What Is In a Name?

A friend of mine was invited to a Nigerian wedding, and she didn’t know what to wear. So I asked another friend who is Nigerian and she promptly asked, “What is the name of the hosts?” Once she knew this, she was able to tell that they were Yoruba, and she could advise my friend on proper Yoruba wedding attire. The name revealed the culture.

A few nights ago, I started to think about my childhood friends, specifically my Black friends. I remembered their last names: Johnson, Richardson, Morrison: all Scandinavian names. And then my family name, Leonard, which is German and my married name, Doyley, which is Irish. Black people are not supposed to have Scandinavian or German or Irish last names. We should have African names: Achebe, Madu, Ugwuanyi, Addo, Mensah, and from those names we would know our people, our tribal womb. Our names should evoke millennia of history and traditions and clothes and food and lore and music. Our names should tell us in part who we are.

But they don’t. They only tell us who owned us. Someone named Leonard bought my forefather, stripped him of his African name and encumbered him with such an ill-fitting name that he would have likely preferred to be naked. Hundreds of years later, no DNA test can ever tell me my name.

Through the years, I’ve held up this dreadful thing called American Slavery and looked at it in ghastly detail from multiple angles, but I never fully considered the lost names, the lost identity, and that night that loss hit me in the chest.

I understand why Malcolm took X as his last name. He refused to wear the name of the one who devastated his family. That X broadcast to the world that he can never know his people. He determined that being called X was better than being called Little, which evoked only horror and loss. I wish I had that same courage.

I know that that both my father’s family and my husband’s family were likely taken from what is now Nigeria, and that they were probably Igbo. They both survived the misery of a slave ship only to be sold in America and Jamaica. Africa is the most ethnically diverse continent on earth, so I can’t know our Igbo roots for sure, and I certainly can’t know from our names. My friend referenced above is Igbo and it makes me smile that we might have come from the same stock. But then I think that I could have had a last name like Amadi or Achebe and I feel sad and slightly lost all over again.