Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-4

Part 1, Chapters 5-8

Part 2, Chapters 9-12

Part 3, Chapters 13-16

Part 3, Chapters 17-20

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 1, Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “She Makes an Errant Path Through the City”

Chapter 5 Summary: “Manual for General Housework”

This brief chapter is formatted in the style of dictionary definitions, giving various interpretations of the word “manual.” The first few definitions describe “manual” as related to the hands and what is done using them. The definitions evolve into a commentary on possession and, in turn, slavery and refused autonomy. “Manual” is also defined in opposition to one’s own mental and physical autonomy. Relating to the hands again, “manual” pertains to the worn hands of working people and all the ordinary things they do with them, from engaging in sexual intimacy to earning wages.

Additionally, “manual” is opposed to abstract thinking, planning, and intelligence. It relates to being handled, not only in terms of objects but also in terms of objectified people. Hartman describes the struggle that can ensue between the handled—like the enslaved or modern-day Black people—and the handler—like slaveholders or aggressive law enforcement. Finally, “manual” is defined as a kind of handbook.

Chapter 6 Summary: “An Atlas of the Wayward”

Two well-dressed Black women walk down South Street in Philadelphia and admire men’s shoes in a storefront window. They pass by sociologist and Harvard PhD W. E. B. Du Bois, who is also dressed up. He is taken aback by the raucous energy of the Black people in the slum where he walks. Philadelphia is home to a large young Black population of people living freely but also with increased crime rates, prostitution, unemployment, and poverty. Du Bois is commissioned to move to the ghetto and “write a comprehensive study of the Negro problem” (88). For one, Du Bois blames the immorality on nonstandard kinship practices like nonmarital cohabitation and “sexual excess.”

Du Bois creates graphics to illustrate the types of conjugal unions Black people engage in, and he understands the relationship between the plantation and the ghetto. As he is dressed too nicely, his many neighbors are reluctant to be interviewed and question his intentions. In the interviews, he hears about their unconventional family arrangements and loose interpretations of concepts like marriage. Their painful stories and hopes change his mind from thinking they are to blame for the city’s decline to understanding that their opportunities are limited and their talents stifled.

Du Bois continues working on graphics that show population numbers and class levels. The prevalence of prostitution has much to do with young girls exposed prematurely to sex. At age 17 in Tennessee, Du Bois himself had an affair with an older, married woman, Mrs. Dowell.

Black people are interested in fashion, material goods, and beauty, all in excess. Sexual excess is also common, and Du Bois’s chaste wife stands in contrast to the many sex workers in the ghetto, like the women admiring the shoes in the window.

Chapter 7 Summary: “A Chronicle of Need and Want”

The chapter opens with Fanny Fisher publicly cursing out the rent collector Helen Parrish on Philadelphia’s Saint Mary Street, where poverty and crime are high. Helen Parrish and Hannah Fox, daughters of the white elite, are housing reformers. They struggle to collect rent from their tenants each week. When the Black porter, Gallen, brings the latest gossip to Helen about a couple having sex in the foyer, she reports it to the police as prostitution. Helen is intrusive and generally unwelcome in the social matters of her tenants.

When Mamie Shepherd and James Shepherd—whom Mamie falsely claims is her husband—move in, Helen seeks to protect Mamie from the negative influence of the people. Helen soon learns that Mamie also goes by Mamie Sharp and has a reputation for promiscuity. Helen confronts her, and Mamie’s response is direct and unashamed. Soon James also learns the truth and breaks the door down when he comes home. He is mostly estranged from his family in the wake of emancipation; Mamie is all he has. Helen insists they move out and pushes James to leave Mamie, feeling it is the best thing for her. In the meantime, Helen intends to rehabilitate Mamie by sending her to the country.

The Philadelphia Inquirer publishes an article—“Shot in the Neck”—about a Joseph Spanks who, while scuffling with another man, was shot by a George Grant. Helen reads and knows that Joseph is James Shepherd. Mamie visits him daily in the hospital, all while still Helen’s tenant and never intending to go to the country. When James is released, he and Mamie disappear. Helen is disappointed that she could not make Mamie into a respectable woman.

Chapter 8 Summary: “In a Moment of Tenderness the Future Seems Possible”

Black peoples’ dreams of marriage and romance are met with many challenges related to finances, employment, and mortality rates. After all their hard work, Black mothers try to protect their daughters, but they ultimately cannot. The imagination of a possible future is mixed with the known difficulties of the past, and the “threat of ruin hangs over the head of the right couple” (156). These couples wander through a metaphorical forest during a storm seeking refuge. Some of their stories end well, some end in tragedy and pain.

Part 1, Chapters 5-8 Analysis

Unlike the other chapters, Chapter 5 is written to mimic the style of a dictionary entry for the word “manual.” Hartman does not include the standard break down of syllables and phonetics, but she offers various definitions. Here, Hartman departs from the linear narrative style used in previous chapters.

This abrupt change in style has two effects. First, it evokes her earlier objective (most apparent in Chapter 1) of inviting the reader to see Black life differently than the critical reformers and sociologists did. She does this by making a commentary, through the definitions, on the perception of African Americans as laborers. She demonstrates this by describing “manual” as related to physical labor, possessions, and “three-fifths of a human,” a reference to the Three-fifths Compromise of 1787. The Three-fifths Compromise determined how enslaved people would be counted in state population numbers for the purposes of determining House of Representative seats. Hartman establishes the historical ties between African Americans, slavery, and manual labor. Then she writes, “Manual: as opposed to mental, as in not an exercise of rational faculties. As opposed to the formation of critical reflections” (77). Here she shows the reader how African Americans have been perceived as only physical laborers with limited capacity for intellectualism. Her commentary invites the reader to see the intellectual and imaginative capacities of Black people, and to see that manual and mental work are not mutually exclusive.

The second effect of Hartman’s abrupt stylistic change in Chapter 5 is to reflect how Wayward Lives is a creative and stylistic departure from much of her previous work. Hartman is an academic and a professor. In Wayward Lives, she experiments with form, pulling away from the standard scholarly style. Hartman carries out research in formal archives, but she writes about her findings as though they are stories. Further, in most of her chapters she speculates, wondering or imagining what things might have been like. This is a departure from the academic imperative to write only about facts. Chapter 5’s unique style enables the reader to reflect on how unique the entire book is in comparison to other academic works.

Chapters 6 and 7 are about the policing of Black female sexuality. Black women engage in sex more freely, with more partners, and with less regard to the structure of a marriage or monogamy. As scholar Hazel Carby writes, during the Great Migration, “[f]emale movement raised ‘moral panics’ that the black female migrant was ‘sexually degenerate’ and ‘socially dangerous’” (Carby, Hazel. Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America. Verso, 1999, 23). Carby explains that these newly migrated women were perceived as a threat to (1) the progress of the Black race, (2) the establishment of a respectable middle class, (3) positive Black-white relations, and (4) the fostering of Black masculinity in cities (Carby, 24).

In many ways, Victoria Earle Matthews’s failed efforts to reform Mattie Jackson (Chapter 4), W. E. B. Du Bois’s directive to make sense of the “Negro problem” (Chapter 6), and Helen Parrish’s disappointment in Mamie Shepherd’s promiscuity (Chapter 7) are all evocative of the class and race battles among upper-class white folks, middle-class Black folks, and poor Black migrants. This push and pull between respectability and personal freedom, and between hope and reality, drives the conflict in Chapter 8 too. The ambiguous couple, like every other party vying for their wants and needs, dreams of romance and a happily ever after but is faced with the harshness of the world.