Notes from No Man's Land

Notes from No Man's Land is a 2009 collection of essays by American author Eula Biss. Drawing on Biss’s personal experiences and extensive historical research, the essays comprise a portrait of race in America, exploring Biss’s conflicted position as a white woman who was raised in a partially African American cultural setting. Notes from No Man's Land won the 2008 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in the Criticism category.

The collection’s opening essay, “Time and Distance Overcome,” begins with a history of the telephone, and the race to connect the American continent with telegraph poles. Next, she delves into the more obscure history of local people’s attempts to destroy the poles. Finally comes a pivot towards a more brutal hidden history: "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 Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the hanged man was riddled with bullets.” Recalling how beautiful the poles seemed to her as a child, Biss tells her sister “these poles, these wires, do not look the same to me.” The remainder of the essay unpacks the hidden and not-so-hidden history of lynching, showing how it connects everywhere to contemporary American life: “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. 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 second essay, “Relations,” opens by retelling the infamous story of a white woman who gave birth to twins—one white and one black—after a mix-up in her IVF treatment. Asking whether the child belongs to the white woman who birthed it or the black couple whose genes it bears, Biss interrogates the power of racial categories in other complex situations. She examines the “doll studies,” in which black children were found to show a preference for white-looking dolls, alongside a census worker’s struggle to categorize her own mixed-race cousin. Biss puts pressure on her own identity and the privileges it confers: “It isn’t easy to accept a slaveholder and an Indian killer as a grandfather, and it isn’t easy to accept the legacy of whiteness as an identity. It is an identity that carries the burden of history without fostering a true understanding of the painfulness and the costs of complicity. That’s why so many of us try to pretend that to be white is merely to be raceless.” Biss’s own position is complicated in the next essay: “Three Songs of Salvage” explores Biss’s mother’s embrace of Yoruba religious tradition, alongside an analysis of the religious pamphlets Biss has been handed on the streets.



“Land Mines” recalls Biss’s years as a teacher in the Bronx and Harlem, tying her experiences to the history of education for freed slaves in the Reconstruction era. “Goodbye to All That,” a response to Joan Didion’s essay of the same name, is Biss’s love letter to New York City.

In “Black News,” Biss discusses her experiences as a reporter for an African American newspaper in San Diego. Recounting her efforts to help a black woman reclaim custody of her children, Biss dives into the history of eugenics and racial sterilization. Over the border, in “Letter to Mexico,” Biss discusses NAFTA and its impact on the people of La Salina, Mexico. “Babylon” begins with the history of the city’s legendary hanging gardens before pivoting to the history of California’s non-native palm trees.

In “Back to Buxton,” “Is This Kansas” and “Also U of Iowa,” Biss looks at the racial history of the Midwest, through the story of Buxton, a once-integrated mining town, and her own experiences at the University of Iowa.



“No Man’s Land” unveils the history of the title expression, as a nickname for “the sparsely populated place between the city of Chicago and the city of Evanston, the place just north of the boundary that once designated Indian Territory, a place where the streets were unpaved and unlighted.” Biss extends the concept to include the United States as a whole. “Nobody Knows Your Name” is a history of race in America, including the shifting definitions of “whiteness.”

The collection’s final essay, “All Apologies,” is a list of apologies—given and not given—by Biss and by US Presidents for the various crimes of American history, concluding: “I apologize for slavery. It wasn’t me, true. But it might have been my cousin.”