Jennifer campbell diary of a social gal

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

There were few memories of her childhood she could recollect with any pleasure. It would not be wrong to say that she had never been a child, or at least, she had never been a happy child. Are precocious children ever happy? To learn about the world or to blossom too early was dangerous. It wasn’t clear if her father, the man who raped her twelve-year-old mother, was the son of the family that had owned her grandmother’s people; all she knew was that he was the sort of southern gentleman who had no scruples against making concubines of their servant girls. Although a term like concubine inadequately described the violence experienced by her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, three generations of women who, in her words, became very practiced at submission. Her great-grandmother had been a slave; her grandmother and mother were nominally free. The monstrous intimacy of chattel slavery, the violent coupling and compulsory reproduction, marked each generation of her family. The child follows the condition of the mother—partus sequitur ventrem—so that the daughters labor even now under the outcome. What happened to Edna’s mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother was neither unique nor exceptional. It was to be expected if you were a servant in the house. House service, wrote Du Bois, preserved “the last vestiges of slavery and medievalism.” The “personal degradation of the work” was so great that “any white man of decency would rather cut his daughter’s throat than let her grow up to such a destiny.” Throughout the world, there was “no greater source of prostitution than this grade of menial service.” Du Bois echoed Frederick Douglass, who a century earlier described the kitchen as brothel. The kitchen contained a “whole social history,” not only of racism and servility, but sexual use and violation.

Her grandmother joined “the wild rush from house service, on the part of all who could scramble or run,” and moved the family to Boston so that Edna might avoid this fate. The awful things they escaped were described only through euphemisms like loyal servants and concubines and fathers, but her grandmother was too honest to disguise the brutality part and parcel of intimate labor as love or consent. Dissemblance was the way they managed and lived with this violence. What Edna knew was: All the women in the family were beautiful and They probably often submitted to the white men. She also knew never to speak the name of her father or her mother’s father or her grandmother’s father. The secrets and lies and the perverse lines of descent encompassed slavery and its afterlife. Only when she was an adult did her mother share the graphic account of her rape. A white family had hired her mother as a nursemaid. Her family was so poor they permitted it. When she was in bed sleeping beside her three-year-old charge, her employer, a fine Virginia gentleman, entered the bed and raped her. At twelve, she didn’t even realize that she was pregnant, she was too young to know anything about sex or babies, and so believed the old people when they said there were snakes in her belly.

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M y sister, my mother. Until she was about six years old, Edna believed her grandmother was her mother. She and her mother lived with her grandmother and the Negro man she had married after giving birth to her second child by a white man. They were poor but lived on the outskirts of a very nice colored neighborhood and strived to assume their place among decent and respectable Negroes. Being nearly white endowed them with status; being nearly white also raised questions about the circumstances that afforded Edna’s ivory complexion, golden wavy hair, and blue eyes. The missing father exposed the lie of any presumed respectability. Once it became apparent that Edna had no father and was nameless, the other children on the block mocked her and called her terrible names, making cruel sport of the things their parents whispered behind closed doors. They adored and reviled her, envied her near-white beauty and held her in contempt as the child of a white man’s whore. Half - white bastard. Her fate was sealed. Even her aunt Nancy believed Edna would never amount to anything and would be a bad woman like her mother.

When in a fit of jealousy, her grandfather murdered the fiancé of his then-sixteen-year-old stepdaughter and was sentenced to life in prison, Edna was condemned as the granddaughter of a murderer too. All hopes of blending invisibly with the upper ranks were dashed. The scandal of the murder and the stepfather’s envy of his daughter’s lover cast an additional layer of shame on their house.

Her mother was too free. She did what she wanted. Her sexual relations were social. She was never kept by anyone. This excess—being reckless enough to have sex with a number of men, both colored and white, could not and would not be forgiven. Her mother was beautiful, loose, and unrepentant in her sexuality. She was attracted to men who were gentle and to men who abused her. Burdened by the weight of her mother’s history, Edna felt guilty and condemned. It wasn’t hers to carry, but the world punished her anyway. The knot of shame that blossomed inside her had as much to do with the names their neighbors called them as with what she now believed. It was hard to look at her mother and not judge her a bad woman.

As they lived in three small rooms, Edna found it impossible to avoid the sight of her mother in bed with colored and white men. White man’s whore, the neighbors spat. The words promiscuous or dissolute weren’t in the six-year-old Edna’s vocabulary. Lax in sexual matters, loose-living, abandoned, unrestrained in behavior, unruly, lavish, wistful. When she was old enough to understand the meaning of such words, she preferred to describe her mother as too free. A flood of tears accompanied the conviction that what the neighbors said about her mother was true. It was not the picture of her mother’s body entwined in the arms of a casual friend or stranger that made her sob inconsolably; rather, it was the vision of her mother applying rouge to her cheeks. The blood-red color was the same as that of the artificial rose she had soaked in water, loosening the pigment, and then painted onto her face. Her mother was beautiful, cut-rate, and deep scarlet. Only bad women did that.

Guessing at the World
Masked behind the quiet demeanor, the cultivated manners, the very fair and very pretty appearance, was a quiet turbulence. Edna was slow to realize it was not simply that her circumstances were unsettled; rather, there was something decidedly unsettled about her. A riot inside was palpable, but its source she couldn’t discern. Perhaps it was simply unhappiness, the brutal loneliness that characterized a failed and unhappy marriage. Perhaps it was the three generations of hurt transmitted along the maternal line. There was the creeping fear and the risk that her resolute passivity might yield to something dangerous and unexpected. Maybe it was the blind groping for something she could not name.

Lloyd Thomas did not try to seduce her as so many others had. The lovely twenty-nine-year-old Edna traveled in the best circles. As the social secretary of Madame C. J. Walker, the first black woman millionaire, she quickly gained entry to the worlds of the wealthy and the fashionable. The aspiring actress was courted by admirers, both white and black, and moved easily between the worlds of Greenwich Village and Harlem, taking pleasure in the opportunities and the glamour afforded by the city, at least for the beautiful and talented, and she was both. Edna was fascinated by Lloyd’s indifference. This dour, taciturn man, who managed aspiring singers and actors as well as several Harlem nightspots, did not appear to want or desire her, and that made her desire him fiercely. She initiated the courtship, and they married in a very short time. He was attractive, debonair, cosmopolitan; most importantly, he was a master of withholding. Even when surrounded by a roomful of beautiful chorus girls, his eyes never wandered. He remained aloof, cold, unreachable. This amazed and aroused her, encouraging her determination to make him want her fiercely. He loved her from a distance, if he loved her at all. He had never said that he did, and refused to utter those three words—I love you—despite her badgering, as if it were an outrageous or unreasonable thing to expect of a man. It surprised her although he had never expressed ardor or tenderness before they married, she wrongly assumed he would relent and soften. Certainly, he wasn’t a conventional man; he enjoyed the company of artists, writers, and entertainers whose desires were not fixed by the coordinates of identity, who outrageously defied expectations regarding who they were supposed to be and who they were required to love. (As with Edna, he might have enjoyed the experience of being wanted by those he did not want; more likely, he was attracted to the queer men regularly in his company, the poets, singers, and club owners who made Harlem beautiful; or maybe he wanted them with an intensity that Edna never could have guessed. Rumors circulated that it was a marriage of convenience.)

Despite his indifference, Lloyd proved to be a passionate lover; he satisfied her physically, and he was faithful insofar as he seemed completely unaffected by other women, yet his heart belonged to him alone. The very qualities that initially made him so attractive—his sexy reticence, Olympian reserve, and striking impassivity—caused a great deal of grief.

What was at stake in trying to transform indifference into love and adoration? Should she be satisfied with his cold constancy and a fidelity ensured by boredom with other women? Was the impossible effort to transform aloofness into devotion yet another attempt to break loose from her mother’s life? Or make up for what her mother failed to give? She had escaped her mother’s fate, and had been lucky when compared with the women in her family. No rapists, murderers, or mercurial violent men. No savage love and fierce carnality. At sixteen, she had rushed into marriage still a virgin, determined to escape poverty and scandal. All she and her mother noticed was the veneer of respectability and the gilded family name. Her husband, the son of a wealthy self-made man, enjoyed a secure place in “brown society.” What could be more attractive to a bastard child than social standing, than the protection of fathers and husbands? Only after she became a Mrs. did she discover that he was spoiled and irresponsible; he never worked; he drank and gambled away their money. It was a colossal mistake. She quietly planned and plotted a way out and vowed never to become a mother. The first abortion was difficult, but she was as resolute the second time.

With the first marriage, she miscalculated, confusing appearance with substance, seeking safety from the turbulence of her childhood in the priggish straight-laced milieu of the Negro upper classes, but she had been wrong to believe that by preferring constancy to passion, and a well-scripted life to uncertainty, she could avoid being damaged by the world. Only the wealth of her father-in-law had protected her and her husband from the streets. The second time, there was no one to whom she could turn. And to protect her from what? A tepid marriage, a lukewarm coital embrace, waning affection, boredom? All the secrets harbored inside a marriage: the remoteness of the husband, the abrading routine of daily life, the monotony of domesticity, the thousand missed opportunities for an act of tenderness or a small proof of love. The loneliness of the marital bed threatened to break her.

On stage, she had purpose. She was no longer a disappointed wife; she was alive, resplendent. It didn’t matter that this feeling was transient and ephemeral. The freedom of being less like Edna and more like others was exhilarating. To be lost to the world of marriage and duty and disappointment and tedium as she entered the space of the ensemble and the intensity of creating and inhabiting a world with others, a domain of collective bodies, kinesthetic experience and gestural language. All other roles had to be relinquished. The stage enabled her to escape her paltry individual life and slip into someone else’s existence—prostitute, queen, toiling laborer, flawed heroine—and to shed every petty concern. When she stepped into a character and lent her body to the gesture, she was nobody and everyone at the same time, no longer bound to her personal history and yet able to express deeply all the pain and failure and want, sharing it with the world but not shamed by it.

She disappeared into other lives; she became other selves. This was exquisite. It was the most sustained joy she had ever experienced. In the world of actors, directors, singers, playwrights and stagehands, she found a vehicle, an outlet for her tamped-down passion; she let go the impulse to seek safety within the confines of restraint and to settle for a dispassionate existence.

