Memory and Ancestry: Reclaiming the Past in Golden Ax

Defining the Thematic Claim

In Golden Ax, Rio Cortez treats memory and ancestry not as passive records but as active, imaginative acts of survival. The poet excavates a family history fractured by slavery, migration, and erasure, drawing on archives, oral tradition, and personal intuition. She acknowledges the unreliability of memory—gaps, contradictions, and silence—yet insists on claiming the unnamed and the silenced. The collection proposes that ancestry is lived through place, story, and metaphor, not merely documented through names and dates. This thematic claim runs through the Author’s Note, the poem “Family Tree at Earth’s Surface,” and the lyric meditation “The Idea of Ancestry,” each demonstrating a different facet of how the poet builds a lineage from fragments.

Excavating Family History: The Author’s Note and Byrdie Langon

The Author’s Note introduces the terms Afropioneerism and Afrofrontierism to frame the family’s post‑Reclamation migration from Louisiana to Utah. Cortez explains that her great‑great‑aunt Byrdie Lee Howell Langon self‑published Utah and the Early Black Settlers, and that she relies on Kate B. Carter’s pamphlet The Story of the Negro Pioneer alongside family memories. These sources are fragmentary: the pamphlet was written by a white Mormon historian, and oral tradition carries the risk of fading or distortion. Yet Cortez claims these records as the foundation of her work, calling her ancestors “Afropioneers” and emphasizing that “imagination” is a tool of survival.

In the chapter “Far Enough,” a poem written by Byrdie’s pastor, Jerry Ford, uses the metaphor of reaching past superficial weakness to draw out hidden beauty. The phrase “far enough” becomes a call to look deeply at people and communities whose value has been overlooked. This poem honors Byrdie as someone who helps others see their best qualities—a parallel to the poet’s own act of looking deeply into family history. Here memory is inseparable from the act of attention and love.

The Search for the Unnamed: “Family Tree at Earth’s Surface”

The poem “Family Tree at Earth’s Surface” directly confronts the limits of genealogical research. The speaker uses “all the tools on the table: / expert, archive, attic, passed word, hunch, self” and arrives at a “Nameless mother and her son.” The nameless mother is compared to the moon, a “tidemaker”—a force that shapes life even without a recorded name. The poem then traces blackness to a boy called Jackson, a farmer and coffin builder who left his last name. Here the poet acknowledges that official records are insufficient: names may be lost, but emotional connection remains.

The poem reaches a turning point when the speaker realizes “there is another tool, / another knowing that we arc forever / an arc in which the moon herself / is affectionately mothered.” This shift from counting names to feeling connection brings comfort, and the speaker loses the impulse to keep recording. This is a profound statement about memory and ancestry: the past is not a ledger to be completed but a relationship to be felt. The speaker accepts the unknown as part of the inheritance, honoring those who cannot be named.

Immediate Connection Through Place: “The Idea of Ancestry”

In “The Idea of Ancestry,” after Etheridge Knight, the speaker stands in Millcreek canyon and feels the physical presence of her people. She describes standing where her grandmother fished, near a timber trail felled by her great‑grandfather, listening to aspen leaves that “sang just like this / for them.” The landscape becomes a living archive. The speaker declares, “I am standing / right at the center / of its singing,” suggesting that ancestry is not only in blood but in geographic and sensory memory.

This poem also complicates the idea of purity: the speaker notes she could be “moonless / and shining in wildflower,” implying that identity can be luminous even without a fixed origin story. The timber used for a house built by “my mother’s grandmother’s / mother’s hammer in hand” becomes a roof that keeps frost from her babies. The act of building—the hammer in hand—becomes a direct, embodied link across generations. Memory here is not a document but a material inheritance.

Complexity and Contradiction

Cortez does not flatten the complexities of her ancestry. The conversion of Abner Howell to Mormonism created lasting tensions, as the LDS church banned Black priesthood until 1978. In the poem “As Cain,” the poet directly addresses the church’s doctrine that Black people were neutral in a pre‑earth life. She writes, “Tell me, what mark has God / given me?” and “God’s always changing his mind about us.” This poem reclaims the story of Cain and Abel, questioning a theology that has been used to justify exclusion. Yet the poet does not reject her ancestors’ faith; instead, she holds the contradiction—honoring Abner’s testimony while critiquing the institution.

