According to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources the Great Black Swamp once spanned over three million acres. The wetlands stretched across northwest Ohio, northeast Indiana, and southeast Michigan. Writing for Belt Magazine in 2022, journalist Ashley Stimpson described it as “a massive quagmire” in which “towering oaks and sycamores loomed above murky pools of tannin-stained water—tangled, disorienting, dark. Fifteen hundred square miles of mud and mosquitos from Fort Wayne to Findlay to Toledo.”
It was the Toledo War of 1835, a shockingly bloodless border dispute between Ohio and Michigan concerning who could rightly lay claim to the Toledo Strip, a slip of land that kissed the borders of both, that led to the draining of the swamp. Militias were deployed along each side of the Maumee River, but the only shots actually fired were perfunctorily lobbed into the mosquito-ridden air. The conflict was quickly resolved and resulted in Michigan gaining statehood and Ohio officially retaining the land.
Ashley Stimpson sheds some light on how the “war” led to the eventual demise of the wetland. “On their way to a battle that never happened, the Ohio militia was waylaid by the mire, and the governor took note. The state poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into fixing the Maumee and Western Reserve Road, proving that with enough money, manpower, and ditches, the swamp could be tamed. In 1859, the state passed its first “Ditch Law,” and the people of Northwest Ohio got to work on bleeding the Great Black Swamp dry.”
The swamp may be gone, but it is certainly not forgotten. Look no further than Lisa Slage Robinson’s excellent debut short story collection Esquire Ball: Stories from the Great Black Swamp. A former corporate attorney, Slage practiced law in both the United States and Canada. Part of her career was spent working in Toledo and those years of firsthand experience bring an earned authenticity to these stories largely featuring lawyers plying their trade in Ohio’s “Glass City”.
Ultimately, laws are humanity’s imperfect hedge against chaos. They are the rickety fences which we must constantly patch, which we must move a few feet this way one day and then a few feet that way on another, in which we discover wide open spaces previously believed securely breakered by slats. Whether it is the howling void of the universe or the terrifying nameless darkness within ourselves that compels us to create order, laws, both civic and religious, are the barely adequate tools we have at our disposal to do the job.
The thirteen stories contained in Esquire Ball: Stories from the Great Black Swamp mostly concern themselves with goings on at Strathy, McMahon, a venerable Toledo law firm whose roots in the swamp run deep and weird. Most of the stories involve Cissy Armstrong, a young associate when we meet her in the opening story and whose personal history is slowly revealed as we move through the book. Her layers deepen, personality quirks which originally come across as strange gain a certain inevitability as we go.
We first meet Cissy in “Fruit of the Poisonous Tree”, where she breaks into a client’s home. She introduces herself to the reader thusly, “Don’t call me a thief. I am a collector. I would never pocket, for example, something so pedestrian as Wallenda’s gold cigarette lighter or one of Mad Dog’s monogrammed cufflinks. It is the ineffable I seek. Like that time, when one of the partners at my law firm asked me to babysit, I reached under his sleeping nine-year-old’s pillow and snatched the kid’s pointy canine. I soaked the macaroni-encrusted and blood-stained tooth in hydrogen peroxide for two days before I tucked it into a robin’s nest, the one I pinched from the underbelly of my neighbor’s downspout. The curiosity now sits on my office credenza, next to my stapler and rolodex.”
The difference between a thief and a collector is that a thief is opportunistic, compulsive and disinterested in what she steals. A collector, however, is someone with a psychological pathology that drives them to create a story. What is a collection, after all, but a story made manifest. Cissy explains, “I discovered my need for tokens when I left home with my high heels, casebooks, and law school diploma, eager to forget the people who had broken me in one way or the other, but not quite willing to give up the sting.”
