Notes from No Man's Land

American Essays

Graywolf Press

Contents

Before

Time and Distance Overcome

"Of what use is such an invention?" the New York World asked shortly after Alexander Graham Bell first demonstrated his telephone in 1876. The world was not waiting for the telephone.

Bell's financial backers asked him not to work on his new invention 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 by 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.

Even now it is an impossible idea, that we are all connected, all of us.

"At the present time we have a perfect network of gas pipes and water pipes throughout our large cities," Bell wrote to his business partners in defense of his idea. "We have main pipes laid under the streets communicating by side pipes with the various dwellings. ... In a similar manner it is conceivable that cables of telephone wires could be laid under ground, or suspended overhead, communicating by branch wires with private dwellings, counting houses, shops, manufactories, etc., uniting them through the main cable."

Imagine the mind that could imagine this. That could see us joined by one branching cable. This was the mind of a man who wanted to invent, more than the telephone, a machine that would allow the deaf to hear.

For a short time the telephone was little more than a novelty. For twenty-five cents you could see it demonstrated by Bell himself, in a church, along with singing and recitations by local talent. From some distance away, Bell would receive a call from "the invisible Mr. Watson." Then the telephone became a plaything of the rich. A Boston banker paid for a private line between his office and his home so that he could let his family know exactly when he would be home for dinner.

Mark Twain was among the first Americans to own a telephone, but he wasn't completely taken with the device. "The human voice carries entirely too far as it is," he remarked.

By 1889, the New York Times was reporting a "War on Telephone Poles." Wherever telephone companies were erecting poles, home owners 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 granted a group of home owners an injunction to prevent the telephone company from erecting any new poles. Another 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. And in some places there were also telegraph wires, power lines, and trolley cables. The sky was netted with wires.

The war on telephone poles was fueled, in part, by that terribly American concern for private property, and a reluctance to surrender it for a shared utility. And then there was a fierce sense of aesthetics, an obsession with purity, a dislike for the way the poles and wires marred a landscape that those other new inventions, skyscrapers and barbed wire, were just beginning to complicate. And then perhaps there was also a fear that distance, as it had always been known and measured, was collapsing.

The city council in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, ordered policemen to cut down all the telephone poles in town. And the mayor of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, ordered the police chief and the fire department to chop down the telephone poles there. Only one pole was chopped down before the telephone men climbed all the poles along the line, preventing any more chopping. Soon, Bell Telephone Company began stationing a man at the top of each pole as soon as it had been set, until enough poles had been set to string a wire between them, at which point it became a misdemeanor to interfere with the poles. Even so, a constable cut down two poles holding forty or fifty wires. And a home owner sawed down a recently wired pole, then fled from police. The owner of a cannery ordered his workers to throw dirt back into the hole the telephone company was digging in front of his building. His men threw the dirt back in as fast as the telephone workers could dig it out. Then he sent out a team with a load of stones to dump into the hole. Eventually, the pole was erected on the other side of the street.

Despite the war on telephone poles, it would take only four years after Bell's first public demonstration of the telephone for every town of more than ten thousand people to be wired, although many towns were wired only to themselves. By the turn of the century, there were more telephones than bathtubs in America.

"Time and dist. overcome," read an early advertisement for the telephone. Rutherford B. Hayes pronounced the installation of a telephone in the White House "one of the greatest events since creation." The telephone, Thomas Edison declared, "annihilated time and space, and brought the human family in closer touch."

* * *

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. In Danville, Illinois, a black man's throat was slit, and his dead body was strung up on a telephone pole. Two black men were hanged from a telephone pole in Lewisburg, West Virginia. And two in Hempstead, Texas, where one man was dragged out of the courtroom by a mob, and another was dragged out of jail.

A black man was hanged 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.

Lynching, the first scholar of the subject determined, is an American invention. Lynching from bridges, from arches, from trees standing alone in fields, from trees in front of the county courthouse, from trees used as public billboards, from trees barely able to support the weight of a man, from telephone poles, from streetlamps, and from poles erected solely for that purpose. From the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, black men were lynched for crimes real and imagined, for whistles, for rumors, for "disputing with a white man," for "unpopularity," for "asking a white woman in marriage," for "peeping in a window."

In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a black man charged with kicking a white girl was hanged from a telephone pole. In Longview, Texas, a black man accused of attacking a white woman was hanged from a telephone pole. In Greenville, Mississippi, a black man accused of attacking a white telephone operator was hanged from a telephone pole. "The negro only asked time to pray." In Purcell, Oklahoma, a black man accused of attacking a white woman was tied to a telephone pole and burned. "Men and women in automobiles stood up to watch him die."

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.

Early telephone calls were full of noise. "Such a jangle of meaningless noises had never been heard by human ears," Herbert Casson wrote in his 1910 History of the Telephone. "There were spluttering and bubbling, jerking and rasping, whistling and screaming."

The children's game of telephone depends on the fact that a message passed quietly from one ear to another to another will get distorted at some point along the line.

In Shreveport, Lousiana, a black man charged with attacking a white girl was hanged from a telephone pole. "A knife was left sticking in the body." In Cumming, Georgia, a black man accused of assaulting a white girl was shot repeatedly, then hanged from a telephone pole. In Waco, Texas, a black man convicted of killing a white woman was taken from the courtroom by a mob and burned, then his charred body was hanged from a telephone pole.

A postcard was made from the photo of a burned man hanging from a telephone pole in Texas, his legs broken off below the knee and his arms curled up and blackened. Postcards of lynchings were sent out as greetings and warnings until 1908, when the postmaster general declared them unmailable. "This is the barbecue we had last night," reads one.

"If we are to die," W. E. B. DuBois wrote in 1911, "in God's name let us perish like men and not like bales of hay." And "if we must die," Claude McKay wrote ten years later, "let it not be like hogs."

In Pittsburg, Kansas, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole, cut down, burned, shot, and stoned with bricks. "At first the negro was defiant," the New York Times reported, "but just before he was hanged he begged hard for his life."

In the photographs, the bodies of the men lynched from telephone poles are silhouetted against the sky. Sometimes two men to a pole, hanging above the buildings of a town. Sometimes three. They hang like flags in still air.

In Cumberland, Maryland, a mob used a telephone pole as a battering ram to break into the jail where a black man charged with the murder of a policeman was being held. They kicked him to death, then fired twenty shots into his head. They wanted to burn his body, but a minister asked them not to.

The lynchings happened everywhere, in all but four states. From shortly before the invention of the telephone to long after the first transatlantic call. More in the South, and more in rural areas. In the cities and in the North, there were race riots.

Riots in Cincinnati, New Orleans, Memphis, New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Houston ...

During the race riots that destroyed the black section of Springfield, Ohio, a black man was shot and hanged from a telephone pole.

During the race riots that set fire to East St. Louis and forced five hundred black people to flee their homes, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole. The rope broke and his body fell into the gutter. "Negros are lying in the gutters every few feet in some places," read the newspaper account.

In 1921, the year before Bell died, four companies of the National Guard were called out to end a race war in Tulsa that began when a white woman accused a black man of rape. Bell had lived to complete the first call from New York to San Francisco, which required 14,000 miles of copper wire and 130,000 telephone poles.

* * *

My grandfather was a lineman. He broke his back when a telephone pole fell. "Smashed him onto the road," my father says.

When I was young, I believed that the arc and swoop of telephone wires along the roadways was beautiful. I believed that the telephone poles, with their transformers catching the evening sun, were glorious. I believed my father when he said, "My dad could raise a pole by himself." And I believed that the telephone itself was a miracle.

Now, I tell my sister, these poles, these wires, do not look the same to me. Nothing is innocent, my sister reminds me. But nothing, I would like to think, remains unrepentant.

One summer, heavy rains fell in Nebraska and some green telephone poles grew small leafy branches.

