The Ladder

By Salim Nourallah

Even though I have an ethnic name, I’ve always been able to pretty much pass for a white guy. But my name has always been a liability. In Arabic, it means “the truthful light of God.” In English, it means “I’m not like the rest of you.” My mother was from Michigan, after all, and my father was a light-skinned Arab from Syria. A lot of people back in El Paso, where I grew up, thought my dad was Mexican or maybe “exotic,” like an Italian. But the name got me unwanted attention every time.

When I was born, my American grandparents, Robert and Edna Severs, were hoping that my parents would give me a sensible American name. Something like David, Richard, or John. John Nourallah sounds pretty awful, right? But, there was no way I was getting “John Nourallah.” Fayez, my father, was running the show, and Arabic tradition insisted that the firstborn child should take the name of the father’s father. For me, that would be Salim. The child’s middle name also needs to be the father’s first name. So I was anointed Salim Fayez Nourallah. It’s a mouthful. There’s even a Z in there. We all know what happens to people when they see a Z.

My grandmother Edna Severs wasn’t on board with having to explain her first grandchild’s name to the women she played pinochle with. She decided to call me “Sam.” Many years later, my mother gave me some baby photos that had belonged to Edna. “Sam” was written on the back of each one. Thank God that nickname didn’t stick. It was bad enough having grandparents who were openly embarrassed by my ethnicity. Giving me the name Sam made it even worse. Even before the “Sam” years, I knew that they lived with an ever-present disappointment that I didn’t have a normal American name or a normal American father.

I’m certain my dad never considered the ramifications of naming his children. He wasn’t that kind of guy. I was going to be Salim Fayez no matter what. He never pondered what my first day of school might look like or how I might spend my life feeling like I was trapped somewhere between Syria and El Paso.

Dad ended up living to be 83 years old. He never once asked me about how it felt to have this name. But when he’d first met my mother at the University of Illinois, he told her his name was “Michel,” and that he was from France. So he must have already had a sense that his name and heritage were some sort of issue. He’d been in the United States less than a year at that point.

In the ’80s, I went to the department store Dillard's with my father. Dillard's was in Cielo Vista Mall on the Eastside of El Paso. We lived on the Westside so it was always a bit of a haul to get there. When the I-10 highway curved North just past the University of Texas El Paso, we'd get a clear view of the shantytown directly across the Rio Grande from the campus. I stared out the window of dad's Jaguar into the sea of cardboard boxes and shacks across the river in Ciudad Juarez in Mexico.

My dad liked buying Armani suits at Dillard’s. An Armani suit was a symbol of status, just like his maroon Jaguar sports car that was always stalled in our driveway or sitting in a repair shop. The poor suit salesman looked frazzled as dad ran him around the department store searching for the perfect suit. My brother Faris and I disappeared into the clothing racks, we were so embarrassed. He talked to the man like he was his disobedient dog. That man was Hispanic. My dad always said he “loved” Hispanics, but he also said they were “lazy” and they ate nothing but refried beans and cheese. He also said that was why they were all fat. I think his “love” for them came from his feeling superior to them on what he called “the ladder.” The race ladder. He saw the ladder as an obvious thing. It’s something I wish he had never shared with me. He said it was shown to him when he first arrived in the United States back in 1962. He was 26 then and fresh out of the University of Cairo.

As my dad saw things, Hispanics were next up from the bottom rung, then the “yellow-skinned” ethnicities, followed by Middle Easterners. Education was important on the ladder. He had no respect for anyone without at least a Bachelor’s degree in something. A Hispanic or Black person with a degree was higher up on the ladder than the ones without college degrees, but no matter how much education they had, they’d never make it to the top.

My dad said Black people were at the “very bottom” of the ladder. When he first met my mother’s father, my dad said my grandfather’s only comment was, “I was expecting her to bring a Black man one day. At least she brought you.” Still, Robert E. Severs was totally dismayed that his only daughter, Karen, was set on marrying a Muslim Arab.

The two men shared a deep dislike of each other that dominated my childhood. My grandfather had grown up in rural Arkansas, only attained a high school education, and never made nearly as much money as my father. Yet my dad always had a massive chip on his shoulder when it came to their relationship. No matter how much money he made, no matter how many properties he owned, no matter how many Armani suits he had hanging in his closet, he still felt looked down upon by his wife’s father — a white man without a college education.

So who sat at the top of the ladder? Well, of course, the “Anglo-Saxons.” My father always referred to white people as Anglo-Saxon. His contempt was palpable. According to Fayez, the universal qualities of the Anglo-Saxon were that they were cold, uncaring, two-faced, greedy, disloyal, and had no regard for the importance of family. And yet he married an Anglo-Saxon woman. With her blue eyes and fair skin, Karen Severs, from Detroit, Michigan, could not have been any more “Anglo.” She also possessed none of the characteristics my father universally attributed to her race. In fact, she was one of the warmest people you could ever hope to meet.

