My name is not my given name; it’s my chosen name. The women in my family—my mother, my sister, and I—all have names we chose for ourselves and all have different surnames. It can be confusing, this history of re-identification. It’s common enough for people to rename themselves, to reclaim their identity from their abuser or oppressor, or to be renamed through circumstance by saviors or enslavers or someone in between. There’s a history of it in this country dating back at least to the initial European colonizers, if not before. One of my first ancestors to land here was a Welsh foundling, so the story goes, who knew his name was George but neither where he was from nor who his people were. He liked to sing and dance; so, those who found him named him George Musick and he came to America in 1657. Sometimes I think about the trauma of separation and abandonment that brought George to this country as well as the trauma my family has inflicted or suffered in the interceding three-hundred-fifty plus years. And I wonder what if anything can be done to lessen the effects of said trauma on the world other than to live a better life than they did.
The day I claimed my new name, my mother and I stood together in line at the DMV filling out our name change forms. Her divorce from my father had been settled and I was finally old enough to decide my name for myself. My parents didn’t give me a middle name but I always wanted one. The girls I wanted to be friends with in secondary and grade school, who didn’t want to be friends with me, had middle names. They were pretty and popular. They didn’t wear glasses or blush when their names were called in class as I did. They ignored me and wouldn’t let me play with them. So I’d cut recess and hide in the large crafts closet adjacent to the classroom or in some remote corner of the playground to avoid public shame.
Separation and abandonment. Is this how George felt, rootless in a Welsh wood?
My mother and I edged closer to the front counter where we were to hand over our name change forms; and thus, under the fluorescent lights of the DMV with impatient strangers as witnesses, we would be re-christened in the eyes of the state of California with our new self-chosen names. It was now or never. If I was to have a middle name, I had to decide. I chose Charles.
***
I’d met Timmy in ninth grade. One day he was there and we were everywhere together. We had a group of friends who hung out on a brick wall on the side of the courtyard in front of Berkeley High School’s main building. The Berkeley Brick Burnouts. We had classes together, cut classes together. We pooled our change to buy a joint. One for a dollar. Three for two. We went to the park and got high together. We walked up to Telegraph Avenue to peruse the stands on the street of craftspeople peddling their handmade ceramics and jewelry and tie dye. We went to Tower Records and looked at albums we wanted but couldn’t afford—Earth, Wind & Fire, The Brothers Johnson, Heatwave, The Commodores.
Timmy lived on the other side of town in the Berkeley flats with his father, older brother, and younger sister. Their mother had died long before I met Timmy. I can’t remember if I ever knew what she died from, but I know she’s buried on the Shoshone reservation in Southern California. Once I saw a grainy black and white video of a woman who could have been her standing on the rocks of Alcatraz Island with three young children. It must have been news footage taken from a helicopter or a boat during the Occupation of Alcatraz. In November of 1969 a multi-tribe group of Native Americans landed on Alcatraz in the San Francisco Bay. The Treaty of Fort Laramie that the U.S. signed with the Sioux in 1868 returned abandoned federal lands to Native Americans. The prison at Alcatraz was closed in 1963 and the island was deemed surplus federal land. According to the Fort Laramie Treaty, Native Americans could reclaim it. Seventy-nine people landed on Alcatraz that November. People came. People went. In June of 1971 the last fifteen people living there were forcibly removed.
George Musick, did you separate any Manahoac from their land in what is now called Virginia? Did you abandon them to rootlessness like you were abandoned?
Timmy told me that story. Years later, I saw the news footage. It could’ve been Timmy and his family. I like to believe it was. I’ve looked at pictures online trying to find them, but even though there are children in the pictures, I haven’t been able to identify Timmy, his brother, or sister. They could have been there for a day or a year. There’s no way to check—not now.
When Timmy was in 11th grade, his father went to his home state of Tennessee for a visit. He never came back. By then, Timmy’s brother was grown and living on the streets—or so I heard. His sister was in 10th grade and had moved in with her boyfriend’s family. Timmy was left to do what he had to do: he packed up their rental house, moved in with a friend’s family, and got his GED. He went to work. I remember he first worked in an office, something that had to do with adding long lists of numbers. Later he went to work for a mutual friend’s high-end house cleaning business.
I occasionally went on jobs with him. Once I was on my knees cleaning Angela Davis’s floor when she stepped over me and paid me no mind.
He must’ve been sixteen or seventeen. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now, looking back, I’m in awe of what he did and had to do.
Separation and abandonment. Did George’s family leave him on purpose? Did they die?
Two years later Timmy was able to follow his dream of attending the San Francisco Academy of Art for fashion design. He loved it. He was good at it. He was proud of his work like I’d never seen him before. He was an incredible artist whose long dark fingers sparkled with iridescence like oil slicks after a rain. He designed prom dresses for his friends—tiered skirts that transformed from gown to mini with a zipper, jewel-toned dresses with marabou trim. They were fabulous.
After his dad disappeared and he left school, we still hung out all the time. We cooked his famous barbecue at my house, laughed our heads off on mescaline in Ohlone Park, and went dancing in San Francisco. We took the last BART train to the city and lounged around the Hyatt Regency, with its glass elevators and millions of little white lights streaming over the lobby balconies like a waterfall of stars. We waited until two a.m. when Studio West stopped serving alcohol and opened their doors to the under twenty-one crowd. We danced. Oh, how we danced. New wave and disco music, a light-up dance floor right out of Saturday Night Fever, and all kinds of people—Black, White, Asian, Latin, gay, straight. But no one cared: all were welcome as long as they danced. Timmy, with one hand up on the mirrored walls, shook his groove thang in outfits he often made himself.