As her career soared, Lloyd became jealous and resentful. Her name appeared regularly in the theatre reviews, first in amateur productions, next as a member of the Lafayette Players, and then as a leading lady. Each success she enjoyed made him feel smaller and smaller, like there wasn’t enough air in the room for the two of them; like she was trying to become the dominant one, like they were in a competition, and he wouldn’t be anyone’s second. He had opposed adamantly her career as an actress and now she intended to go on tour. After six months on the road with Lulu Belle, she returned home to find him dating younger women, frequenting cabarets and theatre clubs without her, spending the night at other Harlem apartments. Things unraveled but it was all very civil: no cussing and fighting and cutting up clothes and throwing his belongings into the streets. They were moderns. They were bohemians. Again, she was alone and disillusioned in marriage; she had become practiced at being let down, accustomed to heartbreak.

Whether it was Evelyn Preer or Fredi Washington or Rose McClendon—she never confided. All she disclosed was that a romantic encounter with a colored leading lady turned her life around. One dance sent her hurtling down a radically different path. Embraced in the arms of this lovely lady, Edna felt something electric, and it made her feel alive; it let her know that she was someone other than who she imagined herself to be. It was her first experience with a woman. They danced together and something very terrific happened, a very exhilarating thing. It made her know. Rumors circulated. It was the theatre so no one was shocked. Then there was the gossip about her relation with A’lelia Walker. Edna was among the circle of beautiful women who surrounded the Harlem heiress. They were intimate friends. She left it at that.

She met Olivia at a party at A’lelia’s house. For six months Lady Olivia Wyndham pursued Edna relentlessly, claiming to be madly in love after their first meeting and not giving a damn about Lloyd. The English aristocrat was mannish, elegant, addicted to opium, and reckless. She had once cut herself on the head with a knife and thrown herself down a flight of stairs so that she might be hospitalized and attended by a nurse she loved. The intensity and force of her desire made Edna recoil. It frightened her. It was the opposite of everything she sought in a husband. For six months, Olivia, undeterred, regularly appeared at Edna and Lloyd’s Seventh Avenue apartment stylishly outfitted like a gentleman of wealth. Folks in Harlem accepted it as the English way after Radclyffe Hall, Sackville-West, and Nancy Cunard. She was after all a distant cousin of Oscar Wilde. Wyndham was the tempest threatening to destroy what remained of Edna’s staid and loveless marriage. After months of relentless pursuit, Olivia conceded defeat and decided to return to England. On the night she was scheduled to depart, she made a last visit to Edna, presumably to say goodbye, but not without hope. Edna had done everything possible to quash Olivia’s expectations, never reciprocating her affection or encouraging her desire. Yet, somehow after months in this sustained war of position, rejecting Olivia at every chance and determined not to feel anything at all for Lady Wyndham, she had succumbed to her charms. Had her resolve simply been worn away? Or was it more like rain after a long dry season? Unexpected, startling and necessary. If forced to do so, she would have no choice but to admit that she did harbor feelings for Olivia. Now that her departure was imminent, it was easier to admit. When Olivia arrived that evening, Edna invited her inside the apartment and then refused to let her go. They lived together for decades.

The romance of the English aristocrat and the Negro leading lady captivated the press. The articles stepped gingerly around the obvious—never mentioning the words lady lovers or homosexuals or lesbians—and cast no aspersions. People wrongly assumed ménage a trois; Edna and Olivia were the couple, but expansive enough to include Lloyd as a housemate. Lloyd didn’t seem to mind releasing her and enjoyed the attention they received in the press: Rich British Woman Forsook Own People to Reside in Harlem or She Renounced British Tradition for Her Negro Friends. He and Edna had drifted into the arms of other lovers, creating parallel lives, but the three of them lived together in their Seventh Avenue flat, hosted dinner parties for their mutual friends, and regularly appeared in the society columns as the Lloyd Thomases and friend, whether attending A’lelia Walker’s soirees, charity benefits, theatre openings, or the Hamilton Lodge Ball. Wallace Thurman, Dorothy West, and Jimmy Daniels rented a room in their place and Lloyd’s beautiful young lover, Harlem’s It girl Blanche Dunn, made a second home there until she jilted him for an English oil magnate. Olivia’s fortune allowed them to live comfortably. After his Harlem nightclub closed, Lloyd never worked again. Marriage provided the cloak that allowed them to live as they wanted and without public censure.

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It was all so unexpected—late love and a successful career, a farmhouse in Connecticut and European holidays in English castles and French chateaus. For a poor girl who had been raised in a three-room apartment on the outskirts of respectability, it was astonishing and unbelievable—unless you were a leading lady or a brilliant entertainer or member of the beautiful set. She was one of the lucky ones: “the remnants of that ability and genius . . . whom the accidents of education and opportunity have raised on the tidal waves of chance,” a rare bird, a Negro artist.

The world kept Edna guessing about what she might do and who she might become. She had done all of the shocking things imaginable and the only reason she could summon was the urge for expression, an urge that no one experienced more fiercely than black women and that none paid as dearly when this need was unmet, when one remained an artist without an art form. Everywhere you looked you could find it. No modern intelligent person was content merely existing. Sometimes it was good to take a chance.

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.

A Minor Figure

The small naked figure reclines on the arabesque sofa. Looking at the photograph, it is easy to mistake her for some other Negress, lump her with all the delinquent girls working Lombard Street and Middle Alley, lose sight of her among the surplus colored women in the city, condemn and pity the child whore. Everyone has a different story to share. Fragments of her life are woven with the stories of girls resembling her and girls nothing like her, stories held together by longing, betrayal, lies, and disappointment. The newspaper article confuses her with another girl, gets her name wrong. Photographs of the tenement where she lives regularly appear in the police briefs and the charity reports, but you can barely see her, peering out of the third-floor window. The caption makes no mention of her, noting only the moral hazard of the one-room kitchenette, the foul condition of the toilets, and the noise of the airshaft. The photograph taken of her in the attic studio is the one that is most familiar; it is how the world still remembers her. Had her name been scribbled on the back of the albumen print, there would be at least one fact I could convey with a measure of certainty, one detail that I would not have to guess, one less obstacle in retracing the girl’s path through the streets of the city. Had the photographer or one of the young men assisting him in the studio recorded her name, I might have been able to find her in the 1900 census, or discover if she ever resided at the Shelter for Colored Orphans, or danced on the stage of the Lafayette Theatre, or if she ended up at the Magdalene House when there was nowhere else to go.

Her friends refused to tell the authorities anything; but even they didn’t know how she arrived at the house on the outskirts of the Seventh Ward, or what happened in the studio that afternoon. The Irish housekeeper thought she was the black cook, Old Margaret’s, niece, and, neglecting her work as they were wont to do had wandered from the kitchen to the studio. Old Margaret, no kin to the girl, believed that Mr. Eakins had lured her to the attic with the promise of a few coins, but never said what she feared. The social worker later assigned to the girl’s case never saw the photograph. She blamed the girl’s mother and the slum for all the terrible things that happened and filled in the blanks on the personal history form, never listening for any other answer. Age of first sexual offense was the only question without certain reply.

From these bits and pieces, it has been difficult to know where to begin or even what to call her. The fiction of a proper name would evade the dilemma, not resolve it. It would only postpone the question: Who is she? I suppose I could call her Mattie or Kit or Ethel or Mabel. Any of these names would do and would be the kind of name common to a young colored woman at the beginning of the twentieth century. There are other names reserved for the dark: Sugar Plum, Peaches, Pretty Baby, and Little Bit—names imposed on girls like her that hint at the pleasures afforded by intimate acts performed in rented rooms and dimly lit hallways. And there are the aliases too, the identities slipped on and discarded—a Mrs. quickly affixed to a lover’s name, or one borrowed from a favorite actress to invent a new life, or the protective cover offered by the surname of a maternal grandmother’s dead cousin—all to elude the law, keep your name out of the police register, hold the past at a safe distance, forget what grown men did to girls behind closed doors. The names and the stories rush together. The singular life of this particular girl becomes interwoven with those of other young women who crossed her path, shared her circumstances, danced with her in the chorus, stayed in the room next door in a Harlem tenement, spent sixty days together at the workhouse, and made an errant path through the city.

Without a name, there is the risk that she might never escape the oblivion that is the fate of minor lives and be condemned to the pose for the rest of her existence, remaining a meager figure appended to the story of a great man and relegated to item number 304, African American girl, in the survey of his life and work. If I knew her name I might be able to locate her, discover if she had any siblings, if her mother was dead, if her grandmother was “living in” with a white family, if her father was a rag seller or day laborer, or if he had disappeared. A name is a luxury that she isn’t afforded—other sitters are unnamed, but they can be identified; she is the only one who is anonymous.

In a compelled photograph, a girl’s name is of no greater consequence than her desire for a different kind of likeness. (The only thing I knew for sure was that she did have a name and a life that exceeded the frame in which she was captured.) When the scandal erupted and the white girls who lived in large stately homes with powerful fathers disclosed the things the artist had forced them to do, no one mentioned her or any other black girl. Years later when another anatomist, another man of science, was found with a cache of nude pictures of colored schoolgirls, no one remembered her. Without a name, it was unlikely that I would ever find this particular girl. What mattered was that she was a placeholder for all the possibilities and the dangers awaiting young black women in the first decades of the twentieth century. In being denied a name or, perhaps, in refusing to give one, she represents all the other girls who follow in her path. Anonymity enables her to stand in for all the others. The minor figure yields to the chorus. All the hurt and the promise of the wayward are hers to bear.

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It was not the kind of image I was looking for when I set out to tell the story of the social revolution and transformation of intimate life that unfolded in the black city-within-the-city. I had been searching for photographs unequivocal in their representation of what it meant to live free for the second and third generations born after the official end of slavery. I was hungry for images that represented the experiments in freedom that unfolded within slavery’s shadow, the practice of everyday life and escape subsistence stoked by the liberties of the city. Beautiful experiments in living free, urban plots against the plantation flourished, yet were unsustainable or thwarted or criminalized before they could take root. I searched for photographs exemplary of the beauty and possibility cultivated in the lives of ordinary black girls and young women and that stoked dreams of what might be possible if you could escape the house of bondage. This archive of images, found and imagined, would provide a necessary antidote to the scourged backs, glassy tear-filled eyes, bodies stripped and branded, or rendered grotesque for white enjoyment. I refused the mug shots and the family albums of black elites who fashioned their lives in accordance with Victorian norms, those best described by W. E. B. Du Bois as strivers, as the talented tenth, as whites of Negro blood.

