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1. On Becoming Carol Ascher

2. What's in a Name?

On Becoming Carol Ascher

CAROL ASCHER

My aunt told me an old Jewish story when I changed my last name. "Each person has three names," she said, "The first is given by one's parents, who dream of their child's happy future. The second is the name used when people call one an ugly or embarrassing name. The third is the name one chooses oneself: the important name." For most women, that third name has long been the name of the husband who, like a prince, was supposed to save them. My married name, Lopate, had held that promise once. Yet there came a time, after ten years of no longer being married (coinciding with nearly as many years of being a feminist) when my former husband's name felt like the second kind of name. I was ashamed of it, humiliated by its reminder of a discontinued legal tie and an emotional bond it seemed to perpetuate in sticky ways. We'd had no children to worry about. I needed a name of my own, a third name.

In 1978, after much seemingly pointless talk with close women friends about what to do about my married name, I thought I would write about the problem. Writing can either goad me toward action or soothe my nerves after I have acted or been unable to act. My piece was entitled "What's in a Name," and began:

Here I am, thirty-six years old, a woman who has worked all her adult life, who has been in the women's movement for nearly a decade. Here I am, assertive and competent, and I can't find a name for myself.

Disgusted, I was obviously trying to shame myself into action ─  a bad strategy, since it divides me into the aggressor and the one who is bent on self-protection. Besides, I'm so stubborn in the face of my own intimidation that I should have known I wouldn't budge.

My father, a Viennese whose last name is Bergman [I went on to explain] is dead. My mother, who still bears his name, was born in Berlin, an Ascher. My birth certificate reads "Carol Ann Bergmann" ─  Carol in honor of wealthy woman who gave my parents visas so that they could leave the refugee camp where they had met to come to this country; Ann for no apparent reason; and Bergmann, with two n's (when was it shortened?) from my father's Austrian Jewish patrilineage. Bergmann means mountain man or miner. Lopate, a Russian name, means shovel. I used to think that a Lopate should be useful to a Bergmann, and maybe it has been. However, people often assume the name is Italian or Spanish. Once I was even inadvertently flown across the country for a job interview by a university hoping to fill its Hispanic quota.

The thought of my former husband's remarrying and another woman becoming a Lopate made me queasy, but so far I had been lucky. I thought of returning to my birth name via a hyphenated "Bergman-Lopate", and had some legal documents done up this, but the image seemed more married than if I retained a single last name. My feminist superego harassed me. "Women who want to break free of the patrilineal naming system," I wrote, "can use their mother's first names with an English suffix." In my case, the name would be Ellenchild. Carol, daughter of Ellen. But the memories of leading my refugee mother through the labyrinths of a new culture were too strong for me to let go so easily of my German-Jewish name.

One spring day I rode my bicycle uptown to the Museum of Natural History to buy a hundred postcards on which I planned to write everyone I knew about my change back to Bergman, the name on all my public school grade cards all the way up to my B. A. I still remember the postcards: a blood red background with an African mask representing a god of judicial decisions in rich brown. I hurriedly filled out my first card and rushed to my friend, Paul, who lives in a fifth-floor walkup two blocks from the museum.

"You can't change your name now, after all these years," he insisted, as he stood at the stove to boil me water for tea, "It's so self-destructive. Carol, you just never take yourself seriously. You belittle your past, your social presence. You're a writer. If you change your name to Bergman now, it'll be like starting from scratch. Nobody will know who you are."

As I sipped my tea, I felt he was onto something. A book and many articles in small magazines already had the name Lopate affixed to them. Yet, as was somehow typical of me, I felt I could start afresh. Did I really believe that my public presence was so small that I would lose nothing by a change of name? I kept looking wistfully at the postcard he had dropped on the kitchen table. What was I going to do if respect for myself meant keeping my married name? When I finally climbed on my bike to ride home, I had ninety-nine unused blood red postcards with African masks on them. The god of judicial decisions seemed to have been wrong ─  for the time being.

It seemed that I could not push past the slightest obstacle to return to my father's name. A lot of people ─  famous, infamous, and ordinary ─  are called Bergman. Yet the actual name (including its rustic meaning) had little to do with it. "I had a problematic relationship with my father," I would apologize to friends, and add somewhat disingenuously that my former husband had looked more kindly on my ambition, which was why I was keeping his name. Then one day I blurted: "I'm tired of being married to my father, as it is." And this perhaps was the deeper truth. If one can't let go of a husband, there may well be a father lurking behind.

My little manuscript, "What's in a Name?" had begun with the wrong tactics and could not push me to a resolution. It ended suddenly in the deepest of feminist depression.

I see young women, even women my age, taking on new married names. I imagine they think it's forever, but even without divorce, what's the sense of losing a name? What devastation we as women go through in being chosen for "holy wedlock". What a senseless repair in trying to find our own names.

Then in August, while hiking in the woods, I imagined a short story called "In the Shadow of a Name". I was thinking of a woman painter who still retained the name of her former, now famous, artist husband. But in my mind was also my own last name, and how my former husband's writing career, which had suddenly taken off, would make me feel about being a Lopate in the years ahead." The story should look back on her life," I wrote in my journal, "It should be like living in the shadow of a gloomy mountain." Having discovered the futility of harassing myself into change, I must have hoped that fiction would serve me in coming to peace with my married name. Yet who would choose to live on the sunless side of a mountain? The story was never written: I couldn't convince myself enough of the resignation I sought even to begin.

And then one frosty night in January 1979 I had a dream, and in the morning I had a new name. In the dream, I was a witch in a wide black hat, flying happily through the air with a flock of large, fluffy, white bird-cats.

"You've changed Bergman to Birdlady," said Bob, who was my lever then, and who to this day sees the puns in my dreams.

"Ascher Birdlady," I said smiling ─  having lifted off the mountain, without thinking, I had added my mother's family name.

And then over Sunday breakfast, he interviewed me on my new, happily transcended state:

Bob: I guess I really want to know how you were able to leave the ground.

Ascher Birdlady: Ah, I think it wasn't so much leaving as no longer being there. So now it takes an effort to lower myself to the ground: a little like what it must be like for you to dive to the bottom of a deep lake. But lifting back off into the sky is a release from effort, a kind of letting go.

Bob: You're quite lucky. Most people don't realize this.

Ascher Birdlady: It amazes me now the effort people use to hug the ground. Why, if they would just let go, they would be up in the sky like me!

Bob: But isn't it scary to be up there all the time? Aren't you ever afraid?

Ascher Birdlady: Well, first I'm not always up there. I've come down a bit to talk to you. I come down when I want. The trouble is, I may want to come down less and less. As for fear, it's the other side of joy. There's such joy in being able to move my body freely on all sides.
    Bob: But don't you get buffeted around by the wind?

Ascher Birdlady: Well, you know, one only feels buffeted if one is terribly sure where one ought to be. If pone is just flying around, the currents only offer amusement and diversion. Sometimes they even give one the little push in an interesting direction one hadn't thought of.

As happy as I felt that morning, my unsuccessful attempts to change my name were not conducive to certainty that I could carry through. Nevertheless, this time I seemed to have unfettered energy and daring. At a big party a few days later, I found myself announcing gaily, "I'm changing my name Ascher, mother's family name." "Oh," people said, "terrific". My two close women friends, from whom I needed confirmation for every important decision, seemed uncannily relaxed about the change.

So I telephoned my friend Paul by the museum. Over rice and beans in a Chinese-Cuban restaurant, I told him my new plan. And he argued forcefully and sweepingly against it. Although Ascher was a better name for a writer than Berman ─  more unusual, he conceded me this ─  I was merely going further out on a limb, this time cutting myself off from all those who had known me before the age of twenty-two. High school friends, neighbors from childhood ─  he was eloquent about the scores of people who might have leapt at the sight of a story signed by Carol Bergman ─  would now be lost for good. This in addition to all those who had finally learned to look for work by Carol Lopate.

