130.-riotous-manner.pdf
Web PDF • Imposed PDF • Raw TXT (OCR)
















































‘The Anarchist Library
Anti-Copyright

Saidiya Hartman
‘The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner
July 2018

South Atlantic Quarterly 1 July 2018; 117 (3): 465-490.
DOI:10.1215/00382876-6942093

theanarchistlibrary.org
Contents

‘Wayward Experiments

‘The Future of Involuntary Servitude .

Contraband Love
Riot and Refrain
Voices in the Chorus

a7
20
23
34
Esther Brown did not write a political tract on the refusal to
be governed, or draft a plan for mutual aid or outline a memoir
of her sexual adventures. A manifesto of the wayward: Own
Nothing. Refuse the Given. Live on What You Need and No
More. Get Ready to Be Free — was not found among the items
contained in her case file. She didn’t pen any song lines: My
‘mama says I'm reckless, My daddy says I'm wild, I ain’t good
looking, but I'm somebody's angel child. She didn’t commit to
paper her ruminations on freedom: With human nature caged
in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we
speak of potentialities? The cardboard placards for the tumult
and upheaval she incited might have said: Don’t mess with
me. Iam not afraid to smash things up. But hers was a strug-
gle without formal declarations of policy, slogan, or credos.
It required no party platform or ten-point program. Walking
through the streets of New York City, she and Emma Goldman
crossed paths, but failed to recognize one another. When Hu-
bert Harrison encountered her in the lobby of the Renaissance
Casino after he delivered his lectures on “Marriage versus Free
Love” for the Socialist Club, he noticed only that she had a
pretty face and a big ass. Esther Brown never pulled a soapbox
onto the corner of 135" Street and Lenox Avenue to make a
speech about autonomy, the global reach of the color line, in-
voluntary servitude, free motherhood, or the promise of a fu-
ture world, but she well understood that the desire to move as,
she wanted was nothing short of treason. She knew firsthand
that the offense most punished by the state was trying to live
free. To wander through the streets of Harlem, to want better
than what she had, and to be propelled by her whims and de-
sires was to be ungovernable. Her way of living was nothing
short of anarchy.

Had anyone ever found the rough notes for reconstruction
jotted in the marginalia of her grocery list or correlated the
numbers circled most often in her dog-eared dream book with
routes of escape not to be found in Rand McNally’s atlas or





5
seen the love letters written to her girlfriend about how they
would live at the end of the world, the master philosophers
and cardholding radicals, in all likelihood, would have said
that her analysis was insufficient, dismissed her for failing to
understand those key passages in the Grundrisse about the ex-
slave's refusal to work — they have ceased to be slaves, but not
in order to become wage labourers — she nodded in enthusias-
tic agreement at all the wrong places — content with producing
only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption — and
embraced indulgence and idleness as the real luxury good; all of
which emphasized the limits of black feminist polities. What
did they know of Truth and Tubman? Or the contours of black
women’s war against the state and capital? Could they ever un-
derstand the dreams of another world which didn’t trouble the
distinction between man, settler, and master? Or recounted
the struggle against servitude, captivity, property, and enclo-
sure that began in the barracoon and continued on the ship,
where some fought, some jumped, some refused to eat. Others
set the plantation and the fields on fire, poisoned the master.
‘They had never listened to Lucy Parsons; they had never read
Ida B. Wells. Or envisioned the riot as a rally ery and refusal
of fungible life? Only a misreading of the key texts of anar-
chism could ever imagine a place for wayward colored girls.
No, Kropotkin never described black women’s mutual aid soci-
eties or the chorus in Mutual Aid, although he imagined animal
sociality in its rich varieties and the forms of cooperation and
mutuality found among ants, monkeys, and ruminants. Impos-
sible, recalcitrant domestics weren't yet in his radar or anyone
else's, (It would be a decade and a half before Marvel Cooke
and Ella Baker wrote their essay “The Bronx Slave Market” and
two decades before Claudia Jones's “An End to the Neglect of
the Problems of the Negro Woman”)

It is not surprising that a negress would be guilty of conflat-
ing idleness with resistance or exalt the struggle for mere sur-
vival or confuse petty acts for insurrection or imagine a mi-

6
nor figure might be capable of some significant shit or mis-
take laziness and inefficiency for a general strike or recast theft
as a kind of cheap socialism for too fast girls and question-
able women or esteem wild ideas as radical thought. At best,
the case of Esther Brown provides another example of the ten-
dency to exaggeration and excess that is common to the race
A revolution in a minor key was hardly noticeable before the
spirit of Bolshevism or the nationalist vision of a Black Empire
or the glamour of wealthy libertines, fashionable socialists, and
self-declared New Negroes. Nobody remembers the evening
she and her friends raised hell on 132 Street or turned out
Edmund's Cellar or made such a beautiful noise during the
riot that their screams and shouts were improvised music, so
that even the tone-deaf journalists from the New York Times de-
scribed the black noise of disorderly women as a jazz chorus.

Wayward Experiments

Esther Brown hated to work, the conditions of work as much as,
the very idea of work. Her reasons for quitting said as much.
Housework: Wages too small. Laundry work: Too hard, Ran
away. General Housework: Tired of work. Laundress: Too hard.
Sewing buttons on shirts: Tired of work. Dishwasher: Tired of
work. Housework: Man too ross. Live-in-service: I might as
well be a slave. At age fifteen, when she left school, she experi-
enced the violence endemic to domestic work and tired quickly
of the demand to care for others who didn’t care for you. She
ran the streets because nowhere else in the world was there
anything for her. She stayed in the streets to escape the suf-
focation of her mother’s small apartment, which was packed
with lodgers, men who took up too much space and who were
too easy with their hands, She had been going around and mix-
ing it up for a few years, but only because she liked doing it.
She never went with men only for money. She was no pros-
titute. After the disappointment of a short-lived marriage to
a man who wasn't her baby’s father (he had offered to marry
her but she rejected him), she went to live with her sister and
grandmother and they helped her raise her son. She had sev-
eral lovers to whom she was bound by need and want, not by
the law,

Esther's only luxury was idleness and she was fond of say-
ing to her friends, “If you get up in the morning and feel tired,
go back to sleep and then go to the theatre at night” With the
support of her sister and grandmother and help from gentle-
men friends, she didn’t need to work on a regular basis. She
picked up day work when she was in a pinch and endured a
six-week stretch of “Yes, Mrs. I'll get to it” when coerced by
need. So really, she was doing fine and had nearly perfected
the art of surviving without having to scrape and bow. She
hated being a servant, as did every general houseworker. Ser-
vice carried the stigma of slavery; white girls sought to avoid
it for the same reason ~ it was nigger work. Had her employ-
crs suspected that the better the servant, the more severe the
hatred of the mistress, Esther would not have been “entrusted
to care for their precious darlings”

Why should she toil in a kitchen or factory in order to sur-
vive? Why should she work herself to the bone for white peo-
ple? She preferred strolling along Harlem's wide avenues and
losing herself in cabarets and movie houses. In the streets,
young women and men displayed their talents and ambitions.
It was better than staying home and staring at four walls. In
Harlem, strolling was a fine art, an everyday choreography of
the possible; it was the collective movement of the streets, head-
less and spilling out in all directions, yet moving and drifting
en masse, like a swarm or the swell of an ocean; it was a long
poem of black hunger and striving. The bodies rushing through
the block and idling on corners and hanging out on front steps
were an assembly of the damned, the venturous, and the dan-
gerous. “All modalities sang a part in this chorus” and the

8
refrains were of infinite variety. On the avenues, the possi-
bilities were glimmering and evanescent, even if fleeting and
most often unrealized. The map of the might could or what
might be was not restricted to the literal trail of Esther's foot-
steps or anyone else’s. Hers was an errant path cut through the
heart of Harlem in search of the open city, ouverture, inside
the ghetto, Wandering and drifting was how she engaged the
world and how she perceived it. The thought of what might
be possible was indistinguishable from moving bodies and the
transient rush and flight of black folks in this city-within-the-
city. Streetwalking in the black capital emboldened the way-
ward, shored up the weary, stoked the dreams of the wretched,
and encouraged wanderlust.

