Esther Brown did not write a political tract

on the refusal to be governed,

or draft a plan for mutual aid

or outline a memoire 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 momma says I’m wreckless

My daddy says I’m wild

I ain’t good looking

But im somebody’s angel child,”

She didn’t commit to paper her ruminations on freedom,

with human nature caged in a narrow space

wooped daily into submission —

how can we speak of potentialities?

The carboard plackards for the tumult

and upheaval

she incited might have said:

“Don’t mess with me

I am not afraid to smash things up,”

But hers was a struggle without formal declarations,

policies,

slogans,

or credos.

It required no party platform

or 10 point program.

Walking through the streets of New York City,

she and Emma Goldman crossed paths

but failed to recognize one another.

When Houghward * Harrison encountered her

in the lobby of the Renaissance Casino

after he delivered his lecture

on Marriage vs. Free Love

at the socialist club,

he noticed only that she had a pretty face

and a big ass.

Esther never pulled a soap box

onto the corner of 135th Street

on Lennox avenue

to make a speech about autonomy,

the global reach of the color line,

involuntary servitude,

free motherhood,

or the promise of a future world —

but she well understood the desire to move as she wanted

was nothing short of treason.

She knew first hand that

the offense that was 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 desires

was to be ungovernable —

Her way of living was nothing short of anarchy.

Had anyone ever found the rough notes through reconstruction

jotted in the margin area of her grocery lists,

or correlated the numbers circled most often

in her dog-eared dream book,

with routes of escape not to be found in McNally’s Atlas

or seen the love letters written to her girlfriend

about how they would live at the end of the world

the master philosophers, and the card-holding radicals

in all likelihood

would’ve said that her analysis was insufficient,

dismissed her for failing to understand those Key Passages

in the Grundrisse

about the ex-slaves refusal to work,

and emphasized the limits

of Black feminist politics

“They have ceased to be slaves,

but not in order to be wage laborers!”

She had Amen’d an enthusiastic agreement

at all wrong places —

content with producing only what i strictly necessary

for their own consumption

and she embraced wholeheartedly

indolence,

indulgence,

and idleness

as the real luxury good.

What did the untested militants,

and smug ideologues,

know of Truth

and Tubman?

Unlike Unruly Colored Women,

they failed to recognize that experience

was capable of opening up new ways,

yielding a thousand new forms

and improvisations.

Could they ever understand

the dreams of another world

that didn’t trouble the distinction between

State, Law, Settler, and Master?

Or account the struggle against servitude,

captivity,

property, and

enclosure

that began in the Barracoon

and continued on the ship

where some fought, some jumped,

some refused to eat,

others at the plantation and the fields

on fire

poison the Master?

They had never listened to Lucy Parsons…

They had never read Ida B. Wells,

or envisioned the riot as a rally cry:

a refusal — a fungible life…

Only a misreading of the key text of anarchism

could ever imagine a place for Wayward Colored Girls.

No, Kropotkin never described Black women’s

mutual aid societies

or the chorus in mutual aid —

although he imagined animals sociality

in its rich varieties

in the forms of cooperation and mutuality

found among ants, monkeys, and ruminants

and possible recalcitrant domestics

weren’t yet, in his view,

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’

“An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman”

Their revolt against the personal degradation of their work,

and unjust labor conditions expressed itself in militant refusals,

soldierings, sullowness,

petty pilfering,

unreliability,

and fast and fruitless change of Masters.

Yet it had no chronicler —

none responded to the call to write The Great Servant Girl Novel

It is not surprising that a negress would be guilty

of conflating idleness with resistance

or exalt the struggle for mere survival,

or confuse petty acts for insurrection,

or imagine a minor figure might be capable

of some significant shit,

or mistake laziness and insufficiency

for a general strike,

or recast theft

as a kind of cheap socialism

for two fast girls and questionable women,

or steam wild ideas as radical thought.

At best

the case of Esther Brown

provides another example

of the tendency to exaggeration

and excess

that is common to The Race.

Nobody remembers the evening she and her friends

raised hell on 132nd Street,

or turned out Edmond’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

from the New York Times

described the Black noise of disorderly women

as a jazz chorus.