Instead my stepmother said, “Let’s change it. Let’s change your name,” and that’s when we took on the project of searching through baby books for a new name. It was something we did together, and I suppose in retrospect that I was also desperate to be my stepmother’s daughter. Desperate to have her regard and pay attention to me, to be the daughter she dreamt of having with my father, to be that pretty girl who would surely have been light-skinned and caramel-colored with good hair, who would have been good, unlike me who could never seem to fit in, fly straight, or win her love and approval.
We were sitting in the familiar place, her on the couch, and me on the brown recliner. It’s a choice, she’d said, after narrowing down hundreds of names in the baby books, between Pamela and Leslie. I wavered. “Leslie,” I said. “Les-lee,” I said sounding it out like some student in an ESL class, but for some reason Pamela had the ring of a princess. “Pamela,” I said. “I want my name to be Pamela.”
From that day forward, my name was made official in the courts, I underwent a name-changing ceremony, and my stepmother was officially named my legal guardian with her name added to my fictitious birth certificate. This is primarily how the story ends, with me becoming Pamela, and leaving my name like a country of birth behind. Sometimes I think of changing it back, but Ila is dead. I’ve grown up and formed an identity as Pamela—a poet, performer, teacher—but every so often I think of my name and my mind drifts to a girl I met in college, a white girl named Ananda, whose family and she were forced to leave South Africa during the apartheid era. They were exiles who lost everything coming to America and I remember every time Ananda spoke of her homeland, her eyes welled up with tears, throat croaked with longing.
I disliked Ananda. In every class I challenged her, “How can you only speak of yourself, your maid named Beauty, and the land you left behind when every day Black people fight and die for basic rights.” The white teachers coddled her, pulled me aside after class, said, “Leave her alone, she’s not on your level.” Now I look back and every so often like the fruit and guava of Ananda’s homeland I miss Ila, I miss that little girl, I miss my father calling me Ila on every occasion up until my eighteenth birthday, almost as if he couldn’t help it. He never fully accepted the name Pamela. It was the way he understood me and what made me his.
I miss my aunt and grandmother calling me Ila, pronounced with a Southern twang which sounded like Allah, substituting the I sound for an A and drawing out the first A so it sounded like God. “Alllaaah,” I’d hear ringing out from the front door of my grandmother’s house Allah come here.
“Yes Ma’am,” I’d say, answering back respectfully. Perhaps this is why I was so happy in the gay club when that girl called me Ila. It was the last time anyone who knew me then called me Ila, like someone from a different era, and I received it like a gift, a special part of home and a secret past only a few can attest to.
EPILOGUE:
Recently I took a group of students on a class trip to Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City. A middle-aged, brown-skinned Black man approached and asked, “Are you Pamela?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking he was a stranger. Instead, he was a second cousin I hadn’t seen in more than thirty years.
“It’s me, Reese,” he said. “I knew it was you.”
For a moment the part of me I thought dead came back.
He said again, “I just knew it was you, Ila."
FUNERAL DIVA
During the ’80s, that seemingly idyllic time when
men men girls girls
I was part of a Black lesbian and gay movement.
I don’t know how or where it came from
but a lot of us found ourselves in New York City moving
from small town safety
outer boroughs and families
with hopes of discovering the big apple.
At this time, great Black lesbian warrior poet, essayist,
and foremother Audre Lorde was a living entity
like pioneering Black gay author James Baldwin, she gave voice
to an identity once shrouded like a widow behind the veil of secrecy and silence.
And it was Audre Lorde alongside James Baldwin whose fighting and words
birthed a generation of somewhat nameless travelers
into what I have titled unofficially as a Black lesbian and gay
literary and poetic movement.
It was the year 1986 when Other Countries, a literary troupe
for Black gay male writers formed.
In 1989, I had just finished college and had begun to make my name
as a Black lesbian poet.
A young, impressionable, and burgeoning star, it was natural
I gravitated toward Other Countries
reminiscent of the ’60s Black Power Movement
I saw each collective member as a brother.
In return, I became their sister.
At the time, I also worked at an agency for lesbian and gay youth and
was becoming what is called a prominent figure
Like a job which requires: wardrobe, good politics, poetry,
but above all willingness, readiness, and ability to speak
and speak I did.
As activists and
