Marion in Golden Ax: The Giver of Wings in Steel

Overview

Marion appears only once in Rio Cortez’s poetry collection Golden Ax — in the eponymous poem “[Marion’s 1982 Chevrolet Citation]” (Chapter 14). Yet this single appearance carries outsized weight. Marion is the giver of a beat-up but beloved car, a 1982 Chevrolet Citation that friends call “The Killing Machine.” In handing over the keys, Marion becomes a threshold figure: someone who trusts the speaker with a dangerous, powerful object at the cusp of independence. The act places Marion somewhere between a family member and a close family friend — the kind of person who sees the speaker’s readiness before the speaker does.

Because the book operates as a lyric memoir, Marion is not a fully drawn character in the novelistic sense. Instead, she functions as a symbolic presence: a representative of adult generosity and ancestral faith in the next generation. The speaker is days from turning sixteen, and Marion’s gift transforms the speaker’s spatial and emotional world. The car is “asleep” until woken for the speaker, suggesting Marion has been waiting for this moment.

Plot Role

Marion’s sole action — giving away the Citation — catalyzes one of the book’s most important transitions. In Chapter 13, Partum, the speaker grapples with childbirth, transformation, and divine immanence. Chapter 14 then pivots from internal struggle to external movement. The car becomes a vessel for the speaker’s new agency: “where do I go I wonder without them” — the “them” being parents. Marion removes the speaker from the domestic sphere of mulberry trees and basketball hoops and places her on the road, alone.

Chronologically, the gift occurs in the book’s first third, anchoring the adolescence section. Later poems, such as Chapter 21 Black Annie Hall and Chapter 26 It’s Like That Scene in Annie Hall Where Annie Leaves Her Body, explore adult independence and dissociation. Marion’s car is the physical vehicle that makes those later explorations possible. Without this gift, the speaker might never have learned to drive at night, as she does in Chapter 10 Driving at Night, which nods to Laquan McDonald and the dangers Black drivers face.

Marion’s role is brief but essential: she is the enabler of the speaker’s first solo journey.

Motivations and Traits Shown Through Actions

Marion’s motivation is not stated directly — the poem is from the speaker’s perspective — but it can be inferred from the gift and from what she says. Marion tells the speaker, “it’s like she’s been asleep for me,” implying that Marion deliberately kept the car for this specific moment. The car is old; friends call it “The Killing Machine” because it has survived many years. Marion could have sold it or let it rust. Instead, she held it for the speaker.

This act reveals several traits:

• Generosity without possession: Marion gives away an asset with history and power.
• Foresight and trust: She sees the speaker’s impending need for freedom and responds.
• Practicality: She does not give a pristine vehicle, but a working one — humble, used, yet reliable.
• Connection to community: The gift suggests Marion is part of the speaker’s extended network, likely the Afropioneer community described in the Author’s Note. Marion may be a relative or a friend of the family, someone who shares the speaker’s heritage of migration and survival.

The speaker’s friends mock the car’s ruthlessness, but Marion frames it as a sleeping creature waiting to be woken. This anthropomorphizing aligns with the book’s ecological themes: the car is not a mere machine but a presence with a life of its own.

Chronological Arc

Marion appears only in the present tense of Chapter 14, but her gift creates a before-and-after structure in the speaker’s life.

• Before the gift: The speaker is inside the house, staring out the living room window at the car under a basketball hoop. The mulberry tree “wreaks its havoc on the driveway” — a natural world pressing against domestic order. The speaker is passive, watching.
• The gift moment: Marion speaks the line that redefines the car’s meaning: “it’s like she’s been asleep for me.” This is the only direct speech attributed to Marion. It transforms the object from a junker into a legacy.
• After the gift: The speaker decorates the hatchback with cosmic fish, a choice that blends astronomy with the ocean — two realms of vastness and freedom. She presses the accelerator and wonders where to go without parents. The chrome dashboard shows her reflection “in fraction,” signifying a fragmented but recognizable self. She is becoming the driver of her own life.

Marion does not reappear later in the book, but the car’s influence lingers. Later poems about driving, independence, and dislocation echo the threshold Marion opened.

Relationships

Marion’s relationship to the speaker is not explicitly named — it could be aunt, family friend, older neighbor, or godparent. The context of the collection, with its focus on Afropioneerism and the speaker’s Utah upbringing, suggests Marion is part of the same community of Black pioneers. The speaker’s ancestors include figures like Paul C. Howell and Abner Howell; Marion might belong to that extended family tree.

