspend sentence, offer probation or commit the accused to the reformatory or other appropriate institutions. As a result of this discretion, many young black women who were first-time offenders, or to be more exact, young black women who had their first encounter with the police were likely to be sentenced to the reformatory for three years.

The wayward were guilty of a manner of living and existing deemed dangerous, and were a risk to the public good. Formally, they were not juvenile deliquents because “delinquency includes the commission of an act which if committed by an adult would be adjudged a crime and punished as such.” In contrast, the provisions of the Wayward Minors Act held that “the definition of a wayward minor includes only non-criminal acts but which indicate the imminence of future criminality.”

The paradox was that minor infractions and statutory offenses were subject to more severe forms of punishment than actual crimes. A girl convicted as a wayward minor might receive an indeterminate sentence of three years, while a woman convicted of prostitution might receive sixty days at the workhouse. When the young Billie Holiday apppeared before the Women’s Court after being arrested in a disorderly house, the fourteen-year-old Elinora Harris gave her name as Eleanor Fagan, which was her grandmother’s surname, and pretended she was twenty-one in order to avoid a custodial sentence of three years at the reformatory in favor of a short stint at the workhouse. As she had hoped, the judge (Jean Norris) sentenced her to four months in the workhouse at Blackwell’s Island. This sentence was a month longer than the sentence received by the neighbor who raped her when she was eleven.

Wayward minor laws brought conduct such as drinking, dancing, dating (especially interracial liasions), having sex, going to parties and cabarets, inviting men to your room, and roaming the street under the control of the police and the courts. These counter-conducts (different ways of conducting the self directed at challenging the hierarchy of life produced by the color line and enforced by the state) or errant ways of living were seized by the state in its calculation of social risks and dangers. Risk was the metric for tabulating future crimes and this foreshadowing determined the outcomes of young black women already targeted and vulnerable to myriad forms of state violence. The actuarial logic at work predicted the kind of persons and the kind of acts that were likely to lead to crime and social disorder. State racism exacerbated the reach of wayward minor laws, marking blackness as disorderly and criminal.

Harriet Powell has been credited with nothing: she remains a surplus woman of no significance, a nobody deemed unfit for history and destined to be a minor figure. What errant thoughts and wild ideas encouraged her to flout social norms and live outside and athwart the law in pursuit of pleasure and the quest for beauty? Or to never settle and keep running the streets? Was it to experience something akin to freedom or to enjoy the short-lived transport of autonomy? Was it the sweetness of phrases like I want you, I go where I please, Nobody owns me rolling around in her mouth?

Wayward: A Short Entry on the Possible

Wayward, related to the family of words: errant, fugitive, recalcitrant, anarchic, willful, reckless, troublesome, riotous, tumultuous, rebellious and wild. To inhabit the world in ways inimical to those deemed proper and respectable, to be deeply aware of the gulf between where you stayed and how you might live. Waywardness: the avid longing for a world not ruled by master, man or the police. The errant path taken by the leaderless swarm in search of a place better than here. The social poesis that sustains the dispossessed. Wayward: the unregulated movement of drifting and wandering; sojourns without a fixed destination, ambulatory possibility, interminable migrations, rush and flight, black locomotion; the everyday struggle to live free. The attempt to elude capture by never settling. Not the master’s tools, but the ex-slave’s fugitive gestures, her traveling shoes. Waywardness articulates the paradox of cramped creation, the entanglement of escape and confinement, flight and captivity. Wayward: to wander, to be unmoored, adrift, rambling, roving, cruising, strolling, and seeking. To claim the right to opacity. To strike, to riot, to refuse. To love what is not loved. To be lost to the world. It is the practice of the social otherwise, the insurgent ground that enables new possibilities and new vocabularies; it is the lived experience of enclosure and segregation, assembling and huddling together. It is the directionless search for a free territory; it is a practice of making and relation that enfolds within the policed boundaries of the dark ghetto; it is the mutual aid offered in the open-air prison. It is a queer resource of black survival. It is a beautiful experiment in how-to-live.

Waywardness is a practice of possibility at a time when all roads, except the ones created by smashing out, are foreclosed. It obeys no rules and abides no authorities. It is unrepentant. It traffics in occult visions of other worlds and dreams of a different kind of life. Waywardness is an ongoing exploration of

what might be; it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe, when you have been sentenced to a life of servitude, when the house of bondage looms in whatever direction you move. It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive.