With Love and Seriousness

Surely, he thought, he and his sister had some ancestor, some lithe young man with onyx skin and legs as straight as canae stalks, who had a name that was real. A name given to him at birth with love and seriousness. A name that was not a joke, nor a disguise, nor a brand name. But who this lithe young man was, and where his cane-stalk legs carried him from or to coun never be known. No. Nor his name. His own parents, in some mood of perverseness or resignation, had agreed to abide by a anaming done to them by somebody who couldn’t have cared less. Agreed to take and pass on to all their issue this heavy name scrawled in perfect thoughtlessness by a drunken Yankee in the Union Army. A literal slip of the pen handed to his father on a piece of paper and which he handed on to his only son and his son likewise handed on to his…
-Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon