1. Within her essay, Biss combines two different narratives to tell a story. One of those narratives being the telephone poles and the story behind the invention of the telephone. The other narrative is the lynching, the racism, the race riots that had occurred in the same time period as the invention of the telephone. Throughout her essay, they interact and intersect each other by sharing experiences. Biss states, “In 1898, in Lane Cormorant, Mississippi, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole” (Biss 7). Here is the introduction of racism and lynching within Biss’s essay, showing the weaving of both narratives within each other. By doing so, this allows the reader to find the similarity they have, and think about the common ground they share and how lynching started becoming massively public when telephone poles were first developed. Within her essay, I learned that although the telephone poles were not meant for lynching and hate crimes against blacks, but in fact the telephone poles were taken advantage of to show the lynching’s on a public scale. In her essay, it is stated that many people stopped to watch black men get hanged, or decided to partake in the beating and burning of bodies hung on the telephone poles.
  2. The game telephone represents a child whispering to another child a sentence and as it gets passed along to other children, they see how far it can deteriorate the audio. Like the game, the telephone poles started as a way to hang the wires caused by telephones throughout the towns. It had a clear purpose and message, just like the initial whisper of the first child. Throughout time, the telephone poles started being taken down, “Wherever telephone companies were erecting poles, home owners and business owners were sawing them down or defending their sidewalks with rifles” (Biss 6). This represents a child deteriorating the audio of the initial message throughout the game. After the large influx of telephone poles being taken down, they became widely popular, but then they were being used for lynching, seeing as the audio of the game becomes more and more butchered until its ending message is absolutely nothing like its initial message. The initial goal of the telephone poles were not used for lynching and hate crimes against blacks, but in fact for the communication purposes and to support telephones. As each child hears the initial message, the ending message is not what the initial message was meant for.
  3. My view of her essay has not changed, as I thought it was informative and had a lot of history written within the essay. I did, however, expect her to be black as she wrote as if she had such a connection to the hate crimes brought up within the essay. I feel as if she were black, I would view the essay as more personal and have an experience feel to it, but because she is writing it through the vision of someone else, it does not feel as personal or related as she made it feel. With the information, I did not have a change of view as everything that had been done to the black men was dehumanizing as not deserved, along with the fact that in many cases was unnecessary. That being said, the information and history is valid, but I feel as though it could have been stronger if there was a personal connection.