Cissy shores herself by constructing a barricade against the roiling dark chaos out of the items she takes. These “tokens” as she calls them are reminiscent of the Japanese art of kintsugi in which broken pottery is mended with a golden lacquer, the points of breakage now showing brightly gold become central to the beauty of the object. This is very much in line with the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi which embraces the flawed and imperfect. She displays the child’s tooth along side her stapler and rolodex, both of which items are intrinsic to her job which itself is central to Cissy’s self-conceived identity.
Reflecting on the client whose property she has invaded Cissy remarks, “Victor Sinclair doesn’t know me, the associate assigned to his case, but I know him with an intimacy earned from months of the purgatory known as document review, sorting through boxes of musty papers, edges gnawed by invisible creatures, purchase orders, promissory notes scribbled on napkins, interoffice memos, scores of schematics, blueprints, and quarterly reports.” All of that paperwork, all of those little details jotted on scraps and napkins, sounds suspiciously like the notes a novelist would keep strewn across her desk while composing their story. Cissy is here to fill the gaps in her research, to compose a full-blooded person out of the collection of details on her desk. This is the same work she is doing on herself, building a self out of details and tokens.
In “Devil’s Hole Road” Cissy is asked why she became a lawyer. “I shrugged. Visions of lonely Saturday afternoons, black and white movies offered up on one of three channels, Hepburn and Tracy in Adam’s Rib, husband and wife lawyers, he a prosecutor, she a defense attorney. All that smart banter, dinner parties, she in her black evening gown, her elegant clavicles, the swan of her neck, the ribbon of spine as Tracy zipped her up. “I was a kid when I decided. I thought it would make me feel important. Not so invisible,” I said.”.
Stories as an imperative to the construction of personal identity is a theme that runs throughout Esquire Ball: Stories from the Great Black Swamp even when Cissy is not the central character of a particular story. While she does appear in the title story, it’s another young associate at Strathy, McMahon who steps into the spotlight.
“The Esquire Ball” opens with a simple declaration, “Trevor needed a wife.” The story continues, “Some called the need a twitch, others a tingling, others still a burning. For Trevor, it was a rhythmic throbbing, an invisible pulse, an irrepressible dread that an essential part of himself was missing.” In Trevor’s case this is factually true. He was born absent a couple of ribs. “The doctor said that, yes, while it was unusual, he acknowledged it happens, from time to time. A vast vacant space resided where the twenty-third and twenty-fourth ribs were supposed to float.” Stories again. Myths, biblical tales. Also, as often happens across these stories, a sly echo that arrives in Cissy’s absorption in the movie Adam’s Rib.
Trevor’s search for a mate takes a turn for the magical realist at the titular party held in honor of the law firm’s new hires. His host’s wife finds Trevor, who has fled the revelries after a conversation concerning his ex-fiancé, drunkenly crumpled beneath a willow tree and attends to his dire straits. “She cradled him in her arms, as he rested his head against her iridescent bosom. She twirled his hair with her long proby fingers, twisting the ends into curlicues. Every once in a while, he felt the flick of a tongue on his temple like the comforting lick of a dog.” Here it’s helpful to know that Toledo has another nickname derived from its swampy past: Frogtown. In fact the downtown Toledo court house is adorned with a mosaic tile frog set into the floor.
Later the partners, all men by the way, deliver Trevor to a secret ceremony which if not wholly sinister is definitely strange.
“So that’s why you’re here. To get a wife of your own.”
“Here?”
“Why, certainly. The finest spot in the county. No better place than out in the swamp, a hearty fire
and cigars to keep the black flies away, the chorus of crickets and other critters and the twang of banjo strings to stir things up.” He nodded to the Banjo Man. “Play us some of that clawhammer, Guy.”
The Banjo Man pushed up his hat, swung his banjo from his back to his front. Trevor thought of that scene from Deliverance. Instead of “Dueling Banjos,” the Banjo Man plunked one string, slow, offbeat, out of tune. Mournful. He wailed, like an Appalachian miner, a songful poem, “When Sorrow Encompasses Me”.
