ARCHIVE
Excerpt: from Eula Biss' book of essays,
Notes From No Man's Land
A Stop Smiling Author Event Spotlight
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
On Thursday, Oct. 22, STOP SMILING and Chicago Public Radio will present An October Sort of City: Chicago Authors Talk Chicago, an event that will showcase four Chicago authors rhapsodizing about the city that shaped their lives and work. Click here for event details.
The following is an excerpt from Notes From No Man's Land (Graywolf Press), a collection of essays by Eula Biss. Biss will present her work at the event along with authors Deb Olin Unferth, Cristina Henríquez and Joe Meno.
Click here for an excerpt from Cristina Henríquez's novel, The World In Half
Click here to read an excerpt from Deb Olin Unferth's novel, Vacation
Click here to read an excerpt from Joe Meno's book of short stories Tender as Hellfire
From the essay "Black News" in Notes From No Man's Land:
When I was not the only white person at the events I covered for the [San Diego Voice and Viewpoint], the other white person was usually a politician. Once I arrived at a speech by a candidate for state assembly, Vince Hall, and sat down at a table next to an elderly man who looked at me, looked at my camera, looked at Vince Hall, and asked me, with a tilt of his head, “You related to him?”
When I talk about my family to strangers, I occasionally describe it as mixed. Because I don’t appear to be of mixed race, this term usually confuses people. What I mean is not specifically that my mother’s sister married a black man from Jamaica and had two children, and that one of these cousins came to live with my family when I was in junior high, and that I lived with the other cousin in Brooklyn after I graduated from college. And I don’t mean specifically that my mother’s sister later remarried and adopted a black son, or that my mother’s other sister adopted a Cherokee daughter. And I don’t mean specifically that my mother lived with a black man after her divorce from my father, and that his daughter lived with us as my stepsister, and that later, when my stepsister lost custody of her baby, my mother raised the baby for some time. And I don’t mean specifically that my mother later married a man from China, and that his daughter is now another sister in my family. What I mean is all of this. And what I said to the man who asked me if I was related to the other white person in the room was, “As much as you are.”
When I was sixteen, my mother’s boyfriend Barry told me, with frustration, “We have cultural differences,” but that phrase meant nothing to me then. I remember puzzling over it briefly and then discarding it as meaningless. At that moment, Barry and I were having an argument about whether or not Barry should spank my brother, and my position was that, cultural differences or not, nobody was going to touch my little brother.
I would remember that moment when I interviewed a woman named Eve Johnson for my first story involving Child Protective Services. Because she had already written several letters to the paper, I knew some of her story already. I knew that Child Protective Services had taken her grandchildren away from her daughter-in-law because her daughter-in-law’s new boyfriend had been abusing them. I knew that the children were two and five years old. And I knew that the children had been placed in foster care, despite the fact that Ms. Johnson wanted to care for them.
What I would learn, when she came to my office, was that Ms. Johnson had a certificate in early-childhood education. She had served as a teacher’s aide for seven years. She had also, by the time I spoke to her, completed a series of workshops for prospective foster parents. After learning the requirements for certification as a foster parent, Ms. Johnson told me, she had been surprised that she did not already have the children. “I’m active, I cook, I have time to give, I babysit for friends,” she told me. “There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be caring for those kids.”
When she first requested that her grandchildren be placed with her, two weeks after they were taken from their mother, Ms. Johnson was required to have a fingerprint scan and a background check. The fingerprint scan revealed that Ms. Johnson had been convicted of the felony “discharging a firearm with gross negligence” in 1989. From that point forward, this would be the fact around which her entire case revolved. It would also be the fact that interested me least. At some point I reluctantly asked Ms. Johnson why she discharged that firearm, but the extent to which I felt that it was none of my business is reflected by the omission of her answer in my notes. I made only the vague notation “Domestic violence,” which I do not know how to interpret.