"Are you afraid of being friends with a nobody?" I asked, suddenly feeling I was onto his own vain fears. He gave me a quick grin. And, as he continued his attack, I silently wondered if my women friend took my career insufficiently seriously. No matter, I knew I was going to change my name.

The next morning, I called my mother in California and excitedly told her my plans. I didn't expect her to be comfortable with the idea of my becoming an Ascher. She and I tended to misunderstand each other on much simpler things. But I hoped she would find a way to share in my decision.

"It's a Jewish name, you know," she said, her voice coming across the line crisp with worry.
    "Yes, I know. It's one of the twelve tribes of Israel." Did she want me to hide from a future holocaust with a disguised name?

"I feel a little bad for your father," she said next.

To this, I really had nothing to say, for I was holding back my own peculiar regret.

"Anyway, whatever you do with your life, it's your life," she continued, as if trying to step out of my way.

"It's just a little funny," she added after a moment. "Most people go forwards, but you go backwards." Was she hoping that I would invent an altogether new name, or, more likely, that I would remarry and take yet another man's name?

"Edith and Gerhard will be pleased," she said finally, giving what must have been an ambivalent affirmation; for these were her older brother and his wife ─  Aschers. A childless couple to whom I had always felt close, and who, as I realized, I was somehow turning into new parents. Yet it was also true that I was taking my mother's name.

Although in Germany my new name would have been spelled A-S-C-H-E-R, my mother and two of her brothers had Americanized it into A-S-H-E-R. Which would I choose? For a week I was announcing my new name and simultaneously asking how I ought to spell it. Not surprisingly, friends and acquaintances alike had immediate and strong opinions based on their own associations.

And then one morning I knew I would spell it ASCHER, and I wrote Aunt Edith and Uncle Gerhard to tell them I was changing my name to theirs. I was worried about the letter. I couldn't exactly ask their permission, since I already knew I was going to use their name. Yet I wanted their blessing. When two weeks went by with no mail from them, I told myself that I could not expect belated support from my relatives for my idiosyncratic journey. I would survive, even if they were uneasy, angry, or upset. I had even warned them, "Since I write, you may sometimes be uncomfortable when people you know ask if you are related to Carol Ascher, because you may not always agree with what I write."

One thing I felt sure of: with my own name, I would give more energy and courage to my writing ─  and to pushing my work. In naming myself, I was untying the ropes that held me back and freeing myself to fly. But, of course, that is what my witch dream had said.

And then I got a thick envelope with separate handwritten letters from my aunt and uncle, each welcoming me to their name. My aunt began with the Jewish story about the three names. She said she was moved to have a "visible bond" to express the emotional one that existed between us and reassured me that she would not be embarrassed by anything I wrote. My uncle, who was about to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday, received my new name as a gift. "Love and affection are blessings, often blooming in hidden places," he wrote expansively in his old German script, "They give me happiness and make me feel grateful. They also make me ask, what did I do to deserve it? But the mind does not find the answer. Something in me tells that grace drops from heaven like manna that once fell from the sky on the hungry children of Israel."

Over the next week I wrote, designed, and had printed the most carefully planned announcement of my life. I wanted the paper, the ink, the working, everything, to be perfect. "This is to tell you," "It is my pleasure," "I'm proud to announce," were all tried, until I decided upon "This is to inform you that I am Changing my name from Carol Lopate to Carol Ascher ─  my mother's family name".

This was printed in clean bright blue on a cream card. And this time I had five hundred postcards.

Since I had never seen such an announcement, I had no idea what reactions it would elicit. But I went page by page through my current and old address books, writing out a postcard to everyone I knew or had known. (To the extent that I could help it, I would not disappear.) When I went to meetings or parties, I gave out the cards. "How funny," my only critic, a woman at a film premiere, said, as she turned to get another glass of wine. For the rest, people congratulated me and showed pleasure and excitement ─  even envy at what I had done.

