The Covered Wagon as Spaceship: Forced Arrival and Alien Identity in Golden Ax
What Is the Covered Wagon as Spaceship?
In Rio Cortez’s Golden Ax, the covered wagon—an icon of pioneer expansion—is reimagined as a spaceship. The title poem “Covered Wagon as Spaceship” takes the historical vehicle of westward migration and literalizes it as a vessel of alien abduction. The speaker stands “unseen in the little bluestem,” feeling extraterrestrial and wondering “whether it’s aliens / that brought Black folks to the canyons, valley.” The poem ends with the line “Anyway, it begins with abduction”—a stark reframing of Black arrival in the West as forced, coerced, and alienating rather than a voluntary pioneer journey.
This symbol collapses two distinct registers: the mundane canvas-covered wagon of 19th-century overland travel and the sleek spacecraft of science fiction. By merging the two, Cortez questions what it means to arrive in a landscape where you are the only one who looks like you, where your history has been erased or untold, and where even your own body feels foreign.
Where the Symbol Repeats
The covered‑wagon‑as‑spaceship image appears most explicitly in Chapter 4, but its logic ripples through the entire collection. In the Author’s Note, Cortez writes that she “no longer wondered to myself whether aliens possibly put me on Earth, smack-dab in the Wasatch Mountains.” The child‑self’s sci‑fi coping mechanism—imagining extraterrestrial transport—is the same symbolic move as the covered wagon spaceship. Later, in “UFO, for Instance,” a forest clearing becomes a cosmos, and the speaker’s body divides, echoing the alien experience of dislocation. Even “Marion’s 1982 Chevrolet Citation” describes a car as a spaceship of sorts (“cosmic fish” on the hatchback), suggesting that the vehicle of escape or transformation continues the wagon‑spaceship lineage.
How the Symbol’s Meaning Changes
At first, the covered wagon spaceship represents confusion and solitude. The speaker is “curious and not quite used to living,” searching the landscape for understanding of why she is “where there are no others.” The symbol carries a child’s sense of being dropped onto a foreign planet.
As the book unfolds, the meaning deepens. The wagon‑spaceship becomes a tool for reclaiming history. Cortez’s Afropioneerism explicitly borrows from Afrofuturism, using science fiction to remember the Black past. The so‑called pioneer story is revealed as a narrative of coercion: Black settlers in the West did not freely choose the covered wagon but were abducted into it, their labor and lives commandeered by a white‑supremacist frontier. The symbol thus shifts from personal alienation to structural critique.
By the end, the spaceship metaphor also becomes a source of imaginative power. In “Family Tree at Earth’s Surface”, the speaker finds comfort in an unnamed ancestor and loses the need to count names. The covered wagon spaceship, which once signified not being “enough,” now opens a portal to an alternate genealogy—a way of knowing that transcends recorded history.
Character and Theme Connections
The symbol is most tightly bound to the poet’s persona—the “I” who is Rio Cortez’s stand‑in. She is the science‑fiction child whose history is untold. It also connects to Byrdie Lee Howell Langon, whose self‑published book Utah and the Early Black Settlers documented the very community whose arrival the symbol questions. Byrdie represents the effort to make Black visibility permanent, while the spaceship metaphor underscores how that visibility remains fragile.
Themes that intersect:
- Afropioneerism: The symbol is the central artistic device of this theme, fusing history and science fiction.
- Identity and Duality: The speaker is both a human child and an alien, a pioneer and an abductee.
- Memory and Ancestry: The abduction “beginning” forces a reckoning with what was lost in the forced migration from Louisiana to Utah.
- Ecological Grief and Nature: The “great evaporation of a lake” and the bluestem grass mark a landscape that is both beautiful and hostile to belonging.
- Motherhood and Fear: In later poems like “Eden,” the speaker questions whether she is home or visiting—a question rooted in the initial alien arrival.
4 Study Questions with Answers
1. How does the covered‑wagon‑as‑spaceship metaphor reframe the historical narrative of Black pioneers?
The metaphor undercuts the myth of the voluntary, heroic pioneer. By calling the journey an “abduction,” Cortez insists that many Black settlers were forced to move—first out of slavery, then across the country under economic and social pressure. The spaceship element adds a sense of otherworldliness, reflecting how Black pioneers were treated as aliens in the white‑dominated West.
2. In what ways does the poem “Covered Wagon as Spaceship” connect to the Author’s Note?
The Author’s Note confesses that as a child Cortez wondered if aliens had brought her to Utah. The poem literalizes that wondering into a full‑fledged metaphor. Both texts share the same vocabulary—“alien,” “extraterrestrial,” “science fiction”—and together they frame the poet’s personal history as a collective experience of dislocation.
3. Why does the speaker say her history “is not enough”?
The line “whose history, untold, / is not enough” points to the insufficiency of documented records. The speaker feels that the official story of Black Westerners—reduced to pamphlets and rare books—cannot match the emotional weight of her lived alienation. The spaceship symbol provides a new, imaginative language to fill that gap.
4. How does the symbol relate to Afrofuturism, and what does it add to that tradition?
Afrofuturism typically envisions Black futures through technology and space travel. Cortez applies its lens to the past: the covered wagon becomes a time‑traveling ship that retroactively reveals the trauma of migration. The symbol adds a frontier‑specific critique, showing that the American West was as much a site of forced abjection as the Middle Passage.