As she drifted through the city, a thousand ideas about who
she might be and what she might do rushed into her head,
but she was uncertain what to make of them. Her thoughts
were inchoate, fragmentary, wild. How they might become a
blueprint for something better was unclear. Esther was fiercely
intelligent. She had a bright, alert face and piercing eyes that
announced her interest in the world. This combined with a
noticeable pride made the seventeen-year-old appear substan-
tial, a force in her own right. Even the white teachers at the
training school, who disliked her and were reluctant to give a
colored girl any undue praise, conceded she was very smart,
although quick to anger because of too much pride. She in-
sisted on being treated no differently than the white girls, so
they said she was trouble. The problem was not her capacity;
it was her attitude. The brutality she experienced at the Hud-
son Training School for Girls taught her to fight back, to strike
out. The teachers told the authorities that she had enjoyed too
much freedom. It had ruined her and made her into the kind
of young woman who would not hesitate to smash things up.
Freedom in her hands, if not a crime, was a threat to public
order and moral decency. Excessive liberty had ruined her. The
social worker concurred, “With no social considerations to con-
strain her, she was ungovernable”

Esther Brown was wild and wayward. She longed for an-
other way of living in the world. She was hungry for enough,
for otherwise, for better. She was hungry for beauty. In her
case, the aesthetic wasn’t a realm separate and distinct from
the daily challenges of survival, rather the aim was to make
an art of subsistence, a lyric of being young, poor, gifted, and
black. Yet, she did not try to create a poem or song or painting,
‘What she created was Esther Brown. That was the offering, the
bit of art, that could not come from any other. She would pol-
ish and hone that. She would celebrate that everyday something
had tried to kill her and failed. She would make a beautiful life.
‘What was beauty if not “the intense sensation of being pulled
toward the animating force of life?” Or the yearning “to bring
things into relation ... and with as much urgency as though
one’s life depended upon it” To the eyes of the world, her wild
thoughts, dreams of another world, and longing to escape from
drudgery were likely to lead to tumult and upheaval, to open
rebellion. Esther Brown didn’t need a husband or a daddy or
a boss telling her what to do. But a young woman who flitted
from job to job and lover to lover was considered immoral and
destined to become a threat to the social order, a menace to so-
ciety. Detective Brady said as much when he arrested Esther
and her friends.

What the law designated as crime were the forms of life cre~
ated by young black women in the city. The modes of intimacy
and affiliation being fashioned in the ghetto, the refusal to la-
bor, the forms of gathering and assembly, the practices of sub-
sistence and getting over were under surveillance and targeted

10
by the police as well as the sociologists and the reformers who
gathered the information and made the case against them, forg-
ing their lives into tragic biographies of poverty, crime, and
pathology. The activity required to reproduce and sustain life
is, as Marx noted, a definite form of expressing life, it is an
art of survival, social poesis. Subsistence — scraping by, get-
ting over, making ends meet — entailed an ongoing struggle
to produce a way to live in a context in which poverty was
taken for granted and domestic work or general housework de-
fined the only opportunity available to black girls and women,
“The acts of the wayward — the wild thoughts, reckless dreams,
interminable protests, spontaneous strikes, nonparticipation,
willfulness, and bold-faced refusal redistributed the balance of
need and want and sought a line of escape from debt and duty
in the attempt to create a path elsewhere.

‘Mere survival was an achievement in a context so brutal
How could one enhance life or speak of its potentialities when
confined in the ghetto, when daily subjected to racist assault
and insult, and conscripted to servitude? How can I live? —
It was a question Esther reckoned with every day. Survival
required acts of collaboration and genius. Esther's imagina-
tion was geared toward the clarification of life — “what would
sustain material life and enhance it, something that entailed
more than the reproduction of physical existence.” The mutu-
ality and creativity necessary to sustain life in the context of in-
termittent wages, controlled deprivation, economic exclusion,
coercion, and antiblack violence often bordered on the extrale~
gal and the criminal. Beautiful, wayward experiments entailed
what W. E. B. DuBois described as an “open rebellion” against
society.

This speculative history of the wayward is an effort to nar-
rate the open rebellion and beautiful experiment produced by
young women in the emergent ghetto, a form of racial enclo-
sure that succeeded the plantation. The narrative utilizes the
reports and case files of the reformatory, private investigators,

u
psychologists, and social workers to challenge the primary
tenets of these accounts, the most basic of these assumptions
being that the lives represented required intervention and
rehabilitation and that the question — who are you? — is
indistinguishable from one’s status as a social problem. ‘The
method is critical fabulation. State violence, surveillance, and
detention produce the archival traces and institutional records
that inform the reconstruction of these lives; but desire and
the want of something better decide the contours of the telling,
‘The narrative emulates the errant path of the wayward and
moves from one story to another by way of encounter, chance
meeting, proximity, and the sociality created by enclosure. It
strives to convey the aspiration and longing of the wayward
and the tumult and upheaval incited by the chorus.

For the most part, the history of Esther and her friends and
the potentiality of their lives has remained unthought because
no one could imagine young black women as social visionaries,
radical thinkers, and innovators in the world in which these
acts took place. his latent history has yet to emerge: A rev-
olution in a minor key unfolded in the city and young black
women were its vehicle. It was driven not by uplift or the
struggle for recognition or citizenship, but by the vision of a
world that would guarantee to every human being free access to
earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to in-
dividual desires, tastes, and inclinations. In this world, free love
and free mothethood would not be criminalized and punished,
To appreciate the beautiful experiments of Esther Brown and
her friends, one needs first to conceive something as unimag-
inable and unprecedented as too fast girls and surplus women
and whores producing “thought of the outside’ that is, thought
directed toward the outer bound of what is possible. Such far-
reaching notions of what could be were the fruit of centuries
of mutual aid, which was organized in stealth and paraded in
public view.

12
Collaboration, reciprocity, and shared creation defined the
practice of mutual aid. It was and remains a collective practice
of survival for those bereft of the notion that life and land,
human and earth could be owned, traded, and made the private
property of anyone, those who would never be self-possessed,
or envision themselves as acquisitive self-interested propri-
etors, or measure their life and worth by the ledger or the rent
book, or long to be the settler or the master. Mutual aid did not
traffic in the belief that the self existed distinct and apart from
others or revere the ideas of individuality and sovereignty,
as much as it did singularity and freedom. ‘The mutual aid
society survived the Middle Passage and its origins might be
traced to traditions of collectivity, which flourished in the
stateless societies that preceded the breach of the Atlantic
and perdured in its wake. This form of mutual assistance was
remade in the hold of the slave ship, the plantation, and the
ghetto. It made good the ideals of the commons, the collective,
the ensemble, the always-more-than-one of existing in the
world. The mutual aid society was a resource of black survival
‘The ongoing and open-ended creation of new conditions of
existence and the improvisation of life-enhancing and free
association was a practice crafted in soci 3
taverns, dance halls, disorderly houses, and the streets.






