The last time my mother saw her father alive was during a steamy, windless August afternoon. As she turned off the high way and entered the two-lane road into town, even the air conditioning and closed windows could not block the revolting smell of waste products from the paper mills. My mother had grown up with that odor lingering over every moment of her childhood and knew that she’d soon get used to it.

The maid who had been with my family for 30 years greeted her. “Oh, Miss Cutty, so nice to have you back home!”

“Martha! How’ve you been?”

“Well, the old gray mare ain’t what she used to be, ” she said. “Now, your mama and daddy are expectin’ ya, so just go right on in - but watch your step - if you know what I mean.”

My mother understood. She entered the dark, air-conditioned kitchen guardedly. Her mother greeted her warmly but her father, as was characteristic, did not. She sat with her parents around a too cozy table in the kitchen nook that had not been remodeled to accommodate her daddy’s girth.  After several glasses of iced tea, her mother served the usual grits, Virginia ham with lima beans from the garden, homemade Parker house rolls, and her famous fudge. Her daddy preferred scotch and watched them eat.

He waited until they’d finished their welcome meal. Then he blurted out, “Cutler, since you never saw fit to do your duty to this family, I’m cutting you out of my will. Now you will suffer the consequences!”

My mother, completely mystified, asked what her father was referring to.

“You have three children and not one is named Cutler!”

With an ironic smile she answered, “ Daddy, they are all in their twenties now. I certainly would have considered passing on my name if you had mentioned it when they were born. It’s kind of late to bring it up!”

Seething with rage he told her, “You should have known! Why would someone have to tell you to do the obvious! You are the only one who was given the name of your great grandfather and you did not see fit to keep his memory alive. Mr. Brown, my lawyer, has already been advised to write you out of my will. That is your punishment for not caring about the family. “

Her daddy sat there with a self-satisfied look, ice clinking as he raised his fourth glass of scotch. Her mother did what she was accustomed to doing as a southern gentlewoman: pretending that nothing unseemly had happened in her respectable family. My mother slowly picked up her belongings and headed to the door.

When her daddy died 3 years later, her four sisters went to Mr. Brown ready for battle. Cutler, too proud, refused to go although it was comforting to her that her sisters wanted to protect her from their father’s meanness. The oldest sister let Mr. Brown know the sisters were determined to share their inheritance equally and he might as well understand that from the start.

With an amused look on his face, Mr. Brown slid the will across his desk for them to read.  There was no mention of cutting anyone out of it. The date on the will was 1960 and it had not been altered. As all four women looked at him quizzically, Mr. Brown said with a shrug and sheepish smile that he’d been awful busy the last few years and he just hadn’t gotten around to it.

by Virginia Jardim
Berkeley, CA

My favorite nickname was given to me by some boys in jail. I used to visit them once every 2 weeks my fourth year of college, trying to talk with them about school and family and all the things in their lives they could give another try once they were out. But the truth was, I was a middle class half white girl from the northeast who studied foreign affairs and medieval French literature, and they were boys from three Norfolk and Richmond gangs who had been charged with assault, drug offences, and statutory rape. One skinny kid with a stutter, Jerome, had even shot a cop. He told me the one French word he knew: pardon.

I was 22 and did not have a clue as to what I was doing. And yet, every two weeks, I did manage to get the room of 15 to 18 year old males talking about the mundane and the spiritual alike. We told jokes, admitted fears and failures, debated whether it was better to live wild or live long. I also learned their system of names – the names their mothers had given them, the names they had for each other, and the names they gave themselves.

After six months, I had apparently earned my own. Malechai, big, quiet kid who was head of one of the Norfolk gangs stood up and announced, “The boys and I, we decided to give you a name.  As a matter of fact, we all agreed on it,” waving his arm to indicate that the Tidewater boys and even Richmond were in. I said I was flattered, what was it? “It’s Sweet, Sweet Kim.” He paused before sitting back down. “Don’t sweat. We’re not ‘giving you a name’ giving you a name, you know what I mean? You are your own operation, you know that.”

It was soon May. I was about to graduate, leave Charlottesville, take a job in Japan.  I prepared to make my last visit to the detention center to say goodbye to the boys. There had been some turnover that year, and I had already lost some.

Malechai was there, though. He didn’t come to the table, just stood back against the wall. I wrapped up my visit and said my goodbyes. Malechai followed me to the door.

“Your folks coming down from New York for your graduation?”

I said yes.

Then Malechai spoke softly, said he was getting out in a week. He wanted to come by to my graduation party and meet my parents, tell them what a nice young woman I was and how I had given him and his boys so many important things to think about while they were away. He dropped his voice, asked quietly, “Do you think I can do that? Do you think I can stop through and say hello to your mom and dad, Kim?”

