Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals Paperback – 4 Mar. 2021

I've never read a book that so compellingly charts the journeys of individuals through an an environment marked by violence and social change. There are panoramic overviews of the racial turbulence engulfing early twentieth-century African Americans, but also enthralling excursion into the subjective lives of individuals, captured through diaries and observations. The whole thing is carried by a Baldwinesque evocation of mattresses on fire escapes, street corner scenes, scraps of music and the communal sounds and smells from air shafts. Hartman shows how the ghetto was, on the one hand, held together by the contempt, hatred and fear of the people outside it, and, on the other, a place of personal liberation for people of colour drawn to it from small-town communities in the south. Against the backdrop of a societal macrostructure that restricted and squashed emotions and behaviour, Hartman traces the swerving, unpredictable flights of people determined to be free in their own way. An absolutely enthralling read.

Absolutely wonderful and engrossing read—every aspect of it tries to paint a picture of the lived experiences of the characters within the pages. History isn’t simply about learning from rote—these people lived, loved, laughed, cried, screamed, danced, sang and worked damn hard to survive above and beyond the world’s expectations of who they were, and could be.

This extraordinary book engages with archive material in a completely innovative way, drawing a rich portrait of the lives of young black women in America at the beginning of the last century, in the wake of Emancipation. The depth of scholarship here is impressive, the voice compassionate and compelling; the whole project is an immersive, lyrical reimagining of the way social history can be put to radical use. I found it exhilarating.