Raising Bean

Essays on Laughing and Living

W. S. Penn

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780814349311
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Offered in the oral traditions of the Nez Perce, Native American writer W. S. Penn records the conversations he held with his granddaughter, lovingly referred to as "Bean, " as he guided her toward adulthood while confronting society's interest in possessions, fairness, and status. Drawing on his own family history and Native mythology, Penn charts a way through life where each endeavor is a journey—an opportunity to love, to learn, or to interact—rather than the means to a prize at the end. Divided into five parts, Penn addresses topics such as the power of words, race and identity, school, and how to be. In the essay "In the Nick of Names, " Penn takes an amused look at the words we use for people and how their power, real or imagined, can alter our perception of an entire group. "To Have and On Hold" is an essay about wanting to assimilate into a group but at the risk of losing a good bit of yourself. "A Harvest Moon" is a humorous anecdote about a Native grandfather visiting his granddaughter's classroom and the absurdities of being a professional Indian. "Not Nobody" uses "Be All that You Can Be Week" at Bean's school to reveal the lessons and advantages of being a "nobody." In "From Paper to Person, " Penn imagines the joy that may come to Bean when she spends time with her Paper People—three-foot-tall drawings, mounted on stiff cardboard—and as she grows into a young woman like her mom, able to say she is a person who is happy with what she has and not sorry for what she doesn't. Comical and engaging, the essays in Raising Bean will appeal to readers of all backgrounds and interests, especially those with a curiosity in language, perception, humor, and the ways in which Native people guide their families and friends with stories.

1

The Power of Words—Their Uses and Meanings

IN THE NICK OF NAMES

Names have power. Telling someone your name grants them power over you.

Imagine stepping off a curb crossing against the light because it’s raining and getting soaked expands your sense of entitlement enough so that you feel you don’t have to obey mundane regressions like signals or crosswalks. Just as you get fully into the first lane (it’s a four-lane road), your friend (or enemy) calls out, “Hey, Thom!”

Assuming that your name is “Tom,” which your parents purposely misspelled to make you unique, one of only a thousand or so “Thoms” who are not named “Thomas,” you pause, hesitate, even stop, only to be flattened abruptly like a cake in the mail by a CATA bus intent on keeping its schedule, which, unable to match your expected entitlement, skids to a halt with its right rear tire crushing your empty noggin.

That’s one kind of power.

There’s another, deeper power. Knowing your name allows other people to know a lot about you, possibly even to know a good deal about your parents.

Last names, family names, are complicated. They often come from the deepest past. “Burton,” for example, may originate with a family that lived on a burr or hill who, because they built no walls to keep out immigrants, ended up not occupying Wall Street but a whole town, a “borough town,” which, given the British inability with Shakespearean syllabics, got lazily shortened to “Bur-ton.” Others, like Shoemaker or Tailor or Piddler, Smith, or Brown come mainly from historical activities. While Kaashounds are furry dogs who come from cheese lovers or makers, cheesy people names include Kaasbrook, Kaasmann, and Bleukaas who, way back when, got moldy because they were always blue and teary. Kaashole has, over the centuries, evolved to Pyehole as cheese blintzes went to cheese pies to blueberry pie, and finally to four and twenty blackbird pie. Hedkaas remains in use, as there seems to be a lot of those around.

That’s all old hat, or Old Felter, most of whom were mad as hatters from mercury poisoning. What about modern names?

Not much has changed. People still fall in and out of love and make war while saying “Make love, not war.” They make babies or at least have them constructed and delivered by FedEx and farmed out to caregivers who could give a, well, care.

Oddly enough, the ones who iterate slogans like “Make love, not war” are the very people who think love is constructed and not developed by constant contact and effort. For an example, take a puppy, brought home from the puppy mill to pee and shit all over your plush white carpet until you do one of two things: you successfully house-train it, or you lock it outside where it can poop and pee to its heart’s content until winter, at which point you have to make a decision, leave it out to freeze, or hire someone else to train it before your house starts to smell like a rest home with its underpinning of bodily odors faintly hidden beneath the chemical veneer of bleach.

Contemporary people often treat their infants like puppies, saying with expectant glee, “We’re having a baby.” The blank you are. She is pregnant, yes, and she will deliver the bowling ball to the alley in proper measure when it is time. The male of the species sits on his ass or makes frequent trips to the ice chip machine, hopefully during the commercials on Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night, or Friday night football. Saturday is the Sabbath before Superbowl Sunday, and if his wife passes that bowling ball on the Sabbath, he may want to name it “Sabbath,” not knowing that “Sabbath” comes from words that mean “to rest” or “to cease,” which is why an American might cease to watch grown (and boy are they, bigger than barns) men give one another head injuries and, failing that, simply cripple them for life (which is called “not staying within yourself”).