The jail-visit program prohibited sharing personal contact information with “the inmates.” But Malechai was looking me in the eye. Was I going to trust him enough to cross paths in the world outside? Or was I going to walk out, into safe anonymity?

I wrote down my address. I gave him the paper. “This is for you, Malechai. Just for you. I’m there until June.” Malechai held the paper in his hands, staring. He finally looked up and said, “I’ll be seeing you.”

Graduation weekend came and went. In two weeks, I would move to Japan.

The day before I left Charlottesville, I got a letter in the mail.

It was from Malechai. He wanted to apologize for not having come by for my graduation party and not having met my family. He was supposed to be released that Tuesday, but got into a fight defending Tyrone Walls from the Tidewater boys and he ended up “hurting one of the kids real bad” so his time was extended. He said he felt bad about that, but felt even worse about asking to meet my mother and father and sister and brother and grandmother, too, and then not showing up. He hoped I wasn’t disappointed. He wished me well in Japan. He would be home in Norfolk in no time and would say hello to his mother for me.

There was a PS.  It said, “Next time I write, I’m going to send you a late graduation present. It will be a bracelet that says ‘Sweet, Sweet Kim’ on it. Do you remember your name? It’s a long one, I know. So I guess I’d better make it a necklace.”

I never got a necklace from Malechai. But I keep the name close to my chest, all the same.

by KTS
San Francisco, CA

My name has an uncommon spelling, one first-generation Mexicanos would never pick: V-i-c-k-i-e. Ie. “ie?” people say, how odd. “Is it short for Virginia?” My parents did not pick the last consonant. They only had the concept: baby girl, alive, unimpaired mover and dancer. Mom says the black nurse who provided the spelling had big white teeth and smelled like peppermint gum.

Above all, my name is a reference- to Victoria, my other half who left LA much before I did.

Victoria my oldest sister who never got to beat me up with her left hand while she curled her hair with her right. I never tagged along anywhere with her and her hoochie friends to “Purple Rain” or to the Glendale Galleria. She dreamt her way to heaven so I could be the big sister to our two younger brothers. So I could beat them with one hand and drink my morning milkshake with the other.

She left so I could take my younger brother Jesse to watch, “Batman Begins,” and to pimple-skinned parties on Jaboneria Street. I’m named after a ghost for whom my mother makes birthday cakes out of Styrofoam discs, lovingly covered with real icing and ballerinas every one of her 36 birthdays.

Victoria took a look at south east LA and said, “Chale, I’ll catch you on the rebound.” Neither she nor I got to be a chola, or a cha-cha, or a new waver. She left me here with thick glasses in fourth grade, these stories and a name to live up to, everyday. Don’t. Fuck. It. Up. Girl.

I was born in Inglewood (“always up to no good”), near LAX, where I would make a maiden voyage to visit colleges 17 years later. How it makes sense - that every night or so, I dream of fly-away places, a deluged mélange of everywhere I’ve lived or seen: an Italian mansion in a Chiapas jungle, with a view to the Caribbean from my sleep.

Victoria- I don’t blame you for not staying. It was all mean-ugly girls through high school, then silent throbbing lack in college. Grad school was warm and got me ready for all work in life. There I learned how to dance cumbia ballenato, or is it “vallenato”? You tell me, girl.

I scribbled across your photo face as a toddler- you in the kitchen on top of our marigold painted table. That’s all I’ve ever had for your likeness. How lovely you might look today, all flirty thirties with our wavy hair and long Mendoza eyelashes, living your life somewhere near silver planes.

And my last name? Vértiz. An accent on the “e” thanks to a Spanish from Spain college professor. I’ve also spotted a certain street named, “Doctor Vértiz” in Mexico City with the accent on the ‘e’ too, melting my guilt over the initial gachupin influence over my young college mind. “But Chata,” says dad wearing cop Ray-Bans with a paper bag in his right hand, “Our last name comes from the name ‘Veretti.’ No sabes que somos Italianos?” Of course we’re Italian. That’s why mom speaks Nahuatl like a sailor. I love how Mexicans always find a blue-eyed granny somewhere in our lineage, but never an Indio or Moor or Moreno. This ass is not Indian, I’ll tell you that much.

All I can tell you is that I was very at home when I arrived in Morocco in 2001. All black arching eyebrows and olive pink skin like mine. They were impressed with my gnawan music dancing abilities. I didn’t have it in me to tell them all their songs sounded just like cumbias.

* tocaya: a girl with the same name as me

by Vickie Vertiz
San Francisco, CA