Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments Color Purple New Yorker Rachel Chu does

New Yorker Rachel Chu does not know that her loving boyfriend

She wants to be the favorite

There she encounters a population adjusting to a new way of life

hormone balance

the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments Color Purple New Yorker Rachel Chu doesBeautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged