Notes from No Man's Land by Eula Biss

Author:Eula Biss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-022-2
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2010-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

The Midwest

Back to Buxton

Each of us has certain clichés, I suspect, to which we are particularly vulnerable, certain songs we are compelled to play over and over again, certain words that undo us with their simple syllables. For years now I have been unable to think clearly if the lyrics of “Sweet Home Alabama” are within my hearing, or “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” or even “Long Walk Home.”

Not long after I began college, when it was dawning on me that, having left my family, I would never again feel as essential, as integral, as I had once felt among them, a friend of mine said, “You know, you can never go home.” Because I did not yet recognize that phrase as a cliché, the truth of it rang through me like a gong.

And that was even before I really, truly left home—before I moved from the familiar landscape of rural Massachusetts to New York City, and then to San Diego, and then to Iowa City. Iowa City, where I would eventually find myself sitting alone in a small, windowless room in a big university library, crying while I watched, for the second time, the videotape of an Iowa Public Television documentary titled You Can’t Go Back to Buxton.

Buxton, Iowa, is now just a stack of bricks and a small flock of gravestones in a farmer’s field, but was once an unincorporated mining camp of five thousand, an integrated town with a majority-black population in the mostly white state of Iowa during the Jim Crow era. 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, a kind of promise. But before I understood Buxton’s significance in that way, I understood it as I did when I was sitting in the library among boxes of documents waiting to be archived, leaning toward the small television where old folks in faded living rooms spoke of Buxton in that deeply wistful way that is reserved only for the place you came from.

I came, at one time, from a place by a river, where we lived under the flight path of an airport and I could see the rivets on the bottoms of the passenger jets as they passed overhead. It was a place of unmown fields and sand pits and backwaters where I rode my bike with boys whose houses were flooded by the rising river every spring.

Now, the road through that place has widened by several lanes and is lined with Kmarts and Wal-Marts and a mall called Latham Farms, which sits on land where there were once, in my childhood, actual farms. The airport has sheared off the tops of trees for greater visibility, the next-door neighbor who used to give me books about Sodom and Gomorrah has died, both of my parents have moved away, and I will never live there again.

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