The Medallions of the Widow Walk Saga

I have been asked several times about what the medallions represent on the covers of the first four books of the Widow Walk Saga. For followers who have read all four books, this analysis may be helpful. I have been careful to avoid including significant spoilers in this document, and perhaps it will whet the appetite of future readers.

When creating the medallions, I collaborated closely with the talented graphic artist, Randy Mott, through several iterations on the first three. For the fourth, Little Gangs, I used Photoshop and Grok. In each medallion, my intention has been to symbolize the core messages of the novel and the spirit of its characters.

The four medallions form a visual narrative parallel to the novels themselves. Each is circular, sculptural and monochromatic, giving the series a recognizable identity. You will see that their artistic languages change markedly—from Indigenous Northwest carving, to pre-Columbian metalwork, to a nineteenth-century military medal, and finally to a more universal, almost mythological image of human hands reaching through darkness.

Taken together, they chart the saga’s widening moral geography: family and cultural collision; the struggle within the individual; the devastation of nations; and finally the communal struggle of abandoned children to survive. In book five, The Nine Figs, (in process) I intend to introduce the imperatives and contradictions implied and necessitated by assimilation.

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_{^{Widow Walk medallion by Randy Mott and Gar LaSalle (copyright Solipsis Publishing)}}

WIDOW WALK: identity expressed through animal spirits

The first medallion is the most densely personal and character-specific of the four. It is a facsimile and adaptation of the exquisite argillite carvings of the Haida that I have always greatly admired. In this case, it is composed in the compressed, interlocking style of Northwest Coast art. Its figures do not simply occupy the same space; Randy and I made them appear physically joined, as though every life in the novel is implicated in every other. These are the characters:

• Anah-Nawitka (“The Black Wind”) is Raven, seated in the canoe.
• Jacob is the small captive figure with Raven, identified in a previous blog as the “Little Wolverine.”
• Isaac is Beaver, beneath the canoe.
• Emmy is the two-headed dove-hawk, representing both nurturing motherhood and ferocious defense.
• George Pickett is Eagle, accompanying Emmy in the pursuit. 

The canoe is crucial. It is simultaneously a vehicle of predation, captivity, flight and pursuit. Anah and Jacob travel together, but not voluntarily; their proximity embodies the strange intimacy that develops between captor and captive. Beneath them, Isaac as Beaver appears foundational—industrious, constructive and domestic—but also submerged and tragically doomed. He represents the homestead-building world upon which the story begins, yet he is literally placed below the continuing action, as though death has removed him from the visible human drama while leaving him structurally present.

I believe Emmy’s two-headed bird may be the series’ most important emblem. The dove and hawk are not opposites that cancel each other. They are complementary aspects of motherhood:

the dove preserves life; the hawk attacks whatever threatens it.

That duality defines Emmy throughout the saga. As a formidable protagonist, she is compassionate without being passive, violent when necessary without becoming predatory, and civilized without being helpless. Pickett’s Eagle mirrors her ferocity, but he remains a separate bird. His relation to Emmy is one of affinity and potential alliance, not the organic maternal bond connecting Emmy to Jacob.

In the first iteration of the cover, I tried incorporating representations of totems, represented in argillite, but that did not seem fitting, because the implied character importance in the totem’s hierarchical stacking.

OTHER ITERATIONS: Instead, we decided to use a medallion to tell a story in symbolic complexity.

In the next iterations of the cover, we created a medallion which placed either Emmy or Jacob at the center, surrounded by the important main characters with whom they interacted.

But neither really worked for me because, in writing the chapters, by attempting to place myself into the minds of each character, the spirits of all of the characters needed to be emphasized somehow.

When I look at what we eventually arrived at, one can see that formally and intentionally, the final medallion contains no conventional central hero. One’s eye moves continually around the intertwined figures. Competing peoples, families, desires and moral systems are locked together. The image also does not tell us that one culture stands outside the other; it shows everyone caught within the same circle. 

Central symbolism:

Kinship under assault. The family is broken apart, but all five figures remain symbolically bound.

