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Martyr for a Name
Posted on August 7, 2003 in Book of Days
Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.
Today’s topic: Someone is calling your name.
Yesterday, at the Wednesday writers when I declared one of the subjects to be “vacations from your childhood”, one of the group members balked. It was an ugly subject filled with ugly memories for her. When I read my piece aloud, she said ‘Yes, mine was similar to that’ and shared nothing more from what she wrote. It’s hard to talk about this kind of thing when you’re surrounded by people who had happy childhoods, running organically healthy, wonderful families in their adulthood. You get the feeling that they are saying ‘Whoa! Keep this guy/gal away from my kids!‘ Despite all the insistance on happy talk, despite the people who urge me to think about the starving people in Africa as a panacea to my personal pain (I’m all for feeding the starving in Africa, for the record), I keep writing. It hurts like hell, but it gets it out.
I had a name when I was young and it was mine. It was spelled J O E L and pronounced “Joel”. Not Joe. Joel.
Teachers got it wrong. But that was okay, because teachers showed us how to conform with the mainstream. Catholicism’s mainstream had no place for boys with Hebrew names. Joe was OK because it was short for Joseph, who was a Christian (despite the absence of baptismal records). “What saint are you named after?” the kids would ask me. We checked the hagiographies. No St. Joel in there. Perhaps I would be the first? I offered. This brought laughs because everyone knew that the class crybaby wouldn’t be going to heaven. It was written somewhere, they supposed. Or it was common knowledge.
My name was Joel. My mother respected this and always called me by it. My father, always marking my sensitivities, took to calling me “Giuseppe”. Why the Italianization of Joseph, I don’t know. I wasn’t Joseph and I certainly wasn’t “Joe Seppy”. I was “Joel”.
The old Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary that we owned had a list of names and their meanings in an appendix. Joel was in there. It meant “The Lord is God”. I further learned that Joel was a prophet. (I sometimes say that I have “a prophetable name” but few — even those literate in the Bible — ever get the pun when I say it aloud.) “Only a minor prophet”, my brother scoffed. Robert, now there was a noble name and there was a St. Robert, he’d say. Several of them, in fact. But no St. Joel.
The dictionary entry and the fact that a man of God had bore the name gave me new pride. I would not thereafter allow anyone to call me “Joe” or “Joseph”. I was Joel.
One day, my father called me from one end of his garden to the other. “Giuseppe! Giuseppe get over here.” I didn’t come. He was digging something and needed a shorter back to haul the dirt away. “Giuseppe! Get your ass over here.”
No, I resolved. That was not my name. You didn’t have to come to any name but the one you’d been given. He was my father. He knew what my real name was.
The giant of my youth stamped across the crew-cut, ever yellow-green lawn. “When I call you, you get your ass over here.” I dishonored him by saying “My name is not Joe Seppy! You call me Joel!”
This is not one of those happy endings where the father sees the error of his ways and a new friendship blooms between him and his son. Hands that spanned a width wider than saucers came down about my head and shoulders. A foot found its way into the crack of my buttocks. “My name is not Giuseppe! My name is Joel!” I don’t remember how long the beating lasted. But my resolve remained and I held my ground. I became a martyr for my name. All that was lacking was death and an ethereal hand bearing roses to show my father that he was persecuting an innocent.
Want to participate? First either get yourself a copy of A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves or read these guidelines. Then either check in to see what the prompt for the day is or read along in the book.
Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about something that was stolen.