Esther had been working for two days as a live-in domes-
tic on Long Island when she decided to return to Harlem to
see her baby and have some fun. It was summer and Harlem
was alive. She visited her son and grandmother, but stayed at
her friend Josephine’s place because she always had a house
full of folks dancing, drinking, carousing, and vamping, Es-
ther had planned to return to her job the next day, but one day
stretched into several. People tended to lose track of time at
Josephine’s place. Five West 134" street had a reputation as a

13
building for lover's secret assignations, house parties, and gam-
bling. The apartment was in the thick of it, right off Fifth Av-
enue in the blocks of Harlem tightly packed with crowded tene-
‘ments and subject to frequent police raids. Esther was playing
cards when Rebecca arrived with Krause, who said he had a
friend he wanted her to meet. She didn’t feel like going out,
but they kept pestering her and Josephine encouraged her to
give it a try. Why not have some fun?

Do you want to have a good time? Brady asked. Rebecca
gave him the onceover. A smile and the promise of some fun
was all the encouragement Rebecca needed. Esther didn’t
care one way or the other. She suggested they go back to
Josephine’s, but Brady didn’t want to, so they decided to
hang out in the hallway of a nearby building. A tenement
hallway was as good as any lounge. In the dark passage, Brady
snuggled up with Rebecca, while his friend tried to pair up
with Esther. Krause asked Brady for fifty cents to go buy some
liquor. That was when Brady said he was a detective. Krause
took off quick, as if he knew what was coming as soon as the
man opened his mouth. He would have gotten away if Brady
hadn't shot him in the foot

At the precinct, Detective Brady charged Krause with White
Slavery, and Esther and Rebecca with Violation of the Tene-
ment House Law. They were taken from the precinct to the
Jefferson Market Court for an arraignment. Since they were
seventeen years old and didn’t have any previous offenses they
were sent to the Empire Friendly Shelter while they awaited
trial, rather than confined in the Tombs, which was what ev-
eryone called the prison cells above the Jefferson courthouse.
A day later the charges were dismissed against Krause because
the other detective failed to appear in court. They were wait-
ing to appear before the judge when Krause sent word that he

4
was free. Esther and Rebecca wouldn't be so lucky. It was
hard to call the cursory proceedings and routine indifference
at the Women's Court a hearing, since the magistrate court had
no jury, produced no written record of the events, required no
evidence but the police officer's word, failed to consider the in-
tentions of the accused, or even to require the commitment of
criminal act. The likelihood of future criminality decided their
sentence rather than any violation of the law. The magistrate
judge barely looked at the two colored girls before sentencing
them to three years at the reformatory. The social worker rec~
ommended they be sent to Bedford Hills to rescue them from
a life in the streets.

Harlem was swarming with vice-investigators and under-
cover detectives and do-gooders who were all intent on keep-
ing young black women off the streets, even if it meant arrest-
ing every last one of them. Street strollers, exhausted domes-
tics, nocturnal creatures, wannabe chorus girls, and too loud
colored women were arrested on a whim or suspicion or like-
lihood. In custody, the reasons for arrest were offered: Loi-
tering. Riotous and Disorderly. Solicitation. Violation of the
Tenement House Law. Who knew that being too loud, or loiter-
ing in the hallway of your building or on the front stoop was a
violation of the law; or making a date with someone you met at
the club, or arranging a casual hookup, or running the streets
‘was prostitution? Or sharing a flat with ten friends was crimi-
nal anarchy? Or the place where you stayed was a disorderly
house, and could be raided at any moment? The real offense
was blackness. Your status made you a criminal. ‘The telltale
sign of future criminality was a dark face.

Until the night of July 17, 1917, Esther Brown had been
lucky and eluded the police, although she had been under their
gaze all the while. The willingness to have a good time with





15
a stranger or the likelihood of engaging in an immoral act ~
sexual intimacy outside of marriage — was sufficient evidence
of wrongdoing. To be willing or willful was the offense
to be punished. The only way to counter the presumption
of wrongdoing and establish innocence was to give a good
account of one’s self. Esther failed to do this as did many
young women who passed through the court. It didn’t matter
that Esther had not solicited Krause or asked for or accepted
any money. She assumed she was innocent, but the Women’s
Court found otherwise. Esther's inability to give an account of
herself, capable of justifying and explaining how she lived or,
at least, willing to atone for her failures and deviations, were
among the offenses levied against her. She readily admitted
that she hated to work, not bothering to distinguish between
the conditions of work available to her and some ideal of work
that she and none she knew had ever experienced. She was
convicted because she was unemployed and “leading the life
of a prostitute” One could lead the life of a prostitute without
actually being one.

With no proof of employment, Esther was indicted for
vagrancy under the Tenement House Law. Vagraney was an
expansive and virtually all-encompassing category, like the
‘manner of walking in Ferguson, it was a ubiquitous charge
that made it easy for the police to arrest and prosecute young
women with no evidence of crime or act of lawbreaking. In
the 1910s and 1920s, vagrancy statutes were used primarily
to target young women for prostitution. To be charged was
to be sentenced since the Women’s Court had the highest
rate of conviction of all the New York City courts. Nearly 80
percent of those who appeared before the magistrate judge
were sentenced to serve time. It didn’t matter if it was your
first encounter with the law. Vagrancy statutes and tenement
house laws made young black women vulnerable to arrest and
transformed sexual acts, even consensual ones with no cash
exchanging hands, into criminal offenses. What mattered

16
was not what you had done, but the prophetic power of the
police to predict future crime, to anticipate the mug shot in
the bright eyes and intelligent face of Esther Brown.

‘The Future of Involuntary Servitude

In 1349, the first vagrancy statute was passed in England. The
law was a response to the shortage of labor in the aftermath
of the Black Plague and it was designed to conscript those
who refused to labor. ‘The vagrancy laws of England were
adopted in the North American colonies and invigorated with
a new force and scope after Emancipation and the demise of
Reconstruction. ‘They replaced the Black Codes, which had
been deemed unconstitutional, but resurrected involuntary
servitude in guises amenable to the terms liberty and equality.

In the South, vagrancy laws became a surrogate for slavery,
forcing exslaves to remain on the plantation and radically re-
stricting their movement, recreating slavery in all but name. In
northern cities, vagrancy statutes too were intended to compel
the labor of the idle, and, more importantly, to control the prop-
ertyless. Those without proof of employment were considered
likely to commit or be involved in vice and crime. Vagrancy
statutes provided the legal means to master the newly master-
less. The origins of the workhouse and the house of correction
can be traced to these efforts to force the idle to labor, to man-
age and regulate the ex-serf and ex-slave when lordship and
bondage assumed a more indirect form. The statutes restricted
and regulated black movement and punished the forms of inti-
macy that could not be categorized or settled by the question: Is
this man your husband? Those without proof of employment
and refusing to labor were in all likelihood guilty of crime —
vagrancy or prostitution.

Vagrancy was a status, not a crime. It was not doing, with-
holding, nonparticipation, the refusal to be settled or bound by

Ww
contract to husband or employer. This refusal of a social order
based on monogamous marriage or wage labor was penalized.
Common law defined the vagrant as “someone who wandered
about without visible means of support.” William Blackstone
in his 1765 Commentaries on the Law of England defined va-
grants as those who “wake on the night and sleep in the day
and haunt taverns and ale-houses and roust about; and no man
knows from where they came or whither they go.” The statutes
targeted those who maintained excessive notions of freedom
and imagined that liberty included the right not to work. In
short, vagrants were the deracinated — migrants, wanderers,
displaced persons, and strangers.

