G.G. Jackson was one of many women employed by agencies of the federal government. She had been born in Chicago's South Side in 1963. Her mother, Shavonna Jackson, had been fifteen at the time. Like many 15-year-old single mothers, Shavonna Jackson had not thought much about the realities of motherhood, including the immediate problem of what to name her offspring.
Concurrently, overworked interns on rotation in ghetto hospitals did what they could to entertain themselves amid 20-hour days in depressing surroundings. In 1963, as in all other years, one of the standard gambits among interns assigned to inner-city delivery rooms was to see who could cause the most outrageous name to be printed on the birth certificate of children born to ghetto teenagers.
The second week of February, 1963 saw some serious competition among interns in south Chicago. In a five-day period, there were Chicago-area births registered for Madison Avenue Washington, Epluribus Wilson, Nosmo King (inspired by a waiting room sign), Simian Cook, and Anus Brown. The award that week, however, went to a young doctor from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, who hated working in the Chicago facility. He had suggested to Miss Jackson that she give her infant daughter a distinctive, happy-sounding name, and offered one he thought appropriate. He pronounced the first name with the accent on the second syllable, and Shavonna thought it sounded nice. Like 'Gloria', only fancier. People who read the name would pronounce it differently, but Shavonna could not read, so the impact of the intern's joke was not felt for some time.
[G.G. Jackson's name is not revealed until hundreds of pages later...]
Oh come on now. You can tell us. Really - - -