A New Myth: Untethering My Name from White Folks’ Imaginations

“Names bind us to people, places, and histories. As the descendant of enslaved people, my name only goes so far.”

It is April 8, 2015, and I’m stuck to the dining room couch in my host family’s compound on the outskirts of Yaoundé watching French-dubbed Grey’s Anatomy reruns. This is not why I’m in Cameroon, but if you saw me today, you wouldn’t know otherwise. For the past four years, I’ve been traveling back and forth between this city and Oakland to work on my dissertation. But previous trips don’t stop plans I laid out in my prospectus from going awry, and this morning, phone calls have been made and missed. By noon, missed phone calls have turned into tentatively rescheduled meetings. As the humidity rests heavy on my back, marking a day full of potential with nowhere to put it, I watch Arizona stand in the middle of the Seattle airport and let go of Callie, the love of her life.

As the credits fall, my roommate Black bursts in from the hallway. For the past month, Black has become my self-appointed Bassa language instructor, and his lessons, like him, defy convention. Conjugations always happen in between full bites of ndole. Quizzes in the middle of pop-up manicures at the neighborhood bar over Castle beer.

“Victoria, your last name is Bassa,” he tells me.

I cock my neck back, laughing, my smile its own trick. I have never known Massie to be a common name. Often moving from one corner of North Carolina to the next, I learned to pair each new introduction with an explanation. By the time I was eight years old, “It’s I-E, not E-Y” would run off my tongue before anyone could ask the question. Years later, when swearing was common currency on teen tongues, I’d cut to the chase: “Don’t you see the ‘ass’ in Massie?”

I grew up hearing my name distorted in the mouths of strangers. Here, with Black, Massie rests easy. But my insecurity remains, because Black’s declaration digs deeper. Past the mispronunciation lies an origin story proving to be more fiction than non.

Names aren’t arbitrary. They bind us to people, places, and histories that persist long after their time has passed. As the descendant of enslaved people in America, my name only goes so far. In college, when a white editor asked me where my name is from, I had no answer. He asked me why, as if it isn’t obvious: I am the progeny of property. My name, a centuries-old branding that my person should always belong to other people.

What does it mean to face the possibility this might not be the case?

Hours later, Black and I sit in the living room for my lesson. Outside, the motos, like the rest of the family, have retreated to their private quarters. Inside, behind the rust-covered copper gate, the space for clarity holds steady between the pen in Black’s hand, my Moleskine, and the coffee table light. Black says there are American celebrities whose names, heard carefully, resonate in his mother tongue. His primary example: Rihanna. The spelling is not precise—“Ri Nyana”—but it’s the pronunciation and meaning that forge a tie that binds her to us here. To say her name, Black tells me, is to say someone “lacks respect.” How prophetic, I think, for a black woman refusing to be the subject of someone else’s imagination.

My name shortly follows. “Massie,” he writes out, underlining the letters for emphasis: “De la terre, Victoria ou Victoria De La Terre.” That is, to say my name is to say something is—that I am—“of the soil.”

Black repeats this again, each time a new upending. While learning new languages often highlight the limits of your own, this lesson seems to have little to do with syntax. Massie has always been tethered to the fickle imaginings of white men. Nonetheless, by way of an unexpected translation on the other side of the Atlantic, I can’t help but wonder what it means to rewrite my foundations, and disturb the white men who, for too long, have found solace in the cracks.

*

Before I came back to Cameroon, I spent every Monday with black genealogists in the belly of the Church of Latter Day Saints in DC suburbia. Most of my early experiences trying to trace my name back past people I never met involved learning the tricks of the trade. When the census led me nowhere, Ms. Shannon made sure to tell me to check ten pages before and after my family name’s first appearance. Ms. Robin pointed me to testate documents when birth certificates were not enough.

I saw the difficulty of piecing together the fragments our ancestors left behind. But, for black genealogists, it was understood that this wasn’t always by choice. One of the major tenets of genealogical research is that the answers you find depend on the questions you’re willing to ask. When race rears its head, some answers remain buried simply because of the identity of the person asking.

“Let me tell you about those trees,” Ms. Michelle told us one morning. “They’re only as good as the people who put it up.”

Ms. Michelle had hit a familiar roadblock. It’s true that digitized archives and websites like ancestry.com have made family searches more accessible and efficient than ever before. Genealogical trees are created and saved on the cloud without fear of their destruction, information readily shared with fellow family historians you’ve never met.

But not everyone is prepared to have their foundations reevaluated. Ms. Michelle found the great-granddaughter of the owner of the Mississippi plantation she tracked her family to. At first, the two exchanged pleasantries. Then Ms. Michelle shared her evidence. Immediately after, a day response rate turned into radio silence. A once public tree for everyone to see had been made private.

