Second Place Winner - CWA First Chapter Contest -                            “Daughter of the Weeds”

By Dorothy Garcia

There are 150 synonyms for murder. What you call something, whether you name it at all, is the root of its power. There is a name for the darkness tangled in my DNA. I can trace it back to Antonio Delgado, the first of my ancestors to arrive in the New World in the 1600s. He joined the de Vargas expedition to escape justice after murdering his wife of two months for suspected infidelity. For the past 400 years, every generation of Delgados has given birth to a murderer.

            I was baptized Genevieva María, named for the woman who later married the jealous Castilian and bore him a child. In our tradition, every female child is also named for La Virgen María. After my mother’s death, I longed for a different name. One that would not remind me of the past. Genevieva María is too long, too formal, too much a reminder of my father’s violence. When I was a child my mother held me close, breathed in the scent of my dark hair, and kissed my forehead murmuring “Eva María.’” Eva María is too ethnic, too Catholic, too much a reminder of my loss. I adored my mother, but that name sounds too much like Ave María. My life has not been a song of praise.

I learned quite young the power of words to put you in your place. The Spanish who settled the town I grew up in brought casta with them. Casta refers to the purity of your bloodline and reflects your status. My sisters and I held a status in the village that reflected the murderous nature of our ancestors. The words were whispered as we played outside the adobe home of my grandparents. Mala semillas. Bad seeds. They burned in a sideways glance as we walked down the street. Mala suerte. Bad luck. They thickened the air with tension if a boy asked us to dance. Hijas de las hierbas. Daughters of the weeds. Another thread twisted its way into our DNA. Disgrace. We were the unwelcome offspring of a drunk and killer. I was desperate to escape the village of my birth and the pain of my youth. At the age of seventeen, I left Dos Pies for the University of New Mexico where I chose a new name. Genna. I liked the short-clipped sound of it. It was a reminder that one day I too would live in the sanctuary of self-control and privilege I glimpsed at the university. A world where husbands do not murder wives, and where science and psychology have the power to explain the incomprehensible.

I finished college and graduate school, and when I married took my Anglo husband’s last name of Porter. My transformation was complete, Genevieva María Delgado, hija de las heirbas, became Dr. Genna Porter, professor of Neuropsychology and trauma expert, thirty-two years old, but already widowed. I thought I had escaped the echoes of violence, but you cannot cut the threads of the past embedded in your DNA. They glimmer in the choices you make and the events that follow, sometimes only clear in the retelling.