I believe George Musick would have approved because, although he lost his family of origin and left his home country, he still sang. He still danced.
And when they kicked us out at dawn, we’d take the first BART train back to the East Bay. So much fun we had. So much joy.
A few years later, when I was at college in New York, Timmy didn’t stay out all night. He got on the last train out of San Francisco but fell asleep and woke up at the end of the line in Concord. It was well after midnight. He was black. He was gay. He was alone. And he was in a white suburban neighborhood. Timmy found a payphone and called everyone he could, asking them to pick him up. Either they didn’t answer their phone or they said no. By morning he was hanging from a tree. He was twenty-three.
The police said it was suicide.
His sister said it was a lynching.
***
It was raining in New York on November 3, 1985. I had just dyed my hair purple. My roommate handed me the phone. It was a friend from high school, a fellow Berkeley Brick Burnout, calling from across the country, from home. He told me Timmy was dead.
I went for a walk in the rain up 9th Avenue to Lincoln Center and back to my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.
Separation and abandonment. Did George cry for his lost family? Did they cry for him?
The rain bled my hair and color streamed down my face. Timmy would have appreciated that—purple rain—as he was often compared to Prince in his look and style. So much life. So irrevocably gone.
It’s only now, decades later, that I’ve found articles online about that night and learned things I hadn’t known before. Men in white hooded robes had been arrested earlier that evening in that neighborhood for a different incident. They said they were going to a costume party, but that party was never verified. People heard screams in the early morning. He died between 6 and 8 a.m. But BART opens at 6 a.m. and he could’ve been on the train if he had been able to. Days later, a woman said she knew a member of the KKK who bragged about his involvement in Timmy’s death, holding a gun to his head. The NAACP got involved. They called the FBI. Protests were held.
The case was closed.
Separation and abandonment. Death and unresolved justice. Each loss is a trauma but some are more traumatizing than others. Some fester from unanswered questions. I’m stuck in a liminal space between knowing and not knowing—between the official story and what history tells me is possible when white men don white robes.
George Musick. Which end of the rope were you and your descendants—my family—on as they moved from Virginia to Missouri to California?
Science now tells us trauma is passed down through generational DNA. Spiritual teachings tell us we can do better than our forebears; we can transcend their limitations with intentionality and actions.
The thing about losing someone is it’s never only about that single loss. One incident stretches its tendrils through time and space to hook onto other monumental losses in your life. Like a stand of aspen trees, from which roots form a single organism that stretches underground until a tree of leafing memories sprouts up. One tree connects to another and another and another, frames a wood to wander through. If you choose to, you can stop and lean your back against a trunk and gaze upwards into the canopy of times spent together, laughter had, secrets shared, a testament to a life of loving well.
Timmy is connected to my friend Stuart who passed away from leukemia and would delight my mother by walking with her through her garden, picking cherry tomatoes they popped into their mouths together like bursts of summer freshness. My mother passed away from Alzheimer’s seven years before the nicest man who ever lived, her boyfriend Pete, died of sadness and old age. Pete used to loan me his rickety old pick-up truck and help me with anything he could; and through my mother, he was connected to my father, who was not the nicest man who ever lived but gave me beautiful things: a name I wanted to change and the reasons for doing so. My Aunt Rosie is part of that stand of loss. Her name was really Mary Edna and I don’t know why we called her Rosie. But I do know that she shot herself on a bridge in Puerto Vallarta on my seventh birthday and used to wear brightly-colored paisley muumuus and gold slippers from Marrakesh. I know I wanted to be like her when I grew up.
Each member of my family has given me inspiration to live my own life better, to be better. My father showed me an appreciation of beautiful things and a desire to know more about them. Pete, a kindness I will never attain but still try to. My mother had a child-like sense of awe I try to emulate. Stuart, a network of beloved friends, each one believing they were special to him. Timmy dreamed big and fought hard for those dreams; he was always ready for fun and fashion and dancing. Even George Musick is a distant tree in this wood. Without his separation and abandonment, I wouldn’t be here. Perhaps I wouldn’t feel loss so keenly.
As my mother and I stood in the DMV line together, on the verge of re-christening ourselves with our chosen names, I thought of Timmy who had been gone for a few years at that time. And the trauma of separation and abandonment—both in his life and through his death—now infused my DNA, transfigured by my love for him even though he and I were not related. I thought of how he followed his dream and was scared I wouldn’t have it in me to follow my own. I thought of his strength and determination, the fun we had, and how I wanted a little piece of him to remind me to dream big. To live. To dance.
I am Juli Charles Lasselle.
He was Timothy Charles Lee.
He was my friend.
***
Juli C. Lasselle is a California writer who holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco where she was a fiction editor for the literary journal Switchback. She has been published in The Sun, sPARKLE + bLINK, October Hill Magazine, and Flash Fiction Magazine. She can be found at @JuliCLasselle.
Cynthia Yatchman is a Seattle based artist and art instructor. With an M.A. in child development and a B. A. in education, she has a strong interest in art education and teaches art to adults, children and families in Seattle. A former ceramicist, she studied with J.T. Abernathy in Ann Arbor, MI. though after receiving her B.F.A. in painting from the University of Washington she switched from 3D art to 2D and has stayed there since, working primarily on paintings, prints and collages. Her art is housed in numerous public and private collections and has been shown nationally in California, Connecticut, New York, Indiana, Michigan, Oregon and Wyoming. She has exhibited extensively in the Northwest, including shows at Seattle University, Seattle Pacific University, Shoreline Community College, the Tacoma and Seattle Convention Centers and the Pacific Science Center. She is an affiliate member of Gallery 110 and is a member of the Seattle Print Art Association and COCA (Center of Contemporary Art)