Jan. 23--The television was on in the background, broadcasting Sarah Palin endorsing presidential candidate Donald Trump as the leader needed to "kick ISIS' " butt.
Isis Carswell Jackson turned around instinctively, before the 39-year-old Chicagoland native could process that the threat, of course, wasn't directed at her.
"I looked up, 'cause it's your name," she said.
Jackson says this is part of the "curse of Isis," one of the frustrations that come with sharing a moniker with a terrorist organization.
Others share her resentment. A video message from a bullied 14-year-old named Isis from Oklahoma went viral earlier this month, extending support to others with the name, telling them to love and cherish it. A sign advertising a Colorado bookstore called Isis Books Gifts was vandalized in November, shortly after the Paris terrorist attacks.
And a Florida woman named Isis crafted an online petition a little more than a year ago asking media to cease using the acronym for Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. (President Obama and most U.S. officials use ISIL, for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Some prefer the term Daesh, an Arabic acronym often interpreted as meaning to stomp on or crush underfoot.)
The petition has more than 63,000 signatures, with more trickling in daily.
"My 2-year-old is named Isis, after the Egyptian goddess," an anonymous signer from Illinois posted on the site about a month ago. "She is cute and sweet and (has) dimples that make everyone around her happy. Yet we feel the growing need to change her name because of what is going on."
Jackson said she hadn't heard of the petition but supports its mission. While her reaction to the Palin newscast was a little comical, she said her name's recent association has affected her customer service job, where a first introduction was often followed by a long pause or double take.
Jackson now lives in O'Fallon, Ill., near St. Louis, but spent most of her life in southwest suburban Bolingbrook and the Galewood area, and she is trying to get a job back home in Chicago. She decided to drop Isis professionally and now goes by her middle name, Marie, at work and in her job search to eliminate distraction.
Except she doesn't feel like a Marie.
"I'm totally an Isis," she said. "I'm no Marie."
Decades before the jihadist group came to be, Jackson's father named her after the Bob Dylan song "Isis," which she periodically plays because she loves the soulful lyrics: "I married Isis on the fifth day of May/but I could not hold on to her very long."
Jackson said she almost passed along the name to her daughter, now a teenager, and is glad she refrained.
"I think it would be hard to have that name in school," she said. "I'm older now, I have a thick skin. I can't imagine a child in school with bullying and all that."
Recent negative connotations haven't deterred all parents: 396 babies were named Isis in 2014, according to U.S. Social Security Administration data, though this is down from 561 in 2005, the name's most popular year.
Vilma Lee-Heinzinger owns Facets of Isis, a bead and jewelry boutique in northwest suburban Palatine. She said strangers have come in wondering whether she's affiliated with terrorism. She's also received several threatening voice messages, she said, some telling her to "go back where you came from."
"I just chalk it up to ignorance," Lee-Heinzinger said. "I just delete them."
On Friday morning, she was instructing customers in jewelry making surrounded by glimmering beads and necklaces on display. Christian music played softly in the background.
"I'm a Bible thumper and I'm always talking to people about Jesus," she said. "It's ironic."
She named the business some 13 years ago after her cat -- with an allusion to ancient Egyptian mythology -- and refuses to alter it because rebranding is expensive and could forsake all her years building a reputation.
"I had the name first," she said.
Isis Martin, a 19-year-old student at Chicago State University, recalled doing seasonal work during the holidays at a department store downtown when a customer began asking a question, looked down briefly midsentence, said, "Wow," and walked away.
It was the nametag: Isis.
"I wouldn't hurt a fly on the wall," Isis Martin said, adding that she stopped wearing the nametag afterward.
Despite incidents like this, her father, Bryant Martin, said if he could go back in time he would still give his daughter the same name.
"It's an Egyptian goddess, that's what I relate it to," he said.
Isis Martin said she wouldn't change it either.
"I like my name," she said. "I don't see myself as an Ashley or a Brittany."
eleventis@chicagotribune.com