Every man around the campfire had tears in his eyes. Stash handed Trevor an empty pickle jar with holes punched into the tin lid. “Here you go, Son.”
“I don’t understand,” Trevor said.
“Go to the stream, scoop yourself up some candidates that the Banjo Man called forth.”
Trevor still didn’t understand but did as he was told. He scooped up a full jar of water and muck that he’d just waded through. He screwed on the lid and wandered back over to the fire.
“Let’s see how you did. Hold ‘er up to the light.”
Trevor held up the jar. The mud sank to the bottom and one little tadpole swam through the gunk.
“Why there she is,” Stash said. “Raise her up right, now.”
The scene evokes the darker visions of Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm. There’s a whiff of the eldritch here. Also, the ceremony drips with a queasy paternalism. It’s a grotesque incel fantasy. The coterie of wealthy, powerful bros puffing on cigars, indulging in occult ceremonies indicative of both class and patriarchy. raising a tadpole into the perfect wife, not an equal partner but nothing more than a nubile and subordinate appendage.
The story “Drive” returns the center of gravity to Cissy. Here she is older and fondly remembering a brief affair with The Captain. A Bavarian idyll full of great sex and fast cars. Freedom. Cissy describes the time as “living in a fairytale” and “With the Captain, a whole new world opened up to me”. It was a time in which “I could feel my own power”.
However, the memory is haunted by a tour of the Medieval Criminal Law Museum in which their guide, a young American, shows off the many torture devices housed in the museum. “He couldn’t get enough of this stuff. That’s why, he said, he’d deferred his admission to law school and his political ambitions to study, on a Fulbright, punishment design and criminal justice theory.” Cissy goes on, “The tour guide pointed out the most gruesome tortures, all of which were reserved for women.” The young man’s favorites were the “breast ripper” and the “pear of anguish” which featured “four sharpened petals, which blossomed with each turn of an ornately carved key, expanding into the orifice of the torturer’s choice.” It’s a brief scene that elegantly weaves together the threads of institutional misogyny, the weaponization of the law in service of patriarchy, and art as a tool in service of extremism (the ornate carvings on the torture device).
The sinister tour guide returns by the story’s end which takes place several years in the future. “The Texan eager to extend his influence beyond the state’s borders, formally announces his bid for U.S. Senate, hinting that he may even run for president someday. In the interview, he touts his crime initiative, especially the bill he co-sponsored, and signed into law by the governor: SB 476 authorizing the use of the Pearculum™ confession extraction device. No training, license, or registration required. The device he sayspairs nicely with the Texas Bounty Law which grants a tidy sum to anyone who ferrets out accomplices assisting with the unnatural disruption of a woman’s reproduction cycle.”
Esquire Ball: Stories from the Great Black Swamp equates both the law and storytelling as systems of control. These systems are ingrained in governance but also within ourselves as a species. We fear chaos and the many uncomfortable questions it asks of us regarding the very nature of reality. Chaos is also a system but one which in its seemingly random disjointed motions we do not understand. Our stories, our laws, ultimately they are about reassurance. The Great Black Swamp is the site where order and chaos clash.
Order was imposed upon the Great Black Swamp in the 19th century. The project of draining the wetlands was complete in 1885. In her article Asley Stimpson writes of the project, “It was a feat of engineering to be sure, but its legacy has created another colossal challenge for folks in the watershed today. Without the natural filter of the Great Black Swamp, nutrient-rich runoff from the area’s farm fields now dumps directly into Lake Erie, using the thousands of miles of ditches and drainage tiles laborers once painstakingly carved into the earth. The nutrients in that runoff are responsible for an annual algal bloom in western Lake Erie so large it can be seen from space. Every summer it threatens fisheries, hampers recreation, and imperils the drinking water of half a million people. In 2014, an enormous algal bloom left the City of Toledo without potable water for three days.” In 2019 the Ohio General Assembly voted to begin a large scale project to retore the swamp.
