As my mother lay dying, she would occasionally indicate her cognition with brief moments of randomly recalled memories. She was often in a semi-conscious state, her failing kidneys, unflushed by medical means, leaving her sleepy, a condition her doctor foretold. But she would awaken, briefly, and startle me as I sat by her bedside. I sat with her hoping that she would, and one day she did, and started to sing, softly asking “What’s your Name?”
In the 1960s, many of the young men of my acquaintance were members of “groups,” shorthand for a “singing group.” Doo-wop was the standard for my neighborhood, and I sang with my best friend, my brother, and two others. We called ourselves “The Chancellors,” and we wore navy blazers, gray trousers and white shirts with red striped sties. For all of the many times that my best friend Floyd and I harmonized in hollow hallways, and for all of the hours of practice the group put in, The Chancellors only made one public appearance: at a talent show at our high school. We sang our most refined song, a popular piece by the duo of Don and Juan entitled “What’s Your Name?”
I do not remember much about the show, whether or not there were prizes awarded, but I remember being in gym class the following week (the show was on the weekend) and one of the bullies of my gym life grudgingly according me respect for the solo I had delivered in the song. “I didn’t know you could sing like that,” he said, signaling a truce in his program of attempted assaults against me. The Chancellors lived on the glory of those moments in the spotlight (and my soaring solo) for all of a week. Don and Juan’s song debuted in 1962, and my buddies and I had polished the harmonies to a high gloss in my mother’s living room in 1963, but when she began to sing the song as she lay in the hospice bed 47 years later, I was still surprised to hear it. “You sang that at the talent show,” she murmured to me. I asked her if she had attended the show; “Yes, I did,” she replied, breathless from the effort to sing and speak, her death less than a month away that late day in May 2010.
A friend recently asked me some questions about my childhood, trying to figure out how I came to be the person I had demonstrated to her, how I had managed to shrug off the scars of the abuse by my father. I had no real answer for her other than that I wanted to be a different person, to have different behaviors than those exhibited by my drunken and angry father. I do not know how — or if — I achieved that, but I have suppressed many memories of my childhood, including the fact that my mother had attended the talent show where The Chancellors had sung “What’s Your Name?”
Watching the failure of a life is a cruel and necessary exercise, the ending foretold in all of our beginnings. I sat watch during the day as my mother slid away from her three surviving children into another life beyond my imagining; my sister had the evening shift, ever vigilant for the sign that our mother would take nourishment and commit, again, to living. She did not, this day, but she told me that she knew me and remembered the life we had shared when she sang the song to me, asking the question she knew well: “What’s your Name?”
cjon3acd@att.net