Notes from No Man's Land

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