A surname’s unspoken history

When a Harvard University student inquired about my name, she was clear that she wanted to know about my surname, Bowean.

People ask me if it’s French; I think they are trying to determine if my heritage is Haitian. Others will ask if it’s Celtic, which would connect me to the Irish.

The truth is, my last name was probably supposed to be Bowen, but somewhere in the past someone misspelled it, and the lives of my clan were forever changed.

This was common. Some Southern African Americans struggled with literacy after emancipation, and names took on new spellings. In other cases, white officials didn’t bother to document the correct spellings on public records, and the mistakes lived on.

In this country, there are hundreds of Bowens. Yet my immediate relatives are the only people I have found with the “Bowean” last name.

I explained this all to the curious student. I went on to tell her that the Bowean surname came to my people through marriage.

Before we were Boweans, we were Norwoods and Wakefields rooted in a small town in western North Carolina near the mountains. Those names are connected back to England. “I know some Norwoods and some Wakefields from western North Carolina,” she piped up. It seemed that for a moment she thought we had found common ground. The next sentence she almost whispered: “But they’re white.” We didn’t speak about the legacy of American slavery.

It’s these unexpected confrontations with history that trigger what writer and social commentator James Baldwin called the “constant state of rage.”

I didn’t mention to the student that during slavery, African Americans were assigned names by their owners, and many times didn’t even have a surname. I didn’t talk about how those residents were at times given the last name of their owner so that they could be identified as that white family’s property. These are the names that so many black Americans still wear.

The decision to stay bound to these names is deeply personal. I would never change my name—even if I married—mainly because it connects me to a fragmented people.

“There’s probably a relationship between the two families,” the African American one and the white one, I remember telling the student. “But I don’t know exactly, specifically, what it is.” We left the rest unspoken and parted ways.