"That Ain't Your Name": An Engaged Identity and Other Gifts from a Dysfunctional Southern Family

An article from Southern Cultures 18:4, Winter 2012

Wade Clark Roof

• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781469608433
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

“It was not until 1946 when my grandmother received a copy of the revised birth certificate in the mail from my father and blurted out to me ‘That ain’t your name,’ that I really became aware of the problems. She quickly added, ‘Your mother, she never got it right neither.’”

This article appears in the Winter 2012 issue of Southern Cultures. The full issue is also available as an ebook.

Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center for the Study of the American South.

ESSAY
“That Ain’t Your Name”

An Engaged Identity and Other Gifts from a Dysfunctional Southern Family

by Wade Clark Roof

“No southerner speaks about their region without mentioning family.”
—William R. Ferris¹

“There was no escaping the feeling that you’re an oddity, not quite in the way of Johnny Cash’s ‘boy named Sue,’ yet peculiar enough, like a bastard child or abandoned baby, to require an introduction singling you out as different.” Courtesy of Wade Clark Roof (here, at age 3).

FAMILY

The family saga as a literary form is common in much southern literature. Families are viewed as arenas where deep conflicts and mixed emotions play out, often across generations; where people’s identities and values are linked to a tragic past; where ties to the land are strong and a sense of providential order and destiny prevails; and where black and white, the poor and the privileged are inextricably bound.

My own family story revolves around a succession of names on my three birth certificates. The first lists me as Wayne Clark Roof, given to me at birth in Columbia, South Carolina. Presumably, my mother wanted me to have my father’s name, Wade, along with her family name, Clark; but either she misunderstood his middle name or the nurse failed to record it correctly, I’ll never know. A second certificate, which my father secured as a correction seven years later, identifies me as Clarkie Wade Roof. Divorced from my mother and with the help of a Navy lawyer while serving during World War II, he correctly substituted Wade for Wayne but reversed the order of names and replaced Clark with the little boyish nickname people called me then. Why he did this is not clear, except that it gave my name a rhyming sound like his—Colie Wade—and he liked rhymes; or perhaps it was out of the anger toward my mother and the other Clarks.

If all that wasn’t confusing enough, when I was two years old, my mother decided it was best if she gave me to her parents and they raised me. Though I saw my mother fairly often, my grandmother was a strong, demanding woman who made clear to both of us early on that she was the mother. And she enrolled me in the first grade as Clarkie Clark. My report cards carried this name through the seventh grade, despite occasional notes from teachers with ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• ESSAY “That Ain’t Your Name”