Human beings as animal natures. Each character possesses a governing instinct—cunning, industry, predation, protection or freedom.

Cultural encounter. The Haida visual language places the reader inside the Indigenous symbolic world rather than merely illustrating Native people from a European perspective.

Circular consequence. Revenge, rescue, captivity and attachment feed one another. No action remains isolated.

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_{^{Isthmus Medallion by Randy Mott and Gar LaSalle (copyright Solipsis Publishing LLC)}}

ISTHMUS: the human psyche as a battleground

We shifted the second medallion from Northwest Coast argillite to an image modeled on pre-Spanish Panamanian repoussé metalwork like that found at Sitio Conte. This was appropriate not merely because the story takes place in Panama, but because the whole novel concerns surfaces, masks, hidden drives and transformations under pressure. Repoussé itself creates form by hammering metal from behind: the visible image is produced by forces acting from an unseen side.

I believe that is an apt metaphor for Isthmus.

At the center is Bocamalo, beset by the scars of a botched cleft palate repair and the sad exposure to the death of his mother. Although he identifies with the despicados in his gang, he is consumed by arrogance mixed with self-hatred. Thus, he is depicted as an enormous hybrid monster. He is physically dominant, but he is not sovereign. His psyche struggles with a three-headed devil-serpent representing Anger, Lust and Agony.

To one side stands Brett, the physician, holding a scalpel; to the other, Runnels, the hunter-warrior. Emmy appears below as a Madonna-like figure standing on the serpent’s tail, an intentional echo of Renaissance images of the Virgin subduing the serpent. 

Unlike the first medallion, I decided to be certain the composition had a clear central antagonist. Bocamalo occupies the greatest visual mass. Yet the medallion’s deeper subject is not simply “Emmy versus Bocamalo.” It is Bocamalo versus Bocamalo.

The three-headed serpent externalizes the forces controlling him. Anger, Lust and Agony are not excuses for his acts, but they suggest that evil in Isthmus has a psychological history. Bocamalo is both perpetrator and captive—monster and man wrestling with the monster-forming elements within himself.

Brett and Runnels offer two forms of masculine intervention:

• Brett represents knowledge, medicine and passionate restoration.
• Runnels represents force, tracking and dispassionate martial protection.

Yet neither occupies the moral center. Emmy does. She is smaller than Bocamalo but placed at the point of symbolic mastery: on the serpent itself. Her Madonna posture associates her with mercy and maternal preservation, but because she stands upon the source of corruption, she is also an agent of judgment.

The first medallion portrays animals as spiritual identities. The second uses monsters as psychological identities. I believe the change is significant. In Widow Walk, animal nature is morally complex and culturally meaningful. In Isthmus, the hybrid beast represents human appetites becoming disordered and tyrannical.

The surrounding rim gives the image the character of an artifact or coin—something unearthed from a vanished civilization, its gold cultural treasures melted down into bullion by Spanish conquistadors to finance their Christian war against the onslaught of Islam. That reinforces one of the novel’s historical ironies: the modern railroad crosses a landscape layered with conquest, extermination and buried cultures. The technological “progress” of the isthmus travels over older violence rather than replacing it. 

Central symbolism

The isthmus as both geography and psyche. It is a narrow passage between oceans, cultures, lives and moral states.

Civilization over buried violence. The railroad appears modern, but the region’s history of exploitation and predation remains present.

The divided self. Bocamalo’s chief conflict is internal, even when its consequences fall upon others.

Maternal moral authority. Emmy is not physically the largest figure, but she is the stabilizing and redemptive force.

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_{^{The Fairness of Beasts Medallion by Randy Mott and Gar LaSalle (copyright Solipsis Publishing LLC)}}

THE FAIRNESS OF BEASTS: history judged by an avenging conscience

In the third medallion we abandoned the idiom of Indigenous carving and instead, adopted the form of a nineteenth-century military medal…”those little pieces of tin and cloth for which men will throw themselves into the mouths of cannons”, mused Napoleon. At first glance it appears commemorative—the sort of object intended to celebrate valor. Intentionally however, it subverts the heroic military tradition.

