I Didn't Come From Nowhere

Just Call Me Jim    My father used to watch me walk across the yard and call, “Little girl!” When it wasn’t little girl it was Jim. “Throw your shoulders back. Walk straight. Come on to me.” He’d clap his hands and I’d march over to the beat. He did that often and something about it carried over in my life. Today I watch people walk and slouch, see how they carry themselves, and think about my daddy, how he impressed me when I was very young. I have an idea why my dad started calling me Jim. It was because I was such a big baby. All of them called me Jim. There weren’t any pictures of me when I was a baby so I can’t be sure. The only one who got his picture taken was my little brother Bruce.    The nickname Jim didn’t matter to me. It was just in the family. He called me that until I got way up in school. By the time I was old enough to run to greet him on his return from church he called me little girl. From Jim I went to little girl, or my baby girl. That I resented. I didn’t like his introducing me as his baby girl. I was probably eight or nine, maybe older. I was the youngest girl but I didn’t want him to put baby in there. He’d refer to me as baby and that would make me boil inside, but he didn’t know it. It seemed to me that he could have said, this is my youngest girl, instead of saying this is my baby girl. I never let him know how I disliked it. I just kept the resentment inside me.    I thought about that many a time as I grew up. Why did I resent his calling me baby girl? Maybe it made me feel I was very young or I was always a baby. I didn’t want to be branded a baby. It was a matter of a choice of words. That’s what I think disturbed me.    He called me Cheekie for a while but by the time I was ready for high school they were calling me Mary Jennie. When I started taking French at Henderson they required me to use Marie in class. I picked that up and have used it ever since. It’s my legal name.