Anyway, suddenly, there is little Sab (no kid wants to go by “Sabbath” for fear that he’ll start to sound like a dark Goth rock band). You are happy to have its name all chosen—it could be a girl or boy as “Sab” is pretty neutral like “Hay-den” (or “Barn”), “Taylor,” “Tinker,” “Soljure,” and “Spie” (which latter is either secretive or hangs red-ily from trees). While the woman ceases and rests, making Sabbath’s birthday the only freaking day for the next twenty or thirty years on which she will get to cease doing and rest up, Padre, Daddy, the Mister and Tool of the baby-making trade will change the original diaper, the one filled beyond all diapery measures with a gray goo called meconium; he’ll feel all brave and sacrificing in doing it, too.

Now here’s the problem, Bean. Names mean. They describe for the rest of the world either a relationship to family or an expectation—accidentally, perhaps—of how that baby may be, the how being vastly more important than what, why, or wherefore.

So if you name your kid “Sabbath,” as there is probably no ancestor with a similar name (except Aunt Friday who hangs around oil drum fires outside Yankee Stadium), you should not be surprised if little Sab grows up ceasing and resting and eventually ends up living in your basement when he’s forty, with the new puppy. Accidental or not, kids often—with uncanny, innate, and unarticulated purpose—grow up to inhabit their names, to become the meaning their names have given them for all of their available lives.

Sure, “Morts” can grow up to be humorists, but it will be a dark humor, a Jewish humor. The rest will most likely become Morticians (they’re fun, the oily floggers of expensive boxes in which to bury what will become worms or, if you are Xtian, dust returned to the great vat of dust hanging about with old Ashes) or Mortgage Bankers gauging your ability to pay usurious sums (again, nice people, but you don’t go to your bank dressed to party), or preachers promising ImMortality in the face of climate change or Jim Jones.

In part, at least, growing up to inhabit your name involves the way people respond to the name you hand them to use, in addition to the things you begin to accept as though you know them.

Can LaVapide become anything more than Vapid?

Or how about little Lutheran Zoë whose parents named her Life, after she cuts the cords using the sharp edges of agendas she picks up from the dustbin of schooling, calls herself “Vita,” and starts hanging around doing Lucky Charms with Mort? Vita “feels” different (what kid doesn’t?) and instead of enduring or surviving the way Life does or ought to do, she finds excuses for why she feels different, forgets that she is not unlike two billion other kids (only a million or so who are actually called “Life,” however). She gets angry at her professor because on the first day of class he refers to her as “she” and not “Z.” When she leaves and does not come back, she grants new Life to her professor because who the bloody eff wants “Z” in his class who demonstratively insists that the university build special rooms for their alphabets of slight and insult.

The professor’s response (oh, not by the U, which wants to pretend to diversify while it doesn’t tolerate opinions not in agreement with the common tone and allows or encourages Black kids to all live in the same dormitory so that they won’t feel any more uncomfortable than the White kids who would have been their roommates) ought to be like President Obama’s grandmother’s: “Grow up.”

What about the purposefully different names? They often begin with a negative: I do not want my son to be like Uncle Mort who mutters “I’m sorry for your loss” over the Thanksgiving turkey.

I don’t want my son to be like me or, worse, like his grandfather whose name I bear, though being like his great-grandfather would be something of a plus. I don’t want my daughter or son to wear a name that descends from the assignment of names by slavers to people ripped from their homes and dragged to the New World (which was an awful lot like the Old World, only without cheap labor, or the Present World, which uses hand-wringing as a form of racial justice).

This latter at least has a historical reason. Lots of Indian kids were shunted into the auditoria of Indian schools and, faced with a blackboard listing decent “White” names, were made to pick one. For the parents to want to give them an Indian name that means “Thunder Rising” would be ridiculous only because the child would thereby be condemned to a disproportionate amount of teasing. Parents all want their offspring to be unique, but unique means different, and different can be dire for a kid. Thunder goes around thinking, “I’m unique” when really it is only his name that’s unique and he’s rather run-of-the-mill which highlights how not-unique he is (there is no “more” or “less” unique; you either are or you aren’t).

Maybe a name ought not to try to attempt to create a unique little blob of protoplasm. Maybe a parent seeking a good name for his blob ought to seek connection, place, occurrence.

I mentioned little Sabbath above and made some fun of it, but to recognize the day of the week upon which a child is born is common around the world. Do you know how many African names from a variety of places and countries note that the child was born on a particular day of the week (Aba, Abeeku, Abeena)? So maybe all that is amusing about Sabbath is that it’s the quasi-religious aspect of the poor kid’s name, fenced into a country in which everybody knows that the Sabbath is on Sunday.

Maybe a name ought to join the child into the swimming ebb and flow of life, ought to grant the child as well as his trusted, name-knowing friend a sense of who he is in the great background of ongoing life, of how we might expect him to be. Martin may be “warlike,” but that doesn’t mean that the continuous battle he fought had to be violent, and besides, his middle name, “Lothar,” meant what he was, a “hero of the people.” Dr. King’s parents (at least I doubt it) did not sit down and say, “Let’s see, we want this baby to be unique so we’ll give him a name that is relatively common and undistinguished and only by becoming more, by respecting what he is taught, by enduring and evaluating what he has suffered, will he one day become important enough to get a day named after him.” Dr. King’s parents had no way to know that he would one day become a “doctor,” that through hard work and learning he would teach us all what real oratory and leadership and meaning sound like. But they may have known that having a name like Martin Luther would at the very least make him aware of what can come by nailing ninety-five theses up on the door of a church. They put “Martin Luther” out there and let him walk right into it, for which we are all grateful, and for which we are all lucky, and for which we need not only understand the power of names but also how the name becomes powerful.

