AP Success - AP English Literature: My Name (means hope)

In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It

means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It

is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is

shaving, song like sobbing.

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It was my great-grandmother’s name and now it is mine. She was a horse

woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse – which is

supposed to be bad luck if you’re born female-but I think this is a Chinese lie

because the Chinese, like the Mexican, don’t like their women strong.

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My great-grandmother. I would’ve liked to have known her, a wild horse of a

woman, so wild she wouldn’t marry. Until my great-grandfather threw a sack

over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy

chandelier. That’s the way he did it. And the story goes she never forgave

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him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit

their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got

or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be.

Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but don’t want to inherit her place by

the window.

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At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin

and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a

softer something, like silver, not quite as thick as sister’s name-Magdalena-

which is uglier than mine. Magdalena who at least can come home and

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become Nenny. But I am always Esperanza.

I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real

me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X.

Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do.