[img]139|left|||no_popup[/img]In exactly four months, I’m going to have to come up with a name for our first (and only . . . really) child. The first name will be no problem. Despite my abhorrence of organized religion, I love Old Testament names, and dozens fit the bill.
The child’s last name will be my husband’s because on rare occasions when I just don’t care that much, I follow tradition. The middle name, though, is something with which I’m having great difficulty. For some time, I’ve considered dispensing with the middle name altogether. My parents and grandparents don’t have them, and I have two middle names (that’s one too many), both of which I dislike.
But in America, where conformity is the name of the game, I figure I should make it as easy on this child as humanly possible.
The number of alarmist articles I’ve read on the complexities of life in the United States without a middle name are mindboggling. They claim, among other scare tactics: Your child never will be able to navigate America’s vast bureaucracy! (I can barely navigate it with middle names aplenty). Your child will be indistinguishable from others with the same name. Your child will suffer from middle name block dilemma—what will they put on all those forms?
I don’t think life without a middle name would be quite the doomsday scenario these articles have painted. But I know from first-hand experience that navigating this country as a black person is difficult enough — so I should smooth the way where I can — which is how I came upon my present dilemma.
Choosing My Own Tradition
When I was a child in my Brooklyn, New York, Catholic school, all the kids had middle names. My best recollection is that it stemmed from long held traditions involving patron saints, and confirmation names to be used when they took a vow to serve Jesus. Or something like that.
I never did pay much attention in religion. But I’m no Catholic, despite the schooling, so that won’t be my tradition anyway. Instead, I decided to go the WASP route (I figure I can choose a tradition when I don’t have my own) and use a family surname. Many of my professional women friends (who retained their given name) have gone this route. I like the idea. But this, of course, created a worse dilemma. This tradition butted heads with my refusal to perpetuate the use of slave names.
A few years ago, I was at the eye doctor crossing my fingers and hoping my near blindness hadn’t worsened.
As the optometrist leaned in to get a closer look at my left eye (the really bad one), he asked the question so many white people ask but later regret — the origin of my last name. I looked the optometrist dead in the eye, or as well as I could given the circumstances and optometric apparatus obfuscating my vision, and replied, “Oh, it’s a slave name.”
He didn’t reply. It’s a conversation ender.
I had a similar exchange when one of my husband’s high school friends asked the same question on a drive to Santa Barbara. (What do they teach suburban white kids in public school these days?) After I gave him an answer, I didn’t hear a peep from the backseat for quite some time.
My Uncomfortable Last Name
Were these folks kidding?
Have we so quickly forgotten our American history? My family didn’t come over to North America voluntarily on a passenger ship, sail into Ellis Island, and disappear into the American melting pot. I understand the cargo ship on which my ancestors traveled was much less luxurious.
African Americans’ well-documented history is the middle passage, hundreds of years of slavery, its abolition, followed by Jim Crow laws, sharecropping, and of course, our continued oppression. (One President does not alter that equation for the rest of us).
Actually, my last name is famous. Almost everyone I encounter, of a certain age at least, remembers my surname from his or her high school U.S. History class. Not because my father’s family did anything more memorable than work hard for no pay, but because the family that owned mine and exploited our free labor to build its wealth used some of that money to negotiate the purchase of land that continued the United States’ western expansion. Good ol’ James Gadsden, for whom the Purchase is named, has been quoted as saying that slavery was “a social blessing” and abolitionists as “the greatest curse of the nation.”
Needless to say, I’m not proud to carry his name.
Time and again I’ve considered changing my last name, but I could never find a suitable alternative. X, as in Malcolm, was too short, taken, and well, later rejected for El-Shabazz. I considered names from my mother’s family, Cobb, Franklin, and other names from my father’s family, like Austin… but they too share the ignominy of coming to my family from their original holders—other prominent Southern slaveholders.
None of them is a moniker I want to carry, or to pass on.
The Basis for Selection
In a culture that values the last name as an indication of heritage, culture or history, I have plenty in abundance. Yet it is a history that many would like to forget or just don’t want to remember. I may not like my last name but writing it almost every day lets me not forget my true history in this country of ours.
While my child will be a product of its uniquely American heritage, I’ll spare him or her a daily reminder. Right now, I’m reaching back to the European roots of my husband for a suitable middle name.
With an Old Testament first name, and a middle and last name from my husband’s family, does that mean to the outside world my only contribution to the heritage of our child will be his or her skin color?
Somehow that doesn’t seem right. And so my dilemma continues.
In the end, I will choose a name of which my child can take ownership, for himself or herself, rather than saddle my child with a name that originates from ownership by another.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
