The Mourning Moon (2024)

I stood in the driveway watching a white ball pierce the blue-black sky, navigating branches and clouds. The moon always seems to move instead of the objects around it or the people looking up from below.

When I was a child, I told my parents that the moon was following us as we drove home. They explained that the moon followed no one, least of all us. It was an inanimate sphere that gave the illusion of caring.

I ignored them and decided the moon was following me anyway. It was too immense and intimate not to be my friend.

The last full moon before the winter solstice is called the Mourning Moon. For ancient peoples, it served as a warning that things were about to get worse. Days would become cold and rivers would freeze. Food would grow scarce and people would die. The Mourning Moon tells you to grieve old losses and brace for new ones. The darkest days are coming, and it is time to prepare.

These days everything feels like the Mourning Moon. I took photos of it with my cellphone, but nothing captured the way it stared back.

On a sunny day, it is easy to forget the Mourning Moon. My husband and kids and I watched the Mississippi River shine as we crossed from St. Louis into Illinois. We were headed for ancient burial mounds down the street from a strip club. It was Thanksgiving weekend, and the oldest city in America was beckoning.

The remains of it, anyway.

Built along the Mississippi River, Cahokia was once one of the largest cities in the world. By 1100 AD, the metropolis had eclipsed London and Paris and was the most populous North American urban area outside modern Mexico. Cahokia was a planned community of sacred mounds surrounded by plazas where residents traded and dwelled.

One structure, Woodhenge, was built to align with the sun at the winter solstice. The ancient Mississippians watched the Mourning Moon too.

The dark days came, as prophesized — but they stayed. In the 14^th century, Cahokia abruptly declined and then was abandoned. No one is sure why. Possibilities include war, disease, floods, or, maybe, a curse.

“It’s a total orphan – a lost city in every sense,” Northwestern University archeologist Jim Brown says of Cahokia, which was neglected even in indigenous lore. Successor tribes avoided the topic. There were rumors that bad things happened there, evidence of violence of an unspecified cause.

Earthen mounds are all that remain today. They are inscrutable to visitors who do not know the history. They resemble landfills locals climb for fun, like the mound in Weldon Springs nicknamed the “Nuclear Waste Adventure Trail” due to the radioactive material buried beneath it.

The ancient Mississippians were the first of many peoples in this region to run and leave ruins behind.

* * *

Cahokia’s mounds lie between the towns of East St. Louis and Collinsville. East St. Louis is also famed for its destruction, first spurred by racist mob attacks in 1917 that burnt parts of the bustling Black city to the ground. Residents woke up wondering if they were being invaded by wild animals, but it was white men.

Celebrated performer Josephine Baker was eleven years old when she saw them coming:

“I can still see myself standing on the west bank of the Mississippi looking over into East St. Louis and watching the glow of the burning of Negro homes lighting the sky. We children stood huddled together in bewilderment ... frightened to death with the screams of the Negro families running across this bridge with nothing but what they had on their backs as their worldly belongings... So with this vision I ran and ran and ran.”

Baker ran all the way to Europe, and she did not return.

When I drive through the ruins of East St. Louis, I think about little Josephine Baker and what she saw. She was a witness to the future. Racists never left the region but mutated into a more genteel form: the aggression of abandonment.

After the 1917 attack, East St. Louis recovered and thrived, peaking at a population of 80,000 in the 1950s. This is the city where Miles Davis was brought up, where Tina Turner launched her career.

But when manufacturing declined in the 1960s and 1970s, white flight followed, and few lent the predominantly Black city a helping hand. In 1959, East St. Louis had been hailed by Look magazine as an “All-American City”. That is true, because it produced Black excellence that white people did not respect, and nothing is more American than that.

East St. Louis, which had attracted its large Black population in the 19^th century as a river city in a state banning slavery, became synonymous with 20^th century crime and blight. Houses were abandoned or burned to the ground. It remains an All-American City today, with wounds sharp as gunshots and gaping as empty fields.

We drove past strip clubs and community centers as the holdouts of East St. Louis, a town that has dwindled to 18,000 people, watched from their windows. I wondered if they would stay here. There is a fine line between leaving and having to flee, and the people of this region walk it all the time.

* * *

We drove on to Collinsville, where we reached our destination: the Gateway Convention Center. This is where Native American tribes come on Thanksgiving weekend to sell their wares.

A Ho-Chunk artisan from Wisconsin showed me bright intricate baskets and lamented that few still know how to make them. A Wampanoag craftswoman showed me jewelry made from wampum, a white and purple shell bead. Everything was rare: the materials, the crafts, the chance to gather.

Cahokia Mounds holds this event as a rebuttal to the Thanksgiving story Americans are supposed to swallow, the one where treaties were honored and everyone celebrated as a nation with equal rights.

I walked through the vendor stalls until I was struck by a pastel picture. It looked like a drawing of the woods I wander, until you stare at it awhile. Then the outlines of people appear, and you wonder how you did not see them all along. The artist is Catherine Nagy Mowry of the Miami tribe of Indiana, and the picture is called “Ancestors in the Trees.” She told me she had sketched the indigenous burial mounds near her home, and that the figures had revealed themselves to her there.

I bought the print and hung it by my bed. I looked at it as I fell asleep, tracing the outlines with my eyes, avoiding the cruel light of the Mourning Moon.

* * *

We had planned to explore Cahokia Mounds after the craft fair, but the interpretative center was closed. We decided to save it for another day, when the kids would better understand what they were seeing.

I had a back-up destination and we started driving to it. We were on the backroads of Collinsville when I spotted a hill dotted with slabs of stone.

“Cemetery!” I yelled, and we pulled over.

There are two kinds of old cemeteries in the St. Louis metro: well-kept grounds lined with towering tombs of beer barons, and the decrepit remains of lost communities. This was the latter. Shards of shattered graves were strewn across the hillside, surrounded by Osage oranges flaunting their fluorescence on the sepia soil.

The tombstones were from the 1800s. Most were not legible, and the ones we could read were in German. One said Engelken: angels. Another depicted a hand with a finger pointing toward heaven, but the grave had fallen into the earth and become part of it, and it now gestured at its own interment. I saw the headstones of two sisters, each with the top half missing. I saw graves of babies and felt an ache inside, because that stays sad no matter how much time passes.

I wondered when anyone last visited this place. When I got home, I looked up the cemetery, and discovered that the records of the people buried there were destroyed in a church fire.

In 1918, Collinsville made national headlines for lynching a German immigrant, Robert Prager, as a result of anti-German sentiment during WWI. This was one year after the white mob had murdered scores of Black residents in East St. Louis. All of this happened during a war and a pandemic.

I wonder if the cemetery was desecrated on purpose, or if people just gave up on caring about each other. The end result tends to be the same.

* * *

The abandoned German cemetery is down the street from my back-up destination: The World’s Largest Catsup Bottle. This behemoth – a 170-foot water tower shaped like a bottle of Brooks Old Original Catsup on massive metal stilts – is my favorite place in Collinsville.

I hang onto small things these days, and sometimes the small things are very big.

The World’s Largest Catsup Bottle is red and white and blue and pointless and perfect. Every summer Collinsville holds a festival to honor a product that no longer exists. But the bottle remains, marketing its extinct yet tangy sauce. At the festival they dole out tater tots and ketchup to distract from all the obsolescence.

In front of the bottle is a golden plaque from the National Register of Historic Places. It was issued in 2002 to honor this architectural feat. I keep thinking about the person at the US Department of the Interior who had to make a plaque for a giant catsup bottle right after the 9/11 attacks.

Like a country singer, I turn to the bottle in times of woe. These days, I have extra woe, so I need an extra big bottle.

I drown my sorrows in roadside attractions and reactions. I have a photo of my husband and daughter that they did not realize I was taking. It shows them standing in front of a sign saying Black Friday Liquidation, staring skyward in awed solemnity, like witnesses to a heavenly apparition.

But they are just looking at the catsup bottle.

My family finds all of this less fascinating than I do. But I know an American icon when I see one. I hope The World’s Largest Catsup Bottle lasts forever. I hope if we get conquered, no one knows what to do with it, because it’s too special and too stupid to be understood, just like America itself.

