The Moon Winx Sign
Traveling from Atom City to Tuscaloosa,1950s


Are we there yet? The neon crescent moon
with its neon blue eye and sly smile, illuminating
the night above the Moon Winx Motel, was the sign
that we nearly were — that we’d begun the final mile
of the trip from our city of science into the South.
The neon eye winked open and shut, and “winks”
was spelled (incorrectly, by adults!) with an “x,”
a mark that could mean so much: both the known
(“x marks the spot”), and the unknown, to solve for;
also danger and wrong on signs and exams,
and yes, love and kisses at the close of letters.
The vastness of “x” in “Winx” seemed just right.
Of course the turn onto our grandmother’s road
would be marked by a special spelling, by glowing light,
by a neon moon descended to shine on the entrance
to the Crescent Ridge Road on which she lived.

We were almost there. Only the driveway crunching
under the tires of our family’s car meant we were closer
to the Gothic-shaped radios, the wonder cabinet,
the sheaves of saved, sewing-pattern tissues,
and the lenses that magnified the word of our people.
Their driveways were paved in river pebbles,
a fluid pelt, powdered by drifting clay, then washed
by rain to the sheen of salmon and pearls. Taken
from the Tombigbee River, the cool, silk-smooth stones
could close as snug as pockets around bare feet.

There we made a game called Going to the Moon —
looping red rubber bands on gimcrack rockets,
shooting the balsa-wood ships with cellophane wings
into the sky, then craning our necks — wowed
by flight. As the rockets returned to earth they fell
into the blankets of kudzu covering, softening
whole trees, houses, woodlands, gullies, and barns.

The land, we learned in time, had been the land
of the Creek (rightly, the Muscogee Alliance),
and an earlier people who built the solemn,
now silent earthen mounds that rose nearby,
holding time and absence. The relic mounds
were treated reverently, but some piece of time
was missing, altogether unknown, or hushed,
and now they had gone (where and why?).

We didn’t then know how to ask, and the land —
it was their land for two thousand years — had become
the home of collards, cotton, Scots-Irish and African
stories and songs, along with soft arms, biscuits,
and the cognitive dissonance that was our inheritance:
the pursuit of happiness / trails of tears,
all men created equal / “whites only” signs,
life, liberty / bound and sold
the new world sorrows, horrors that were ours to end —
in every part of the land, we came to understand,
from sea to shining sea — and we are not there yet.

About the Muscogee Nation | The Mounds of Alabama’s First People
Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America, Keisha Blaine
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Northeastern Law Civil Rights & Restorative Justice Project | Burnham-Nobles Archives
Hymn, a tribute

Published in an earlier version in Green (Graywolf Press,1989); revised 2024
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents at-a-Glance