L. Renée
What's in a Name
FOR THE EVENT ORGANIZER, WHO INQUIRED IN AN E-MAIL: “BUT WHAT’S YOUR REAL NAME?”
She skips my initial altogether,
calls me Renée, because that name
is legible to her thin white
imagination and is French, the rootedness
of which is implied. The root word of Renée
is actually Latin: Renatus, meaning reborn
or born again, which medieval people
seeking new identities in Christ thought
they’d find
in baptism. Water is never just water
when you need a martyr for your grief.
God dwelled across a body of water then,
they had to cross father son
Holy help me Jesus cross water
survive. My father picked my middle name, an act
of survival—something he could give me
that could not be stolen, like inheritance
or land or his own mind when crack made
him a new thing, when he forgot the
former things, like dwelling in his marriage
bed but left us lonely, making his way,
as The Word promised, through the wilderness.
What weariness when he dropped back
down to his body, dope-sick and paranoid,
came back to what remained of the name “Dad”
that he remembered, like always calling me
my first and middle names smooshed
together, booming in one dramatic flourish,
breathless, as if running out of time, some ghost on
his trail ready to gather all the bad checks,
all the forged promises, like when he called
crying again, saying this time would be different,
swore on everything he loved, not God, not
I put that on God, but swore on his last name,
the only precious thing his father gave
that did not bruise, and me, being his only
child with that same last name bound us
together forever on The Patriarchy’s papers. I
am tired of the surname strangling my neck. I
want to tell him that. Say I don’t know your
dead or your living. But what do either mean
to a man existing between worlds?
In between generations of my family,
there are patterns: Mary Magdalene and Mary Frances,
Frances Houndshell and Frances Hamlet,
Rosa Bolden and Rosetta Townes,
Nannie and Annette and Deanna.
I say her names, all our women the same
genetic material in different sequences,
all our women an extended metaphor
for rebirth. When I was born, my grandmother
said it looked like I had been here before.
My grandmother named Mary Magdalene
after the Mary from Magdala, a village buttressing
the Sea of Galilee, the place meaning tower
in Hebrew, as in Mary was a strong tower of witness:
wailing at the foot of a wooden cross watching
Jesus die and appear clear as day to her
three days later, while men didn’t believe her sight
since they couldn’t place her as a wife
or a prostitute, her name belonging to no one
other than herself.
And Frances, in Latin, a description for
the French man, meaning free one,
as in my grandmother’s grandmother,
Frances Houndshell, named free
by her mother
in 1864 or 1865 or 1868, depending
on which document documents her life
without certification of her birth.
I am convinced that her mother,
who I am still looking for
in Stokes County, North Carolina, records
with only a first initial and two different
possible last names from two different possible
slaveholders, was intentional in naming
her baby free. I am not a myth.
I turned myself into myself and ego-tripped.
I freed my name from waiting
for fathers who disappeared themselves. The weight
of a phantom genealogy.
I put that ⬛ I put that ⬛ for real.
on on
L. Renée is a poet and nonfiction writer who works as assistant director of Furious Flower Poetry Center and assistant professor of English at James Madison University. Nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and two Pushcart Prizes, her work has been published in Obsidian, Tin House Online, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and The Watering Hole, she won the 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize.
Photo credit: Jeffrey Albright