People whose origins have been erased against our will know our stories aren’t reducible to creative license. More often, it comes down to the power to wield the pen, with the reassurance that the tales you’ve told about the ones before you can’t be challenged. But for white people, the burden of proof rests differently. They enjoy the benefit of the doubt that what they’ve said, what they believe of themselves, is true—despite the evidence. And when the evidence speaks back, it’s easier to shut down the conversation to avoid accountability.

“They know who we are,” Ms. Michelle says. “They just don’t want to know themselves.”

*

On March 3, 1963, City Desk, Chicago’s popular Sunday-morning talk show, invited Malcolm X to the program. As host Jim Hurlbut explained, Malcolm was the featured guest on the panel to discuss the rising Black Muslim movement around the country. But the interview quickly revealed itself to be an interrogation when the first of the four other panelists, Len O’Connor, barely let a second pass after Hurlbut’s introduction before he asked Malcolm, “What is your real name?”

A generous interpretation would be O’Connor knows his subject: Malcolm was not born with the surname X. In his later conversion to Islam, drawing from then-mentor Elijah Muhammad, who extolled the importance of “resolving [one’s] identity,” Malcolm changed his surname to X to mark the names stolen from his family as a consequence of chattel slavery.

O’Connor’s urgency betrayed him. When Malcolm said his real name was Malcolm X, O’Connor balked, reframing his inquiry into a question of whether Malcolm’s name was “legal.” When Malcolm responded his name was legal to him, O’Connor pushed Malcolm to clarify if this is equally so in the eyes of the courts. Each response was met with its own deflection. One immovable force is met with a similarly immovable object, but the root of the attraction was laid bare.

If, as Gary Younge wrote, 1963 is remembered as the year that “defined the Civil Rights Movement,” it’s due to how black people planted their feet firmly, looked white supremacy in the eye, and dared America to turn away at its own peril. George Wallace declared “segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever,” and, six months later, saw the US marshals usher in James Hood and Vivian Malone, the first two black students enrolled at the University of Alabama, his alma mater, and a civil rights bill submitted to Congress by the White House.

Staged in a two-person debate on Malcolm’s surname was the same reckoning happening across America. The strategies for black liberation differed. But the fact remained that Malcolm, and folks like him, were no longer O’Connor’s to make. Nonetheless, in the quest to uncover Malcolm’s “real” name, O’Connor wasn’t interested in Malcolm’s answer; he needed Malcolm to answer to him. So as O’Connor asked Malcolm to describe his father’s “gifted last name,” Malcolm, with a smirk, must have relished his last words to the man sitting across from him: “I never acknowledge it whatsoever.”

*

We Massies are masters of myth. Only God and my grandmother, Mommie Gloria, know how long she actually walked this Earth because she legally changed the date of birth on her birth certificate. My great-grandfather, Samuel, was an AME preacher in Little Rock, Arkansas. And while he was, no doubt, a man of God, he was also, no less, a man skilled in missing his maker’s wrath by bending the truth just far enough to not break any commandments.

Call it vanity. Call it a proclivity for putting the word to work. This is my inheritance: an ability to, at the very least, tell stories. Even more so, the kind of stories that survive despite everything by not being able to be proven false.

I’ve looked back at Black’s language lesson often over the past two years, trying to figure out what to make of it. I did so when I watched Baltimore police block children from riding the bus home after Freddie Gray’s death and preemptively call it a riot. When I heard of the many deaths after, and the “riots” that followed them, too. When a man clinched the White House decrying the validity of his black predecessor. When a white colleague told me she was sorry on election night. When I saw neo-Nazis dressed in white polos, khakis, and the president’s campaign hats yell “blood and soil” in Charlottesville. Each remembrance, a new frame for refuge.

A part of dealing with the exhaustively consumptive force of whiteness is creating tales of family long before me who could have traced their footsteps along the Gulf of Guinea’s black sand beaches without chains or the prospect of burial at the bottom of shopping lists and white people’s shortcomings. They might have existed before we were traded at what remains of Bimbia’s ruins, in a world where the Atlantic never knew my blood type and a new world’s survival didn’t depend on it for fear of reckoning with the origins of its acquired taste. Sometimes, though, I wonder what good these fantasies are if they are deflections from the present under the guise of self-determination.

I recently asked Nathan, Black’s cousin, if what I had been told about my name was true. He said it wasn’t false. “Ma hisi” sounds like my last name when spoken quickly, he tells me. But my name, as Black laid out, does not exist.

And maybe this is not something to regret. A child born out of an abyss, I may never know where Massie could be located, beyond the unexpected linguistic resonances it bears. But therein lies the gateway for a new myth. The place where I start anew, taking up the pen that has been passed down to me. One that begins with plausible deniability a white man can’t match, asserting over him and his for the first time, “I’m not yours. And your name ain’t mine.”