Identity

Have you ever met somebody whose name or birthday is the same as yours? Lots of us know people who share our first name ("Christian" name or given name), and many of us know people unrelated to us who share our last name (surname or family name). But how many of us know people with whom we share both a first and last name? In these days of identity theft--a real and serious problem--I'm now and then made aware of the curious phenomenon--usually not a problem--of what I'd call "identity sharing."


I have friends named Mike or Michael. Believe it or not, I always feel a twinge of uneasiness when I'm talking to them and the need arises to speak their name aloud. What kind of twinge is this? I think it must have to do with such dark feelings as jealousy and selfishness. But what am I jealous of? What am I being selfish about? The name, I'm sure. But maybe it's my identity too. Because I go by "Michael" these days, I tend to try to call my "namesakes" by "Mike." I suppose it's my attempt to establish some difference between us, to avoid as much as possible sharing an important component of my identity with him. And if, for whatever reason, I have to call him "Michael," I tend to do so in some sort of playful tone that makes light of his apparent attempt to steal my name.



The same situation doesn't seem to exist with the family name. When I meet or hear of people with the last name of Cody, I seem to have a greater willingness to share with them. I might even feel a sense of kinship, even though it's highly unlikely that any traceable kinship exists between us. I've always felt somewhat proud--until recently, at least--of sharing Cody with the Western hero Buffalo Bill (William Cody). More recently, however, as I've read a good bit of Native American literature and thought about the ways the American West was won and lost, I'm not so proud. Still, I'm not jealous of sharing the name. I sometimes have students in class with the last name of Cody. I always want them to do well. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't.



Similar to this is my feeling about people with my last name as their first name. "Cody" has become popular as a first name in recent years. I think my son had two first-name Codys in his eighth grade class. Somehow this kind of sharing seems like an honor of sorts--as if it were this way: "We like your name so much that we're going to name our child that--after you."

I've thought about this from time to time in the past, but I was reminded of it yesterday and again this morning. Leesa and Raleigh and I went last night to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. I walked up to the window and asked for three tickets for the 9:00 showing. The young man on the other side of the glass experienced some difficulty bringing up the tickets, so I had a moment just standing there watching him and what he was doing. He kept making a sequence of entries on his keypad, but something didn't seem to be working the way it was supposed to. This went on for only a few seconds, I'm sure, but it gave me time to notice his name tag: "Cody M." My name is often listed just like this--alphabetical lists, for example. My email name at work is "codym." Somewhere in my mind was that little shock of recognition.

But how many of us know people whose full names--first and last, at least--are the same as ours? On the darker side of this issue is the telephone call I received this morning. A Ms. Williams from suchandsuch company, a collection agency, called because a seriously past due credit card account in the name of Michael A. Cody (my middle name is Amos) had been turned over to her for collection. A balance of almost $900 had been outstanding since sometime in 2005. Oddly enough, I had a credit card with the company in question just a year or so earlier. My card had been paid off, I was certain. But they had my telephone number! Slowly Ms. Williams and I went through the process of realizing that this wasn't my account. The last four digits of the account number were oddly similar--mine 2991, the other's 6991. But even though I had lived in Goodlettesville and Nashville in the past (the 1980s), my current address wasn't a PO Box in Madison, TN, nor did the last four digits of my Social Security match the one on file for the account. The company had looked for a current telephone number for a Michael A. Cody living in Tennessee and come up with mine. The situation gave me a few tense moments but ultimately left me curious and thoughtful, which in turn led to this rather odd post.

Things can get weird with same names. I once dated a girl whose parents had the same name, phonetically at least--his Carroll Anderson, hers Carol Anderson. I publish essays and such on literary topics, and a Michael J. Cody publishes in the somewhat related field of linguistics. When I lived in Nashville, the Attorney General of Tennessee was named Mike Cody. I remember a couple of times getting calls from news services. Thinking that I was somehow included in a general poll, I would answer a question or two related to state business before I realized that the interviewer probably thought I was the AG. (Once in a particularly wicked mood, I went ahead with the entire interview, even after I realized whom the person on the other end thought she was speaking to.) I guess that the reporter's assumption was that the state attorney general would live in the state capital, which in Tennessee is, of course, Nashville. But if I'm not mistaken, Mike Cody lived in Memphis. I guess reporters back then--the 1980s--simply called "information" and for a number; my "Cody, Michael A." was the first of three or four Michael Codys listed in the Nashville telephone book at the time.

To a lesser degree, our birthdays are connected with our identity. In June 1979, I flew from New York to London for a student tour of Europe. This was only my second flight ever--the first having been the day before when I flew from Charlotte to New York. I sat beside this one fellow all the way over the Atlantic, but I don't recall speaking a single word to him. (I was a shy young Appalachian man of 20, stepping out into the big world for the first time.) As we approached the airport in London, the stewardess passed around these little cards we were supposed to fill out. I was diligently working on mine when my neighbor nudged me with his elbow and held his card out for me to see. Except for the years, we shared the same birthday--11/25/19--. Suddenly a sense of connection developed between us, and although we had little time to talk at that point, I felt not so alone in the world.

One last thing: Whenever I teach Frederick Douglass's 1845 autobiography of his life as a slave in the American South, I spend a good bit of time focusing on the fact, discussed in Chapter One, that slaveholders tended not to allow slaves to know their specific birthdays. This was part of the system of stripping away things that might suggest an individual--and therefore special--identity.