Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I had a difficult time growing up with the name Major. While Jackson is an unofficial, black royal surname in America, my first name invites all kinds of tomfoolery. I’ve heard all the jokes, know all the puns. Long before I read the book, one teacher teasingly mocked Major Major Major Major, the protagonist in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Another sang “Ground control to Major Jackson.” Friends joked, you’re a major pain in the . . . and on it went.

I did not begin to appreciate my given name until I met the late writer Kristen Hunter Lattany, who exclaimed, Oh, a Major! Your parents blessed you with a “power” name! She explained to me that, in the absence of political agency and social standing, black families ennobled their children with names such as Caesar, Rome, and Prince, with the intention they would grow into the strength of those titles. I thought of a high school best friend, King Britt, now, a legendary DJ, educator, and record producer.

Today, I carry a great deal of pride in my name. Several Majors populate my family tree. A census document dating back to the mid-1800s shows Major Gooch, father of Major Gooch, Jr., the great-grandfather whom I am directly named after. He was the son of Charles Gooch, member of the 16th Regiment, United States Colored Infantry, who fought in the Battle of Nashville in 1864, only a handful of miles from where I now live and write.

Names carry family histories, maybe even indicate what region of the country we reside in, or from where our ancestors traveled. This is why it comes as an affront when someone fails to learn how to say our name or worse, makes up a name for us, like my fourth-grade teacher who, instead of learning to pronounce the “ethnic” names of her students, renamed all of us after French painters.

Today’s poem highlights those psychic demands of integrating into a society while carrying our names, what we go through in order not to feel othered or marginal.

from BOOK OF THE OTHER
by Truong Tran

These things, they are just things. You are told all your life to
develop a thick skin, that you should not take these things so 
seriously. These things, these moments, they are just things in
the greater scheme of things, so what if you are consistently
called by your last name?—it is easier to pronounce—it is just
a small thing. These things, they accumulate, they stick, they
cling to your clothing, your skin, they alter your thinking, they
affect your seeing, your way of being. You wake up one day.
You look in the mirror. You have grown a thick skin, and the 
you in the mirror is no longer you. One day, in the third period 
on the first day of class, you decide to change your name to
Tom. You do not care for the name, not in the slightest. It is
easy to spell. It is easy to say. You will have plenty of time to 
regret your choices. It is just a thing, you tell yourself. You
carry these things. They are placed on you. They are thrown at
you. You walk through life. You are carrying these things. You
anticipate a time when someone is compelled to correct your
grammar; again it happens, and you collapse under the weight.
You are buried beneath a lifetime of these things.

“from BOOK OF THE OTHER” by Truong Tran from BOOK OF THE OTHER © 2021 Truong Tran. Used by permission of kaya press.