Suddenly I was discovering over and over that women I thought I knew well were ashamedly still carrying former husbands' names. One man confided wistfully that he had long toyed with changing his name; like many last names of European Jews, it had been forced on his forefathers by a town official in the eighteenth century to make them accessible for taxation and conscription. A white Southerner now living in New York confessed with shame that the only other people in the phone book with her last name were black families, descendants of slaves owned by her forefather. Others told me that their names had been altered ─  by themselves, their parents, immigration officials. On a writing assignment, I met a Greek American with the odd name Preey-Perdikides. Being a new connoisseur, I asked him what his name implied. He had changed his name to Perry when he came to this country. He said, after being warned that no one would be able to say Perdikides. Now he wanted his Greek name back, but since he was known as Mr. Perry, he had settled on the compromise, hyphenated name. A year earlier, when I had tried writing an article on changing my name, I had assumed that the problem of last names was solely a woman's problem. Now I saw that it was also a wider one: part of the suffering of so many in any disenfranchised or minority group.

"Okay," my former husband had said amiably, when I told him of my new name. He seemed so understanding that I was almost hurt. Until one day I met him standing with a woman friend of his on a street corner. "We were just talking about a story of yours," he greeted me.

"Did you say I wrote it under my new name, Ascher?" I asked, beaming at them both.

"Of course not," he said. "I'm not going to brag that you're no longer a Lopate."

Others who have changed their names will not be surprised that people instantly agreed and remembered to call me by my new name. Yet it continually thrilled me to see that I needed only to tell someone that I was now Carol Ascher for that person to turn to the next one and introduce me by my new name. I had hung on for years to an outgrown sense of my powerlessness that seemed retrospectively to be encapsulated in my name. Now every day I watched myself take new charge of my public presence.

The bank, two department stores, the public library, even the motor vehicle bureau, all agreed to change my name. Only Master Charge refused to let me rid myself of Lopate. I called an old friend, Emily, a feminist lawyer. "You have a civil right to use any name you like," she laughed, "just as long as you're not changing your name to evade the law." But her argument about my rights did not impress Master Charge. They were concerned with credit, they told me, and credit does not transfer without a court order.

Which was how I decided to change name legally. The cost of an attorney for a legal change of name was then about $300, unless one went to a legal clinic, where it could be as low as $125. In addition, there would be filing and publishing fees. Emily told me that I could act without counsel, and she gave me a copy of a legal petition to imitate and listed the steps, from getting a docket number in the Supreme Court of New York, to having the petition signed by a judge and posting a notice in a legal newspaper, to filing the petition in the Court. "It's not hard," Emily assured me in that breezy style she has maintained through years of grinding legal practice. "It's just that you have to wait here and come back there, and they lose everything at least once." Though I was afraid of the time it would take, I didn't have to pay a lawyer. More important, I didn't want to lose my wonderful change-of-name experience into someone else's hands.

It was now early spring, and as the days grew fine, I began to be a regular visitor to the courts. This was all very new and exciting, as well as disturbing at times. My journal recalls the day of March 26, 1979.

Just now as I turned in my documents on the third floor of the Superior Court of New York, having gotten my index number for twenty-five dollars in the cellar below, I was called up to translate for a festively dressed Haitian couple who wanted to get married. When I explained in French that the court clerk was asking her immigration papers, she fled from the room in terror, her bridegroom running after her. And so my successful intervention in the law on my behalf was saddened by these Haitians running from their marriage because at least the bride is obviously an illegal alien.

Legally giving up my father's name, Bergman, reawakened the deep loss I had suffered at his death. I didn't want to go back on relinquishing his name. But I was struck by how little I had ever known about him, and how confined in years and content my relationship to him had been. Once again, I found myself mourning for him.

