Peel me a Book
Let's Peel
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
An experiment in listening to the lives no one thought worth remembering.
Perfect if you want to hold the archive close and feel it start to breathe.
Synopsis
"To tell a story capable of engaging life in the act."
A polyphonic, aching reimagining of the early 20th century lives of Black girls and women, this book dissolves the lines between fact and speculation, scholar and storyteller. Hartman doesn’t restore lives—she dreams alongside them, tracing gestures of refusal, improvisation, and beauty in the cracks of systemic brutality. Each chapter hums with intimacy and rage, exposing what it means to try and live freely in a world that punishes the attempt.
This isn’t about recovering the past—it’s about letting it haunt, break, and remake us.
Mood:
intimate · radical · disruptive · haunting
Tone:
lyrical · historical · defiant · elegiac
It Feels Like
Body:
a trembling in the chest, like being seen and never un-seen again
Tempo:
shifting—like a breath held too long, then released in chorus
Texture:
the softness of worn paper laced with blood and perfume
A Little Taste
“Waywardness is a practice of possibility at a time when all roads, except the ones created by smashing out, are foreclosed. It obeys no rules and abides no authorities. It is unrepentant. It traffics in occult visions of other worlds and dreams of a different kind of life. Waywardness is an ongoing exploration of what might be; it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe, when you have been sentenced to a life of servitude, when the house of bondage looms in whatever direction you move. It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive.”
The Aftertaste
A shift from curiosity to grief, and then toward awe
Undoes the myth of the archive as objective truth
You feel wide-awake
Opens a space to mourn what was lost—and imagine otherwise
Peel With a Drink
To Be read With a chilled Mondeuse Noire — a Savoyard red, wild with black cherry, violet, cracked pepper, and bitter herbs. It’s a grape that was nearly erased, like so many of the lives in this book—survivor of frost, obscurity, and neglect.
Drink it alone, or with someone who’s had to rewrite their own story more than once. Let it stain.
Peel With a Reel
Cane River (1982, dir. Horace B. Jenkins) — A forgotten Black love story, rich in subtext, reclaiming softness and history on its own terms.
I Am Not Your Negro (2016, dir. Raoul Peck) — Baldwin’s unfinished words brought to life—a confrontation, a poem, a mirror.
Peel with a Beat
Peel me a Book
Or Try:
Audre Lorde
Both authors craft language like it’s blood. They don’t write what happened—they write what matters.
Let's Peel
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
An experiment in listening to the lives no one thought worth remembering.
Perfect if you want to hold the archive close and feel it start to breathe.
Synopsis
"To tell a story capable of engaging life in the act."
A polyphonic, aching reimagining of the early 20th century lives of Black girls and women, this book dissolves the lines between fact and speculation, scholar and storyteller. Hartman doesn’t restore lives—she dreams alongside them, tracing gestures of refusal, improvisation, and beauty in the cracks of systemic brutality. Each chapter hums with intimacy and rage, exposing what it means to try and live freely in a world that punishes the attempt.
This isn’t about recovering the past—it’s about letting it haunt, break, and remake us.
Mood:
intimate · radical · disruptive · haunting
Tone:
lyrical · historical · defiant · elegiac
It Feels Like
Body:
a trembling in the chest, like being seen and never un-seen again
Tempo:
shifting—like a breath held too long, then released in chorus
Texture:
the softness of worn paper laced with blood and perfume
A Little Taste
“Waywardness is a practice of possibility at a time when all roads, except the ones created by smashing out, are foreclosed. It obeys no rules and abides no authorities. It is unrepentant. It traffics in occult visions of other worlds and dreams of a different kind of life. Waywardness is an ongoing exploration of what might be; it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe, when you have been sentenced to a life of servitude, when the house of bondage looms in whatever direction you move. It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive.”
The Aftertaste
A shift from curiosity to grief, and then toward awe
Undoes the myth of the archive as objective truth
You feel wide-awake
Opens a space to mourn what was lost—and imagine otherwise
Peel With a Drink
To Be read With a chilled Mondeuse Noire — a Savoyard red, wild with black cherry, violet, cracked pepper, and bitter herbs. It’s a grape that was nearly erased, like so many of the lives in this book—survivor of frost, obscurity, and neglect.
Drink it alone, or with someone who’s had to rewrite their own story more than once. Let it stain.
Peel With a Reel
Cane River (1982, dir. Horace B. Jenkins) — A forgotten Black love story, rich in subtext, reclaiming softness and history on its own terms.
I Am Not Your Negro (2016, dir. Raoul Peck) — Baldwin’s unfinished words brought to life—a confrontation, a poem, a mirror.