Nelson was one of thousands of young black women who emigrated from the rural South and the Caribbean in the early years of the 20th century to neighbourhoods in Philadelphia and New York City that were not yet the ghettos they would become. The prison’s detailed records enable Saidiya Hartman to reconstruct her story, one of many she recounts in her brilliant new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. The price she paid for her desires was steep: three years in Bedford Hills prison for stealing underwear from a clothesline. She craved beautiful things – cashmere sweaters and fancy lingerie – as well as sexual satisfaction. But Mattie, now attuned to her own desires, was determined to fulfil them. He abandoned her, as did her next partner. Her 25-year-old boyfriend introduced her to sex and thereby reset the course of Mattie’s life. It was 1913, and the jobs she found as maid and laundry worker were in fact no better, but the social life in the city was freer than she could have imagined. At the age of 15, Mattie Nelson travelled by steamer from Hampton, Virginia, to New York City, in search of a better life than the menial labour on offer in her segregated hometown.
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