Reginald Brown

I’m an only child. It feels very strange that I’m older now than my parents were when I was born. Now they’re gone. I have no kids. I’m the last one.

Last one of what? What does it take to make a people in the modern homogenized world? It’s not your politics, what sports you follow, what car you drive, what brand of makeup you put on your face, or what television shows you watch religiously. I felt there had to be something more rooted in the earth and the old country, like ancestors who sat for Van Gough when he painted “The Potato Eaters.” I knew nothing. I didn’t even know why my parents named me Reginald.

I grew up in a suburb of Chicago. Went to school, tried out for sports, went to church on Easter Sunday, graduated and got a job in my hometown, making deliveries for a florist. After that, I got union jobs under Teamsters local 916. Never married. After my folks died, my only family were the guys I knew at the Lazy Lou Tavern.

I decided to search for where I came from. There had to be cousins that Mom and Dad never mentioned. Maybe there was a whole town of people who were related to me. Some of them would know where we came from.

It was useless looking for people named Brown. There are a million and a half people in the U.S. whose last name is Brown.

I dug out my birth certificate, or at least what Mom called my birth certificate. It said I was born in Park Barrow, Louisiana. I could believe that, except when I looked it up on a map, it was clear there was no place named Park Barrow, Louisiana. Just a road that ran across some farmland. I did a web search. Zero. No way was I born there.

Were my folks in a witness protection program? Wouldn’t a program like that know better, and be more likely to claim I was born in Chicago, or some place where the hospital burned down? My fake birth certificate must have been made by an amateur. That seems like the only possibility, unless you think that towns big enough to be born in only 45 years ago could be abandoned and plowed under the topsoil, leaving no trace.

I don’t know. Obviously, I had ancestors in some town in Europe. Maybe one of the multitudes of descendants of Charlemagne. I am human, after all. Fair skin, brown eyes, brown hair, medium height. Seemed pretty vague. Unsatisfyingly vague.

I could make up a story about how my folks were political refugees from Czechoslovakia and came over ilNEXTP, and that I was born on a container ship, having no place to claim me, no place that could NEXTP claim me. That seems more plausible than being born in Park Barrow, Louisiana. But what would that make me—an American?