The relationship with the speaker is one of trust and generational passage. Marion gives without condition. The verb “says” in the poem is matter-of-fact: Marion does not lecture or explain. Her action speaks for itself.

The speaker’s relationship with the car itself is intimate. She “boards” it like a ship, feels its “heavy sails,” adjusts its mirrors. The car mediates her relationship with the world beyond home. It also changes her relationship with her parents: “where do I go I wonder without them” is both a practical question and a declaration of separation.

Key Decisions and Consequences

Marion’s decision to give the car is the root cause of all subsequent decisions. It is an act of faith that the speaker will use freedom wisely. The speaker’s choices — decorating, driving, wondering where to go — are consequences of that trust.

Theme and Symbol Connections

The car itself is a symbol aligned with multiple themes:

• Identity and Duality: The speaker sees herself “in fraction” on the dashboard. This evokes the theme of identity and duality: the self as multiple, reflected in chrome and glass. The car allows the speaker to hold together these fragments into a moving whole.
• Ecological Grief and Nature: The mulberry tree “wreaks havoc,” and the speaker later decorates with cosmic fish — mixing organic and celestial. The car is both a machine and a “creature” asleep. This tension between natural and artificial relates to ecological grief and nature, especially the speaker’s awareness of environmental mess.
• Afropioneerism: Marion’s gift echoes the resourcefulness of Black pioneers who had to make do with what they had. The car is not new or flashy but it runs. This reflects the Afropioneer spirit of survival and imagination.
• Memory and Ancestry: The car has a history. Marion kept it “asleep” — preserving it for a future use. This connects to memory and ancestry, where objects carry the weight of past lives and are passed down to new generations.
• Motherhood and Fear: The speaker is “days from my sixteenth birthday,” a classic stage of rebellion. Parting from parents involves fear and longing. The poem does not directly address motherhood, but the speaker’s question “where do I go I wonder without them” touches on the motherhood and fear theme — specifically, the child’s fear of leaving, and the parent’s fear of letting go (implied offstage).
• Threshold to adulthood: The ending explained page notes that the book’s close returns to domesticity and listening. The car is the first major step out of that domestic sphere. It is the “golden ax” of the title — a tool that cuts the speaker free.

5 Book-Specific Questions and Answers

1. Why does Marion give the car to the speaker?

Explicit fact: Marion says, “it’s like she’s been asleep for me.” This implies Marion intentionally kept the car for the speaker’s sixteenth birthday. Interpretation: Marion likely sees the speaker as ready for independence and wants to pass on something durable but imperfect — a gift that requires skill to handle, mirroring the realities of adulthood.

2. Why do the speaker’s friends call the car “The Killing Machine”?

Explicit fact: The speaker reports that “all my friends call her The Killing Machine.” Interpretation: The nickname suggests the car is old, heavy, and potentially dangerous — yet it has survived many years. The irony is that the car is a “killing machine” only in how it has preserved itself, not in any violent action. For the speaker, it becomes a life machine.

3. What does the chrome dashboard reflection mean?

Explicit fact: The speaker sees herself “in fraction” — her wristwatch, her eyebrow, fragments. Interpretation: This fragmented reflection mirrors the speaker’s identity as someone still assembling herself. She is not a complete image but a collection of parts that will cohere only through movement and experience. It aligns with the duality theme.

4. How does the car connect to the book’s other poems about driving, like “Driving at Night” (Chapter 10)?

Explicit fact: “Driving at Night” deals with misidentification of objects (birchwood as quails) and the violence of police killings (Laquan McDonald). Interpretation: The car from Marion makes such night driving possible. The speaker later must navigate roads as a Black driver, seeing dangers others miss. Marion’s gift, while liberating, also opens the speaker to the risk of driving while Black — a risk that the earlier poem frames with tragic context.

5. Is Marion a relative or a friend? Does she appear in the family tree poem (Chapter 48)?

Explicit fact: Marion is not mentioned in Chapter 48 “Family Tree at Earth’s Surface,” which focuses on the “Nameless mother and her son” and a boy named Jackson. Interpretation: Marion is likely a family friend rather than a blood relative. Her name does not appear in the genealogical list, yet her presence is fused with a gift that spans generations. This positions her as part of the community network that sustains the speaker outside the direct family line.