I looked at Thomas Askew’s lovely portraits of the black aristocracy but didn’t find the young women whose lives unfolded in streets, cabarets, and tenement hallways, rather than in grand homes with parlors furnished with pianos and wingtip chairs adorned with lace antimacassars. Young women with serial lovers, husbands in the plural, and women lovers too. Young women who outfitted themselves like Ada Overton Walker and Florence Mills, young women who preferred to dress like men. I looked at vernacular images, collections of photographs in municipal archives, anthologies of black photographs, documentary surveys of the slum, black portraits and group pictures displayed in Negro buildings and institutes of social economy at international expositions and world fairs. I browsed thousands of photographs taken by social reformers and charity organizations, hoping to find them, but they failed to appear. They averted their gaze or they rushed past the photographer; they clustered at the edge of the photos, they looked out of windows, peered out of doorways, and turned their back to the camera. They refused the terms of visibility imposed on them. They eluded the frame and remained fugitives—lovely silhouettes and dark shadows impossible to force into the grid of naturalist description or the taxonomy of slum pictures.

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The young mothers were the ones pictured most often; they were required to sit with their children in crowded bedrooms and kitchenettes in order to receive the assistance which they had been promised: some milk for the children, or a visit from the nurse because the youngest was ailing, or the loan of a pair of shoes to go out and find work. The mothers had to appear in the reform pictures, and these images were marshaled as evidence in the case made against them by the social workers and the sociologists.

Young women not in desperate need, not saddled with children, and old enough to say Hell no and Get out of my face evaded capture. The few images of young women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three are group pictures taken with their families or with their neighbors. They never looked wild and wayward or too fast in these pictures. Despite their fugitive gestures of refusal—slumped shoulders and side-eyes and radiant anger—they are made into clients and types and examples; they are transformed into social documents and statistical persons, reduced to the human excrescence of social law and slum ecology, pitied as betrayed girl mothers, labeled chance creatures of questionable heredity. The ash barrels lining the street and the ramshackle buildings and the friendly visitors to the poor dominate and infantilize them.

I grew weary of the endless pictures of white sheets draped on the clothesline, leaking faucets, filthy water closets, and crowded bedrooms. I recoiled at the lantern slide show and its oscillating pictures of cause and effect, before and after, the movement of images propelled by moralistic narratives of sexual promiscuity, improper guardianship, and the dangers of the saloon, boarding house, and dance hall. The visual clichés of damnation and salvation: the black-and-tan dive, the sociality of neighbors across the color line, hanging out on the stoop, marrying outside the race, or the model tenement occupied by a monochromatic family of the same race. The outcomes were stark: on one hand, the morgue, prison and the workhouse; on the other, the privatized household and the sovereignty of the husband and father.

The surveys and the sociological pictures left me cold. These photographs never grasped the beautiful struggle to survive, glimpsed the alternative modes of life, or illuminated the mutual aid and communal wealth of the slum. The reform pictures and the sociological surveys documented only ugliness. Everything good and decent stood on the ruins of proscribed modes of affiliation and ways of living: the love unrecognized by the law, households open to strangers, the public intimacy of the streets, and the aesthetic predilections and willful excesses of young black folks. The social worlds represented in these pictures were targeted for destruction and elimination. The reformers used words like “improvement” and “social betterment” and “protection,” but no one was fooled. The interracial slum was razed and mapped into homogeneous zones of absolute difference. The black ghetto was born.

The captions transform the photographs into moral pictures, amplify the poverty, arrange and classify disorder. Negro quarter. The caption seems to replicate the image, to detail what resides within its frame, but instead the caption produces what appears. It subsumes the image to the text. The words attached to the image—unsightly, broken, typical—seem almost to be part of the picture, like the crumpled bed-sheets or the boards covering the broken windows of the shack. The captions index the life of the poor. The words police and divide: Negro quarter. Announce the vertical order of life: Damaged Goods. Make domestic space available for scrutiny and punishment: One - room moral hazard. Declaim the crime of promiscuous social arrangements: Eight Persons Occupy One Bedroom. Manage and segregate the mixed crowd and represent the world in fidelity to the color line: View of Italian girls, Boys with Cap, and Two Negroes in Doorway of Dilapidated Building.

Such pictures made it impossible to imagine that segregation was not natural selection based on affinity and that Jim Crow had not always prevailed. Social reformers targeted interracial intimacy or even proximity; the Girl problem and the Negro problem reared their heads at the same time and found a common target in the sexual freedom of young women. The attendant fears of promiscuity, degeneration, and interracial sexual intimacy resulted in their arrest and confinement. Improving the slum and targeting urban vice extended the color line in absence of a legal apparatus or statutory law to mandate and enforce it. Progressive reformers and settlement workers were the architects and planners of racial segregation in northern cities.

The photographs coerced the black poor into visibility as a condition of policing and charity, making those bound to appear suffer the burden of representation. In these iconic images of the black urban poor, individual persons were forced to stand in for sweeping historical narratives about the progress or failure of the Negro, serve as representatives of a race or class, embody and inhabit social problems, and evidence failure or improvement. These photographs extended an optic of visibility and surveillance that had its origins in slavery and the administered logic of the plantation. (To be visible was to be targeted for uplift or punishment, confinement or violence.)

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Some things didn’t appear in the photographs, like the three flowerpots lined up on the windowsill, the crazy quilts covering the tick mattresses, the Bibles wrapped in lace and calico, the illustrations from the mail-order catalogue affixed to the walls. The reformers and the journalists were fixated on the kitchenette. They didn’t know that the foyer, the fire escape, and the rooftop were a stretch of urban beach, not until the rich adopted the practice and sleeping on rooftops became fashionable. They didn’t know that the hallway and the stairwell were places of assembly, a clearing inside the tenement, or that you love in doorways. There is no photograph of the hallway, barely illuminated by a flickering gaslight that hides everything that is unlovely. Even in the daytime, the shadows are too dark and too deep to capture it. The hallway provides the refuge for the first tongue kiss, the place for hanging out with your friends, the conduit for gossip and intrigue. Here you first learn about the world and the role to which you have been consigned, so you scribble fuck or wretched on the wall in the stairwell. The hallway is where the authorities post the tenement-house laws and the project rules, and the guidelines might as well say, Negro, don’t even try to live. It is inside but public. The police enter without warrants and arrest whoever has the bad fortune to be found and caught. It is the passageway that leads to the two rooms where you stay with your mother, father, aunt, and your two sisters. Your mother tries to make the drab rooms home by setting out your grandmother’s tea set, which is too fancy for the small kitchen table; the set belonged to the white folks she worked for. She said it was a gift, but once let it slip that it was owed to her, she earned it and much more. A Masonic Lodge calendar and lithograph of Frederick Douglass hide the crack on the plaster wall. The sheer curtain hanging in the window filters the weak light of late afternoon. The ivory table mat covering the battered stovetop confirms that even in the worst places one finds beauty. All that effort makes it less terrible. No one forgets that they are here because excluded from everywhere else, so you make do and try to thrive in what’s nearly unlivable. It is the Black Belt: You are confined here. You huddle here and make a life together.

In the hallway, you wonder will the world always be as narrow as this, two walls threatening to squeeze and crush you into nothingness. So you imagine other worlds, sometimes not even better, but at least different from this. You and your friends hatch plots of escape and dereliction. This black interior is a space for thought and action, for study and vandalism, for love and trouble. The hallway is the parlor for those who manage to live in cramped dark rooms with not enough air and who see the sunlight only when they step out onto the front stoop.

It is ugly and brutalizing and it is where you stay. It doesn’t matter if you don’t love the place; you love the people residing there. It is as close to a home as you’ll get, it is a transient resting place, an impossible refuge, for those forced out, pushed on, displaced always. They stay but never settle. The hallway is a space uneasy with expectation and tense with the force of unmet desire. It is the liminal zone between the inside and the outside for the one who stays in the ghetto; the reformer documenting the habitat of the poor passes through without noticing it, failing to see what can be created in cramped space, if not an overture, a desecration, or to regard our beautiful flaws and terrible ornaments. This hallway never appears in the lantern slide show. Only the ones who reside in the tenement know it.

It won’t be photographed from the inside until decades later. Not until 1953 will a photograph convey the experience of dwelling within these walls, offer a glimpse of the life worlds made there, capture the breathlessness of a fourth-floor walk-up, know first-hand that how we live and where we stay is not a social problem. It is our relation to the white world that is the problem. Even in the kitchenette one can find the joy of couples dancing under a clothesline suspended from the ceiling, teenagers playing cards and laughing with their friends, a man sitting at a kitchen table drinking tea, the steaming cup pressed tight against his cheek. He delights in the sensation of the heat against his face, the feel of the porcelain on his skin.

The how-to-live and the fierce urgency of the now can be perceived in these other photographs, the images lost and found, imagined and anticipated, like stills edited from an unfinished movie. The tintypes taken at a church picnic. The Kodaks on the beach at Coney Island. Images of too fast black girls trying to make a way out of no way, a serial picture of young black women rushing to the city to escape the plantation and intent on creating a free life in the context of a new enclosure. They are as desperate to find an escape route from servitude, as they are hungry for new forms of life. Watching people stroll the avenue or play cards on the step or drink wine on the roof, they are convinced that Negroes are the most beautiful people. The communal luxury of the black metropolis, the wealth of just us, the black city-within-the-city, transforms the imagination of what you might want and who you might be, encouraging you to dream. Shit, it don’t even matter if you’re black and poor, because you are here and you are alive and all these folks surrounding you encourage you and persuade you to believe that you are beautiful too. This collective endeavor to live free unfolds in the confines of the carceral landscape. They can see the wall being erected around the dark ghetto, but they still want to be ready for the good life, still want to get ready for freedom.

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The photograph is small enough to be cradled in the palm of your hand. It is not a lush silver print, but an inexpensive albumen print that measures 1 7/16 × 2 7/16 inches; its tiny size announces its minor status. It is a compelled image, an image taken without the permission of the sitter; it is an image intended to classify, isolate, and differentiate. It is not the kind of photograph that she would have wanted and it was not taken at her request.

The odalisque, an image of a reclining nude, conjoins two distinct categories of the commodity: the slave and the prostitute. The rigidness of the body betrays the salacious reclining posture, and the girl’s flat steely-eyed glare is hardly an invitation to look. She retreats as far away from the camera as possible into the corner of the sofa, as if seeking a place in which to hide. Her direct gaze at the camera is not a solicitation of the viewer, an appeal for recognition, or a look predicated on mutuality. The look assumes nothing shared between the one compelled to appear and those looking. The private wish is that the harm inflicted won’t be too great and that there will be an exit from this room and others like it.

