“You don’t still live there?” I asked.
“No, no, I’m in college. Well,” she said, walking away, “Nice seeing you again, Ila.”
It’s difficult to explain my name change, to say I was born under another name and had a different identity. It’s difficult because the story involves not just me, but my family, primarily my father and his second wife, who thought changing my name was a good idea.
“Ill-ahhh,” my fifth grade homeroom teacher, the red haired and mustached Mr. Mastriani pronounced laughingly (Ill-ahhh sounding like killahhh minus the K) for the entertainment of my fifth grade class.
“Ila not Ill-aahh,” I said correcting him. I think he’d done that more than once, pronounced my name incorrectly for the benefit of the class. It was a technique designed to keep me in line, because of all the fifth grade girls in his class, I was the most boisterous and outspoken. His mantra was make a joke of the kids first, before they make one of you.
“Ill-ahhh-Sneeze,” the fifth grade boys called me, embellished with a “ka-chew” for sneeze. “Ill-ahhh, the jolly green giant, and Hey Stretch,” they said, probably because at age eleven, I was already 5'10", towering above my classmates. As if imagining I existed at a different altitude, they yelled “How’s the air up there?”
In fifth grade I had wanted to fit in, belong, in size and shape and attitude to look like the girls in my classroom. They were all white, with varying shades of blonde, brunette, and occasionally red hair. There was Laura, dark haired and Jewish, and Robin, a raven-haired beauty. There was Marlene, and her younger sister who was severely pigeon-toed, whose parents spoiled them. There was Terry, an Italian girl whom we kids visited after school and whose mother was famous for making something called, “sauce.” There was Deborah with long strawberry blonde hair, whom I taunted and put gum into her hair, which resulted in her having to cut it. They were all monstrously good. I, on the other hand, was dark-skinned, Black and unruly.
It was in fifth grade, the year that my name changed when I’d started acting out. I rebelled, talked back to authority, bonded with boys, and tried as best I could to make teachers like Mr. Mastriani miserable. I also terrorized the French teacher Mr. Blanch who wore a blonde toupee and made us conjugate verbs in rhythm. He would say, “Répétez, s’il vous plait,” and then bang his ruler on a desk for us to keep time like a drill sergeant. “Un deux trois quatre cinq six sept huit neuf …” I led the disruption with fart noises, paper planes, passing notes, and frequently got tossed out. In fifth grade, around my name change, is the time I’d secretly begun to tear my hair out in patches and chew strands. Fifth grade is the time I began to have bald spots and needed to wear a wig. It all began in fifth grade, when my name was changed.
As far as I know, I was born into the world as Ila Levette Sneed. The surname came later. This is as far as I know because for child adoptees, birth certificates are fictitious. They never reveal the mother’s or father’s name, nor the precise hour and exact location of the child’s birth. These important facts are intentionally left out, stored in sealed records in government offices for the purpose of protecting and insuring the anonymity of the birth parent’s identity. I can only assume my birth mother named me, having no other gift to offer. She named me “Ila,” a special name for a girl she’d have to give away.
Yes, Ila is uncommon, and rarely if ever in my adult travels have I heard of anyone called by the same name. I presume it was my birth mother who named me, but maybe not. Perhaps in the adoption agency where I’d stayed for two years until adoption, I had a special friend. Perhaps it was like in a made-for-TV movie, when a nurse or social worker befriended me and named me “Ila.” Perhaps the name Ila was a gift bestowed upon me for what they sensed would be an extraordinary human journey. I have no factual information about that time. As far as I know, life began with my father, the man who adopted me, and his first wife Ruthie, both of whom were and are to this day secretive about my origins.
It was reported to me by my stepmother, whom my father married after Ruthie, that upon meeting me at two years old, I’d run up to him in the adoption agency and said, “Daddy,” flung my arms around him, though he was at that time a complete stranger. Something about me must have clicked for him also, because I was the one out of all the children in the world he picked. My father has never told me any of this history, and if it were up to him, I wouldn’t even know this much. He never wanted me to know of my adoption, nor of life and history before him. It was my stepmother who told me.
“I know you think he’s your father but he isn’t, and Ruthie isn’t your real mother.” I was standing in the mouth of a long hallway that connected the kitchen to the bathroom and bedrooms in our apartment. I was six years old, speechless, and trying to piece the story like broken shards together. I was shattered, and had no way to understand it all. “If it weren’t for your father and I, Ruthie would have sent you back to the adoption agency.” Ruthie and my father had divorced two years previously. I understand now that my stepmother was jealous of my relationship to Ruthie. I understand now in a twisted battle for custody and ownership, she wanted to destroy any ties I had had to Ruthie.
I had lived with Ruthie for a short time after she’d