* * *

On the drive back to St. Louis we drove by an underpass with graffiti that said PATRIOT FRONT. Patriot Front is a white supremacist group that has been vandalizing the region and threatening to murder people.

They left their mark this time in East St. Louis. I thought of Josephine Baker standing by the same river a century ago, watching her future burn.

In 2021, there was a billboard near where the Patriot Front graffiti is now, asking for tips about the Capitol attack. In 2023, the government decided that sedition does not matter, and that coup plotters can walk free and run for president.

There are no patriots in office, only fronts.

The people the US government most reliably protects are foreigners committing crimes. When I got home, I turned on my computer to read about their latest slaughter. There is a “humanitarian pause”, a phrase that denotes cruelty, because the default position is to be inhumane. There is nothing humanitarian about a massacre on delay.

I watch a video of a Palestinian boy marveling at the absence of Israeli war planes. For the first time in his life, he can look to the sky without fear. The sun shines on him, lighting up his smile.

I am scared that when the “humanitarian pause” ends, I will check the news and find this boy is dead. That is what it is like to watch genocide from a distance. To witness the deaths of strangers and be filled with helpless horror. Your grief is miniscule compared to that of those who knew the victims. But people will attack you for any sign of sorrow.

They attack you for feeling anything for the Palestinian people for whom you were taught to feel nothing -- much as white Americans were taught to feel nothing about Black Americans and Native Americans during their torture and ethnic cleansing.

It is against the rules to feel, because compassion opens the door to consequences.

I don’t know how anyone, least of all a mother, can watch the children of Gaza and not weep. I don’t understand how you do not see your own children in their children’s playful smiles, hear your own babies in their babies’ coos and cries. I don’t know how you can contemplate the prospect of their deaths and not feel disgust that you are being told to do so without sadness or sympathy or shame.

I live in a country where officials want us to react to mass death with no feeling at all, even when the victims are children.

* * *

The mass killing of children in Gaza is abnormal even for a country at war. Nothing rivals it in modern history. The number of children killed in Gaza in three weeks surpassed the annual number of children killed in the world’s worst conflict zones – Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, Sudan, and Central African Republic -- between 2019 and 2023.

The Israeli military has turned Gaza into a graveyard for children. They could stop the killing, but they do not want to.

“Nothing happens by accident,” an Israeli military source told the joint Israeli-Palestinian publication +972. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target.”

The logic of child murder is beyond comprehension. How can a person look at the Israeli children who Hamas captured or killed and feel rightful grief and rage, yet not feel the same emotions for captured and killed Palestinians?

I know the answer. I live in a country that carried out supremacist crimes, a country selective in both its targets and its grief, a country that never learned its lesson even though the evidence of sin surrounds us in literal ruins.

But knowing the answer in my mind doesn’t mean I can handle it in my heart.

I drive around America, crossing rivers and state lines, but the children of Gaza fill my thoughts. How could they not? I think of the places they played, reduced to rubble by the Israeli army. I take my own children on road trips to the remains of our American days, our monuments and mounds, our faded relics and crumbling graves.

To the dead dreams -- and the murdered ones.

* * *

The moon is a compass. It tells time and controls the tides. In the Midwest, where oceans are distant, we use it to navigate lakes and rivers. In warm months, my husband and I go canoeing with the full moon to guide us. I feel free on the water at night, with no path to follow and no one able to see me. We do this until the Mourning Moon comes, and it is too cold to continue.

There is a heaviness in the air as the year ends, a cold wind of inevitability, a guarantee of darker days. It feels like living in a rupture. Seams of morality were severed, and a force was unleashed, evil and unmoored. I watch governments confess to a universal taboo – child murder – without remorse or repercussion. I do not have answers, only anguish.

The Mourning Moon clocks borrowed time. That is why I trust it, because it does not deny danger. When a universal taboo is broken, there is comfort in knowing the whole world is watching the same orbiting object, encircling us with condemnations and condolences, giving us permission to cry.

There is power in grief, even though when you feel it, you feel powerless. There has to be power in it, or people would not try so hard to prohibit its expression.

The German cemetery with Osage oranges and broken graves

The World’s Largest Catsup Bottle!

Baskets from the Ho-Chunk tribe on display in Collinsville, Illinois