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Reviewed by:
  • Notes from No Man’s Land, and: Poor Man’s Provence
  • Sarah Salter (bio)
Eula Biss. Notes from No Man’s Land. Graywolf Press.
Rheta Grimsley Johnson. Poor Man’s Provence. New South Books.

Identity as a theme, however configured and expressed, has long attracted writers. In two very different nonfiction collections, Eula Biss (The Balloonists) and Rheta Grimsley Johnson (Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schultz) balance their searches for individual understanding with genuine social insight. Like John Howard Griffin in Black Like Me, Biss examines black experience from a white perspective. She wishes to escape from the legacy of exploitation her skin color symbolizes, focusing on the struggle to understand and eventually overcome the guilt she feels as a Caucasian American. Throughout these essays, Biss chafes against the privileged inevitability of her white identity. “I saw, as I imagined everyone else did, my whiteness, dancing there, mocking me, daring me to try and understand it.” In Poor Man’s Provence, Johnson also looks at an identity she cannot claim as her own, turning a humorous yet ethnographic eye on an adopted low-country home. Unlike Biss, Johnson understands her white, middle-class identity as a constant: her awareness of herself as an interloper proves unshakable, despite her love for Cajun Louisiana. Each woman seeks to comprehend the social spheres she inhabits and to gain greater appreciation for other perspectives.

Notes from No Man’s Land opens with a meditation on the telephone, an object “the world was not waiting for.” The phone itself has little importance—poles draw the author’s attention instead. Crossing the country by highway, Biss does not see a march of progress; she sees rows of lynched black victims hanging from every available pole. “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.” Biss opens with a litany of the dead, a song of despair for a time before the [End Page 170] insufficient but undeniable progress made during the civil rights movement. The pain Biss narrates as she observes the hanging dead carries such empathetic force that the revelation of Biss’s white skin surprises the reader. This surprise allows for a reflection on our most basic presumptions about racial solidarity, which may leave one feeling implicated in a convenient assumption. By undermining the racial poise of her readers, Biss successfully begins her study.

Eula Biss’s life journey begins in upstate New York with an extended family of mixed racial heritage and a mother studying traditional African art. Several essays make clear that Biss has been engaging with questions of race and culture for much of her life. “Relations” narrates the complexities of articulating a childhood identity, while other pieces offer details about an impressive array of community-oriented jobs. Biss and her husband eventually settle in Chicago’s Roger’s Park, where she teaches creative writing at Northwestern University. The title essay illustrates the author’s affection for her neighborhood, an inevitably but slowly gentrifying area along Lake Michigan. Biss feels sorry for foolish white neighbors who “do not visit the corner store for milk or beer, do not buy vegetables in the little markets, do not, as one neighbor admitted to me, even park further inland than one block from the lake.” Unlike the uneasy city dwellers the book describes, Notes from No Man’s Land interrogates the source and veracity of our greatest racialized anxieties, about black men and gangs and bad neighborhoods, about Mexican interlopers and mixed-race adoptions. Biss argues that these worries often result from misunderstanding and a guilty conscience.

Biss’s beautiful prose and poetic juxtaposition of theme and image evoke complex emotional responses (despair, delight, and disgust all have a place) even as she appeals to reason for support, offering careful reporting on sociological studies. With all this data, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the dangerous ways in which white culture menaces minorities, and Biss unflinchingly exposes hegemonic American truths. “Fear mongers,” she quotes Barry Glassner as saying, “project onto black men precisely what slavery, poverty, educational deprivation, and discrimination have ensured...

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