Nowadays, this kind of naming, this who-you-are part of, has been turned on its head. Often, it does not tell who you are (or are becoming) but who your parents hope you may become. Sometimes the thinking behind naming is negative: we don’t want little Themba to grow up like Uncle Mort. Moreover, it reveals just how simpleminded your parents may be and whether or not they know how to spell: “Taylor” is still pretty much “Tailor,” but “Taylore,” with accentuated emphasis on the “lore,” means only that your parents are foolish enough to fantasize that misspelling “Taylor” will make you unique, unlike the five hundred other Taylors on the email system of whatever college or junior college to which your lack of “lore” will get you admitted. These are probably people who hear a sportsman or woman talk about “staying within oneself” and think, “Wow, that is right, and so wise,” the same people who fall for the trick of tax cuts wherein the rich save a million or two while they save enough to purchase McDonald’s milkshakes all around.

“I know, let’s name him or her Taylor.”

“Great, Bob. Except I don’t want her or him growing up to be just like all the other Taylors in the world.”

“So how ’bout we stay within ourselves and call it ‘Tay-LORE.’”

“Oh, Bob. You’re so smart.”

“Thanks. And while we’re at it, let’s take the hundred bucks we saved on taxes and blow it on a splurge at Micky D’s.”

“You’re so sweet. And here I was worried that you’d want to waste it on a yacht or maybe a Learjet or a new window for the front of our travel trailer.”

Fewer and fewer young parents don’t name their children after blood relations to recognize and acknowledge the fact that you, like me, are not merely a product of people past but also a continuation of them and that it is our individual responsibility to polish the name and keep it bright.

Instead, parents consult lists of athletes, celebrities, or pop stars with the magical hope that little Wilde Bonnet (pronounced “WILL-dah Bone-AY”) will naturally, without work or effort, suffering, or endurance, become rich and famous. They try to use the inverted power of names that mean to propel little Wilde Bonnet into the world of success, which they confuse with money—as in “He cheats and lies, but he lives in a tower and has more money than Croesus, so he must be successful”—and without ever questioning whether or not being Midas (the king, not the muffler) is worthwhile, fun, or meaningful.

A name should not be something given or assigned but something acquired. Earned. It’s not a gift: “Here, little Taylore, go and be cute and rich”; it cannot express much more than the attitudes of the parents. It’s a burden, something that must be lived up to, modified in personal ways, and earned. The name “Taylore” derives, probably, from the occupation of Taylore’s forebears, not from an expectation of uniqueness.

What if, growing up, Taylore accidentally reads a book or two that isn’t self-help, confessional memoirs, magical beasts, or the possibilities of space travel (and the concurrent possibilities of becoming robotic, a controlled “base” of numbered voters)? What if she, he, or it decides that sh/e/it would rather be happy than rich or that “contented” is not the same as “complacent” or that “noncomplacent” (ah, Diogenes!) might in fact lead into the spa of contentedness? What if sh/e/it actually gets off its butt and leaves the television to go out of the cave and realizes that the shadow on the technological screen is the shadow formed by all the people sitting dumbfounded before Fox News, defined by the light of entertainment and money, and that it is meaningless?

Ought sh/e/it to change its name? Is it even possible for little sh/e/it to change its name? If it has a mind that is mindful, sh/e/it may never again look at Fox News or the shadows of Fox’s faithful viewers the same again. It will always be aware of the elusiveness of illusion. Sh/e/it can’t change itself by changing its name, but sh/e/it can with effort become something more than s/h/it.

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I remember in college in the over-berated sixties, a woman I went out with told me that I ought to go by “Liam.”

“Well,” I thought, “I am not Irish and I am not Liam.”

You can’t just change your name and become someone else. No more than you can name someone in the hope that he or she will grow into it. Rather, you inherit (Latin heres, “heir”) your name and then earn it and make it your own. Else you end up a contradiction caught in a falsehood. Sigurd may name his boy Sigurdsson; if he names him Sigurdssdottir—well, you see the difficulty? If Sigurdssdottir then marries Helgudsdottir, what will they name their son?

“I don’t want him to be William the Fourth.”

Fair enough. (A numeral isn’t going to change things. I mean, so what if Sigurdsson is Sigurdssotherson?) But William he is. We can give him his maternal grandfather’s name as a middle name, thereby recognizing the two genetic and moral strains, the Indian and the Italian—and indeed, he will be both.

Like these formal names, “Nick” names are often bestowed out of affection or perception. Nic...