She Who Must Be Named

In pursuit of a personal identity

“Vanessa?” said the bartender, reading my name off the card that I had given her. “Anything else for you today?”

I briefly wonder if it’s worth it to correct her. I haven’t gone by Vanessa in about 20 years. It almost doesn’t seem like my name anymore. But, my banks, HR managers, and apparently bartenders know me as Vanessa, not knowing to call me by my much more pronounceable middle name.

I smile at her. “No, thanks,” I say.

My parents named me for actor Vanessa Redgrave and her mother Rachel Kempson. They were and still are big fans of the arts, and I certainly took well to being named after actors, working in theatre and film throughout my career. When I started school in Pennsylvania, some peers and teachers struggled to pronounce the first name and insisted on misspelling the middle name, but no one made a big deal about it. Then we moved south.

There, I, a weird Yankee girl among a bunch of Southern darlings, was ruthlessly picked on at school. It didn’t help that I, in a small Georgia town deeply afflicted with racism and de facto segregation, had a name that, in the area, was primarily used by people of color. While my white classmates mocked me for my “ethnic” name and called me things like “Banessa” (???), my POC classmates seemed to think…