What knowledge of anatomy did Eakins or his students uncover that afternoon in the studio? They had encountered black bodies before, mostly the corpses at the Jefferson Medical College. The bodies of poor Negroes not claimed by kin, or whose families had no money for a proper burial, or bodies stolen from the colored cemetery. There had been several scandals. She was a living body, not a corpse, but the image of her was not like the other photos of children taken to corroborate or question theories of skeletal development or to determine the movement of the musculature on the frame. I hope he didn’t attach electrodes to her to observe the movement of muscle mass. It was unlikely that there was a chaperone attending to this girl. What knowledge of the world did she gain that afternoon? Was Susan Eakins present? Did she take the photograph? Did she whisper foul things in her ear? Or encourage her to stay still and not move? Had she done the same with the nieces too? Did she assist him or turn a blind eye to his work? It is hard to look at the photograph and not think about the images that preceded it and the images that would follow in its wake. Afterimages of slavery intended to remind the viewer of the power they exercised over such a body and the threat hanging over the subject captured within its frame of the kinds of terrible things that could be done to a black girl without a crime having occurred.

Was it possible to annotate the image? To make my words into a shield that might protect her, a barricade to deflect the gaze and cloak what had been exposed?

Anticipating the pressure of his hands, did she tremble? Did the painter hover above the sofa and arrange her limbs? Were his hands big and moist? Did they leave a viscous residue on the surface of her skin? Could she smell the odor of sweat, linseed oil, formaldehyde, and clothes worn for too many days? Did she notice the slippers, tattered shirt, and grubby pants, and then become frightened? Had the other models left their imprint in the lumpy surface, the oily patina of the upholstery, and the rank musky odor?

The girl who entered 1729 Mount Vernon Street was not the same one who departed. Rumors about the other girls surfaced: they were white, they were the daughters of the elite, so there was public outrage and the painter disgraced. They had been spared this: the odalisque, the pose of the whore and the slave. They had not been required to look directly at the camera and acknowledge his gaze and pretend to invite it. The other girls might have mentioned her if she hadn’t been black and poor.

She left the studio exactly the way she came: down the four flights of stairs into the rectangular garden with the row of elephant ears, past the water hydrant, the four cats, and the setter, exiting through the wooden fence back onto Eighteenth Street, and then made her way back home. Was she able to settle back into her life or did this latest violence leave a mark, a record as indelible as the photograph?

The look says everything about the kind of female property she is—a female not in the class of those deserving protection, and unlike the daughter of the bourgeoisie, whose sexuality is the private property of the father and then the husband, she is one intended for public use. The pleasure yielded by the disavowed assault, by the graphic picture of violated black embodiment provides an inkling, an anticipation, that her body, her labor and her care, will continue to be taken and exploited; the intimate labor of the domestic will define her subjection. It is a stark and brutal image, despite its purported power to arouse. Is the pleasure of looking predicated on the disavowal of violence, the insistence on the girl’s agency, the invitation to look signaled by her direct gaze at the camera? Is the precondition of this pleasure indifference, which is the habituated response to black pain? Or is the pleasure achieved through the cultivation of suffering and the infliction of harm?

The odalisque is a forensic image that details the violence to which the black female body can be subjected. It is a durational image of intimate violence. So much time accumulates on her small figure, the girl might well be centuries old, bearing the weight of slavery and empire, embodying the transit of the commodity, suturing the identity of the slave and the prostitute. All of which makes it impossible for her to be a child. The photograph fabricates her consent to be seen. How does she consent to coercion? How does the pleasure taken in the image of sexual assault issue from the girl’s invitation? It is a picture redolent with the auction block, the plantation, and the brothel.

It is a picture that confounds our efforts to classify it. Art? Science? Pornography? It is a cold image that makes apparent what can be taken and what can be done under the guise of science and observation. The violence achieved and practiced justifies itself as the study of the Negro, as an anatomy lesson. How does one describe the life that oscillates among the categories of domestic, whore, slave, and corpse? Is it apparent that her life is disposable? Or that she is subject to a regime of brutality so normalized that its violence is barely discernible? How does one make this violence visible when it secures the enjoyment, sovereignty, and bodily integrity of man and master?

Her body is exposed, but she withholds everything. “The body shows itself,” complying with the demand, yet “it does not give itself, there is no generosity in it.” Is it possible to give what has already been taken?

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What can a photograph of a girl posed on a horsehair sofa tell us about black life at the turn of the century or about the lives of young black women rushing to the city and desperate to enter a new era? How might it anticipate the obstacles awaiting them? How might this photograph illuminate the entanglement of slavery and freedom and offer a glimpse of the futures that will unfold?

Looking at her immobilized on the old horsehair sofa, pinioned like a rare specimen against the scrolling pattern, her small arms tucked tight against her torso like clipped wings, I think about the kinds of touch that cannot be refused. In 1883, the age of consent was ten. There was no statutory rape law to penalize what occurred in the studio, and had such law existed, a poor black girl would have fallen outside its reach. When a rape or assault was reported to the police or the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the girl, seduced or raped, might be sentenced to the training school or the reformatory to protect her or punish her for being too fast, too mature, or too knowing. The precocious sexuality of girls ripened too soon made them vulnerable to confinement and arrest. Previous immorality negated any claims to protection by the law. Innocence (that is, virginity) was the issue, not what age a girl was old enough for the taking. Previous immorality meant a man could do whatever he wanted. Colored girls were always presumed to be immoral. (One of the arguments against the statutory rape legislation passed in the 1890s, raising the age of consent in most states to sixteen or eighteen, was that lascivious Negro girls would use the law to blackmail white men. Black girls came before the law, but were not protected by it.)

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As the photograph makes plain, her body was already marked by a history of sexual defilement, already branded as a commodity. Its availability to be used, to be hurt, was foundational to the prevailing set of social arrangements, in which she was formally free and vulnerable to the triple jeopardy of economic, racial, and sexual violence. This necessary and routine violence defined the afterlife of slavery and documented the reach of the plantation into the ghetto.

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Looking at the photograph, one wonders if she had ever been a child. By age ten, had she learned everything about sex she would ever need to know? By twelve, had she no interest in it? Did she know the women working the street, the ladies in sporting houses, the sweet men, the badgers and thieves who lived on her block? Had she become prematurely knowing because of what had already been done to her or by observing the world around her? Was the violence experienced in an attic studio or at a neighbor’s house irreparable? If so, how did it determine her course? Did it eclipse the possibility of sexual autonomy or stamp it indelibly? Did it make her vow never to love a man or seek his protection? Did it make her yearn for a tender touch capable of assuaging and redressing the long history of violence captured in a pose? Did it make her love fiercely and wildly? Did it make her decide that she didn’t want to be a woman, but not a man either?

Looking at the photograph, one can discern the symphony of anger residing in the arrested figure. It is an image that I can neither claim nor refuse. Admittedly, it is a hard place to begin, with the avowal that violence is not an exception but rather that it defines the horizon of her existence. It is to acknowledge that we were never meant to survive, and yet we are still here. The entanglement of violence and sexuality, care and exploitation continues to define the meaning of being black and female. At the same time, I had to move beyond the photograph and find another path to her. How might this still life yield a latent image capable of articulating another kind of existence, a runaway image that conveys the riot inside? What would a moving picture of a young black woman’s life inside the Black Belt encompass? The tenement. The washtub. The dance hall. The house of dreams. Where would it begin? In Farmville, Virginia? In the hold of the ship that conveyed her great-grandmother from Bermuda to Norfolk? In the steamer that delivered her to New York City? And how would it end? With her dancing in Edmond’s Cellar or singing at the Clam House or cleaning rooms at the Hollywood Hotel, or waiting for a job in the Bronx slave market or counting the days until her sentence ended and she would receive the gift of her free papers? Would the serial picture of her life be terrible or lovely or heartbreaking?

In the pictures taken with her friends at a church picnic on the Jersey shore or hugging her girlfriend under the boardwalk at Coney Island, we catch a glimpse of this other life, listen for the secondary rhythms, which defy social law and elude the master, the state, and the police, if only for an evening, a few months, her nineteenth year. In the pictures anticipated, but not yet located, we are able to glimpse the terrible beauty of wayward lives. In such pictures, it is easy to imagine the potential history of a black girl that might proceed along other tracks. Discern the glimmer of possibility, feel the ache of what might be. It is this picture I have tried to hold on to.

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After a year spent looking at a colored girl, posed in the nude, on an old horsehair sofa, I decided to retrace her steps through the city and imagine her many lives. Following in her footsteps and in those of other young black women in the city, I made my way through the Black Belts of Philadelphia and New York, the neighborhoods and black quarters named after their inhabitants, Little Africa and Nigger Heaven, or their aspirations, the Mecca and the City of Refuge. I traced the errant paths and the lines of flight that in the decades from 1890 to 1935 would enclose the boundaries of the black ghetto. In the end, it became not the story of one girl, but a serial biography of a generation, a portrait of the chorus, a moving picture of the wayward.

For decades I had been obsessed with anonymous figures, and much of my intellectual labor devoted to reconstructing the experience of the unknown and retrieving minor lives from oblivion. It was my way of redressing the violence of history, crafting a love letter to all those who had been harmed, and, without my being fully aware of it, reckoning with the inevitable disappearance that awaited me. The upheaval I experienced looking at her image convinced me that I had to go forward, even if I doubted that I would ever find her. I saw her differently from the others. She was a girl situated on the threshold of a new era, one defined by extremes—the nadir of democracy and the Progressive Era. The age was characterized by imperial wars, an epidemic of rape and lynching, the emergence of the legal and social apparatus of racial segregation, and antiblack racial laws that inspired the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws. Race riots swept across the country. At the same time, legal and social reforms attempted to buffer the vulnerable from the predations of capitalism and free markets, and their necessary outcomes: poverty and unemployment and social violence. Political activists and black radicals battled against the resurgence of racism that engulfed the nation and contested the impaired citizenship and the rightlessness that defined the Negro condition. Club women focused their attention on the plight of black girls and women, determined to protect, defend, and uplift them and eradicate the immoral habits, which were the legacy of slavery.

I envisioned her not as tragic or as ruined, but as an ordinary black girl, and as such her life was shaped by sexual violence or the threat of it; the challenge was to figure out how to survive it, how to live in the context of enormous brutality, and thrive in deprivation and poverty. The state of emergency was the norm not the exception. The only difference between this girl and all the others who crossed her path and followed in her wake was that there was a photograph that hinted that something had happened, that enabled everyday violence to acquire the status of an event, a forensic picture of an act of sexual violence not deemed a crime at all.