One time, after making a slur about Anglo-Saxons, I pointed out that he’d married one. His reply was, “But she never looked down on me.” I thought of the ladder.

John Jackson, Oneota, 2025, fujifilm 100v, 9:6.

Jenny Boyer lived next door to me when I was five. We’d just moved from Michigan to our first home in El Paso. It was a duplex on Escondido Street on the edge of the west side. Our front yard looked out to nothing but desert. (Twenty-five years later, a Polaroid my mother snapped of my brother and me playing in cowboy hats in front of that duplex would become the cover of a record we made together called Nourallah Brothers.) Jenny was always cute. She had long, straight blonde hair and the bluest eyes. We played a lot together back then. She was really nice to me. She was my friend. I can picture us as two little kids playing in the front yard. Strange names and ethnicities don’t matter so much to little kids.

We only stayed in Escondido for a little while. After we moved away, I didn’t see Jenny for a few years, not until first grade at Western Hills Elementary School. My parents had built a house on Constellation Street atop a steep hill, only one long block away from the school. It turns out Jenny lived just around the corner from us on Borealis, but I never played with her again. Jenny was destined for popularity. I was destined for Coke bottle glasses, terrible bowl cuts, and “husky” size jeans from JCPenney. I also had the weirdest name in Western Hills. No one ever thought it was “cool” or “unique” back then. It was foreign, and it made me feel like an alien.

The first day of class was always particularly excruciating. The teacher would make their way uneventfully through roll call until they stalled at N. The teachers never got my name right. It was always Saa-lim, Say-lim, Celine or Say-leen. And my last name was a total horror show: Ner-oola, Nav-ralla, Ner-ella, Nor-valla. My poor teachers would stumble, stammer, and blush as they struggled, and then I’d have to slowly repeat the pronunciation in front of a class of gawking onlookers.

I hated my name. I hated my father’s Syrian heritage. It wasn’t mine. Why did I have to suffer for it? I just wanted to be “normal,” or I just didn’t want to be looked at like I was some sort of freak. It never got any easier. My teachers would usually try to make up for mispronouncing my name by asking me where I was from. I just wanted them to move on to the next kid. I was born in Illinois. I just happened to have a jacked-up foreign name because my father was Arabic. Kids don’t really want to explain that sort of stuff in front of a classroom of snickering onlookers. Mrs. Perez, my 6th grade English teacher, was the only one who ever got it right on the first try. She was the only one who really tried.

Jenny Boyer and I had multiple classes together in Western Hills and all through Morehead Middle School. We were in 6th grade band together; she was in the clarinet section that sat a row in front of the baritone section. Baritone is a brass instrument that’s kind of like a mini tuba. That’s what I played at the time. I remember sitting behind her and admiring how perfectly straight her hair was as it fell over the back of her chair. We both went on to attend Coronado High and had more classes together. But she never spoke to me or acknowledged that we used to know each other. Maybe she didn’t remember, or maybe she was just embarrassed.

Jenny went on to be head cheerleader at Coronado and was also homecoming queen and voted most popular our senior year. Coronado was a big school with close to 700 graduating students in the class of 1985. That made her pretty damn popular. The last class we ever had together was English with Sulta Yates. I felt sorry for Mrs. Yates. There was a mean-spirited rumor going around that her husband went out for ice cream one day and never came back. The neighborhood bully, Pool Webb, cackled about it.

Sometimes I would fantasize about making the coolest mixtape ever for Jenny. I’d put my favorite obscure British bands on it. Stuff you’d never hear on our lame classic rock station, KLAQ. Elvis Costello, Squeeze, The Jam, The Comsat Angels, The Great Buildings. In my fantasy, I’d casually walk up to her and say something like, “Hey Jenny, I thought you’d like this tape I made you.” And she’d smile and say, “Wow, that’s super cool of you, Salim. I can’t wait to listen to it.” She’d take it home, put it on, and realize how freaking awesome I might be. A couple of times I started making the mixtape, but I never came close to giving it to her. I’d always chicken out. I continued hoping she would send even a passing smile my way at school. It never happened. And I was too shy ever to approach her. I saw where I was on the ladder, and she was way above me, not even looking down. She was so far up she couldn’t see me at all.

​

Many years later, I got a Facebook friend request from Jennifer Boyer. The teenage cheerleader had been replaced by a middle-aged mom with two children and a husband. We exchanged brief messages a few times. I had a show in Atlanta, where she now lived. She and her sister were going to attend but had to miss the show because Jenny’s son got sick. Even though she never made it to the show I felt like Jenny Boyer finally saw me.

I’d spent my adult life rejecting the ladder. Hearing from Jenny Boyer decades later meant that maybe she had, too. I wish I could have known that day was coming. It wasn’t a mixtape, but it was something.

Racheal Bennett, Thread, 2025, Archival Inkjet Print, 11" x 14".