New York

Relations

In New York City, in the spring of 1999, a story hit the newspapers of a Staten Island woman who had given birth to twins — one white and one black. The woman and her husband were white and the black baby was not theirs, at least not biologically. The embryo that became that baby had been accidentally implanted in the woman's uterus with the embryo of her biological son, but it belonged to a black couple who were clients at the same fertility clinic, and they wanted their son back. After a DNA test, a custody battle, a state supreme-court ruling, and an unsuccessful appeal, it was decided that the black baby was the child of the black couple, legally and entirely.

The story had its peculiarities, like the fact that the fertility clinic notified the black couple that some of their embryos had been mistakenly implanted in another woman but did not tell them anything more, so that they eventually learned of the birth of their son through a private investigator. But even odd circumstances like this took on the sheen of metaphor, pointing, for those of us who were looking, to further evidence of a systematic failure of any number of services to reach black people intact, in the form in which they are typically enjoyed by white people. If both babies had been white, I doubt the story would have become the parable it became, playing out in the newspapers over the next few years as an epic tale of blood and belonging.

The fact that the story involved two babies and two mothers and, eventually, an agreement that gave both babies a family and both families a baby, would inspire some reporters to use the phrase "happy ending," but the story would resist that happy ending for quite some time, in part because the black baby was initially returned to his biological parents on the strict condition that he would continue to visit his twin brother, spending a week in summer and alternate holidays with the white family. On the question of whether a person can have a twin to whom he is not related, the New Jersey Record consulted an expert, who explained that the babies were not technically twins but that their situation was so unusual it was impossible to determine, without further research, how deep a bond they might share. Long after the black baby had been returned to his biological parents and given a new name, the question of what exactly his relationship was to the white baby persisted. The answer to this question would determine whether or not the courts would mandate visits between the black boy and the white family. "Are the baby boys brothers in the eyes of the law," asked the New York Times, "or two separate people who just happened to arrive in the world on the same subway car?"

When we were young, my sister and I had two baby dolls that were exactly alike in every way except that one was white and one was black. The precise sameness of these dolls, so obviously cast from one mold in two different colors of plastic, convinced me that they were, like us, sisters.

There is no biological basis for what we call race, meaning that most human variation occurs within individual "races" rather than between them. Race is a social fiction. But it is also, for now at least, a social fact. We may be remarkably genetically similar, but we are not all, culturally speaking, the same. And if that Long Island woman had raised the black boy to whom she gave birth, he might have been robbed of a certain amount of the cultural identity to which his skin would be assigned later in life and might therefore find himself, as an adult, in an uncomfortable no man's land between two racial identities.

But this no man's land is already fairly heavily trafficked. Without denying that blacks and whites remain largely segregated, and without denying that black culture is a distinct, if not uniform, culture, I think we ought to admit, as the writer Albert Murray once insisted, that American culture is "incontestably mulatto." A friend of mine used to tell a story about a segregated restaurant in the South where a sign on one side of the room advertised "Home Cooking" and a sign on the other advertised "Soul Food" and the customers on both sides were eating the same biscuits and gravy. "For all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences," Murray wrote in The Omni-Americans, "the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other."

Even so, we don't tend to make family out of one another. Marriages between whites and blacks amount to fewer than 1 percent of all our marriages. And even after the last state laws banning interracial marriage were declared unconstitutional in 1967, some states continued to ban interracial adoptions. The agencies that first began placing black children with white couples often viewed these placements as highly progressive. Not everyone agreed. The National Association of Black Social Workers, in particular, has continued to oppose the adoption of black children by white parents ever since the release of their somewhat notorious 1972 statement on the preservation of black families, which suggested that the likely outcome of such adoptions was "cultural genocide."

The bitterness of this statement, and its refusal to see white Americans as viable parents for black Americans, is probably best understood in the context of all the wrong that has been done to black children by white adults in this country. There was, during slavery, the use of black women for "breeding" purposes, the forced infidelities of that system, the denial of slave marriages as legitimate contracts, and the practice of selling members of the same family away from each other, so that sisters were separated from brothers, mothers were separated from fathers, and young children were separated from one or both parents. More than a century after emancipation, we still have the unmanning of black men by law enforcement, the incommensurate imprisonment of black fathers, and the troubling biases of the child-welfare system, in which a disproportionate number of black children are separated from their parents.