Notes from
No Man's Land: American Essays
Eula Biss
(2009, Graywolf Press)
Right out
of the gate, Eula Bliss's essays are arresting. In “Time and
Distance Overcome”, Biss researches the early history of telephone
poles, which were initially met with resistance, because they looked
so ugly and unnatural. The New York Times carried stories about the
workers putting up poles being threatened with tar and feathers, and
other places where the city fathers ordered poles chopped down.
Even more
stories from the times concern telephone poles being used in violence
against black men. “In 1898, in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, a
black man was hanged from a telephone pole. And in Weir, Kansas. And
in Brookhaven, Mississippi.” The New York Times took a peculiarly
dispassionate tone about these events; Biss lets that speak for
itself, though she notes that “[m]ore than two hundred antilynching
bills were introduced to the U.S. Congress during the twentieth
century, but none were passed.”
The string
of facts does not necessarily appear tightly knit. Double spaced on
the page, they might rather be the stone of a mosaic. But then
there's a little burst of concentration: “The poles, of course,
were not to blame. It was only coincidence that they became
convenient as gallows, because they were tall and straight, with a
crossbar, and because they stood in public places. And it was only
coincidence that the telephone poles so closely resembled
crucifixes.”
In this
collection, Biss shows us all kinds of ways our history lives on in
our landscape, and in her own biography. (Her grandfather worked
putting up telephone poles, having his back broken when one fell on
him.) She has interesting things to say the differences between New
York, Chicago, and San Diego, and about how she navigates her white
identity while working for a black newspaper or living with a black
cousin.
Biss can
venture into very touchy territory, speaking of guilt, fear, politics
and power, because she is light on her feet. She roots around in
history that should not be forgotten; she offers a vision of things
we customarily look past, one that might make our own neighborhoods,
and neighbors, more visible to us.
March 2015
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