Welcome to Litsy!

This intense, experimental history weaves together biography, archival record, photographs, and a kind of radical act of imagination to tell the stories of Black and queer women in Philadelphia & NYC at the turn of the century—their experiments in love, living, sex, family, gender, autonomy—all while under severe legal, societal, and police oppression. This is a challenging read—it‘s easy to get lost, but it‘s a worthwhile part of being “wayward.”

QUEER INTERSECTIONS

This was just incredible. Non-fiction with dialogue and poetic description, about Black American women in the Depression who resisted being easily categorized as “victims” or “respectable.” Hartman lifts up runways, prison rioters, sex trade workers, queers, and others seeking freedom and dignity. Some are famous (who knew Billie Holliday was arrested in a disorderly house at age 14?) but the focus is on these struggles‘ universality.
#Bookspin

The chorus gathers…few understand them, study them like they are worth something, realize their inherent value. If you listen closely you can hear the whole world in a bent note, a throwaway lyric, the singular thread of a collective utterance. Everything from the first ship to the young woman found hanging in her cell: marvel at their capacity to inhabit every woman‘s grief as their own, all the stories ever told rush from her opened mouth.

Sonic tumult and upheaval: it was resistance as music, it was a noise strike, in the most basic sense the sounds emanating from Lowell were the free music of those in captivity, the abolition philosophy expressed within the circle, the shout and speech song of struggle. If freedom and mutual creation characterized the music, it too defined the strike and riot waged by prisoners…the chants and cries escaped the confines even if their bodies did not

Black folks had been owned, and being an object of property, they were radically disenchanted with the idea of property. If their past taught them anything, it was that the attempt to own life destroyed it, brutalized the Earth, and ran roughshod over everything on God‘s creation for a dollar.

#Bookspin list for February:

1. We Measure the Earth
2. Undala Trees
3. Seeing Ghosts
4. Mother Tree
5. New Jim Crow
6. Permanent Astonishment
7. Pedagogy
8. How Much of these Hills
9. The Savage Detectives
10. Seven
11. Fresh Banana Leaves
12. The Mountains Sing
13. You are your best thing
14. Night Tiger
15. Rememberings
16. My Grandmother‘s Hands
17. Matrix
18. Kiss the Red Stairs
19. Lot
20. People Love Dead Jews

I inhabited that half-shadow no man‘s land which exists between boundaries of the two sexes. Throughout the world there are thousands of us furtive humans who have created for ourselves a fantasy as old as civilization itself, a fantasy which enables us, if only temporarily, to turn our back on the hard realm of life. Our number is legion, and our heart rate inconceivable.

The first generation after slavery had been so in love with being free that few noticed or minded that they had been released to nothing at all: they didn‘t know that the price of the war was to be exacted from their flesh. People were too busy dreaming of who they wanted to be, where they wanted to live, acres they would farm, and searching for the mother they would never find, wondering what had happened to their uncle; was their sister dead?

If she could feel deeply, she could be free. Beauty was not a luxury, but, like food, a requirement for living. She loved cashmere sweaters, not because they were expensive, but because the fabric felt exquisite against her skin, and the way a gold bracelet glinted and flashed and made the tone of her blue-black flesh so lush, as if right below the skin there were layers of indigo and ochre, a vortex of deep black in which you could lose yourself.

"Those who dared refuse the gender norms and social conventions of sexual propriety - monogamy, heterosexuality, and marriage - or failed to abide by the script of female respectability were targeted as potential prostitutes, vagrants, deviants, and incorrigible children".

1890 - 1935 was an evolution, a revolution of Black intimate life. A desire to live life unrestrictive in a new world - The Ghetto. Drunk with freedom, escaping lives of forced servitude. The North became an altered version of the South. The Ghetto, the slum, the tenements is in fact the plantation extended into the city.

A dreary day just might be the right atmosphere to finally finish a book before it having to go back to the library. Just started this one and I hope I finish it !!

“They have been credited with nothing: they remain surplus women of no significance, girls deemed unfit for history and destined to be minor figures.”

Very excited to finally be starting this! Already I find this writing style engaging 💗

Just added all of these to my TBR because the #NPR #popculturehappyhour gang tends to have my back, though I was sad about the lack of Margaret H. Willison. In order from those I am most excited to those I am not quite as excited to read: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments; The Hating Game; Less; Transit; Here for It; Miss Manners' Guide To Excruciatingly Correct Behavior. 🤩📚

When 2 books becomes 6 ... 🙈

#stacksaturday #libraryhaul

For your TBR lists featuring Black History Month in February. From @Bookpage. The author of the review is Vanessa Willoughby.