How they leap off the page ... a rich resurrection of a forgotten history ... [Hartman's] rigor and restraint give her writing its distinctive electricity and tension. Hartman is a sleuth of the archive; she draws extensively from plantation documents, missionary tracts, whatever traces she can find— but she is vocal about the challenge of using such troubling documents, the risk one runs of reinscribing their authority. Similarly, she is keen to identify moments of defiance and joy in the lives of her subjects, but is wary of the 'obscene' project to revise history, to insist upon autonomy where there may have been only survival, 'to make the narrative of defeat into an opportunity for celebration' ... Hartman is most original in her approach to gaps in a story, which she shades in with speculation and sometimes fictional imagining—a technique she has used in all her work but never quite so fully as in this new book ... This kind of beautiful, immersive narration exists for its own sake but it also counteracts the most common depictions of black urban life from this time—the frozen, coerced images, Hartman calls them, most commonly of mothers and children in cramped kitchens and bedrooms.

... clearly presents Hartman’s underlying values as a researcher: that no life is insignificant, that suppressed narratives deserve daylight, that we hold within us the capacity to expand history with our imagination and shared humanity ... I have, in conversation with other writers, debated the merits of speculative nonfiction as a genre, but Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is a perfect case study in the necessity of such a genre ... Extending her experiences as a human, as a woman, as a person of color, Hartman is able to convincingly stitch a line between fact an intuition, presenting full narratives on behalf of women that might have otherwise remained single-word entries in the record: vagrant, prostitute, wayward, loose ... The beauty in the wayward, the fiction in the facts, and the thriving existence in the face of a blanked out history are the recurring motifs of Wayward Lives, and as a beautiful experiment in its own right, it shines through as a successful one.

Hartman’s real interest is in these young women—those who who ran away from grinding labor and resisted the trap of good behavior. In granting these forgotten women a voice, and conjuring their longing for freedom, Hartman resists the century-long diminution of their lives to social problems ... pushes beyond the effort to recover forgotten stories, in order to tell them in a deliberately poetic, evocative way ... That perspective transforms the so-called slum from a place of incipient criminality into a space of intimacy, love and tenderness, for all that it coexists with violence and suffering. Woven together in this remarkable book, these stories remind us how much is lost when histories focus only on what’s visible on the surface, on the stories that come down to us polished and preserved by the powerful; they demonstrate that the best of intentions to improve other people’s lives are liable to harm as well as help, so long as the people affected are not allowed to speak for themselves. The result is an effect more usually associated with fiction than history, of inspiring a powerful imaginative empathy—not only towards characters in the distant past but towards the strangers all around us, whose humanity we share.

... radical, genre-defying ... an extraordinary comment on the centrality of Black women’s history and experience to the history and politics of the United States. By situating them as central agents, Hartman disables the notion that US history thrived on the momentum of progress in the Progressive Era. Instead, the lives of ordinary Black women hold the horrors of the American past as much as they represent the possibility of the future represented in their movement and rebellion ... a blistering critique of historical archives as the singular or even most authoritative source of credible knowledge ... Hartman incisively unravels the duplicity and hypocrisy of social scientists and reformers who stood in judgment of the lives of Black women and at times colluded with the police and the criminal justice system to punish Black women for a failure to conform to their imagined social order and hierarchy of society ... she is providing a space for Black women in the history that has systematically left them out...tapping into a much longer history and tradition of storytelling as a method of keeping histories alive ... Hartman’s role within the text becomes a part of its greater significance and meaning ... She is not romanticizing the margins, though she suggests that we can find romance — the implacable pursuit of freedom — within the margins’ constraints.

It’s impossible not to read this as a manifesto for a practice of writing that moves, consciously and intentionally, between observation and the imagination. The inner lives of the most resistant and unacceptable people—the ones we most want access to—are exactly the ones least likely to be captured in any detail in historical accounts. That’s the cramp in the creative act (because it is a creative act) of bringing these lives into focus... a collective portrait of women who could not be understood in the language of their own time. In this sense, Wayward Lives is a profound and painstaking act of reconstruction that renews our understanding of an era now largely faded from public memory ... more than anything else, is a meditation on what it meant to love and have sex freely when marriage for poor black couples was all but impossible, when migration for work could mean months or years of separation, and adequate health care and birth control were inaccessible ... I found it a little disconcerting to encounter Hartman insisting that readers could verify Wayward Lives through its sources, when at many other points in the text she expresses, so vividly, her need to say what the sources do not. This led me to wonder: Is the relationship between Wayward Lives and its archive so different from the relationship between Toni Morrison’s Beloved? ... What matters in all these texts is the imaginative hunger that prompts the writer to create new vocabularies for speaking about history. The archive is part of the process (and sometimes part of the text), but in the end, in the reader’s eye, it almost vanishes—it is, so to speak, overwritten.

... an attempt to battle erasure, a determined strike against the archives’ purported silence regarding the lives of African-American women living in the direct shadow of slavery ... This is a daring, and often inspiring, way to consider these women’s lives, although one suspects that it applied more to some of the women than others ... poignant and imaginative ... Hartman is a tremendously gifted writer with the eye and the lyrical prose of a novelist ... The talent to do what Hartman does in this book is rare. Fortunately for the women in Wayward Lives, she possesses that talent in abundance, and it is on full display.

Illustrated with startling historical photographs, Hartman’s blend of narrative and imagined internal monologue uncovers a world of unjust imprisonment, child prostitution, and race riots but also lively dance halls and chorus lines and the daring transformation of tenement hallways into 'places of assembly' and rooftops into 'stretches of urban beach' ... Hartman has created an insightful feminist reassessment of a key era in American history.

Lyrical and novelistic ... Taken together, the affectionate and reverent reconstructions add up to a picture of black urban women’s courage, their attempts to carve out freedom, love, autonomy, power, and pleasure in socially constrained circumstances ... This passionate, poetic retrieval of women from the footnotes of history is a superb literary achievement.

Sometimes Hartman’s rhetoric becomes a touch too high-flown, as if swept up in the exuberance of the fight for freedom, and interrogatives sometimes threaten to overwhelm declarative sentences. However, close attention to 'beautiful experiments' and 'the sexual geography of the black belt,' as two section titles have it, yield new insight into the truth of a central proposition: 'No modern intelligent person was content merely existing. Sometimes it was good to take a chance' ... Lucid and original—of considerable interest to students of the African-American diaspora and American social and cultural history.