In “To Salt Lake, Letter Regarding Genealogy,” the speaker adopts a defiant voice: “I have had to build. O! how I have built for you! … I stole the mountain’s sandstone … I did the work of believing with you.” This poem acknowledges the labor and sacrifice of Black pioneers who helped build Utah while being denied full membership. The letter is addressed to Salt Lake itself, personifying the city as a reluctant witness to Black history.

The poem “Eden” further complicates belonging. The speaker stands at a kitchen window washing dishes and wonders if she is home or just visiting. She describes a “snow cup” that has melted into the “summer people” they truly are, suggesting transformation and perhaps a departure from the told story of her life. This poem implies that ancestry must be constantly reimagined—not fixed in a single place or identity.

Symbol Connections

The collection’s symbols deepen the theme of memory and ancestry. Salt appears in the epigraph as the Great Salt Lake at sunset, a natural wonder that also preserves and erodes. Salt is both a preservative (memory) and a sign of barrenness (what is lost). The covered wagon as spaceship transforms the pioneer journey into a cosmic migration, blending history with imagination. The scorpion often appears as a creature of defense and hidden threat—perhaps the sting of forgotten history. The robin’s egg symbolizes fragility and new life, much like the fragile yet persistent act of remembering.

Conclusion

Across Golden Ax, Rio Cortez builds a poetics of memory and ancestry that is both skeptical and reverent. She uses every tool available—archives, oral history, intuition, metaphor—and ultimately values emotional connection over exhaustive documentation. The collection honors the unnamed and the silenced, complicating easy narratives with the realities of religious conflict, migration, and erasure. In doing so, Cortez claims a lineage that is vast, imaginative, and deeply rooted in the landscapes and struggles of the Afrofrontier.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does Cortez use the concept of Afropioneerism to reframe Black Western history?
   Cortez coins Afropioneerism as a parallel to Afrofuturism, using imagination and historical research to reclaim her family’s role as Black pioneers in the West. This term centers Black agency and survival in a narrative often dominated by white settlement, and it allows her to critique and expand traditional frontier mythology.

2. What role does the “Nameless mother” play in “Family Tree at Earth’s Surface”?
   The nameless mother symbolizes the countless enslaved and free Black women whose names were lost to record‑keeping. By comparing her to the moon and a tide‑maker, Cortez grants her cosmic significance, suggesting that influence does not depend on documentation. The speaker ultimately finds peace by accepting her unnamed ancestors as part of an emotional, rather than archival, lineage.

3. How does the poem “The Idea of Ancestry” connect the speaker to her ancestors through landscape?
   The speaker stands in Millcreek canyon where her grandmother fished, near a timber trail her great‑grandfather felled. She listens to aspen leaves and imagines they sang the same song for her ancestors. The landscape functions as a living archive—sensory experience bridges the gap between past and present, making ancestry tangible and immediate.

4. In what ways does Cortez question the reliability of memory in Golden Ax?
   Cortez acknowledges that her sources—a white historian’s pamphlet, family stories, and her own imagination—are partial and potentially flawed. In “Family Tree at Earth’s Surface,” she exhausts “expert, archive, attic, passed word” yet still arrives at unnamed figures. The poem “As Cain” directly confronts the unreliable doctrine of the LDS church about Blackness. Rather than discarding memory, Cortez embraces its gaps and uses them as spaces for creative reclamation.

5. How does the symbol of salt relate to memory and ancestry in the collection?
   Salt appears in the epigraph describing the Great Salt Lake at sunset, a natural feature that preserves and erases. As a preservative, salt suggests the power of memory to keep the past alive; as a corrosive element, it implies that memory is always changing and incomplete. The lake itself is a landmark of Black Western history—the region where Cortez’s family settled—making salt a dual symbol of endurance and loss.