The False Name

They did not ask my name. That is how you know what you have become, not by what they do to you but by what they no longer bother to ask. A man with a list looked at me and gave me a name off the list, a name that was not mine, a soft pretty name that belonged to no one and could be handed to the next girl when I was used up. I will not write it here. It was the first thing they put on me that I refused to keep, and I have gone on refusing it ever since, which is maybe where I first learned that a name is a thing you can refuse.

With the name they gave me a story, and the story had hope in it, because hope is more useful to them than fear. Fear makes a girl fight or freeze. Hope makes her walk where you point. They told me about the work in the north, the money, the debt I would pay down and then be free. They told it well. They had told it many times. And the terrible part, the thing I need you to understand about how this is done, is that I wanted to believe it, and wanting to believe a thing does most of the work of believing it. I held the false name and the false story the way you hold a stranger’s hand in the dark, because it was the only hand there was.

Underneath, though, quiet, I was still Ixchel. I said my own name to myself at night, the whole of it, the one my grandmother gave me, the one with the old gods and the river in it. I said it the way I said my prayers, to keep it from going out. And the prayers I was still saying, but I had begun to say them low. Not because I believed less. Because I had started to learn which things were safe to be seen wanting. A girl who prays out loud is a girl who still thinks someone is coming, and that, I was learning, drew a certain kind of attention. So I took my faith and I folded it small, the way you fold money you do not want stolen, and I carried it on the inside.

That was the work they were doing in those weeks, and it is slower and quieter than the bruises, and it lasts longer. They were taking Ixchel, the girl with a name and a grandmother and a God she talked to out loud, and they were turning her into the soft pretty name on the list, the thing with a price and a destination. They did it patiently. They did it the way water does a stone. And I helped them more than I will ever forgive myself for, because every time I answered to the false name it got a little easier to answer to, and every time I prayed a little quieter the quiet felt a little more like home.

I was still in there. I want that on the record too. Folded small, carried on the inside, saying my own name in the dark. They never got all the way to the bottom of me. But they got far, in those weeks, and a girl who started the road praying so the whole table could hear her was, by the end of this part, a girl who moved her lips and made no sound at all.