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Denise H
ere’s the deal: I don’t have a middle name. Of my seven brothers and sisters, I’m one of two who didn’t get one. All the other middle names were chosen with great care and consideration, laden with nostalgia, nuance, a bit of poetry. Me, I got zilch. Such, perhaps, is the nature of the middle child, a happy addition to a burgeoning family but spared, or bereft of— depending on one’s perspective—the intense focus on nomenclature that comes in the birth order with firsts and lasts. Growing up, I’d been of two minds about the absence, wondering whether I’d gotten shortchanged or anointed. I coveted a middle name, but not having one somehow made me slightly edgy, outré. When I’d ask my parents why, Rodney and Miriam were coy, uncharacteristically dismissive. I’d get a sympathetic shrug and shake of the head from my father and a bemused look from my mother that said, “You kids. As if being conceived weren’t good enough.” So, I came to accept the naming as a quirky fact, not realizing until much, much later (miraculously, in the process of writing this essay) the linguistic brilliance of it. Names, after all, are semantic qualifiers. Even before birth, a child inherits a surname, which automatically positions that child within a particular tribe. A given name is a unique iteration of the tribe. Who an individual may want to become—that innate striving for autonomy and identity—is thus partially predetermined in utero. Toss in a middle name, and there’s an additional signifier the child must eventually negotiate in the process of becoming. It is both a burden and a blessing, an exercise in how no freedom is absolute, not even self-determination, or necessarily
8 www.alumni.duke.edu/magazine
desirable, if it means being born into the terrifying prospect of an existential vacuum. Therein lies the beauty of NMN—“no middle name”—but which I prefer to call the gap. That space between my first and last name is an opening, a microscopic fissure into which I may venture to create something out of nothing, or to leave well enough alone. There are many such gaps in a lifetime, those with increasing import and possibility, risk and reward. History, too, is rife with change agents who opted not to leave well enough alone. For them, freedom didn’t entail minding the gap; it meant stepping into it. Doing so is often brazen, fraught with danger, perhaps suicidal, and quintessentially American. For the intrepid European settlers, the New World itself was a gap, a yawing chasm of possibility, exploitation, and reinvention. It was also an illusion. The continent was not a tabula rasa awaiting the imprint of Western Europeans; it had already been inscribed by millions of Native Americans. Still, the settlers came, blinded by a quest to make it new, blindsided when running headlong into those who had beaten them to it. In the early going, there was room for everybody, and ample geography to go around. Temperance Flowerdew, one of the first female settlers in Jamestown, left behind the security and comforts of a genteel English life and flourished in colonial Virginia as a
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