The title of Walk Two Moons comes from a mysterious note left on Sal’s friend Phoebe’s porch that reads, “Don’t judge a man unless you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins.” In other words, one should only judge another person if one knows that person’s full story or has had the same experiences. This saying underpins 13-year-old Sal’s coming of age as she and her grandparents take a cross-country trip along the same route that Sal’s Momma took before she died. Along the way, Sal tells Gram and Gramps the story of Phoebe’s mother’s disappearance, and in the process, she realizes that the story of her own Momma’s death is “behind Phoebe’s” story. Recounting what happened to Phoebe’s family helps Sal look at events from multiple perspectives and better understand what’s happened to her own family. Through this, she realizes that the book’s titular saying holds true—that people are too complex to judge without first understanding their unique experiences and motivations. The novel thus suggests that understanding others’ stories and empathizing with them, rather than making assumptions about them, is a crucial part of maturation. Moreover, it’s an effective way to process past events and understand how and why things happened as they did.
The novel suggests that while making snap judgments about people might be understandable, those judgments harm both the person being judged and the person doing the judging. The most obvious example of this is Sal’s contentious relationship with her dad’s friend Margaret Cadaver. Sal resents Margaret from the outset, as Margaret is the one who helps Dad facilitate their move from rural Kentucky to suburban Ohio. She also thinks that Dad is romantically interested in Margaret, meaning that Margaret is taking Dad’s attention away from Momma (whom readers eventually learn was killed in a bus accident and was sitting next to Margaret when she died). For these reasons, Sal hates Margaret, so she’s willing to go along with her friend Phoebe’s insistence that Margaret is “creepy,” might be a witch, and probably murdered her husband. Because Sal refuses to learn Margaret’s real story or let Dad and Margaret explain their shared connection to Momma, Sal misunderstands Margaret, prolongs her own grief over Momma, and strains her relationship with Dad.
Phoebe also judges her mother, Mrs. Winterbottom—and while Sal can’t see how judging Margaret harms both Margaret and herself, she does see how Phoebe’s assumptions about her mother harms both Mrs. Winterbottom and Phoebe. Phoebe, her sister Prudence, and Mr. Winterbottom think of Mrs. Winterbottom as a reliable fixture in their home who only exists to cook, do chores, and support them emotionally. None of them can see what Sal sees: that Mrs. Winterbottom feels trapped and unhappy in her role as a housewife. And ultimately, this leads Mrs. Winterbottom to leave home for a week without warning—something that reflects her own emotional turmoil, and something that rocks Phoebe’s understanding of her family.
In order to counteract these sorts of judgments and understand situations and people for what they really are, the novel suggests that it’s necessary to consider other people’s perspectives. As Sal watches Phoebe try to make sense of her mother’s absence, she realizes that Phoebe is doing many of the same things that Sal did right after Momma left. Phoebe insists it’s impossible that her mother could’ve left her, something that Sal also told Dad. Phoebe makes wild assumptions about a lunatic or Margaret Cadaver kidnapping and murdering Mrs. Winterbottom, much like Sal outright refuses to believe that Momma is dead. As Sal makes these connections between Phoebe’s story and her own, the novel shows that seeing one’s own experiences reflected in someone else can be a useful tool: Sal isn’t willing to acknowledge how stubborn she’s being until she watches Phoebe believe just as stubbornly that her mother was murdered. Sal learns this again when she finally agrees to hear Margaret out and learns the real reason why Dad wants to be around Margaret: not because he’s in love with her, but because she makes him feel more connected to Momma. This revelation helps Sal see that Margaret isn’t a witch or a murderer, nor is she a threat to Sal’s family. It also helps Sal decide that since Momma told Margaret all about her family, Momma must have missed them—which helps Sal come to terms with Momma’s choice to leave in the first place.
