My Name

I was named after a girl that my mother didnt like. She was a red-boned, long-haired

girl in white knee socks and a fresh pleated skirt with a country accent that everybody picked

on. After the bell rang she ran home from school with rowdy, rough kids from the west side of

town nipping at the heels of her polished bucks. Where you runnin, Lettuce? they yelled, but

she had cleared the the flight of what seemed like a thousand stairs and was safely inside

before could hear the daily slaughtering of her name. When she hung her coat on the wooden

coatrack in the hall, she was just, Celetta; and now so am I: Celetta Motumia Williams.

Let me say, for years I hated my middle name; it was a source of pride for my mother, a

name that to her celebrated the new found black is beautiful, Black Pride, Black Panther, pro-

Africa agenda. The semester of Swahili, left her with the desire to push a Black to Africa

agenda right into my middle name. She always told me that it meant lady but at the age of 10,

I didnt get it. My last name was my fathers and even after they divorced and I didnt see him

regularly because of his new wife and kid, it was the one thing that I got to keep.

My family always called me by my name, I didnt have nicknames, I didnt understand

why, because I would have gladly traded in all of my names for just one. Through the years

some tried to assign nicknames: CC, Letta but none seemed to stick. I even tried to call

myself Lettie-Bo in the early eighties and Essence was a self-ascribed MC but nothing stuck.

What I did get, was a ton of mispronunciations and batterings of my first name; nobody, ever

knew my middle one until I could handle the jokes that would follow. Then in 1988, it all

changed. Catching the bus home from Castlemont High and walking to my house, I would

always be greeted by men of all ages with, Mizlady, why dont you smile? They said it so much

that I began to adopt it as my nickname and when people would ask my name, particularly boys,

Mizlady was my reply.

Later in life, after I had my first child my mother confessed that she named my after that

girl in high school because she actually admired her. She was jealous of how pretty and smart
 My Name

she was and one day she stopped being one of her tormentors and stood up for her; beating up

several of the kids that didnt understand the reason for her sudden change of heart. At first, I

was puzzled but I began to understand. Her confession helped me to not only embrace that

name by my middle name too and I became proud to have a name that left me with something

to aspire to. Now, at 45, I am comfortable with being confident in my beauty and my brains and

the the fact that I am not only a woman, Im a Lady and her foresight has given me something

to live up to. Thanks mom.