Summary
At the Natural Bridge arch in Virginia, Moth comments that the phenomenon looks like land that has grown around an ancient giant’s head. They hike to the top. At their first motel, they lie in bed and Moth tells a tale about a Hoodoo man performing a ritual at a former slave plantation. He prepares a feast and invites his ancestors to join him at the table. The offering brings peace to the building.
Sani responds with a creation story called “The Four Worlds.” He says the Diné (another term for the Navajo people) call the first world the Black World, where only the Holy People and insects live. The First Man and First Woman arrive like a miracle, escaping to the Second World when the Holy People “set fire to the darkness.” They live in this blue, life-filled world until the Holy People send great winds across it.
The tale continues as the First Man and First Woman climb into the Third World. It is peaceful, but Coyote takes Water Monster’s baby, causing Water Monster to make it rain in sadness. The First Man plants a female reed that stretches to the sky and he and First Woman escape to the Glittering World. There they plant soil from the the Yellow (Third) World and find a balance in growing things and living peacefully until it is time to die. Sani tells Moth he’ll hide with her in any world she wants. They sleep holding each other close.
Moth and Sani sneak into an abandoned amusement park in North Carolina. Sani says his people believe ghosts are tricksters and that ghosts can cling tightly to you. He takes two clear capsules stuffed with dried herbs of some sort. He drives without speaking to her. They sleep without touching. He finally says that it hurts him to know she will leave, just as everything else has left him. She says she won’t leave him. They make up after viewing the largest outdoor metal sculpture in Tennessee.
While driving onward, Sani reflects that it isn’t his fault his stepfather hates him. Moth says some people are born unbalanced and hateful. At the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, Moth has what appears to be a panic attack while thinking about visiting the same cafe with her mother after a national dance competition. Sani leads her from the restaurant to the car and tries to hold her until she calms, but Moth breaks free and runs away—just like Sani told her she would.
When she returns to the motel, Moth allows herself to dance while standing on Sani’s feet. For a moment, her stomach/body is “full on movement.” They stop at the Nashville cemetery where, ten years prior, Grandfather buried the photo of himself and Moth with a white feather. Moth digs at the spot under the willow tree and finds the feather, which is still crisp. It still smells of the smoke Grandfather blew into the hole. Moth digs deeper and finds a musty application to Juilliard that looks like it was printed out a decade earlier. Sani exhales and his face goes dark. He takes out more of his mystery herbal pills.
Sani is silent as they drive to the next motel. Moth comments that his sadness comes in waves. He says he has always needed “blue and white pills,” but he needs them less when he is with her. He teaches her how to play some guitar chords in the motel. They begin kissing with what feels like electricity on their tongues. The next day they stop at Fort Smith, a National Historic Site on the Trail of Tears in Arkansas. Sani says the Cherokee lost a quarter of their population, along with their way of life and Motherland. Sani’s father taught him there are 568 Native American tribes but only 326 reservations.
At Pinnacle Mountain State Park, a brief respite from the rain ends with a downpour. Moth takes off her jeans and jumps into the lake, with Sani following. He has more tattoos than she could have guessed. She feels baptized by the rain and lake water, sinless and free. They say they could live and thrive there. After getting dressed, they drive on with headlights lighting the way. Moth flinches whenever a moth is attracted by their headlights and dies on the windshield. It concerns her that Sani doesn’t appear to care.
Analysis
As Moth and Sani continue their road trip, the two deepen their intimacy by sharing stories from their respective cultural backgrounds. However, the theme of abandonment arises after their visit to an amusement park full of disused rides. Sensing the presence of spirits, Sani takes some of the herbal capsules that he took on the bus when first meeting Moth. Moth perceives that the capsules put Sani at a distance from her, and he is no longer as communicative and forthcoming. This hints at the herbal remedy’s purpose of warding off spirits.
However, as neither Sani nor Moth understands yet that Moth is a ghost, Sani simply senses that she will inevitably abandon him like everyone else has. Moth makes good on Sani’s fear when they go to a diner that brings up a memory of Moth visiting the same diner with her mother. Remembering her mother inspires a destabilizing reaction in Moth. While Sani tries to lead her out of the diner and back to the car, she comments that “the heated hands of hell are coming for me—I was supposed to die with them in the car that split like a candy bar.” With this line, McBride hints at the coming revelation Moth will have, a revelation that will recast this panic attack–like reaction as a moment when Moth nearly continued her delayed passage to the afterlife.
Briefly making up after Moth’s abandonment, Sani and Moth continue their trip with a stop at the graveyard where Grandfather cast his “finding spell.” Moth digs at the spot to find the objects Grandfather brought together still intact. Eerily, however, Moth finds that the photograph of herself and her grandfather is unblemished aside from their faces, which have rotted away. The sinister image hints at the fact that Moth is just as dead as her grandfather; by comparison, the white feather (representing Sani and his role in the spell) hasn’t degraded at all, even after a decade.
In an instance of situational irony, the excavation of the hole also reveals an application to Juilliard that wasn’t shown in Moth’s earlier dream about the day Grandfather cast the spell. To see these objects unearthed prompts Sani to take his herbal pills. Once again, the intimacy between him and Moth is obstructed as his face clouds with darkness. However, the closeness returns to Moth and Sani’s relationship at their next motel as Sani and Moth play guitar together, engaging in a mutually healing experience.
The themes of grief and trauma arise again with Moth and Sani’s visit to Fort Smith, a historic site on the Trail of Tears. Occurring from 1830 to 1850, the Trail of Tears was a historic atrocity that saw the US government forcibly displace and ethnically cleanse 60,000 members of the Five Tribes (Cherokee, Seminole, Muskogee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw) from the American South. This Congress-approved act of removal involved the deaths of between 13,000 and 17,000 people as they were displaced from their ancestral homelands to Oklahoma. The displacement meant the loss of traditional culture that was rooted in their homelands and put members of the Five Tribes into conflict with Indigenous tribes who lived on the North American plains. This historical trauma is palpable to Sani as he touches the ground and says, “So many ghosts linger here, so much pain.”
