My Name is My Name

In memory of Armstead Carlos Griffin (1934-2021)

One of my favorite family stories is the one about how I got my name. I was supposed to be named Armstead Semaj Marshall. Armstead is (was?) the name of my grandfather and my great grandfather. Semaj is my father’s (and his father’s) name backwards. That was supposed to be my name until my grandmother intervened.

My grandparents were divorced and as the story goes my grandma said “There are one too many Armsteads in the world. If his name is Armstead I won’t babysit.”

Now to be sure this story is maybe apocryphal. Perhaps that was the sentiment but maybe it was a longer, more intense fight. Perhaps my grandmother’s proclamation has become more eloquent and succinct over the years. Perhaps there are a whole set of dynamics that didn’t survive the great migration from experience to narrative and so I’ll never know those lost details. Any of those things could be true but that was the story as I was handed it and it’s one I love for a number of reasons.

I’ve always been fascinated by names. Maybe this is because I loved hip-hop in an era where people still named themselves with a flair for the grandiose. Maybe it’s because I grew up hearing the lore of Muhammad Ali and El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz. Maybe it’s because it’s just because I come from a line of folks who constantly recycle and remix names and so I understand the process of naming to be a means to carry a story across generations.

So as the story goes I didn’t become Armstead Semaj and the compromise was that Armstead became my middle name and instead I got the name Nathaniel as a first name in honor of one of my mother’s cousins who passed before I was born.

I’ve always been fond of my whole name, maybe because I’ve always been fond of the people implicated in the names. Anybody who went to elementary school with me might remember me signing all my papers Nathaniel A. Marshall. If you’ve read either of my full-length poetry collections my middle name makes multiple cameos, as does my grandfather. I keep thinking about names.

There’s a picture my mom has of me as a little boy sitting with my grandfather and my great grandfather. Sometimes in the family that picture has been referred to as “all the Armsteads.” Both of the other Armsteads called me by my middle name. Maybe as a protest or maybe as a way of showing love. Maybe as a way of pointing out our special and particular connection as men in a family with very few men. Likely the reason was some combination of these reasons. Maybe it was just a good way to keep forgetting.

My great grandfather had Alzheimer’s all my life until he passed. He called every woman in our family “pretty lady” once it got bad but he always called me Armstead. Maybe he thought I was his son. Maybe the name was just a placeholder. Maybe he really knew me. Nobody really can say.

This Sunday my grandfather passed away. He spent the last many years of his life, like his father, suffering with Alzheimer’s. By the end of his forgetting he started to forget some of the basic functions of living, or he decided to discard them. In his last few months he stopped walking. In his last few days he stopped swallowing. In his last few hours speech left before his body did.

Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease and its one I’ve thought a lot about nearly my whole life, because of the other two Armsteads. My dear friend the brilliant playwright, Erika Dickerson-Despenza refers to herself as a “memory worker” and I’ve been struck by the phrase since it was first introduced to me (I think by her but my memory fails me). What writers like Erika do is certainly memory work, a plumbing of complicated histories as a prerequisite for processing and imagining new worlds. I hope that’s what I do in my writing. A thing I’ve always thought is that I would eventually have Alzheimer’s as well, because it’s the only way I’ve ever seen men in my family get old. What a strange thing to be a memory worker who is working against time and their own unruly mind?

What was I talking about again?

Ah yes. My granddaddy.

My granddaddy made so much of my life possible. When I was a kid and I started going to camp at Northwestern University my mom would save all year to pay my way there. Once the deadline for payment came my granddaddy would fill the gap between the saving and the balance.

When I was early in my teen years my mom had some anxiety that because of the schools I’d gone to and the camps I’d gone to maybe I would begin to build a life that was far away or estranged from the people and neighborhoods I come from. She told me about expressing that to my granddaddy once and his reply. He told her that it was possible that my life might look very different but he encouraged her to be open to that difference and to trust that I would always find ways to honor and love my family and my community regardless of where experience might take me.

I think about this role my granddaddy played in our family. My grandma taught me so much of who I am and have become and my granddaddy always held space for me to be whoever I needed to be and he did what he could to aid me in that actualization. I think he’s done that for many of us in our family. He didn’t judge us.

My granddaddy wasn’t a perfect man. He struggled with a number of demons in his life. I won’t catalog them today for you but trust that they were there and significant. He was born in a poor Black neighborhood in Chicago and was the first generation of us born away from the former Confederacy. A lot of the stories I know about his childhood are things you might read as sad or tragic or hard. Maybe they were. I am certain his childhood and his whole life also contained beauty and joy. He was no saint. I love that he was no saint. He was a person. He was flawed but beautiful and we had a beautiful relationship. I am grateful to have had him for as long as I did. I am grateful for his name.

Nathaniel Armstead Marshall