Status offenses were critical to the remaking of a racist order
in the aftermath of slavery and accelerated the growing dispar-
ry between black and white rates of incarceration in northern
cities at the beginning of the twentieth century. While the legal
transformation from slavery to freedom is most often narrated
as the shift from status to contract, from property to subject,
from slave to Negro, vagrancy statutes make apparent the con-
tinuities and entanglements between a diverse range of unfree
states — from slave to servant, from servant to vagrant, from
domestic to prisoner, from idler to conviet and felon. Involun-
tary servitude wasn’t one condition — chattel slavery — nor
was it fixed in time and place; rather it was an ever-changing
mode of exploitation, domination, accumulation (the severing
of will, the theft of capacity, the appropriation of life), and con-
finement. Antiblack racism fundamentally shaped the devel-
opment of “status criminality.” In turn, status criminality was
tethered ineradicably to blackness.

Not quite two centuries after the conspiracy to burn down
New York was hatched at a black-and-tan dive called Hugh-
son's Tavern, black assembly and the threat of tumult still made
New York's ruling elite quake in fear. The state was as in-
tent on preventing the dangers and consequences posed by
Negroes assembled in a riotous manner. Gatherings that were



18
too loud or too unruly or too queer; hotels and cabarets that
welcomed black and white patrons; black-and-tan dives fre-
quented by Chinese men and white girls or black women with
Italian paramours; or house parties and buffet flats offering
refuge to pansies, lady lovers, and inverts — were deemed dis-
orderly, promiscuous, and morally depraved. These forms of
intimate association and unregulated assembly threatened the
public good by trangressing the color line and eschewing the
dominant mores. The lives of the wayward were riotous, queer,
disposed to extravagance and wanton living. This promiscuous
sociality fueled a moral panic identified and mobilized by the
city’s ruling elite to justify the extravagant use of police power.

Penal laws against disorderly conduct, disorderly houses,
disorderly persons, unlawful assembly, criminal anarchy, and
vagrancy were intended to regulate intimacy and association,
police styles of comportment, dictate how one assumed a
gender and who one loved, and thwart free movement and
errant paths through the city.

Esther Brown was confronted with a choice that was no
choice at all: volunteer for servitude or be commanded by the
law. Vagrancy statutes were implemented and expanded to
conscript young colored women to domestic work and regu-
late them in proper households, that is, male-headed house-
holds, with a proper he, not merely someone pretending to be
a husband or merely outfitted like a man, not lovers passing for
sisters or a pretend Mrs. shacking up with a boarder, not house~
holds comprising three women and a child. For state authori-
ties, black homes were disorderly houses as they were marked
by the taint of promiscuity, pathology, and illegality, shelter-
ing nameless children and strangers, nurturing intimacy out-
side the bounds of the law, not organized by the sexual dyad,
and not ruled by the father; and producing criminals not cit-
izens. The domestic was the locus of danger; it threatened
social reproduction rather than ensured it. Is this man your
husband? Where is the father of your child? Such questions, if

19
not answered properly, might land you in the workhouse or
reformatory. With incredible ferocity, state surveillance and
police power acted to shape the black household and regulate
intimate life. Affiliation and kinship organized along alternate
lines, an open mesh of possibilities, was suspect and likely to
yield crime. The discretionary power granted the police in dis-
cerning future crime would have an enormous impact on black
social life and the making of the ghetto.

The plantation, the ghetto, and the prison were coeval; one
mode of confinement and enclosure did not supersede the
other, but extended the state of servitude, violence, and death
in a new guise. The afterlife of slavery unfolded in a tenement
hallway and held Esther Brown in its grasp. Plainly put, the
Negro problem in the North was the arrival of the ex-slave in
the city, and the moral panic and the race riots that erupted
across the country document the reach of the plantation and
the enduring status of the black as fungible life, eternal alien,
and noncitizen.

‘The plantation was not abolished, but transformed. The
problem of crime was the threat posed by the black presence
in the city; the problem of crime was the wild experiment in
black freedom; and the efforts to manage and regulate this
crisis provided a means of solidifying and extending the color
line that defined urban space, reproducing the disavowed
apartheid of everyday life.

State violence, incarceration, and controlled depletion de-
fined the world that Esther Brown wanted to destroy. It made
her the sort of girl who would not hesitate to smash things up.

Contraband Love
‘The letter her ex-husband sent didn’t say ifthe article appeared

in the metro column of The Amsterdam News or the New York
City Briefs in The Chicago Defender or the City News section of

20
the New York Herald, in which case only a few lines dedicated to
the when, where, and how would have appeared, just the cold
hard facts, perhaps accompanied by statistics that documented
the rising rate of prostitution, or the increasing numbers of
young colored women arrested for solicitation and violation of
the Tenement House Law. It would not have been a showy or
sensationalist headline like Silk and Lights Blamed for Harlem's
Girl Demise or a lead story of moral crisis and sexual panic
manufactured by vice commissions and urban reformers. If
the details were especially sordid, a column or two might be
devoted to a young woman's demise.

All her ex-husband said was that “a rush of sadness and dis-
belief had washed over him" as he tried to figure out how his
Esther, his baby, had come to be involved in such trouble. He
encouraged her to be a good girl and he promised to take care
of her when she was released, something he had failed to do
in the few months they lived together as husband and wife in
her mother's home. Now that it was too late, he was trying to
be steady. The letter was posted on army stationery and it was
filled with assurances about his love, promises about trying to
be a better man and pleading that she try to do better. You will
not live happy; he cautioned, until [your] wild world end{s). He
hoped she had learned a long lost lesson in the wild world of fun
and pleasure.

Esther's grandmother and sister didn't know that she had
been arrested until they saw her name in the daily newspaper.
‘They were in disbelief. It wasn’t true. It couldn't be. Anyone
in Harlem could tell you that stool pigeons were paid to lie. Ev-
eryone knew Krause was working for the cops. He would sell
his own mama for a dollar. Besides, if anyone was to blame for
Esther's trouble, her grandmother thought, it was her mother,
Rose. She was jealous of the girl, mostly because of the atten-
tion paid to Esther by the men boarding in the rented rooms of
her flat. Rose was living with one of them as her husband, al-

ai
though the relation, properly speaking, was outside the bounds
of the law.

When Rose heard the news of her daughter's arrest it
confirmed what she believed: the girl was headed for trouble.
Some time in the country and not running the streets might
steady her, she confided to the social worker, tipping the
hand that would decide her daughter's fate. What passed for
‘maternal concern was a long list of complaints about Esther's
manner of living. Rose told the colored probation officer, Miss
Campbell, that her daughter had “never worked more than six
weeks at a time and usually stayed in a place only a couple
of weeks” She just wouldn't stay put or keep a job. She had
a good husband and she left him. She was young and flighty
and did not want to be tied down to one husband. What more
was there to say?

‘The neighbors told a different story. The mother is the one
who needs to be sent away. Everyone knew Rose Saunders
consorted with one of the men who lodged in her apartment.
“What kind of example is that for a girl? That's no straight
road”

“The letter from Esther's girlfriend was nothing like her hus-
band's. It didn't plead for her to be a good girl or beg her to
leave the wild world behind or caution her to take the straight
road, but instead reminded her of all the pleasures awaiting her
when she received her free papers, not the least of these being
Alice's love:



Dear Little Girl, Just a few lines to let you know
that everything is ok. I suppose you think I was
foolish to leave Peekskill but I could not stand the
work. T have not been used to working so hard
when Teave Bedford and why should I do so when
Idon’t have to, you stay where you are as you ex-
pect to live in New York when you are free... It will
surprise you, I am going to be married next month,

22
not that I care much but for protection. I went to
New York Sunday and seen quite a number of old
friends and heard all the scandal and then some ...
New York is wide open, plenty of white stuff & ev-
erything you want so cheer up there are plenty of
good times in store for you. So I must close with
the same old love wishing you well.

