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

 

Woman in white shirt and yellow skirt sitting in front of a garden with yellow flowers, a brick wall, greenery. There is a white building behind the brick wall.

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 ObsidianTin House OnlinePoetry 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

 
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