MISTAKEN IDENTITY

I think it’s very nice that because of the internet, everyone in the entire universe knows that I was born Salvatore Lombino. (I like to think I was born Unnamed Baby, but that’s another matter.) I think it’s not very nice that no one bothers to mention that I changed my name legally to Evan Hunter in 1952, which means that I’ve been Evan Hunter longer than most of my readers have been on this earth. I can promise you that if you call me Sal, even if you knew me when I was three years old, I will not answer.

As a matter of fact, back then there were two Salvatore Lombinos roaming the streets of New York. We were both named after my grandfather on my father’s side, an immigrant from Sicily who got run over and killed by a street car on First Avenue when my father was still a child. My father hardly knew him. I never met him. I was born on a blanket on our kitchen table on 120th Street and First Avenue, in what was then New York’s Italian Harlem, a ghetto redolent and resonant of the streets of Naples, from whence most of its residents had come. My Aunt Jenny — born and bred in America — delivered me. She was a midwife. My parents — born and bred in America– named me Salvatore, in honor of my father’s scarcely remembered father. My father’s brother chose this name for his son as well. Two little Sals, both born American, but nonetheless struggling to be considered American.

Rather than bore you with explanations of why I felt it necessary in the American climate of the Fifties to change my name by court order (I would do it all over again in the American climate of the twenty-first century,) I will merely quote from a book I wrote titled KISS, published in 1992.

“So if we allow this trial to become a name calling contest . . .”

“Uh-huh.”

“One minority group against another . . .”

“Uh-huh.”

“An Italian-American victim versus . . .”

“I find that word offensive, too,” Carella said.

“Which word?”

“Italian-American.”

“You do?” Lowell said, surprised. “Why?”

“Because it is,” Carella said.

He did not think that someone with a name like Lowell would ever understand that Italian-American was a valid label only when Carella’s great-grandfather first came to this country and acquired his citizenship, but that it stopped being descriptive or even useful the moment his grandparents were born here. That was when it became American, period.

Nor would Lowell ever understand that when we insisted upon calling fourth-generation, native-born sons and daughters of long-ago immigrants “Italian-Americans” or “Polish-Americans” or “Spanish-.Americans” or “Irish-Americans” or worst of all–“African-Americans,” then we were stealing from them their very American-ness, we were telling them that if their forebears came from another nation, they would never be true Americans here in this land of the free and home of the brave, they would forever and merely remain wops, polacks, spics, micks, or niggers.

“My father was American,” Carella said.

And wondered why the hell he had to say it.

“Exactly my . . .”

“The man who killed him is American, too.”

“That’s how I’d like to keep it,” Lowell said. “Exactly the point I was trying to make.”

But Carella still wondered.