There have been a lot of times when this research process has been incredibly frustrating. I haven’t found what I wanted to find in the archives. I have been worried that what I’m finding did not fit the narrative that …
Resisting by Doing What She Had to Do
I am unavailable for servitude. I refuse it.
These words, from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: W.W. Norton 2019, p. 299), encapsulate what I imagine was …
Who gets a say in a Black woman’s embodied politics?
At the time of my last blog post, I was anticipating doing an oral history interview with Louise Madison’s granddaughter, Carol. Carol and I have been in contact off and on for about the past 15 years as each of …
Structuring my questions about the “wayward and wild”
“…promiscuous, reckless, wild and wayward…”
I’ve been thinking a lot about ways to approach the oral history interview I have scheduled with Louise’s granddaughter at the end of January. I’ve known Carol for maybe 15 years, since her first email …