07/31/2008 1:00 am

Life

Liz Smith's Grandfather, Jerome Bonaparte Smith, Is Not Related to Napoleon. Liz Explains ...

Liz Smith
My grandfather, Jerome Bonaparte Smith. I always supposed his French mother gave him that name because Napoleon’s brother was affiliated with Louisiana and so she named him the same way black people named their children George Washington Carver or Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones. He was the issue of a very brave woman who, speaking no English, singlehandedly drove her children in an oxcart from Louisiana to Texas where she thought they’d have better luck.

Grand-daddy bragged that he was a direct descent of the Bonapartes. All his friends call him “Bone-y” and I thought, during my childhood, that this was because he was thin and all bones. If he elected to inflate his name, he was at least fitted to his last name; he was a smith, an ironworker. He made cast-iron skillets for my mother and I still own one. He was one for practical jokes; when the yo-yo came in fashion, he tied an onion on a string and cast it up and down. He was good to us children and paid attention to us. This was an exception in the days when children were “seen and not heard.” Nobody paid us any mind except Bone-y.

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rockyrocky
Ms. Smith — Just FYI: I was curious to see how George Washington Carver might have gotten his name and thought it would be easy to find out since his life is relatively well known. Although the motive you suggest may have contributed to his name, it wasn’t his parents who named him “George Washington” according to Wikipedia: “… When he identified himself ‘Carver’s George,’ as he had done his whole life, she replied that from now on, his name was ‘George Carver.’ … [Later] In order to avoid confusion with another George Carver in his [college] classes, he began to use the name George Washington Carver.” — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Carver
By rockyrocky on 07/31/2008 11:29 pm
rockyrocky
Again, respectfully and not at all to criticize, I started my little search because I had it in my mind that the black people of that time were named by their “owners,” and seldom were their parents allowed to name their children themselves. I could not immediately find substantiation, but did find again that the motive you attribute to that type of naming is more correct than not. Again from Wikipedia: “During enslavement, slaves’ names were assigned by their owners. Others received a name based on what kind of work they were forced to do … such as Cotton … After emancipation … some blacks in the U.S. took on the surname Freeman, while others adopted the names of popular historical or contemporary figures of social importance, such as former presidents Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson.” — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_name
By rockyrocky on 07/31/2008 11:43 pm
rockyrocky
Wish I could take all this back. It’s part of my job to check facts … Sometimes I forget to leave that mindset at work! Again, meant no criticism. I was merely curious.
By rockyrocky on 07/31/2008 11:50 pm