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I followed her from Philadelphia to New York, the largest black cities in the north, stumbling through the streets of the Seventh Ward and then onto the Tenderloin and after that Harlem. I spotted her everywhere—on the corner, in the cabaret, on the boardwalk at Coney Island, in the chorus; sometimes I failed to notice her. At other times, the headliners and celebrities overshadowed her when she was allowed among their company. She bore faint resemblance to the girl I first encountered, and had I not known about the attic or that she had been forced to sleep in a coal bin or that she was raped by her uncle or assaulted by a neighbor or brutalized by her employer, I would have never guessed from looking at her. It was an age when Negroes were the most beautiful people, and this was no less true of her. Even her detractors reluctantly admitted as much. It’s hard to explain what’s beautiful about a rather ordinary colored girl of no exceptional talents, a face difficult to discern in the crowd, an average chorine not destined to be a star, or even the heroine of a feminist plot. In some regard, it is to recognize the obvious, but that which is reluctantly ceded: the beauty of black ordinary, the beauty that resides in and animates the determination to live free, the beauty that propels the experiments in living otherwise. It encompasses the extraordinary and the mundane, art and everyday use. Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.

In my search for her, I soon encountered all the others hovering about her—the sociologist, housing reformer, probation officer, club woman, social worker, vice investigator, journalist, and psychiatrist—all of them insisting their view of her was the truth. One of them was always there, standing in my way, blocking my path, whenever I encountered her. None of them believed she would blossom. Their notebooks, monographs, case files, and photographs created the trails I followed, but I read these documents against the grain, disturbing and breaking open the stories they told in order to narrate my own. It required me to speculate, listen intently, read between the lines, attend to the disorder and mess of the archive, and to honor silence. The official documents made her into someone else entirely: delinquent, whore, average Negro in a mortuary table, incorrigible child, and disorderly woman. In the statistical chart, the social survey, and the slum photograph, she seemed so small, so insignificant. Everything else loomed large—the condition of the tenements, the perils of the ghetto, the moral dangers of the kitchenette, the risks presented by too many bodies forced into the cramped rooms of the lodging house. It was easier for the professionals to imagine her dead or ruined than to entertain the idea that she might thrive, that chance or accident might permit her to flourish. I had to be mindful not to do damage of my own. Only the chorines, bull daggers, aesthetical Negroes, lady lovers, pansies, and anarchists supported her experiments in living free. She was their avenging angel. Only the wayward appreciated her riotous conduct and wild habits and longing to create a life from nothing; only they could discern the beautiful plot against the plantation she waged each and every day.

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The moving men found the albumen prints among the rubbish of the abandoned house. They might have been aroused by the photograph of a naked colored girl reclining on an arasbesque sofa and not at all concerned about whether she was yet of legal age. A flat-chested, narrow hipped, thick-thighed, prepubescent child arrested in the classic pose of the whore and the concubine was as good an incitement as any other dirty picture. When pleasure yielded to indifference, the photograph was discarded and thrown into a pile with the other debis from the studio.

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It was not the kind of picture that the girl would have wanted. It didn’t even look nothing like her. The eyes are flat and withholding; hard like the eyes of the girls working Middle Alley. They are eyes in advance of time and experience. To keep the photographer from coming any closer, she tried to make mean stay away from me eyes, I dare you eyes, eyes of flint, not whore eyes that solicited—Hey Mister—and refused—I don’t do that—in the same glance. When she crossed Du Bois’s path over a decade later, the longing in those eyes would betray her.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Helen C. Jenks, Women Rush through the Alley, Lombard Street, c. 1900 – 1905 (Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA)

5 Helen C. Jenks, Houses Owned by Octavia Hill Association, c. 1897 – 1906 (Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA)

7 Two girls sitting in stairwell —Lombard Street, Cellar Living (Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA)

12 Black Nude, Jason Beaupre Photography

16 The Anatomist Posed with Two Negro School Girls before He Removes Their Clothes (Herman M. Bernelot Moens, Towards Perfect Man: Contributions to Somatological and Philosophical Anthropology, New York: s.n., 1922)

18 Thomas E. Askew, African American girl, half - length portrait, with right hand to cheek, with illustrated book on table, ca. 1900. W. E. B. Du Bois albums of photographs of African Americans in the “American Negro” exhibit, Paris Exposition Universelle, 1900 (Library of Congress)

21 “Home”: One Room Moral Hazard (Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA)

26–27 Thomas Eakins, African American girl nude, reclining on couch, ca. 1882. Albumen print. 1 7/16 × 2 7/16 in. Accession no: 1985.68.2.565. Courtesy Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection, purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA)

32 Photograph of Ethel Waters, age 12, n.d. (Photographs of Prominent African Americans, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

36 Bruce Roberts, Segregated Public Rest Rooms (Getty Images)

41 Ida B. Wells, standing left with Maurine Moss, widow of Thomas Moss, lynched in Memphis, Tennessee, March 9, 1892, with Thomas Moss, Jr. (Special Collections, Research Center, University of Chicago Library)

44 Unidentified young African American Woman, n.d. (ca. 1915–1925; Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA)

46 William Vandivert, Gray waves that batter & freeze a man to death in 30 minutes being whipped high by a winter squall in the North Atlantic (Getty Images)

50 A Type of Negro Girl, Everyday Life at Hampton Institute (Hampton, VA: Hampton Institute, 1907)

54 F. Holland Day, Young woman in dress with striped collar and necklace, Hampton, VA, ca. 1905 (The Louise Imogen Guiney Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

73 List of infractions against Mattie, case #2466 (Bedford Hills Prison Files, New York State Archives, Albany, NY)

80 Street Scenes, Seventh Avenue around 30th St., Colored District, 1903, Byron Company, New York, NY (Museum of the City of New York, 93.1.1.15397)

92 W. E. B. Du Bois, Diagram representing age structure of Negroes and Whites in Philadelphia, 1890 (The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, 1899; repr. Millwood, NY: Kraus Thomson Organization, 1973)

97 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Georgia Negro: Conjugal condition. Diagram prepared for the “American Negro” exhibit of the American Section at the Paris Exposition Universelle, 1900 (Library of Congress)

111 W. E. B. Du Bois, Diagram representing the historical development of Negro occupations (Philadelphia Negro)

112 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Georgia Negro: The States of the United States according to their Negro Population, diagram prepared for the “American Negro” exhibit at the Paris Exposition Universelle, 1900 (Library of Congress)

122 Joseph Pennell, Madam Sperber Group, 1906 (University of Kansas, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, Joseph Pennell Collection, Lawrence, KS)

126–27 Helen C. Jenks, Panorama of Lombard Street (Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA)

136 Ada Overton Walker, 1912 (Library of Congress)

138 Dilapidated home. Man, wife and two children (Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA)

149 Diary entry, Journal of Helen Parrish (Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA)

151 “Shot in the Neck . . .” (Philadelphia Inquirer, October 4, 1888)

155 Film Still, Oscar Micheaux, Body and Soul (1925; George Eastman House Collection)

156 Film Still, Oscar Micheaux, Body and Soul (1925; George Eastman House Collection)

160 Diagram of “Pearl M.” George Henry’s Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Pattern, 2 vol. (New York: Hoeber, 1941), 562

170 Girls Fleeing Police During Riot, Bettman Collection (Getty Images)

172 The Evening World, August 16, 1900 (Library of Congress)

178 G. Walter Roberts, Woman dressed in men’s clothing, c. 1890 (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations)

180 Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington (Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington, designed by Sean O’Halloran/SO’ Creative)

185 Butch, friend of Mabel Hampton circa 1930 (Lesbian Herstory Archives, Mabel Hampton Collection)

190 Untitled (Olympia Vernon and Marshall Smith III)

192 Sterling Paige, Portrait of Gladys Bentley (Rochester Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY)

195 Detail from broadside of Jackie Moms Mabley at the Apollo Theater, Harlem (New York Public Library)

198 Three stills from Oscar Micheaux, Swing ! (1938) (Library of Congress)

201 Carl Van Vechten, Portrait of Paul Meeres (1931) (Photographs of Prominent African Americans, James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

204 James Latimer Allen, Portrait of Edna Thomas (© Carl Van Vechten Trust, Photographs of Prominent African Americans, James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

214 Marvel Cooke, “From the Brilliance of Mayfair To—: SHE RENOUNCED BRITISH TRADITION FOR HER NEGRO FRIENDS,” New York Amsterdam News, June 22, 1940 (Images produced by ProQuest LLC as part of ProQuest ® Historical Newspapers, www.proquest.com)

215 Underwood & Underwood, “Photograph of Silent Protest Parade: Race prejudice is the offspring of ignorance and the mother of lynching.” July 28, 1917 (Photographs of Prominent African Americans, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

216 UNIA Parade, Harlem 1920 (New York Public Library)

219 Helen Peters arrest — undated newspaper article from prison file (Bedford Hills Prison Files, New York State Archive)

223 Eleanor Fagen (Billie Holiday) arrest card (3 × 5 index card; Committee of Fourteen Records, Rare Books and Manuscripts, New York Public Library)

224 William Gottlieb, Portrait of Billie Holiday and Mister, Downbeat, New York, N.Y., ca. Feb. 1947 (Library of Congress)

231 H. Lindsley, Harriet Tubman full - length portrait, standing with hands on back of chair, carte - de -visite, ca. 1871 (Library of Congress)

245 Letter from husband to Esther Brown, case #2507 (Bedford Hills Prison Files, New York State Archive)

253 Billie Holiday on list of arrests (Rare Books and Manuscripts, New York Public Library)

255 Trixie Smith, “My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll),” Black Swan Records (University of North Carolina Libraries, http://search.lib.unc.edu/search?R=UNCb6496077)

260 Photograph of Hannah Davies, case #3499 (Bedford Hills Prison Files, New York State Archive)

264 Alice Kennedy wearing uniform that says “4501,” case #4501 (Bedford Hills Prison Files, New York State Archive)

269 Couple on Street Dressed for Ball (Bettman Collection, Getty Images)

271 Letter from Aaron Perkins (Kid Chocolate) to Bedford Hills prison authorities (re: Elsie/Eva), case #2504 (Bedford Hills Prison Files, New York State Archive)

273 James Van Der Zee, Kid Chocolate at shoe store, c. 1929 (Studio Museum of Harlem)

278 Alexandria, VA interior of slave pen, 1860s (Library of Congress)

281 “Singer Too ‘Tight,’ ” Baltimore Afro-American, June 26, 1926 (Baltimore Afro-American)

288–89 Webster Hall “Costume Ball,” 1920s (Alexander Alland Sr. Collection, Wikimedia Commons)

291 Chicago “Josephine Bakers” chat gaily before style show, Ebony Magazine, March 1952

296 Two women hugging (Pauli Murray Collection, Schlesinger Library)

304 Mabel Hampton arrest card, 405 W. 123rd Street (Committee of Fourteen Records, Rare Books and Manuscripts, New York Public Library)

306 Mabel and two other chorus girls on a Harlem rooftop (Lesbian Herstory Archives, Mabel Hampton Collection)

312 Champion Charleston dancer Gwendlyn Graham with the chorus of the revue “Blackbirds” taking part in their first rehearsal on the roof of the London Pavilion theatre, 1928 (Getty Images)

