Ramblin rose meets jamestown quilt

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.