Finally, by retracing her mother’s cross-country journey and telling her and Phoebe’s interwoven stories along the way, Sal is finally able to understand Momma and come to terms with her past trauma. Prior to the road trip, Sal blames herself for Momma’s departure. A few months before Momma left, Sal broke her leg. Momma (who was pregnant at the time) carried Sal inside, which Sal thinks caused Momma’s preterm labor and stillbirth that evening. Momma then had to have a hysterectomy, and her depression after this is seemingly what prompted her westward journey in the first place. But as Sal traverses her mother’s footsteps and recounts Phoebe’s and her own parallel stories, she realizes that Momma’s departure didn’t have anything to do with her. Like Mrs. Winterbottom, Momma was just unhappy—and unlike Mrs. Winterbottom, Momma was the victim of a tragic accident that meant she was never able to remedy her unhappiness and return to Sal and Dad. Put another way, Sal’s road trip and storytelling along the way help her to empathize with Momma—to “walk two moons in [her] moccasins.” Sal is finally able to think about Momma’s departure without blaming anyone, and she finally learns to see Momma as a person independent from her husband and daughter, which is an important part of Sal’s maturation process. Together, the trip and the stories teach Sal to humanize her mother—and this, the novel suggests, is one of the most meaningful gifts that perspective can offer.
Judgment, Perspective, and Storytelling ThemeTracker
Judgment, Perspective, and Storytelling Quotes in Walk Two Moons
Tiny, squirt trees. Little birdhouses in a row—and one of those birdhouses was ours. No swimming hole, no barn, no cows, no chickens, no pigs. Instead, a little white house with a miniature patch of green grass in front of it. It wasn’t enough grass to keep a cow alive for five minutes.
From what I could gather, Mr. Winterbottom worked in an office, creating road maps. Mrs. Winterbottom baked and cleaned and did laundry and grocery shopping. I had a funny feeling that Mrs. Winterbottom did not actually like all this baking and cleaning and laundry and shopping, and I’m not quite sure why I had that feeling because if you just listened to the words she said, it sounded as if she was Mrs. Supreme Housewife.
Just then, she came in from the back porch. My father put his arms around her and they smooched and it was all tremendously romantic, and I started to turn away, but my mother caught my arm. She pulled me to her and said to me—though it was meant for my father, I think—“See, I’m almost as good as your father!” She said it in a shy way, laughing a little. I felt betrayed, but I didn’t know why.
It is surprising all the things you remember just by eating a blackberry pie.
Ben touched Phoebe’s arm. She flinched. “Ha,” he said. “Gotcha. You’re jumpy, too, Free Bee.”
And that, too, bothered me. I had already noticed how tense Phoebe’s whole family seemed, how tidy, how respectable, how thumpingly stiff. Was I becoming like that? Why were they like that? A couple times I had seen Phoebe’s mother try to touch Phoebe or Prudence or Mr. Winterbottom, but they all drew back from her. It was as if they had outgrown her.
Had I been drawing away from my own mother? Did she have empty spaces left over? Was that why she left?
“She looked as if she’d been crying. Maybe something is wrong. Maybe something is bothering her.”
“Don’t you think she would say so then?”
“Maybe she’s afraid to,” I said. I wondered why it was so easy for me to see that Phoebe’s mother was worried and miserable, but Phoebe couldn’t see it—or if she could, she was ignoring it. Maybe she didn’t want to notice. Maybe it was too frightening a thing. I wondered if this was how it had been with my mother. Were there things I didn’t notice?
My long hair floated all around me. My mother’s hair had been long and black, like mine, but a week before she left, she cut it. My father said to me, “Don’t cut yours, Sal. Please don’t cut yours.”
My mother said, “I knew you wouldn’t like it if I cut mine.”
My father said, “I didn’t say anything about yours.”
“But I know what you’re thinking,” she said.
“I loved your hair, Sugar,” he said.
I saved her hair. I swept it up from the kitchen floor and wrapped it in a plastic bag and hid it beneath the floorboards of my room. It was still there, along with the postcards she sent.