314 On the Beach (Lesbian Herstory Archives, Mabel Hampton Collection)

326 Advertisement for “Come Along, Mandy” at Lafayette Theatre, Chicago Defender, December 22, 1923, 17 (Chicago Defender)

327 Florence Mills in Plantation Revue (Mander & Mitchenson / University of Bristol / ArenaPAL)

329 “Ann Trevor as Gisele and Helen Menken as Irene (seated),” 1926 (Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library)

332 “Singer Gets $10,000 Award” article clipping (Marian Anderson), from Mabel Hampton’s scrapbook (Lesbian Herstory Archives, Mabel Hampton Collection)

334 Ismay Andrews with ukulele (Lesbian Herstory Archives, Mabel Hampton Collection)

339 Mabel Hampton in striped shirt (Lesbian Herstory Archives, Mabel Hampton Collection)

342 Portrait of Mabel Hampton standing with hands in pockets (Lesbian Herstory Archives, Mabel Hampton Collection)

344 Young girls dancing the Charleston in Harlem in the 1920s (Getty Images)

348 Lukas Felzmann, Swarm, no. 92–23, 20, 2011

The Socialist Delivers a Lecture on Free Love

In his lecture, the Socialist questioned whether humans were monogamist by nature or forced by social convention into such arrangements, emphasizing “the difference between what we like to say and what we like to do.” In February 1917, Hubert Harrison delivered a series of lectures that challenged middle-class propriety and respectability by considering whether marriage was an institution esteemed primarily for the disposition of private property, suggesting that monogamy was unnatural, although imposed by state law and social regulation, and ill-suited to our erotic longings. On the topic “Is Birth Control Hurtful or Helpful?” he detailed what every woman should know about protecting herself and advocated for free love. Only a few blocks away from where the police seized Harriet Powell on the dance floor and arrested Esther Brown and her friend Rebecca for their willingness to make love with strangers, and fifteen blocks away from where the police arrested Eleanor Fagan and four other young women in a jump raid on a disorderly house, the brilliant orator and stealth libertine gave political expression to the manner in which they had chosen to live. Not that the young women needed him to justify anything, but his words amplified the radical breadth of their actions. They would have been surprised to hear their lives described in these terms, but would have appreciated Harrison’s willingness to defend the errant path they understood as freedom.

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It is possible that he saw their faces in the far reaches of the crowd that gathered on the corner of 125th and Seventh Avenue or 135th and Lenox Avenue as he lectured on a soapbox or spotted Mabel and Ismay among the audience at the Temple of Truth on a Sunday evening. Given his amorous nature, he would have noticed attractive too fast young women assembled on Harlem corners, especially those who made it a practice of strolling Seventh Avenue with their friends at all hours of the night.

No typescript or notes of his lectures on “Sex and Sex Problems” remain, so speculation is required to recover and sketch his ideas. Is it possible that Hubert Harrison’s lectures extolled the erotic life of the ungovernable? Would he have advocated for the serial relationships that defied monogamy, conjugal union, and the law? Or defended the wild unapologetic manner in which Mamie Sharp and Esther Brown lived? Would his sexual curiosity have found a mirror in their polymorphous passions? Would he have been able to make sense of the letters from Esther’s husband as well as those sent by her girlfriend Alice? Would his cheeks have warmed as he read Frances Rabinowitz’s letter to Lee Palmer, describing in graphic detail what a blonde mama would do for her black daddy? Had his erotic wanderings made him the perfect listener, or would he have been greedy for more details? Would his ideas about the struggle against capitalism and the color line have been expansive enough to describe the sexual practices of the wayward without making claim to words like inversion or pathology or prostitution? Would he have embraced their sexual variance while remaining silent about his own? Or would his lectures have captured only the broad contours of the lives of these young women, but missed the truth of it, applying to them the same double standard he utilized when chastising his daughters for staying out late or stepping outside of the boundaries of the proper? Would he have been as blind as other socialists and tried to save the girls from the street by making them respectable women? Would he have seen their gestures of refusal as “responding to the call of battle against the white man’s ‘Color Line’ ”? Would he have been guilty of mistaking an experiment in living for a chronicle of transgressions, or capable of recognizing their yearning and passion? Might he have understood that they also were embarked on a radical project? Harrison certainly would have objected to and denounced the police harassment of young colored women and the targeting of Harlem’s tenements by the vice squad and the police. Without question he would have explained it as the assault of the color line, as part and parcel of the law’s effort to subject the race, control their aspirations and longings, and restrict the lives of young people to a variation of the plantation, impeding and obstructing every attempted departure. The protest and struggle enacted on Harlem streets might be thwarted, but impossible to stop or eradicate.

For him, there would have been personal reasons, too. As all of his friends knew, he could be all-embracing in sexual matters and catholic in taste, often weighing the prerogative of freedom more heavily than the faculty of discernment. It made him something of a joke, and he barely escaped being named in Marcus Garvey’s divorce suit because of his passionate affair with Amy Ashwood. It was one of at least ten affairs he had during the course of his marriage.

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While the lives of Esther and Harriet and Rebecca were described as tragic, his sexual foibles and misdemeanors were made the stuff of farce. Neither view is adequate or able to grasp the raw need or the insurgent passions that longed to destroy the (white man’s) world. Claude McKay, known less well for his indiscretions than for the ease and facility with which he cloaked them, derided Harrison, making a joke of his erotic appetites in print. McKay was affectionate but ruthless in his description of the satyr-socialist, describing him as “erotically very indiscriminate.” A government intelligence report filed in 1921 described Harrison in similar terms, noting that one of the chief reasons for the failures of this very intelligent and highly educated man and scholar was his “abnormal sexualism,” which was unabated despite the fact that he had a wife and had fathered several children. The government report hinted at something more than infidelity. Harrison never tried to cloak his love of drag balls, which he attended regularly. In his journals, he described the beauty of women he encountered there. Each woman was a different world, a discovery. A hand resting on a sequined hip might make a man bow down, the casual gesture outlining the contours of the body, the jeweled fabric soliciting the gaze of the onlooker, daring one to touch, to imagine what might be possible; the feast on this attitude an invitation which he found impossible to decline. Had he loved any of them? Had he been open to the ball’s experiment? Or guided by curiosity and willing to explore intimacies not defined by the polarities of identity? Did he accept that practices were flexible and changing?

His extensive collection of erotic literature had filled his head with a range of lovely variations and offered diverse blueprints of the possible; this very adult library was second to none in New York. Finding it imperative to “translate his ideas about culture and the superiority of the black man into the Harlem idiom through which to harangue the man in the street from a soap box on any convenient corner,” he sold his library of erotica. In all likelihood, the need of money also forced him to do so. For much of his life, he lived in deep poverty. This had been the case since 1911, when he was fired from his job at the post office after writing a letter to the Sun critical of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee machine and black leaders handpicked by white folks. (The letter, titled “Insistence upon Real Grievances the Only Course of the Race,” condemned Washington for denying the realities of race hatred and the dispossession and social exclusion of Negroes, while apologizing for Jim Crow Democracy and insisting that black folks should be thankful.)

The young Henry Miller was enamored of Harrison and marveled at his skills as a street-corner orator. The consensus was that Harrison, the Black Socrates, was the most brilliant orator in New York. It is uncertain whether Miller was privy to the rumors about his personal life, but perhaps he suspected as much, perceiving the intensity of passion and the spirit of erotic adventure in the force of Harrison’s political rhetoric. Miller took such lessons to heart in Tropic of Cancer and acknowledged the debt in Plexus, insisting that sexual freedom was as necessary as economic freedom and that the volcanic force of an orgasm might be compared justly to an uprising. It was not news. Emma Goldman said it; Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith and Lucille Bogan said it even better, but when the white boy said it, the world listened, and it became philosophy, not entertainment. Few would have suspected the lines of connection between The Tropic of Cancer and The Negro and the Nation, or discerned Miller’s debt and the tribute to Harrison. The lines of affiliation and the shared entanglements are apparent in radical analysis and stream-of-consciousness prose, written in opposition to the police reports and the statutory laws, battling empire and the barbarism of civilization. The two men stand as icons of the radical spirit of the age. The others—the sweet boys who spent the savings from a year’s wages trying to outdo the black Gloria Swanson at the Webster Hall or the Hamilton Lodge Ball, the fast types who eluded the eyes of private dicks and barricaded Harlem apartments against the police so that lady lovers could flirt and dance unafraid, the working girls and the madams who offered refuge to anarchists and bull daggers, the recalcitrant domestics and dreamy laundresses who kept company with celebrities and chorines, the wild children who made church in the dives and cabarets of Jungle Alley, who danced until spent in the Garden of Joy, who imagining themselves liberators filled their pockets with rocks on a March afternoon after the first brick had been thrown through the window of the Kress Five and Dime store—remain unknown. They were the faces in the crowd, yearning as avidly for another world as the fervent street-corner orator.

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

—NELLA LARSEN Quicksand

In a Moment of Tenderness the Future Seems Possible

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The right couple exists in a state of peril. The future promised by the marriage plot will be derailed when the mother asks, “What that niggah got to marry on?” It is the question on which black marriage founders. The numbers doom love. The death table, the rate of unemployment, the skewed gender ratios, the murderous abstractions. The numbers secure the law and determine the dire outcome. What kind of anchor is love against all that? The happily-ever-after will elude them. The beautiful life that might have been is captured in a moment of tenderness that in no way betrays what is to come—the mother cloaking her daughter in a burial garment. All the maternal toil and sacrifice fail to assure any better prospects for her daughter or provide an escape from the unspeakable. For this too the black mother will shoulder the blame. She has given all she has, all that matters, but to no avail. A vague disquieting feeling hangs in the air. It will cost her and the daughter everything.

The narrative is disjunctive. The story is in fragments. The chain of cause and effect goes awry. It is impossible to be confident about what happens and what is imagined. The whole story is unbelievable, so it is hard to reconstruct the chain of events. Dream and flashback thwart the attempt to order time into tidy categories of past, present, and future. The story advances and stumbles in uncertainty. So the account of the romance is necessarily speculative.

The threat of ruin hangs over the head of the right couple. Is it all just a waking nightmare? Is there an alternative scenario, a parallel track where they live happily ever after? Where invention is capable of sustaining love?

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A storm descends. It is not from paradise, but the kind of storm that reminds them hellhounds are on their trail. The weather causes them to lose their way. It threatens to devour them. Engulfed in the storm, they can’t find a path of escape, a route to safety; they keep going in circles. Will they make it? They search for shelter and find an old house, but the domestic offers no refuge. The closed doors hide the hurt, make the brutality a secret history. In another telling, the rape never happens and a perfect life awaits them. In another telling, the nightmare ends and love triumphs.