Joan Didion once wrote that the answer to "Why I write?" lies in the sound of the words I, I, I. Changing my name was in this like writing. For months, the focus on my name threw my past and present back at me. Going over my birth certificate, my marriage license and my divorce decree as I prepared my petition had been like looking in different mirrors.

One morning, an envelope lay in my mailbox addressed to Carol Ascher in my mother's fine but sturdy handwriting. How strange ─  I suddenly understood ─  for her to be addressing me by her childhood name! As if we were sisters, or I were even her mother. Inside the envelope, the letter mentioned nothing about my changed name; but the message, as best my mother could convey it, was on the envelope. She would call me by her name. That was enough.

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What's in a Name?

by Itabari Njeri

The decade was about to end when I started my first newspaper job. The seventies might have been the disco generation for some, but it was a continuation of the Black Power, post-civil rights era. And that was the part of America I wanted to explore. As a good reporter I needed a sense of the whole country, not just the provincial Northeast Corridor in which I was raised.
    I headed for Greenville ("Pearl of the Piedmont"), South Carolina.

"Wheeere," some people snarled, their nostrils twitching, their mouths twisted so their top lips went slightly to the right, the bottom ones way down and to the left, "did you get that name from?"

Itabiddy, Etabeedy. Etabeeree. Eat a berry. Mata Hari. Theda Bara. And one secretary in the office of the Greenville Urban League told her employer: "It's Ms. Idi Amin."

Then, and now, there are a whole bunch of people who greet me with: "Hi, Ita." They think "Bari" is my last name. Even when they don't, they still want to call me "Ita." When I tell them my first name is Itabari, they say, "Well, what do people call you for short?"
    "They don't call me anything for short," I say. "The name is Itabari."

Sophisticated white people, upon hearing my name, approach me as would a cultural anthropologist finding a piece of exotica right in his own living room. This happens a lot, still, at cocktail parties.

"Oh, what an unusual and beautiful name. Where are you from?"

"Brooklyn," I say. I can see the disappointment in their eyes. Just another home-grown Negro. 

Then there are other white people who, having heard my decidedly northeastern accent, will simply say, "What a lovely name," and smile knowingly, indicating that they saw Roots and understand.

Then there are others, black and white, who for different reasons take me through this number:
    "What's your real name?"

"Itabari Njeri is my real, legal name," I explain.

"Okay, what's your original name?" they ask, often with eyes rolling, exasperation in their voices.

After Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Ntozake Shange, and Kunta Kinte, who, I ask, should be exasperated by this question-and-answer game?

Nevertheless, I explain, "Because of slavery, black people in the Western world don't usually know their original names. What you really want to know is what my slave name was."

Now this is where things get tense. Four hundred years of bitter history, culture, and politics between blacks and whites in America is evoked by this one term, "slave name".

Some white people wince when they hear the phrase, pained and embarrassed by this reminder of their ancestors' inhumanity. Further, they quickly scrutinize me and conclude that mine was a post-Emancipation Proclamation birth. "You were never a slave."

I used to be reluctant to tell people my slave name unless I surmised that they wouldn't impose their cultural values on me and refuse to use my African name. I don't care anymore. When I changed my name, I changed my life, and I've been Itabari for more years now than I was Jill.

Nonetheless, people will say: "Well, that's your real name, you were born in America and that's what I am going to call you." my mother tried a variation of this on me when I legalized my traditional African name. I respectfully made it clear to her that I would not tolerate it. Her behavior, and subsequently her attitude, changed.

But many black folks remain just as skeptical of my name as my mother was.

"You're one of those black people who changed their name, huh," they are likely to begin.

"Well, I still got the old slave master's Irish name," said one man named O'Hare at a party. This man's defensive tone was a reaction to what I call the "blacker than thou" syndrome perpetrated by many black nationalists in the sixties and seventies. Those who reclaimed their African names made blacks who didn't do the same thing feel like Uncle Toms.

