#50: Notes from No Man’s Land, by Eula Biss

This is a collection of essays. The introductory essay is titled “Time and Distance Overcome,” and it begins with some historical notes about the invention of the telephone.

Biss makes the interesting point that it was as much the rapid deployment of infrastructure, in the form of poles and wires, as it was Bell’s actual invention that remade the world so quickly.

Bell's financial backers asked him not to work on his new invention anymore because it seemed too dubious an investment. The idea on which the telephone depended—the idea that every home in the country could be connected with a vast network of wires suspended from poles set an average of one hundred feet apart—seemed far more unlikely than the idea that the human voice could be transmitted through a wire.

In fact, for a brief period of time there was considerable resistance to the idea of putting up poles everywhere:

By 1889, the New York Times was reporting a “War on Telephone Poles.” Wherever telephone companies erected poles, homeowners and business owners were sawing them down, or defending their sidewalks with rifles. Property owners in Red Bank, New Jersey, threatened to tar and feather the workers putting up telephone poles. A judge found that a man who had cut down a pole because it was “obnoxious” was not guilty of malicious mischief. Telephone poles, newspaper editorials complained, were an urban blight. The poles carried a wire for each telephone— sometimes hundreds of wires. There were also telegraph wires, power lines, and trolley cables. The sky was netted with wires.

But the resistance was brief, if spirited. The price for overcoming time and distance was poles and wires everywhere.

In a note at the back of the book, Biss tells us how she came by her information about telephones and poles in the 1880s:

I began my research for this essay by searching for every instance of the phrase “telephone pole” in the New York Times from 1880 to 1920, which resulted in 370 articles.

So here we are embarked on an essay about how technology changed the world. That’s a familiar theme and one that’s easy to cozy up to. But then some of Biss’s short factual paragraphs begin to weave in a very different kind of theme:

In 1898, in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole. And in Weir City, Kansas. And in Brookhaven, Mississippi. And in Holdenville, Oklahoma, where the hanged man was “riddled with bullets.” In Danville, Illinois, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole, cut down, burned, shot, and stoned with bricks. A black man was hung from a telephone pole in Belleville, Illinois, where a fire was set at the base of the pole and the man was cut down half alive, covered in coal oil, and burned. While his body was burning, the mob beat it with clubs and cut it to pieces.

A part of me thought: “Are we to be scolded now?” Was Biss deliberately ambushing unsuspecting readers by trying to make us feel guilty after such an innocent beginning? Turns out, in her search for articles about telephone poles she found an intersecting theme—lynching. Here is how the paragraph describing her research methodology continues:

I was planning to write an essay about telephone poles and telephones, not lynchings, but after reading an article headlined “Colored Scoundrel Lynched,” and then another headlined “Mississippi Negro Lynched” and then another headlined “Texas Negro Lynched,” I searched for every instance of the word “lynched” in the New York Times from 1880 to 1920, which resulted in 2,354 articles.

The connection is that telephone poles proved convenient for lynchings. Or maybe it’s just that the juxtaposition of technology and brutality is itself incongruous. The second time I read this essay, I knew what was coming, and I think I was able to see Biss’s point, or at least to appreciate the significance of the unexpected juxtaposition of “America the technological dynamo” with “America, the country that was routinely and blithely lynching its own citizens until a couple of generations ago.” In the standard history of our country we tend to like to keep such things separated.

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This essay, like many in No Man’s Land, is not a static argument or exposition, it is a device, an arrangement of words designed to recreate the evolution of the author’s thought, or to baffle and surprise the reader just enough to make him or her ask—“Why are these things together?” At first I wasn’t sure I liked Biss’s method. I liked her moral sensibility, but I wasn’t always sure mine was as finely tuned as her’s. Would her exquisite zen gardens of facts and meditations just look like a bunch of rocks to me?

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But I grew to appreciate Biss’s method, which is quite consistent across the essays in this book. She has a kind of recipe, a set of ingredients that she likes to mix in different ways. The first ingredient is her personal history—during the course of the book we learn that she grew up in the northeast, moved to New York City after college, then moved from there to San Diego, on to Iowa City, and finally to a suburb of Chicago. Along the way Biss tries on and eventually discards one potential life, one set of assumptions about herself and the world, after another.

The second ingredient is the details that Biss gives us about her somewhat unconventional family and upbringing:

My mother was thirty-four when she left her husband, who was the father of her four children. She moved into a duplex with a poet and was initiated into the Yoruba tradition, a West African religion. A few years later, she left the poet and moved to a farmhouse with an African drummer from the Bronx.

Race is a major theme for Biss, and her personal history—she also shared an apartment for a year with a first cousin who is half black—certainly gives her a personal investment in this theme. As Biss says,

What exactly it means to be white seems to elude no one as fully as it eludes those of us who are white.

So ingredient one is her personal experience, and ingredient two is her rather unconventional family and its contribution to her makeup. Ingredient three is the surprising things she is able to excavate about the history of the United States. One of my favorite essays in the book is titled “Back to Buxton.” In this essay, Biss describes moving to Iowa City (presumably because of the writing program) and thinking she had finally found a place where she felt like she belonged:

On the evening of my first day in Iowa, in a humid darkness full of the purring of cicadas, I finally went down to the river, where I had been waiting to go all day, ever since I first saw the water from the car as I drove into town that afternoon. When I stepped onto the bridge across the Iowa River and stood looking out across the water, I knew I was home. I was wrong about that, as it turns out.

Biss initially appreciates the anonymity her white skin confers in Iowa. But then she comes to realize, “[i]n the end I suffered not for lack of anonymity, but for lack of a community to which I belonged in some essential way.” She cites sources on the concept of community in America, how the necessary interdependence of pre-industrial communities planted across the continent gradually gave way to “joining things” in the form of clubs, churches, and societies in the late 19th century. Then she tells about Buxton, a company mining town in Iowa where blacks and whites managed to coexist harmoniously for a couple of decades.

Biss cites a report from the 1980s that investigated the “legend” of Buxton and determined that “yes, Buxton had been a utopia.” Buxton was a company mining town, but it was untypical because the company in question, Consolidated Coal, made no effort in this case to play one ethnic group off against another, standard protocol for keeping wage demands in check. They brought in white people, and they brought in black people. How and why it happened the way it did is not clear, but what might have seemed at the time quite normal to the residents of Buxton seems quite fantastic in retrospect:

Buxton was built in 1900, and it was a ghost town by 1920, but it continues on in books and songs and folklore and public-television documentaries as a myth and a specter and, as I came to see it, as a kind of promise.

In America, we take racial strife almost as a given, but Biss suggests that there is nothing spontaneous or inevitable about it. And yet, in America, nothing seems quite so elusive as a sense of community. More and more, we define ourselves in ways that separate us from other people. “Good fences make good neighbors,” said Robert Frost. But then he also said “Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out.”

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No Man’s Land is very much a young person’s book—very earnest and serious. But it is also an eloquent and honest book, written with art, skill, and intelligence.