An Unloved Woman

When the conductor asked her again to give up her seat in the ladies’ car, she refused. He didn’t say that the other passengers objected to her company, but simply ordered her to surrender her seat and move on to the segregated car. Until he attempted to remove her forcibly, the ladies had assumed she was a servant traveling with her mistress, so were comfortable with the place she occupied in the first-class car. Only after the dispute erupted and the brown-skinned woman insisted that her first-class ticket entitled her to a seat did the white ladies recoil and begin shouting and ordering her to “get away” because they were “not in the habit of sitting on the seat with Negroes.” Then their nerves were shocked by her presence and the imposition of such intimate contact. The distress aroused by her proximity was not lessened by the petite stature of the colored schoolteacher—she was a few inches short of five feet—or her discernible refinement. The attractive twenty-one-year-old was attired in a stylish linen duster. The rancor of the women and the threats of the conductor hovering above her did not weaken her determination to continue on her journey from Memphis to Woodstock, Tennessee, or lead her to doubt her right to assume the seat for which she had paid. The conductor’s eyes, the harsh tone of his voice, and then the rough hands were not enough to dislodge her. No, she would not budge. The conductor attempted to yank her out of the comfortable upholstered chair, but when he grabbed her arm, she fastened her teeth onto the clenched hand assaulting her and bit down with all the force she could muster.

She took pride in the fact that two additional men were required to assist the conductor in ousting her. She fought like a tiger. They clutched her hands and feet, dragging her through the aisle, tearing her traveling coat. She held on to the seats, scratched and kicked, but there were too many of them and only one of her. The white passengers stood on their seats and clapped when she was ejected. She was not a lady. She was not a woman. She was a Negro. The Jim Crow car had no gender designation. Ida Wells chose to exit the train rather than suffer the humiliation of the segregated coach, which also served as a smoking and drinking car for white men. The conduct prohibited in the first-class car was licensed in the colored coach. White men smoked in the foul car, spat on the floor, drank liquor, cursed, read lewd magazines, ogled and molested colored women. As one young woman recalled, “You were at the mercy of the conductor and any man who entered.” Ida was familiar with “all the awful tragedies which had overtaken colored girls who had been obliged to travel alone on these cars.” This had been the rationale for the ladies’ coach.

Luckily there were no bruises, or black eyes, or battered ribs. For Miss Jane Brown, another colored woman who had earlier been removed from a first-class coach, the action was justified after the fact by the charge that “she was not a respectable person” but “a notorious public courtesan, addicted to the use of profane language and offensive conduct in public places.” The damage done to Ida Wells was justified not by a bad reputation, but by her status as “not-quite human.” A darky damsel and a black cow were strangely equivalent and indicative of the category crisis she embodied. What kind of woman was she, if a woman at all? The question was no less prescient or urgent than it had ever been. A century later, it would achieve mythic proportions: Ain’t I a woman? The hold of the uncertainty was so inescapable that it mattered little that Sojourner Truth had never uttered such words. As Ida Wells experienced directly, a colored woman could be labeled a prostitute, cursed as a “slanderous and dirty-minded mulatress,” and threatened with castration.

On her way back home, she decided to hire a lawyer and fight the railway company in court. An obedient disposition did not come naturally to her. By her own description, she was tempestuous, hardheaded, and willful which meant she was prepared to confront and stand against white men and the law, and the whole world if need be. She would not stay in her place or kowtow to the ruling race. When she shared the story with her attorney, her voice did not break with the mortification the violent incident sought to produce; rather, it unleashed her innate fearlessness and a quality of courage so fierce and steadfast that it enabled her to do what “reasonable” Negroes declined—to confront, battle, boycott, and oppose white supremacy on all fronts. Only her skin betrayed her as she recounted what had happened; it prickled as she recalled the hands of white men on her arms and legs and tugging at her waist. The bitter taste of the words stuck in her throat might have caused a weaker woman to cry or to retch, but she held it all in check.

The conductor and the baggage handler might have done far worse, and the law would have permitted it. She knew first-hand the terrible things that happened to Negro women. That very day, she had read a story in the Appeal about a colored woman who had been lynched in Richmond, Virginia. Terrible things had happened in her family too. She remembered distinctly an exchange between her grandmother Peggy and her father, James Wells, about the old master and his wife. Her father was the offspring of the slave owner, property not son. Her grandmother mentioned that Miss Polly, the old mistress, wanted to see James and his children. The vehemence of her father’s response surprised the young Ida: “I never want to see that old woman as long as I live. I will never forget how she had you stripped and whipped the day after the old man died, and I am never going to see her.” Her father’s hard words raised questions that she dared not ask her grandmother, but which soon found their answer in the sexual violence that engulfed the south. In The Free Speech, Ida Wells would write stories about the schoolgirls and domestics and teachers raped and beaten and hanged. The women of the race have not escaped the fury of the mob. She would tally the atrocities. She would make a timetable of the deaths. She would denounce mob rule, lynching, sexual violence, and the white man’s law until the death threats forced her to flee Memphis and seek exile in the north.

In the parlor of well-appointed homes in Philadelphia and New York, she exchanged stories with other black women about the insults, the obscene propositions, the hateful glances, the lustful eyes, the threats of grievous bodily harm. There was no asylum to be found in the north either. The very words “colored girl” or “Negro woman” were almost a term of reproach. She was not in vogue. Any homage at the shrine of womanhood drew a line of color, which placed her forever outside its mystic circle. Together they recounted these stories in a world-weary tone, but without shame—they were treated less kindly than a stray dog, handled less gently than a mule, they were brutalized and abandoned by the law. Then there were the stories that made the room go silent: that woman in New Orleans murdered for living with a white man as her husband; the housekeeper lynched for stealing a Bible; the mother hanged alongside her son for the usual charge; the postmaster’s wife, Mrs. Baker, who lost her husband and infant daughter to the mob, enraged that a Negro had taken a white man’s job; the thirteen-year-old girl, Mildrey Brown, lynched in Columbia; the eight-year-old Maggie Reese raped in Nashville; Lou Stevens hanged from a railway bridge for the murder of the white paramour who had abused her; and it went on. The Red Record never ceased. More than a thousand Negroes had been murdered in six years. All the terrible things she and the other survivors would never forget no matter how hard they tried.

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As the women drank tea and ate shortbread, they planned ways to prevent such things from ever happening, collectively dreamed of a country in which they might be citizens, weighed the pros and cons of African emigration, lamented the dead. Ida Wells described the virtues of the Winchester and concluded self-defense was the sole protection afforded black women. One had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap. The sentence she penned about the outlaw hero, the attic-philosopher Robert Charles, could well be applied to her. She had already determined to sell her life as dearly as possible if attacked.

The delicate clatter of a porcelain teacup placed gently in a saucer, the ring of a silver spoon laid carefully on the Wedgwood pattern seemed to announce—Still here. It was the murmur, the music that animated their speech. Still here. They didn’t allow their voices to crack or their eyes to glisten at the cold facts, at the brutal calculus of life and death. Only us and we and still here allowed them to utter one atrocity after another without breaking.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

The Arrested Life of Eva Perkins

It was the first night of August and the third night in a row with a temperature near 100 degrees. It was too hot to sleep. At 11:30 p.m. Eva Perkins walked over to 135th and Lenox Avenue and picked up Aaron’s supper at the café, three sandwiches and two slices of pie. Her routine had been the same for nearly a year, except for the two days she was in the hospital when she lost the baby. Usually, she arrived at the building where Aaron worked as an elevator operator by midnight. In the daytime, all the elevator runners were women, but the law wouldn’t allow them to work at night. Sometimes, the runner from the neighboring building joined them for dinner and conversation. After an hour or two, Eva headed back to their apartment. By the time Aaron finished work and arrived home in the morning, she was at the factory, so they relished the midnight supper.

It was nearly 1:30 a.m. when Eva reached the front door of the apartment. She had a leftover sandwich in one hand and her keys in the other. In the hallway, she noticed a man she hadn’t seen in the building before. “You want to have a good time?” he asked her. “I’ll give you two dollars.” “I am not interested,” she said and left it at that. When she pushed open the apartment door, three detectives forced their way in behind her. They winked at the colored man and told him to disappear before they charged him too.

“Tell us where Shine is?” She didn’t know anything about Shine, except that he lived one flight up. The rumor was that he was in France, but she didn’t say that. “I don’t know anything,” she replied, trying to explain she had just come back from taking dinner to her husband. “Husband? You’re not married,” one of them said, laughing in her face. “You are just another woman of Kid Happy.” Did he say woman or something worse?

The detectives called Aaron by his fighting name, like they were friends of his rather than the law who had busted their way into his house to harass and threaten his woman. Everyone knew Aaron because he had been boxing at many of the clubs in Harlem and at benefits for the soldiers and the Red Cross. The detective said he knew Kid; then barked, “Go ahead, tell us something.” “I don’t know nothing about Shine,” Eva repeated. That’s when one of them said, “You better come with us.” The other one snickered and said, “Charge her with the Tenement House Law.” Before they dragged her out, Eva asked to leave a note for Aaron. When he came home in the morning, he found it on the table. All it said was: I am locked up.

In Harlem, the police snatched you first and found an excuse later. After the 1905 riot in San Juan Hill, the police commissioner gave the officers a stern warning: They couldn’t beat Negroes up without charging them with a crime; it didn’t look good. Now if they decided to drag you to the station or beat your ass, they charged you with disorderly conduct, public nuisance, rioting, Tenement House Law. Eva didn’t know anything about Shine. Half of the Negroes in Harlem were Kid somebody. Kid Happy. Kid Chocolate. Kid Midnight. If they weren’t Kid, they were Sheik or Shine. It was hard to know if the “bad nigger” the police were after even existed; if he was one man or a composite, a monster to them and a hero to us; or if he was a figure colored folks made up, just a bundle of capacities endowed with a name, a badass hero of extraordinary talents, a Stagger Lee, a street-corner philosopher, a miracle worker able to find a way out from under the thumb of white folks and elude the everyday disasters of the color line. To defy a world unable to see Negroes as anything other than shines—shine my shoes, wash my clothes, and adore me. Shine was a beautiful myth about a Negro who could survive anything and everything a white man could send his way, and yet weather the catastrophe that was life under Jim Crow.