It is not clear if Esther had the chance to read Alice’s letter.
‘This missive of contraband love was seized by prison author-
ities and included with the disciplinary reports and the notes
from the staff meetings, augmenting the folio of documents
that formed the case file and invited greater punishment.

Attitude: She is inclined to be sullen and defiant.
Came to Bedford with the impression that this was
a very bad place and decided that she would not let
any of the matrons run over her.” She said “If they
keep yelling at her they'll find that isn’t the way to
treat Esther Brown.” And “Esther Brown isn’t going
to stand for that.”

Note: Patient is a colored girl with good mental-
ity who has had her own way and enjoyed much
freedom. The influence of her family and her en-
vironment have both been bad. She is the hyper-
kinetic type which craves continually activity and
amusement.

Riot and Refrain

‘The reporters were most interested in what happened to the
white girls. Ruth Carter, Stella Kramer, and Maizie Rice were
the names that appeared in the newspapers. Ruth was the
first one to tell the State Prison Commission about the terrible

23
things done to them at Bedford Hills: they were handcuffed in
the cells of Rebecca Halls, they were stripped and their mouths
gagged with dirty rags and harsh soap, they were beaten with
rubber hoses and handcuffed to their cots, they were hung
from the doors of their cells with their feet barely reaching the
ground, they were given the “water treatment” and their faces
immersed in water until they could hardly breathe, and they
were isolated for weeks and months behind the double doors
of the cells in the Disciplinary Building. The double door pre-
vented any light from entering and the lack of air made the
dank smell of the dark chamber and their waste and rank un-
washed bodies unbearable. The stench, the sensory depriva-
tion, and the isolation were intended to break them.

‘There were two hundred and sixty-five inmates and twenty-
one babies. The young women ranged in age from fourteen
to thirty and the majority were city girls exiled to the country
for moral reform. They came from crowded tenements. Eighty
percent of the young women at Bedford had been subjected
to some form of punishment — confined in their rooms for a
week, confined in the cells of Rebecca Hall, confined in the
Disciplinary Building. Even the State Prison Commission was
forced to concede it was cruel and unusual punishment. It was
a reformatory in name only and there was nothing modern
or therapeutic about its disciplinary measures. When asked
if hanging girls up, handcuffing them, and beating them with
hoses was abusive, one matron replied: “If you don’t quell them
or rule them with an iron hand you cannot live with these peo-
ple” When questioned as to why she failed to mention such
punishments, the prison superintendent, Miss Helen Cobb, re-
sponded that she hadn't mentioned such practices because she
considered them “treatment? not punishment.

‘The smallest infractions invited harsh punishment: a com-
plaint about dinner, a sheet of stationery found tucked under
a mattress, or dancing in a lewd manner might be punished
with a week locked in your room or confined in Rebecca Hall





24
or stripped and tied to a cell door in the Disciplinary building,
Black girls were more likely to be punished and to be punished
more harshly.

Loretta Michie was the only colored girl quoted in the
newspaper article. The prison authorities resented that the
inmates had been named at all. It fueled the public hysteria
about the abuses and endowed the atrocities with a face and a
story. Loretta and several other black women testified before
the State Prison Commission about how Miss Cobb and Miss
Minogue treated them. Perhaps it was because the sixteen-
year-old had curly hair, dark brown eyes, and a pretty face
that she caught the attention of the reporters and prompted
them to record her name. Pethaps it was the graphic account
of brutality that made her words more noteworthy than the
others. Did she describe more vividly the utter aloneness of
the dungeon, how it felt to be cut off from the world and cast
out again, and that in the darkness shouting out and hearing
the voices of others was your lifeline; or how your heart raced
because you were afraid you might drown, even when you
knew it was just a pail of water, but hell it might as well have
been the Atlantic. ‘The fight to breathe waged again. How
long could one live under water? The world went black and
when your eyes opened you were beached on the dark floor
of an isolation cell. Was the body suspended from the door
of a neighboring cell yours too? The pain moving and cutting
across the body shared by all those confined in the ten cells,
of the D.B.? The newspaper offered a pared-down description:
Loretta Michie testified that she had been “handcuffed to the
bars of her cell, with the tips of her toes touching the floor, for
so long that she fell when she was released.” She also noted
that the colored girls were assigned to the worst jobs in the
kitchen, the laundry, and the psychiatric unit.

Other women reported being stripped and tied naked to their
cots, they were fed bread and water for a week, they were
strung up and suspended in their cells, denied even the small





25
relief of toes touching the ground. Esther too could have told
them about Rebecca Hall; like Loretta Michie she had been con-
fined in the Disciplinary Building several times; she could have
told them about Peter Quinn and the others slapping and kick-
ing the girls had she been asked to appear. But Peter Quinn
didn't need anybody to testify against him. He was one of the
few guards who owned up to some of the terrible things he had
done, mostly to make Miss Cobb look bad. By his own admis-
sion, he helped string up girls about one hundred times. He
was the one who “showed Miss Minogue how to first handcuff
a girl to the cell partition with her hands back of her, and that
he knows that at that time the feet were always wholly on the
floor” Under the direction of Miss Minogue the practice “just
grew" to lift them a little higher.

In December 1919, the women in Lowell Cottage made their
voices heard even if no one wanted to listen. Lowell, Flowers,
Gibbons, Sanford, and Harriman were the cottages reserved
for black prisoners. After a scandal about interracial sex and
“harmful intimacy” erupted in 1914, segregation had been im-
posed and cottages sorted by race as well as age, status, addic-
tion, and capacity. A special provision of the Charities Law
permitted the state to practice racial segregation while safe-
guarding it from legal claims that such practices were uncon-
stitutional and a violation of the state’s civil rights laws.

‘The newspaper described the upheaval and resistance of
Lowell Cottage as a sonic revolt, a “noise strike,” the “din of
an infernal chorus.” Collectively the prisoners had grown
weary of gratuitous violence and being punished for trifles,
so they sought retribution in noise and destruction. They
tossed their mattresses, they broke windows, they set fires.
Nearly everyone in the cottage was shouting and screaming
and crying out to whoever would listen, They pounded the
walls with their fists, finding a shared and steady rhythm that
they hoped might topple the cottage, make the walls crumble,
smash the cots, destroy the reformatory so that it would never

26
be capable of holding another “innocent girl in the jailhouse”
‘The “wailing shrieking chorus” protested the conditions of the
prison, insisted they had done nothing to justify confinement;
they refused to be treated as if they were not human, as if they
were waste. The New York Times reported: “The noise was
deafening. Almost every window of the cottage was crowded
with Negro women who were shouting, angry and laughing
hysterically. The uproarious din emanating from the cottage
smote the ears of the investigators before they got within
sight of the building” Songs and shouts were the vehicle of
struggle

‘The chorus spoke with one voice. All of them screamed and
cried about the unfairness of being sentenced to Bedford, ar-
rested in a frame-up, the three years of life stolen. Were they
nothing or nobody? Could they be seized and cast away and
no one in the world would care or even give a damn? Were
Harriman and Gibbons and Sanford and Flowers also up in
arms? A month after Miss Minogue put her in a chokehold,
beat her head with a set of keys, pummeled her with a rubber
hose, Mattie Jackson joined the chorus. Thinking about her son
and how he was growing up without her made her wail and
shout louder. It is not that she or any of the others imagined
that their pleas and complaints would gain a hearing outside
the cottage or that the findings of the New York State Commis-
sion of Prisons would make any difference for them. This riot,
like the ones that preceded it and the ones that would follow
in its wake, was not unusual. What was unusual was that the
riot had been reported at all. The state investigation of abuse
and torture at the reformatory made rioting colored women a
newsworthy topic.