What I started doing was remembering the day before my mother left. I did not know it was to be her last day home. Several times that day, my mother asked me if I wanted to walk up in the fields with her. It was drizzling outside, and I was cleaning my desk, and I just did not feel like going. “Maybe later,” I kept saying. When she asked me for about the tenth time, I said, “No! I don’t want to go. Why do you keep asking me?” I don’t know why I did that. I didn’t mean anything by it, but that was one of the last memories she had of me, and I wished I could take it back.
“He probably never took English,” Phoebe said.
To me that Y looked like the newly born horse standing up on his thin legs.
The poem was about a newlY born horse who doesn’t know anything but feels everything. He lives in a “smoothbeautifully folded” world. I liked that. I was not sure what it was, but I liked it. Everything sounded soft and safe.
And just like Phoebe, who had waved her mother’s sweater in front of her father, I had brought a chicken in from the coop: Would Mom leave her favorite chicken?” I demanded. “She loves this chicken.”
What I really meant was, “How can she not come back to me? She loves me.”
“So you didn’t leave Gramps just because of the cussing?”
“Salamanca, I don’t even remember why I did that. Sometimes you know in your heart you love someone, but you have to go away before your head can figure it out.”
All through dinner, I kept thinking of Bybanks, and what it was like when we went to my grandparents’ house for dinner. There were always tons of people—relatives and neighbors—and lots of confusion. It was a friendly sort of confusion, and it was like that at the Finneys’ […] Maybe this is what my mother had wanted, I thought. A house full of children and confusion.
It went on and on like that. I hated her that day. I didn’t care how upset she was about her mother, I really hated her, and I wanted her to leave. I wondered if this was how my father felt when I threw all those temper tantrums. Maybe he hated me for a while.
I knew Phoebe was convinced that her mother was kidnapped because it was impossible for Phoebe to imagine that her mother could leave for any other reason. I wanted to call Phoebe and say that maybe her mother had gone looking for something, maybe her mother was unhappy, maybe there was nothing Phoebe could do about it.
When I told this part to Gram and Gramps, Gramps said, “You mean it had nothing to do with Peeby?” They looked at each other. They didn’t say anything, but there was something in that look that suggested I had just said something important. For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe my mother’s leaving had nothing whatsoever to do with me. It was separate and apart. We couldn’t own our mothers.
Instead, I lay there thinking of the poem about the traveler, and I could see the tide rising and falling, and those horrid white hands snatching the traveler. How could it be normal, that traveler dying? And how could such a thing be normal and terrible both at the same time?
I started wondering if the birds of sadness had built their next in Mrs. Cadaver’s hair afterward, and if so, how she got rid of them. Her husband dying and her mother being blinded were events that would matter in the course of a lifetime. I saw everyone else going on with their own agendas while Mrs. Cadaver was frantically trying to keep her husband and her mother alive. Did she regret anything? Did she know the worth of water before the well was dry?
If there had been a vase, would have squashed it, because our heads moved completely together and our lips landed in the right place, which was on the other person’s lips. It was a real kiss, and it did not taste like chicken.
And then our heads moved slowly backward and we stared out across the lawn, and I felt like the newlY born horse who knows nothing but feels everything.
Ben touched his lips. “Did it taste a little like blackberries to you?” He said.
“It’s not terrible,” my mother said. “It’s normal. She’s weaning them from her.”
“Does she have to do that? Why can’t they stay with her?”
“It isn’t good for her or for them. They have to become independent. What if something happened to Moody Blue? They wouldn’t know how to survive without her.”
While I prayed for Gram outside the hospital, I wondered if my mother’s trip to Idaho was like Moody Blue’s behavior. Maybe part of it was for my mother and part of it was for me.
Lately, I’ve been wondering if there might be something hidden behind the fireplace, because just as the fireplace was behind the plaster wall and my mother’s story was behind Phoebe’s, I think there was a third story behind Phoebe’s and my mother’s, and that was about Gram and Gramps.