Prompt Entry 4

Periplaneta americana.

Let us begin with a little etymology:

Peri-, prefix meaning "around, about, enclosing." Comes from the Greek "peri-" meaning "around, about, beyond."

Planeta- a word that does not exist in modern usage, it is Latin with its origin in the Greek phrase asteres planetai, "wandering stars." Planetai is further traced back to planesthai, "to wander."

Americana, logically, means "American."

A name is an entryway. A name can contain some sense of a thing but never encompasses it wholly. A name is a place to start.


The first time I saw a cockroach, I was laying on Sarah Hyder's grandma's bed in Punta Gorda, Florida, on my way to college spring break in Daytona. Oma had forewarned us. Sort of.

"Oeh, thzey are evrewhzere, thze Palmettoze. Looke ouht."

Sarah, Liz and I got the master suite. Oma, a traditional, German hostess, refused to stay in her own room and chose the smaller guest bedroom. We were drinking cheap rum mixed with orange juice when Liz screamed.

"(Unintelligible, loud hysteria)!!!"

Sarah and I whipped our heads around. She spotted it seconds before I did and began to laugh. I leaped back.

On the middle of the creamy beige wall, a brown monstrosity hung motionless. It was the size and shape of an overlong almond. Even from my position cowering in the back of the room, I could see its segmented body and antennae.

"You two are ridiculous. It's just a palmetto." Sarah chided us as she rolled up a magazine for the kill.

"That. Is. A. Cockroach." Liz gasped.

"Duh. They're basically the same thing." Sarah struck and missed. A dreadful thing happened.

"(Angry, unintelligible hysteria)!!! IT CAN FLY!!!!!!!" Liz brought a pillow to her face and yelled into it. Sarah jumped from the bed to the ground. It happened quickly. SLAP! Squish...

"Yeah," Sarah whipped her hair back and stood. "They can do that."

When I saw them in movies, cockroaches indicated filth. The man with the cockroach infestation was the creep, the killer, the hobo. The protagonist reflected on scuttling cockroaches in his childhood home, safe in the spotless residence of his adulthood.

In Savannah, the palmettos were everywhere. I came to the conclusion that southerners couldn't shed the plague of the roaches so they shed the name. A palmetto could be beautiful if you let it.

A cockroach can travel up to 50 times its body length in a second. That's the equivalent of a human being running 330 miles per hour. As it is, it's about 3.4 mph, or a leisurely walking pace for Homo sapiens. The roaches accompanied me as I walked to and from work. At first, I went to great lengths to avoid them. If I saw a roach, I jumped into the street and jogged a few paces before returning to the sidewalk. Roaches. They disgusted me. I feared their entry into my home, armed my apartment with traps to insure their demise. When they scuttled alongside me, I imagined I could hear the clickity clack of their multiple legs. They darted between my feet unexpectedly. I was sure this was an attempt at torture. Shiny brown bodies blended with the fallen leaves of live oak trees, providing the perfect cover for the infestation.

After weeks, months of journeying with them, I lost my fear of the roach. I conceded defeat and began addressing them as palmettos. When they showed up in my path, I shared it. They, after all, had been there first.

Periplaneta americana, the American cockroach, the palmetto bug. Despite their species name, the palmetto isn't even American. Palmettos came to the states from Africa during the slave trade. The southerners renamed the slaves too. P. americana sought out the warmest, moistest climates, the ones reminiscent of Mother Africa. They have been unjustly labeled a household pest. Cockroaches will do almost anything to avoid a human home. They want to live out of doors beneath the stars.

All around the planet. Wandering around, looking for stars.