Loretta, or Mickey as some of her friends called her, beat
the walls, bellowed, cursed, and screamed. At fourteen years
old, before she had her first period, before she had a lover, be-
fore she penned lines like “sweetheart in my dreams I'm calling
you,” Mickey waged a small battle against the prison and the

27
damned police and the matrons and the parole officers and the
social workers. She was unwilling to pretend that her keepers
were anything else. The cottages were not homes. Miss Cobb
didn't give a damn about her and Miss Minogue was a thug in
a skirt. The matrons were brutes and not there to guide or pro-
vide counsel or assist them in making better lives, but to man-
age and control, punish and inflict harm. They let you know
what they thought: you were being treated too well and each
cruel punishment was deserved and the only way to communi-
cate with the inmates, especially the colored girls. Miss Daw-
ley, the sociologist, interviewed them. She asked questions
and wrote down everything they said, but her recommenda-
tion was always the same: prison is the only place for her.

Mickey rebelled without knowing the awful things the
prison staff said about her in their meetings — she was
simple-minded and a liar, she thought too much of herself,
“she had been with a good many men.” The psychologist, Dr.
Spaulding, said she was trying to appear young and innocent,
but clearly wasn't. Was it possible that she was just fourteen
years old? Miss Cobb decided the matter: “let's just assume
she is eighteen” Everyone believed prison was the best place
for a young black woman on an errant path.

Staying out all night at a dance with her friends or stealing
$2.00 to buy a new dress so she could perform on stage was suf-
ficient cause to commit her. Mickey cursed and pummeled the
wall with her fist and refused to stop no matter how tired. She
didn't care if they threw her in the Disciplinary Building ev-
ery single day, she would never stop fighting them, she would
never submit.



Disciplinary Report: Very troublesome. She has
been in Rebecca Hall and the Disciplinary Build-
ing. Punished continually. Friendship with the
white girls,

28
She had been in the D.B. more times than her disciplinary
sheet revealed. In Rebecca Hall, she schemed and plotted and
incited the other girls to rioting and disorder. She was proud to
have been the cause of considerable trouble her entire time at
Bedford. When confined in the prison buildings, she managed
to send a few letters to her girlfriend. The love letter seized by
the matron was written in pencil on toilet paper because she
was not allowed pen and paper in confinement. The missive to
her girlfriend Catherine referred to the earlier riots of 1917 and
1918 and expressed the spirit of rage and resistance that fueled
the December action in Lowell:

1 get so utterly disgusted with these g-d — cops I
could kill them. They may run Bedford and they
may run some of the pussies in Bedford but they
are never going to run Loretta Michie... It doesn’t
pay to be a good fellow in a joint of this kind,
but I don’t regret anything I ever done I have
been to prison (Rebecca Hall) three times and DB.
once and may go again soon and a few others
and myself always got the Dirty End. Everytime
prison would cut up in 1918 or 1917 when police
came up whether we were cutting up or not we
were [there]... They would always string us up
or put us in the Stairway sheets but we would
cut up all the more. Those were the days when
JM. [Julia Minogue] was kept up all night and all
day we would wait until she go to bed about 1
o'clock at night and then we would start and then
we would quiet down about 4 o'clock and start
again about 8 in the morning... Then there was a
good gang here then we could have those days
back again “if” we only had the women but we
haven't so why bother... Ihave only one more day
but when you've had as much punishment as I



29
have you don’t mind it. Well the Lights are being
extinguished so Good Night and Sweet pleasant
dreams. Loyally yours, Black Eyes or Mickey

Lowell Cottage roared with the sounds of upheaval and re-
volt. They smashed the windows of the cottage. Broken win-
dows linked the disorder of the prison to the ghetto, explained
the sociologist in a lecture on the culture of poverty. Glints and
shards of shattered glass were the language of the riot. Furni-
ture was destroyed. Walls were defaced. Fires started. Like
Esther Brown, Mickey didn’t hesitate to smash things up. The
cottage mates yelled and shouted and cursed for hours. Each
voice blended with the others in a common tongue. Every ut-
terance and shout made plain the truth: riot was the only rem-
edy within reach,

It was the dangerous music of upheaval. En masse they an-
nounced what had been endured, what they wanted, what they
intended to destroy. Bawling and screaming and cursing made
the cottage tremble and corralled them together into one large
pulsing formation, an ensemble reveling in the beauty of the
strike. Young women hanging out of the windows, crowding
at the doors, and huddling on shared beds sounded a complete
revolution, an upheaval of the given, an undoing and remak-
ing of values, which called property and law and social order
into crisis. They sought redress among themselves. ‘The call
and the appeal transformed them from prisoners into rioters,
from inmates to fugitives, even if only for thirteen hours. In
the discordant assembly, they found a hearing in one another.
‘The black noise emanating from Lowell Cottage expressed
their rage and their longing. It made manifest the latent re-
bellion simmering beneath the surface of things. It provided
the language in which “they lamented their lot and what they

30


called the injustice of their keepers at the top of their voices”
To those outside the circle it was a din without melody or cen-
ter. The New York Times had trouble deciding which among the
sensational headlines it should use for the article, so it went
with three: “Devil's Chorus Sung by Girl Rioters” “Bedford
Hears Mingled Shrieks and Squeals, Suggesting Inferno Set to
Jaz[2]? “Outbreak Purely Vocal” What exactly did Dante’s In-
ferno sound like when transposed into a jazz suite? For the
white world, jazz was a synonym for primal sound and savage
modernism. It was raw energy and excitement, nonsense and
jargon, empty talk, excess, carnal desire: it was slang for cop-
ulation and conjured social disorder and free love rather than
composition or improvisation.

You can take my tie
You can take my collar
But I'll jazz you

Till you holler

Sonic tumult and upheaval — resistance as music had to be
construed as jazz. It was the only frame to make legible their
utterances. 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. If freedom and mu-
tual creation defined the music, so too did it define the strike
and riot waged by the prisoners of Lowell. “The Reformatory
Blues,’ facile label coined by the daily newspapers to describe
the collective refusal of prison conditions, was Dante filtered
through Ma Rainey and Buddy Bolden. Their utterances were
marked by the long history of black radical sound — whoops
and hollers, shrieks and squawks, sorrow songs and blues. It
was the sound track to a history that hurt,

‘The chants and cries escaped the confines of the prison, even
if their bodies did not: “Almost every window [of the cottage]
was crowded with negro women who were shouting, crying,

31
and laughing hysterically.” Few outside the circle understood
the deep resources of this hue and cry. The aesthetic inher-
itance of “jargon and nonsense” was nothing if not a philos-
ophy of freedom that reached back to slave songs and circle
dances — struggle and flight, death and refusal became music
or moaning or joyful noise or discordant sound.

For those within this circle, every groan and cry, curse and
shout insisted slavery time was over. They were tired of being
abused and confined, and they wanted to be free. Those exact
words could be found in the letters written by their mothers
and husbands and girlfriends: “I tell you Miss Cobb, it is no
slave time with colored people now” Alll of them might well
have shouted, No slave time now. Abolition now. In the sur-
real, utopian nonsense of it all, and at the heart of riot, was
the anarchy of colored girls: treason en masse, tumult, gath-
ering together, the mutual collaboration required to confront
the prison authorities and the police, the willingness to lose
oneself and become something greater — a chorus, a swarm,
an ensemble, a mutual aid society. In lieu of an explanation or
an appeal, they shouted and stomped and screamed. How else
were they to express the longing to be free? How else were
they to make plain their refusal to be governed?

