My Name Is Margaret
My Name Is Margaret. “My Name Is Margaret” written by Maya Angelou. Maya Angelou is novelist, poet, playwright, actress, composer, and singer. Actual name is Marguerite Annie Johnson born in 1928. People identify with our name in many ways. Our name is what links us to our family; History and we are the image that is associated with our name. In the outline of the essay, the narrator is informative of how it was like to live in that precise time period. Margaret distinguished between a white girl and a black girl developing up in the south. Mrs. Viola’s friend sees a lack of importance in calling Margaret by her actual name, as “that may be, but the name’s too long. I’d never bother myself. I’d call her Mary if I was you.” In doing this, “Old Speckled-Face,” as Margaret called her, attempts to dehumanize her and epitomizes the standard way of thinking of the common, rich white people in the 60’s and 70’s. A name for me represents history. Too many names are lost and/or changed because someone’s past, someone’s culture, someone’s story was “too long” to remember, and that just really makes me dejected. It makes me sad to know that people lost so much, especially their names. Maybe that’s why I take my name so seriously. I know I have difficulty remembering other people’s names sometimes, and I’m working on that. I think names are something we take for granted, like we don’t always feel the weight behind our names. There is so much pain and struggle in the past, so many new names that were “better” than the ones people came with from Africa, Asia, or wherever our ancestors immigrated from. Maya Angelou discusses changing names, when Miss Glory tells her about how Mrs. Cullinan changed her name from Hallelujah to Glory, again because it was too long to remember. She didn’t seem to mind, though. Mrs. Cullinan finally calls Margaret by her real name. It only took the breaking of her prized china. I find it sad that she could only bear to say/