These so-called Uncle Toms couldn't figure out why they should use an African name when they didn't know a thing about Africa. Besides, many of them were proud of their names. No matter how they had come by them. And it should be noted that after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, four million black people changed their names, adopting surnames such as Freeman, Freedman, and Liberty. They eagerly gave up names that slave masters had imposed upon them as a way of identifying their human chattel.

Besides names that indicated their newly won freedom, blacks chose common English names such as Jones, Scott, and Johnson. English was their language. America was their home, and they wanted names that would allow them to assimilate as easily as possible.

Of course, many of our European surnames belong to us by birthright. We are the legal as well as "illegitimate" heirs to the names Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, et al., and in my own family, Lord.

Still, I consider most of these names to be by-products of slavery, if not actual slave names. Had we not been enslaved, we would not have been cut off from our culture, lost our indigenous languages, and been compelled to use European names.

The loss of our African culture is a tragic fact of history, and the conflict it poses is a profound one that has divided blacks many times since Emancipation: do we accept the loss and assimilate totally or do we try to reclaim our culture and synthesize it with our present reality?

A new generation of black people in America is reexamining the issues raised by the cultural nationalists and Pan-Africanists of the sixties and seventies: what are the cultural images that appropriately convey the "new" black aesthetic in literature and art?

The young Afro-American novelist Trey Ellis has asserted that the "New Black Aesthetic shamelessly borrows and reassembles across both race and class lines." It is not afraid to embrace the full implications of our hundreds of years in the New World. We are a new people who need not be tied to externally imposed or self-inflicted cultural parochialism. Had I understood that as a teenager, I might still be singing today.

Even the fundamental issue of identity and nomenclature, raised by Baraka and others twenty years ago, is back on the agenda: are we to call ourselves blacks or African-American?

In reality, it's an old debate. "Only with the founding of the American Colonization Society in 1816 did blacks recoil from using the term African in referring to themselves and their institutions," the noted historian and author Sterling Stuckey pointed out in an interview with me. They feared that using the term "African" would fuel white efforts to send them back to Africa. But they felt no white person had the right to send them back when they had slaved to build America.

Many black institutions retained their African identification, most notably the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Changes in black self-identification in America have come in cycles, usually reflecting the larger dynamics of domestic and international politics.

The period after World War II, said Stuckey, "culminating in the Cold War years of Roy Wilkins's leadership of the NAACP," was a time of "frenzied integrationism". And there was "no respectable black leader on the scene evincing any sort of interest in Africa ─  neither the NAACP nor the Urban League."

This, he said, "was an example of historical discontinuity, the likes of which we, as a people, had not seen before." Prior to that, for more than a century and a half, black leaders were Pan-Africanists, including Frederick Douglass. "He recognized," said Stuckey, "that Africa was important and that somehow one had to redeem the motherland in order to be genuinely respected in the New World."

The Reverend Jesse Jackson has, of course, placed on the national agenda the importance of blacks in America restoring their cultural, historical, and political links with Africa.
    But what does it really mean to be called an African-American?

"Black" can be viewed as a more encompassing term, referring to all people of African descent. "Afro-American" and "African-American" refer to a specific ethnic group. I use the terms interchangeable, depending on the context and the point I want to emphasize.

But I wonder: as the twenty-first century breathes down our necks ─  prodding us to wake up to the expanding mélange of ethnic groups immigrating in record numbers to the United States, inevitably intermarrying, and to realize the eventual reshaping of the nation's political imperatives in a newly multicultural society ─  will the term "African-American" be as much of a racial and cultural obfuscation as the term "black"? In other words, will we be the only people, in a society moving toward cultural pluralism, viewed to have no history and no culture? Will we just be a color with a new name: African-American?

Or will the term be ─  as I think it should ─  an ethnic label describing people with a shared culture who descended from African, were transformed in (as well as transformed) America, and are genetically intertwined with myriad other groups in the United States?