Outsiders described the din as a swan song, to signal that
their defeat was certain and they would return to their former
state as prisoners without a voice in the world and to whom
anything might be done. There was little that was mournful
in the chants and curses, the hollers and squawks. This col-
lective utterance was not a dirge. As they crowded in the win-
dows of the cottage, some hanging out and others peeking from
the corners, the dangerous music of black life was unleashed
from within the space of captivity, a raucous polyphonic ut-
terance that sounded beautiful and terrible. Before the riot
was quashed, its force touched everyone on the grounds of the
prison and as far away as the tenements, rented rooms, and

32
ramshackle lodging houses of Harlem, Brooklyn, and Staten
Island.

‘The noise conveyed the defeat and the aspiration, the beauty
and the wretchedness that was otherwise inaudible to the ears
of the world; it revealed a sensibility at odds with the insti-
tution’s brutal realism. What to make of the utopian impulse
that enabled them to believe that anyone cared about what they
had to say? What convinced them that the force of their collec-
tive utterance was capable of turning anything around? What
urged them to create a reservoir of living within the prison’s
mandated death? What made them tireless? The next month,
the prisoners confined in Rebecca Hall waged another noise
strike. “Prisoners began to jangle their cell doors, throw furni-
ture against the walls, scream, sing, and use profanity. In the
opinion of one of the noisemakers, “the medley of sounds, ‘the
Reformatory Blues; may yet make a hit on Broadway, even if
the officials appear to disdain jazz.” They carried on all night
in the prison building. They rioted again in July, August, and
November.

‘The chants and cries insisted: We want to be free. The strike
begged the question: Why are we locked up here? Why have
you stolen our lives? Why do you beat us like dogs? Starve us?
Pull our hair from our heads? Gag us? Club us over the head?
It isn’t right to take our lives. No one deserved to be treated
like this.

All those listening on the outside could discern were: “gales
of catcalls, hurricanes of screams, cyclones of rage, tornadoes
of squalls” The sounds yielded to “one hair-raising, ear-testing
Devil's chorus” Those inside the circle listened for the love and
disappointment, the longing and the outrage that fueled this
collective utterance. They channeled the fears and the hopes of
the ones who loved them, the bad dreams and the nightmares
about children stolen away by white men and lost at sea. The
refrains were redolent with all the lovely plans about what they



33
would do once they were free. These sounds traveled through
the night air.

Voices in the Chorus

‘This speculative history of Esther Brown is based on the
“Statement of the Girl! the interviews with her family
members, the verified history, personal and institutional
correspondence, notes of staff meetings found in Bedford Hills
Correctional Facility, 14610-77B Inmate Case Files, Records
of the Department of Correctional Services, New York State
Archives. ‘The New York State Archives required that the
names of the prisoners be changed to maintain the privacy of
the records. See Inmate File #s 2507, 2503, 2466, and 4092. The
Bedford prison files are very detailed, particularly until the
year 1920, when the Laboratory of Social Hygiene conducted
extensive intake interviews of the girls and women upon
their arrival. The intake process included personal interviews,
family histories, interviews with neighbors, employers, and
teachers, psychological tests, physical examinations, intelli-
gence tests, social investigators’ reports, as well as the reports
of probation officers, school report cards, letters from former
employers, and other state records (from training schools
and orphanages). Following a twoweek evaluation of the
compiled materials, physicians, psychologists, social workers,
sociologists, and prison superintendents met to discuss each
individual case. The idea of indeterminate sentencing was
based on the notion that punishment must be tailored to the
requirements of the individual prisoners. In practice, this
resulted in sentences as long as three years for status offenses
and the likelihood of future crime. The files contain personal
correspondence, discussions of sexual history, life experiences,
family background, hobbies, as well as poems and plays
written by the prisoners. The case file intended to produce

34
deep knowledge of the individual in a genre that combined
sociological investigation with literary fiction creating a statis-
tical portrait of the young women. The importance of the case
file was critical to prison reform and the idea that probation,
punishment, and parole must be individually suited to each
offender; this approach favored indeterminate sentencing. In
practice, this meant that for status offenses and the likelihood
of future criminality or the likelihood to become morally
depraved a young woman might spend three years confined
at Bedford and be entangled with the criminal justice system
and under state surveillance for a decade of her life. The case
‘was grounded in a hermeneutics of suspicion and a horizon of
reform, It was an exemplary product of the therapeutic state.

Somebody's Angel child: Smith, Bessie. 1925. “Reckless Blues”
Lyrics by Fred Longshaw and Jack Gee. Columbia 14056D.
10-inch LP.

Speak of potentialities: Goldman, Emma. 1969. “What Is Anar-
chism?" In Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Dover.
Pretty face and a big ass: Perry, Jeffrey. 2010. Hubert Harri-
son: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918, New York:
Columbia University Press; Streeby, Shelley. 2013. Radical
Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Idleness and Luxury: Marx, Karl. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations
of the Critique of Political Economy. ‘Translated by Martin
Nicolaus. New York: Penguin.

Cooperation and mutuality among ants and ruminants:
Kropotkin, Pyotr. (1902) 1955. Mutual Aid. Boston: Porter
Sargent; Hine, Darlene Clark, ed. 2005. Black Women in
America: An Historical Encyclopedia. New York: Oxford
University Press.

‘Neglect of the problem of Negro woman: Baker, Ella, and Marvel
Cooke. 1935. “The Bronx Slave Market.” Crisis 42, no. 11:

35
330-32; Jones, Claudia. 1949, “An End to the Neglect of the
Problems of the Negro Woman!’ Political Affairs 28: 51-67;
Davies, Carole Boyce. 2007. Left of Karl Marx: The Political
Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.

Revolt against labor conditions: DuBois, W. E. B. 1999. “The
Servant in the House? in Darkwater: Voices from within the
Veil, 63-69. Mineola, NY: Dover.

Jazz chorus: “Girls on ‘Noise’ Strike: Inmates of Bedford Re-
formatory Jangle Cell Doors and Scream.” 1920. New York
Times, January 25; “Vocal Hostilities of Bedford Girls Finally
Halted.” 1920. New York Times, January 27.

The very idea of work: Narrative drawn from “Information con-
cerning the Patient August 12, 1917; “Information concern-
ing the Patient” September 15, 1917. Bedford Hills Correc-
tional Facility. Inmate case files. Series 14610-77B. Records
of the Department of Correctional Services, New York State
Archives, Albany. Bedford Hills Case File # 2507

Care for their precious darlings: Hapgood, Hutchins. 1909. An
Anarchist Woman. New York: Duffield, p. 40.

Like a swarm or swell of the ocean: DuBois described the col-
lective action of the general strike as a swarm or swell. See
DuBois, W.E.B. 1998. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-
1880, New York: Simon and Schuster,

All modalities sing a part: de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The
Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California
Press, p. 99

The map of what might be: Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. “Venus in
Two Acts” Small Axe 12, no. 2: 1-114; Taylor, Ula. 2006.
“Street Strollers: Grounding the Theory of Black Women In-
tellectuals”” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 30,
no, 2: 153-71; Cervenak, Sarah. 2015. Wandering. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, p. 2; Bruno, Giuliana. 1993.
Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City
Films of Elvira Notari. Princeton: Princeton University Press.





36
overture is another way to think about tumult, upheaval, and
the radical practice of everyday life. It is also a reference to
the revolutionary practice of the enslaved.

To smash things up: “Notes of the Staff Meeting” “She is the
sort of girl who would not hesitate to smash out” Septem-
ber 29, 1917. Bedford Hills Case File # 2507. “The unruly
who smash windows and furniture? in Twenty-Sixth Annual
Report of the State Commission of Prisons, March 12, p. 93.
Ossining: New York State Commission of Prisons; On young
women “smashing and yelling,” see Twenty-Sixth Annual Re-
port, p. 94.

That was the offering: Brooks, Gwendolyn. 1993. Maud Martha:
A Novel. Chicago: Third World Press, p. 22.

