This chapter explores the politics of (re)naming place in Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997) and Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006). Both novels depict the historical backdrop of all-Black towns in the American Midwest during the second half of the nineteenth century. While they differ in tone and scope, at the heart of each text’s plot is a process whereby a community founds, names, and then re-names, their town. In both texts, the politics of re-naming the towns bring to the surface competing versions of collective memory, silenced bits of history, and contested myths of origin. At stake is the remembering or forgetting of racist violence and the trauma of slavery. In my reading, I trace the intersection between the politics of naming, the memorializing practices evinced in the different names received by the towns, the distribution of power and the shifts in the collective identity of the communities who live in these towns. Moreover, as Morrison and Whitehead explore in their fiction, the re-naming practices carried out by the communities depicted in their texts serve as indexes of the processes of sacralization, designation, or effacement of specific aspects of their common experience of racism and slavery.