Read an excerpt from "Changing My Name" from Driving with Dvorak: Essays on Memory and Identity by Fleda Brown:

"It is the beginning of the year at Leverett School. I know my name is next in the roll call because the teacher hesitates. I am tense, embarrassed, my name exactly matching my awkward self. I am not a Marianna or a Jane, no matter how hard I try. “Fled (as in ‘escaped’)-uh?” the teacher’s voice rises to a question mark. She has assumed a vowel between two consonants is generally short. Or she says “Frieda,” seeing not the actual letters but what she expects to see. In the sixth grade I decide to use Sue, my middle name. All of us are transmogrified that year, growing new bodies, trying the same thing with our names. When I am thirteen, I go by Sue all summer at the lake, the same summer I go without my glasses to win the love of a boy named Lee with large, soft lips, who spends the summer with his parents at KenThelm, a resort down the lake. I feel my way through a fuzz of trees all through July and August. I paddle down the lake, trusting my instincts to get me around the point, past the shallows. The last day, before we leave, the reason for my deprivation tells me he is in love with Judy Carr, whose family owns the cottage next to ours, because she is such “a sharp dresser.” Indeed, she is. I cannot argue.

Fleda and Sue represented a genteel tug-of-war between my grandmothers. My mother’s mother, Susie Pauline Rawlins Simpich, a member of DAR, family historiographer, would take me aside when I was older and suggest that I fuse FledaSue, so her Sue would not be lost when I married. The Professor Browns next door were perhaps too much for her intellectually, but she had distant relatives who sailed over on the Mayflower to become part of the few indisputable American elite, and she had John Quincy Adams as her direct ancestor. She had Nec vi standum nec metu—Neither Hesitation nor Fear—on a coat of arms. And a brick with a label varnished across its surface that proclaimed, “Made by slaves on the old Rawlins homeplace.”

At four or five, I am so intimidated by Fleda Phillips Brown that I will not call her by her name, Grandmother. The name is her choice. Susie Simpich is Nana, a name I am told I invented before I found out that half the grandmothers in the world are called Nana. But I duck my head in front of my regal Grandmother. I cannot say that I think she is wonderful: at the age of four or five I have no such clearly formed thoughts, but her presence—maybe I pick this up from my mother, who is intimidated by her—often leaves me breathless. Who knows how energy begins to collect, to turn people into icons? She looks a little like Eleanor Roosevelt, only prettier, the same weak chin, the same slightly yellowed iron-gray hair wound on her head. The same strength in the wiry body, the same conviction in the voice. “Say Grandmother,” my mother says, and I duck my head. “Oh, you can say Grandmother,” she begs, as if it were her fault. I pull away. But I sit on Grandmother’s bed and comb her long hair while she reads to me. I stroke and stroke with the ivory comb, lost in her voice, in the privilege of her long hair."