Tried to kill her and failed: Clifton, Lucille. 2012. “Won't you
celebrate with me,’ in Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965~
2010. New York: BOA.

Tobring into relation: Scarry, Elaine. 1999. On Beauty and Being
Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 30.

Subsistence: See Karl Marx on forms and modes of life in Marx,
Karl, 1970. German Ideology. New York: International and
Marx, Karl. 1964. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844 New York: International.

Reproduction of physical existence: Ferguson, Roderick. 2013,
“The Erotic Life of Diaspora: Black Queer Formations in the
History of Neoliberalism.” Paper presented at the Institute
for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia
University, New York, April 5.

Subject to frequent police raids: Robertson, Stephen. 2012. “Dis-
orderly Houses: Residences, Privacy, and the Surveillance of
Sexuality in 1920's Harlem” Journal of the History of Sexual-
ity 21, no, 3: 457. See also Carby, Hazel V. 1992. “Policing
the Black Woman's Body in an Urban Context” Critical In-
quiry 18, no. 4: 738-55.

Charity Girl: Peiss, Kathy. 1986. Cheap Amusements. Philadel-
phia: Temple University Press. pp. 110-12.

37
Require the commitment of a criminal act: Worthington,
George. 1925. Specialized Courts Dealing with Sexual
Delinquency. New York; Tiedeman, Christopher. 1886.
Treatise on the Limitations of Police Power in the United State.
St. Louis, MO: F. H. Thomas Law Book Company; Wagner,
Bryan. 2009. Disturbing the Peace. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.

Your status made you a criminal: Godsoe, Cynthia. 2014. “Con-
tempt, Status, and the Criminalization of Non-Conforming
Girls?” Cardozo Law Review 35, no. 3: 1091-116; “Ungovern-
ability: The Unjustifiable Jurisdiction” 1974. Yale Law Jour-
nal 83, no. 7: 1383-1409.

Leading the life of a prostitute: See Kneeland, George J., and
Katherine Bement Davis. 1913. Commercialized Prostitution
in New York City. New York: Century Co,; of the 647 cases,
examined in the study of the Bedford Hills Reformatory,
Davis (190) writes, “not all of them were convicted for
prostitution but all were leading the lives of prostitutes”

The manner of walking: United States Department of Civil
Rights Division and Theodore M. Shaw. 2015. The Ferguson
Report, Department of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson
Police Department, Civil Rights Division. New York: New
Press.

No cash exchanging hands: Worthington, George E., and Ruth
Topping. Specialized Courts Dealing with Sex Delinquency;
A Study of the Procedure in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia
‘and New York, 217-18, 245, 274, 276, 287, 397-403, 418-19,
New York: F. H. Hitchcock; Whitin, Frederick H. 1914. “The
Women's Night Court in New York City” Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 52: 181-87.

Refused to work: Girls between fourteen and twenty-one, but
sometimes as young as twelve, were sentenced to reformato-
ries for being in a house with a bad reputation or suspected
of prostitution, or having friends or neighbors who were
thieves or prostitutes, or associating with lowlifes and crim-

38
inals, or being promiscuous. See Hicks, Cheryl. 2010. Talk
with You Like A Woman. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, p. 184.

Without visible means of support: Chambliss, William J. 1964.
“A Sociological Analysis of the Law of Vagraney.” Social Prob-
lems 12, no. 1: 66-77.

Vagrants-No man knows from where they came: Tiedeman, p.
118.

Silk and Lights: “Silks and Lights Blamed for Harlem Girls’
Delinquency” 1928. Baltimore Afro-American, May 19,
“Lure for Finery Lands Girl in Jail” 1926. New York
Amsterdam News, August 14.

Assembled in a riotous manner: See Ottley, Roi, and William J.
Weatherby, eds. 1969. The Negro in New York: An Informal
Social History, 1626-1940. Santa Barbara, CA: Prager, p. 22.
(On how slave codes in colonial New York targeted black as-
sembly, see Olson, Edwin. 1944. “The Slave Code in Colonial
New York.” Journal of Negro History 29, no. 2, pp. 1947-165;
Berlin, Ira, and Leslie Harris, eds. 2005. Slavery in New York.
New York: New Press. On the lantern law and other forms
of racial surveillance, see Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Mat-
ters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.

Names that appeared in the newspaper: “Girl Chained, Bed to
Crash if She Moved” 1919, New York Tribune, December 13,
p. 22. chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lecn/sn83030214/191912-
13/ed-1/seq-22/.

Double doors in the cells of the Disciplinary Building: “Doctor
Assails Stringing up of Bedford Girls” 1919. New York Tri-
bune, December 14, p. 14; New York Department of Effi-
ciency and Economy. 1915. Annual Report Concerning In-
vestigations of Accounting, Administration and Construction
of State Hospitals for the Insane, State Prisons and State Refor-
‘matory and Correctional Institutions. Albany, NY: J. B. Lyon
Company, pp. 932-33; New York State Commission of Pris-



39
ons. 1921. “Investigation and Inquiry into Allegations of
Cruelty to Prisoners in the New York State Reformatory for
Women, Bedford Hills? In Twenty-Sixth Annual Report, p. 74.

Two hundred and sixty-five inmates: New York State Commis-
sion of Prisons. 1921. “Investigation and Inquiry into Allega-
tions of Cruelty to Prisoners in the New York State Reforma
tory for Women, Bedford Hills? Twenty-Sixth Annual Report,
Pp. 68, 78, 146.

Friendship with the white girls: New York State Commission
of Prisons. 1921. Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the State
Commission of Prisons, March 12. Ossining: New York State
Commission of Prisons.

The cells of Rebecca Hall: New York State Commission of Pris-
ons. 1921. “Investigation and Inquiry into Allegations of
Cruelty to Prisoners in the New York State Reformatory for
Women, Bedford Hills” in Twenty-Sixth Annual Report, p.
78.

Din of an infernal chorus: “Girls on ‘Noise’ Strike” 1920. New
York Times, January 25.

‘The uproarious din: “Girl Chained, Bed to Crash if She Moved.”
1919. New York Tribune, December 13, p. 22. chron-
iclingamerica.loc.gov/lecn/sn83030214/1919-12-13/ed-1
/seq-22.

Sweetheart in my dreams I'm calling you: “Letter from Loretta
Michie to ‘Devoted Pal” Bedford Hills Case File #2503.

You can take my tie: Ford, Charles A. 1929. “Homosexual Prac-
tices of Institutionalized Females” Journal of Abnormal and
Social Psychology 23, no. 4: 442-48,

Jargon and nonsense: Douglass, Frederick. (1845) 1968, Nar-
rative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,
Written by Himself. New York: New American Library.

Itis no slave time with colored people now: Letter of May 4, 1919.
Also see May 12, 1919, Bedford Hills Case File #2504,

Surreal, utopian nonsense: Moten, Fred. 2007. “Uplift and Crim-
inality”” in Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E.



40
B, DuBois, edited by Susan Gilam and Alys Weinbaum, 317-
49. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

To whom anything might be done: “Devil's Chorus Sung by Girl
Rioters” 1920. New York Times, July 26.

Appear to disdain jazz: “Girls on Noise Strike” 1920. New York
Times, January 25.

41
July 2018
e Bees
“The brutality she experienced atsthe
Hudson Trainin, school forGirls ine
taught her tosfigHt back, tostrike’ out,
uate \haareyaiatacs ari
ole eae Cela mig=-elelen ml

fia a

threat to p order and mor.
decency. Excessive liberty had ruined
her. The social worker concurred,
aia hile} social considerations to
onstelial cima eG

| ungovernable."”

° +,