by Pamela Sneed
Years later, I’m writing, performing, teaching. I still struggle with the aftershocks of abuse. As I finish this story, I am thinking of changing the title from History, instead dedicating it to all the Anna Maes of the world and calling it: For Me, Tina Turner, and All Black Women Survivors.
ILA
THE LAST TIME I’d heard my true birth name was in Boston, when I was back in town partying at a gay club. I must have been twenty-seven years old when this beautiful caramel-colored butch appeared. She walked up to me and said cruisingly, “What’s your name?”
“Pamela,” I answered, haughty and full of New York attitude.
“Oh,” she answered, disappointed. “I thought you might be this girl I knew once named Ila.”
Shocked that anyone outside my family could have known that name, I shouted at the top of my lungs, “It’s me, Ila,” ecstatic to hear my birth name.
“I’m Marion,” she said. “Remember, you hung out with my brothers, Troy and Tony?”
“Oh yeah,” I said laughingly, finally making the connection.
Silently, I marveled to myself at how Marion, once a tomboy, a little sister, had grown into the handsome butch who stood before me. I also marveled at how she survived the small homophobic Massachusetts town we’d grown up in.
“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 divorced my father, and I’m hard pressed to believe she’d have sent me back to the agency. But as a six-year-old hearing that terrible news delivered and undisputed by anyone, I believed what my stepmother told me, which she finalized by saying, “Don’t tell your father I told you. He wouldn’t want you to know.”
If I could physicalize how that news hit me—of my father not being my father and Ruthie not being my mother—I’d describe it as a crushing blow that sent me reeling into another stratosphere. Suddenly at six years old, the world I understood, thought was mine, was no longer true. I no longer belonged, nor had the key fundamental figures that any child needs to survive, a mother and a father. These facts were further verified by the fact that after my father remarried, Ruthie never came around, never rescued me as I’d always prayed she would.
My stepmother and I used to play a game of sorts, when my father went out; she would rifle through the paperwork in his top dresser drawer, looking for information about my identity. She came back one day and announced, “Your mother was 5' 10" and your father was 6' 4". She was light brown and he was dark-skinned. Their last name was Mills. He played basketball. They were from Virginia, but they came to Boston as students. They were young, that’s why they gave you up.”
It was top secret information. I had no way of verifying if what she said was true, but I held onto those descriptions for the rest of my life. If the analogy was drowning or trying to survive, their names were a raft tossed to me. Also, she said, don’t
ever search for them; it will kill your father.
There are two significant stories I must tell, both are important to my identity, and both involve waiting. Before my father met my stepmother and remarried, he was a single parent, a young man who wanted to play the field. For these reasons and also while he worked, my grandmother, his mother, Pearl, often babysat me. Once or twice a year, at school there was a PTA night where teachers gave interested parents in-person progress reports. I had been so good in kindergarten, I had the capacity to write and spell long before the school taught me, because of my father’s at-home lessons. He would sit me down at a table and teach me the alphabet. I copied him as he wrote out I-L-A. I know how important this was to my father, who didn’t have a high school diploma.
I could not wait for my father to go to the PTA night and for teachers to tell him how good I was. But the evening of the meeting he was on a date. In the living room of my grandmother’s house was a huge rectangular picture window. From it I saw down to the end of the street, the Daniels school park with the small hill we kids sled on during winter. I could see the solitary tree on the hill. As we grew up it was the tree we sat under and shared deep conversations, experienced a first kiss. From my grandmother’s window, I saw the entire side of Daniels elementary and junior high school. It was a red colonial building with a long Lego modern wing attached. Beneath my grandmother’s window was an old fashioned silver radiator. On the eve of the PTA meeting I perched my five-year-old self on the silver radiator, like an owl on a branch. I sat and stared out and looked for my father. Hours passed, my father never appeared until finally the school lights started to go out. Every time a light went out in the elementary school and then the junior high, disappointment fell onto my shoulders like two ton bricks. When my father finally arrived home, he was drunk and my grandmother, who I’d rarely seen angry towards him, said in a low voice, “She waited for you all night, why did you do this to her?” I couldn’t hear his response.
The other significant event which shaped me involved waiting for Ruthie, my first mother. Unlike on a PTA night, the waiting wasn’t contained to a few hours or an evening but extended decades, almost a lifetime. Ruthie had dark brown skin and moles that covered her face like freckles. She worked at a beauty shop. She was a hairdresser. In the fashion of many African American women of her time, she wore silver bangles that went up her arm almost to elbow, and were collected from different and exotic places like Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad. Once on a trip to Bermuda after she and my father divorced she bought me a silver bangle like hers, which she instructed should never be taken off. I was so impressed at that age of being able to be like my mother and having a bangle like hers. Eventually though, the bangle which I did take on and off, bent and was lost.
When my father first remarried, Ruthie stayed in contact. There were gifts, occasional cards, but eventually without warning or explanation they stopped coming. I knew that I shouldn’t ask why. So, I sat down by the window like the same little girl perched on a radiator on a PTA night and waited for my mother.
For the seventeen years I lived in my parent’s house, I sat often in front of the window on the corner of my bed and dreamt I saw Ruthie, my mother coming up the drive to rescue me. Pretty close to my eighteenth birthday I realized Ruthie would never appear and that dream like lights in the elementary school on PTA night long ago, faded. I suppose the final nail in the coffin my relationship with Ruthie came when my stepmother confessed without guilt to having burnt all of my baby pictures, pictures of Ruthie and me, which attested to life before her.
My name and how much I disliked it was the only thing my stepmother ever paid attention to. When I came home in 5th grade complaining about teachers and boys calling me, “Illaahh,” for some reason she listened. Truthfully, I did not dislike my name, and she could have explained to me then the power and beauty of being different. She could have told me that honoring my name would be the first step in a courageous and lifelong journey. She could have held me as social workers and parents did in those PBS after school specials about troubled teens, and she could have said, you’re special my dear and your name is part of who you are. Someone, somewhere a long time ago loved you very much to give you a name like Ila.
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
<
br /> 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 founders of a new social and literary movement,
busy writing, publishing, building foundations and networks
to employ future generations, while changing the society we knew,
we were oblivious and unprepared when in the mid-’80s
a devastating and unexplained phenomena struck, eventually called AIDS
like new homeowners watching a whirlwind tornado
destroy dreams of home, camaraderie, and friendship
Like the recent Black populous of Katrina and Haiti