Shine was the hero of a thousand folk ballads; the alter ego of ex-colored men; the leader of a black Republic never to be; he was every Harlem Big Shot or striver with a dream; he was every man who wanted more and had failed. You could find him in nearly any tenement in Harlem. The stories eclipsed and overreached any one person or mere mortal, so it was hard to distinguish the lies from the truth, the fantasy from the facts. Had he been the only passenger to survive on the Titanic? Was he still a soldier in France or just a fugitive on the run? Was he a Harlem maroon or a ghetto rebel endowed with the gift of nine lives?

And what of Shine’s woman—his mate, his friend, his sister, his comrade? Shine, not unlike Caliban, was cast into the fight without a female companion. The most significant absence of all in the dramaturgy of struggle, in the cosmic shattered history of black life, in the unfolding plot of the wretched, was that of his woman. Was the native son ever to be accompanied by a native daughter? Or was there no one at his side as he faced the world? As it faced him? Am I not an ally and a sister? Am I not here? Am I an absent presence? If the text of the human was written over and against him, she fell out of the order of representation all together. Neither subject nor object, but a mute, silenced thing, like an impossible metaphor or a beached whale or a form yet to be named. Her coming of age has been endlessly deferred. What place was there for Eva in the stuff of myth and imagination? Could the Coming of Eva Perkins or its tragic eclipse ever stand as allegory of the race, as the representative tale of blackness? In the drama between the world and him, she disappears, she falls into the black hole; she is the black hole, a person of no account. Unnamed, she waits in the wings, but without her own part to play, the catalyst of nothing. What has she to do with matters of life and death writ large? What about her desire and defiance? Or was she “reduced to having no will or desire except that prescribed” by master and mistress or coaxed by a lover?

What was the text of her insurgency? Did she also possess knowledge of freedom—the miraculous, unfathomable ways of escaping from under the heels of white folks? How did she strike back and lash out? She too had survived a thousand deaths, so why were there no folk ballads about her or exaggerated accounts of her endurance? Stories about how she made a way out of no way? Was her fate to remain trapped within the impoverished realm of realism, or worse, confined in the sociological imagination that could only ever recognize her as a problem? And even in the absence of any evidence of wrongdoing always found her guilty? Yes, she was always to blame.

images

Had she no say in how the world made use of her? No way of talking back to power? How much rage could the body house before it exploded? What were the harsh words she was forced to swallow or the curses she uttered or the prayers she mumbled under her breath? Were refusal and nonparticipation and dissemblance her only ways to fight? Was acquiescence the mask of retribution and destruction? Overcome ’em with yeses and grins . . . agree ’em to death and destruction. “Yes sir” to hell and back.

Eva hated the police detectives who had forced their way into her home and arrested her simply because they could, because Shine eluded them and she could be seized as his surrogate. Next time, she would give them a reason. Silently, she harbored the protest and the complaint. No talking back, no expletives—not even a whisper. She vowed to tell them nothing.

FOR BERYLE AND VIRGILIO HARTMAN,
WHO I MISS EVERY DAY.

FOR HAZEL CARBY,
WHO OPENED THE DOOR.

NOTES

A NOTE ON METHOD

xv the flapper was a pale imitation: See Kevin Mumford, Interzones (New York: Columbia University, 1997) 108, 116–17. The flapper “symbolized the revolution in values.” However, unlike young black women, her modes of sexual expression were not criminalized.

THE TERRIBLE BEAUTY OF THE SLUM

4 dark ghetto: Kenneth Clark, The Dark Ghetto (1967; repr. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989).

6 “terror to white neighbors and landlords alike”: Edwin Emerson, Harper’s Weekly, January 9, 1897.

6 broken up completely by the slave ship: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; repr. Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1973), 67, 71, 178.

9 a colored man, accused of stealing a loaf of bread: Vincent Franklin, “The Philadelphia Riot of 1918,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 99, no. 3 (July 1975): 336.

9 Then dragged a woman from the hallway: The Citizens’ Protective League, Story of The Riot (New York: Citizens’ Protective League, September 1900).

9 “What is to be done with them?”: Paul Laurence Dunbar, “The Negroes of the Tenderloin,” in The Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings, eds. Shelley Fisher Fishkin and David Bradley (New York: Random House, 2005) 264, 267.

9 “vomit them back again to the South”: Dunbar, “The Negroes of the Tenderloin,” 267.

A MINOR FIGURE

15 a different kind of likeness: Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002) first introduced me to this image. See also Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” The Black Scholar 2, November 1, 1981; Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). On the possibilities of a transformative annotation, see Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 116–24.

15 anatomist . . . was found with a cache of nude pictures: Herman Moens, a European “scientist” (he had neither scientific training or a medical degree) studying racial difference took a series of photos of black school-age children in Washington, D.C. The cache was found because the Dutch doctor was being investigated during WWI as a German spy.

19 Despite their fugitive gestures of refusal: see Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 32, 109, 113.

20 the caption: The caption, writes Roland Barthes, “appears to duplicate the image, that is, to be included in its denotation.” Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 26.

21 surveillance . . . and the administered logic: Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Kimberly Juanita Brown, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post - Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

22 you love in doorways: Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival,” in The Black Unicorn (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 255.

23 beautiful flaws and terrible ornaments: Gwendolyn Brooks, “Boy Breaking Glass,” in In the Mecca (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).

23 Not until 1953: Roy de Carava, The Hallway, Imageworks, Art, Architecture and Engineering Library (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1953).

24 compelled image: See Campt, Listening to Images, 49, 75.

25 Afterimages of slavery: “The residue of sexual exploitation on slave women’s bodies is the afterimage of the black diaspora, the puncture of the past materializing in the present. . . . It presupposes a temporal aberration, an incessant invasion of the present moment by the past.” The afterimage is a figure for the sexual legacy of slavery inscribed on black women’s bodies. See Brown, Repeating Body, 18–19, 56. On annotation as practice of reckoning with violence and antiblackness, see Sharpe, In the Wake. Sharpe writes that “Black annotation [is a] way of imagining otherwise.” It is a kind of wake work and part of a long history of imagining otherwise, “in excess of the containment of the long and brutal history.” It is “a counter to abandonment, another effort to try to look, to try to really see.” (126, 112, 115).

27 Art? Science? Pornography?: My reading of this photograph and the girl’s experience in the studio is based on Susan Daly and Cheryl Leibold, “Eakins and the Photograph: An Introduction,” in Susan Daly and Cheryl Leibold, Eakins and the Photograph: Works by Thomas Eakins and His Circle in the Collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1994); Anne McCauley, “ ‘The Most Beautiful of Nature’s Works’: Thomas Eakins’s Photographic Nudes in their French and American Contexts” in Susan Daly and Cheryl Leibold, Eakins and the Photograph; Jennifer Doyle, “Sex, Scandal, and Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic,” Representations, vol. 68 (Fall 1999): 1–33; Elizabeth Johns, “An Avowal of Artistic Community: Nudity and Fantasy in Thomas Eakins’s Photographs,” in Susan Daly and Cheryl Leibold, Eakins and the Photograph; Mary Panzer, “Photography, Science, and the Traditional Art of Thomas Eakins” in Susan Daly and Cheryl Leibold, Eakins and the Photograph; Kathleen A. Foster and Cheryl Leibold, Writing About Eakins: The Manuscripts in Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1989); Henry Adams, Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Fred Moten, “Taste Dissonance Flavor Escape: Preface for a solo by Miles Davis,” Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory 17, no. 2 (July 2007): 217–46; Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Alan Braddock, Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); William Innes Homer, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art (New York: Abbeville Press, 1992); Thomas Eakins, Thomas Eakins: His Photographic Works (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1969); Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, The Revenge of Thomas Eakins (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); and Thomas Eakins, “Notes on a Differential Action of Certain Muscles Passing More than One Joint,” in Thomas Eakins, A Drawing Manual (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2005).

27 “The body shows itself”: This is the definition of pornography according to Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (1979; reprint New York: Hill & Wang, 2010), 59.

28 a new era?: Hazel Carby describes this period as the Woman’s Era because of the political and literary activity of black women. See Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro - American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

28 statutory rape legislation: Mary Odem, Delinquent Daughters, Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the U.S. 1885 – 1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 25–31, 33, 35; Carolyn E. Locca, Jailbait: The Politics of Statutory Rape Laws (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 14–15; Michelle Oberman, “Regulating Consensual Sex with Minors: Defining a Role for Statutory Rape, Buffalo Law Review 48 (2000): 703–84; Jane E. Larson, “Even a Worm Will Turn at Last: Rape Reform in Late Nineteenth Century America, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 9, no. 1 (1997): 70–71; Ruth M. Alexander, The “Girl Problem”: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900 – 1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

African American reformers were very wary of statutory rape laws. They were aware that they would fail to protect young black women while being deployed to criminalize black men. For an analysis of the intimacy of rape and racial violence, see Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors, Lynch Law in All Its Phases, A Red Record and Mob Violence in New Orleans in Southern Horrors, ed. Jacqueline Royster (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1997).

29 Black girls came before the law: The law’s negation of black personhood failed to recognize sexual injury. See Scenes of Subjection (New York: Oxford, 1997), 79–112; Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Vintage, 2010).

29 jeopardy: Francis Beale, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Toni Cade Bambara (New York: New American Library, 1970).

29 had she no interest in it?: See Ethel Waters, His Eye Is on the Sparrow: An Autobiography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951), 23.

29 symphony of anger: Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984; repr. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 129.

29 we were never meant to survive: Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival,” in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 255.

30 potential history: Ariella Azoulay, “Potential History: Thinking through Violence,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 3 (April 2013): 548.

31 a new era, one defined by extremes: For a discussion of the paradoxes and contradictions of this period, see Hazel Carby, “On the Threshold of the Women’s Era,” Critical Inquiry 2, no. 1 (October 1985): 262; and “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry, 18, no. 4 (July 1992): 738.

31 Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws: James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 59–68, 113–24.

35 eyes in advance of time and experience: Marguerite Duras, The Lover, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992).

AN UNLOVED WOMAN

38 The conductor attempted: Ida B. Wells, The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, ed. Miriam DeCosta-Willis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 77–79. This portrait is indebted to Paula Giddings’s wonderful biography, Ida: A Sword Among Lions—Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Amistad, 2009).

38 “the awful tragedies”: Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (Washington, DC: Randall Inc., Printers and Publishers, 1940), 297, 296.

38 “not a respectable person”: Brown v. Memphis & Co., 5 Fed. 499 (1880), U.S. App. 2696.

38 “not-quite human”: In Black Reconstruction, 1860–1880 (1935; repr. New York: Free Press, 1998), Du Bois writes that slavery damaged the Negro’s reputation as human. Proponents of racial segregation would continue to doubt the Negro’s status as human and to assert that crimes against his or her person were socially tolerable because “no human was involved.” See Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); Sylvia Wynter, “No Human Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues” (Stanford, CA: Institute N.H.I., 1994); and Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).