Leka

For my mother.

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The girl was born Leka. It is the name that comes back to her most often, dipped in the honey of her grandmother’s voice. The name had been taken from her. Scraped away by miles of gravel and track, sweat out by Georgia summers. She feels like that about most everything from those days.

She was raised between ocean and redwood.

As she should have been, she sometimes thought.

Should have never left, a voice inside lets her know.

Back then, she was a tiny thing. She knows it only from tattered photos. Inconsiderably tiny when she feels the heft of herself. Now, she thinks, she’s a presence. People stop, look, and listen when she enters a room. She enjoys this contrast, loving the fullness of her body and mind. She wonders what would have been different if she’d learned this love when she was still Leka.

 A doctor named Frankenstein brought Leka into this world. She considers this to be one of the small jokes the universe mother plays on us. The girl was deposited into the arms of her mother, whose brow still beaded despite already having four children before it was Leka’s turn. When her mother tells her the story, it shifts and realigns. Sometimes she says the room was small, smelling of perspiration and stale cleaning agents. Other times, it is packed with bodies until the doctor shoos away all but Leka’s father and the grandmothers. Leka recalls none of this, of course, having only just been brought into the world. It takes decades for her to piece it all together.

Leka’s real name was given to her by her father. To honor his mother and eldest auntie, he gave Leka a name from each. Leka looked nothing like her father, sharing only his surname, but she was his love the moment he laid eyes on her. The girl’s mother misspelled her name on accident while signing the birth certificate. Another joke from the universe. Leka was only half American. “It couldn’t be helped,” she was told years later.  

In her earliest memories, Leka’s mother isn’t there. There is only her father, her grandmother, and a parade of cousins, aunties. Instead, she remembers sitting on the top of a kitchen table weathered by use, eating canned peaches while her grandma, her namesake, stirs long rice and meat in a big pot. Now, full grown, she still finds herself walking the hallways of Grandma’s house in her dreams. From the outside, the house didn’t seem like much. A compact, gray, two-story just on the outskirts of the city. A grey gate encased the yard. Grandma’s brother had found it in the sixties, before the rest of the family followed him to the US. The real magic was inside, nestling in the add-on rooms build by Leka’s father and her uncles, rustling the leaves of Grandma’s garden where seeds brought from the island sprung up craving the sea breeze. It was romping through the yard where a dozen small ones entertained themselves during the long, blistery summer days. But back then, the girl was content learning about cooking while sweet juice dripped from her chin and peaches squirmed in their can, avoiding her fingertips like sticky fish in a pond.  

Growing up, there are two Leka’s. They are both named after Grandma, so it only makes sense to share the nickname as well. The girl’s auntie is the same age as her, but her skin is bronze and she is tall, thick-thighed, and beautiful. She looks like the most like Grandma and they call her Lekatonga. The girl, though, is too scrawny and pale. The family deems her Lekapalangi. The girl doesn’t mind. She takes to calling her auntie by her middle name, Mele, and they play out magical adventures in the yard with all the other kids.  

When she is old enough to go to school, Leka fells bad for all the white children with no history to their names. They were lucky to get more than one, as if their parents were stingy or the child too dull. Leka takes pride in all her names. She spends hours practicing her letters, writing them out in colorful script across the margins of her coloring books and class assignments. Her names mean more than the sum of her all at once.

But no one warns her that when she gets older all her beloved names will weigh her down. No one tells her how embarrassment and dread will mix together in the pit of her stomach when teachers stumbled over the syllables with their thick tongues and her classmates will whisper or snicker. No one will try to cool the burn in her cheeks when they change the shape of her name to fit more comfortably in their mouths. And most importantly, no one will mourn when aging takes her names from her until she is left with a lumpy almost-name that puts up no fight.

She should have resisted, she thinks now. Should have dug in her heels and stuck by her names, held on to them tightly. She could have raised her middle finger and screamed until her throat was raw and the world hid from her instead.

But these thoughts are built on decades of hurt and spite. Leka would never have that rage.

 She wanted to be Leka again.