Such a definition reflects the historical reality and distances us from the fallacious, unscientific concept of separate races when there is only one: Homo sapiens.

But to comprehend what should be an obvious definition requires knowledge and a willingness to accept history.

When James Baldwin wrote Nobody Knows My Name, the title was a metaphor ─  at the deepest level of the collective African-American psyche ─  for the blighting of black history and culture before the nadir of slavery and since.

The eradication or distortion of our place in would history and culture is most obvious in the popular media. Liz Taylor ─  and, for an earlier generation, Claudette Colbert ─  still represent what Cleopatra ─  a woman of color in a multiethnic society, dominated at various times by blacks ─  looks like.

And in American homes, thanks to reruns and cable, a new generation of black kids grow up believing that a simpleton shouting "Ly-no-mite!" is a genuine reflection of Afro-American culture, rather than a white Hollywood writer's stereotype.

More recently, Coming to America, starring Eddie Murphy as an African prince seeking a bride in the United states, depicted traditional African dancers in what amounted to a Las Vegas stage show, totally distorting the nature and beauty of real African dance. But with every burlesque-style pelvic thrust on the screen, I saw blacks in the audience burst into applause. They think that's African culture, too.

And what do Africans know of us, since blacks don't control the organs of communication that disseminate information about us?

"No!" screamed the mother of a Kenyan man when he announced his engagement to an African-American woman who was a friend of mine. The mother said marry a European, marry a white American. But please, not one of those low-down, ignorant, drug-dealing, murderous black people she had seen in American movies. Ultimately, the mother prevailed.

In Tanzania, the travel agent looked at me indignantly. "Njeri, that's Kikuyu. What are you doing with an African name?" he demanded.

I'd been in Dar es Salaam about a month and had learned that Africans assess in a glance the ethnic origins of the people they meet.

Without a greeting, strangers on the street in Tanzania's capital would comment, "Oh, you're an Afro-American or West Indian."

"Both."

"I knew it," they'd respond, sometimes politely, sometimes not.

Or, people I got to know while in Africa would mention, "I know another half-caste like you." then they would call in the "mixed-race" person and say, "Please meet Itabari Njeri." The darker-complected African, presumably of unmixed ancestry, would then smile and stare at us like we were animals in the zoo.

Of course, this "half-caste" (which I suppose is a term preferable to "mulatto," which I hate, and which every person who understand its derogatory meaning ─  "mule" ─  should never use) was usually the product of a mixed marriage, not generations of ethnic intermingling. And it was clear from most "half-castes" I met that they did not like being compared to so mongrelize and stigmatized a group as Afro-Americans.

I had minored in African studies in college, worked for years with Africans in the United States, and had no romantic illusions as to how I would be received in the motherland. I wasn't going back to find my roots. The only thing that shocked me in Tanzania was being called, with great disdain, a "white woman" by an African waiter. Even if the rest of the world didn't follow the practice, I then assumed everyone understood that any known or perceptible degree of African ancestry made one "black" in America by law and social custom.

But I was pleasantly surprised by the telephone call I received two minutes after I walked into my Dar es Salaam hotel room. It was the hotel operator. "Sister, welcome to Tanzania… Please tell everyone in Harlem hello for us." The year was 1978, and people in Tanzania were wearing half-foot-high platform shows and dancing to James Brown wherever I went.

Shortly before I left, I stood on a hill surrounded by a field of endless flowers in Arusha, near the border of Tanzania and Kenya. A toothless woman with a wide smile, a staff in her hand, and two young girls at her side, came toward me on a winding path. I spoke to her in fractured Swahili and she to me in broken English.

"I know you," she said smiling, "Wa-Negro." "Wa" is a prefix in Bantu languages meaning people. "You are from the lost tribe," she told me. "Welcome," she said, touching me, then walked down a hill that lay in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro.

I never told her my name, but when I told other Africans, they'd say: "Emmmm, Itabari. Too long. How about I just call you Ita."

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