At the center stands a winged female figure, holding a saber downward and raising a torch. She is an avenging or truth-bearing angel and, like the dove-hawk and Madonna before her, she represents Emmy. Around her lie the actual products of war: corpses, broken cannon, destroyed fences and a threatened or burning city. Randy suggested adding the surrounding Latin inscription from Virgil:

“Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.“

Approximately: “If I cannot bend the powers above, I will move Hell.”

This medallion is deliberately paradoxical. It resembles an award for glory, but depicts ruin. Its visual argument is that war medals often transform suffering into abstraction—“valor,” “victory,” “sacrifice”—while concealing dismembered bodies, bereaved families and devastated landscapes.

The angel refuses that concealment.

Her torch symbolizes truth, revelation and witness. She illuminates what triumphal history would prefer to place in shadow. Her saber symbolizes action, but it points downward rather than being brandished in celebration. This makes her less a goddess of conquest than a figure of judgment.

She is both Nemesis and witness.

The torch and saber also represent Emmy’s combined capacities. As in the first medallion, she contains two moral functions:

• to see clearly;
• to act decisively.

The ruined fence was especially important for us. A fence signifies boundaries—between properties, armies, loyalties, families and moral categories. Broken fences suggest that civil war destroys not only lives but distinctions. Neighbor becomes enemy, healer becomes combatant, civilian territory becomes battlefield, and private love becomes entangled with national allegiance. (e.d. note: All of that is contained in the chapters about Brett who, as a non-combatant physician, is pressed into service by the Confederates in the midst of one of the many Civil War’s 1861 Peninsula battles).

The corpses derived from Civil War battlefield photography bring documentary reality into the allegory. The medallion therefore stands between myth and evidence. Its angel is timeless, but the bodies are historically specific. 

Central symbolism

The exposure of false heroism. The form says “military honor”; the imagery says “human catastrophe.”

Emmy as avenging truth. Her mission is no longer simply familial rescue. She confronts institutions, armies and the moral evasions of history.

Hell brought to earth. The Virgilian motto captures both determination and the Civil War itself: when human beings cannot command heaven, they unleash the underworld.

The beast within civilization. The “beasts” are not merely cruel individuals. They include governments, armies, ideologies and systems that make mass suffering respectable.

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_{^{Little Gangs Medallion by Gar LaSalle (copyright Solipsis Publishing LLC)}}

LITTLE GANGS: many hands, one struggle

The fourth medallion is the most elemental and least culturally specific. It shows multiple hands and forearms rising through dark, cloudlike or smoke-like forms toward an open central space. The hands differ in size, gesture, position and illumination. Some reach upward; some turn toward one another; some appear to shield, grasp, plead or offer assistance. A Greek-key border encloses the scene. 

Where the earlier medallions identify specific protagonists through symbolic figures, I believe the Little Gangs medallion, like the book, largely suppresses individual identity. There are no faces, costumes, weapons, animals or named heroes. This is precisely appropriate for children whom society has rendered anonymous.

I believe the hands can be read in several simultaneous ways:

The hands of the children

They represent Jacob, Sarah, Robby, Jonny, Falco and the many unnamed displaced children around them. Their individuality survives—the hands are not identical—but their faces have disappeared from public view. To institutions, they are cases, placements, mouths to feed or names imperfectly recorded.

The hand is the remaining proof of personhood: it reaches, touches, works, steals, protects and clings.

Pleading and rescue

Some hands appear to ask for help. Others may be attempting to provide it. This ambiguity is central to the novel. The children are not merely helpless victims. They rescue one another. Their “little gang” becomes a substitute family because the adult world has failed them.

Thus the medallion does not divide neatly into rescuers above and victims below. Everyone reaches from within the same darkness.

The Orphan Train process

For me, the image evokes children being gathered, selected and redistributed. Raised hands can resemble those of children hoping to be chosen. But they can also resemble hands separated from parents, extended toward someone disappearing beyond reach.

That double meaning mirrors the moral ambiguity of the Orphan Train movement in the novel: an undertaking capable of genuine rescue, yet also capable of severing identity, kinship and the child’s right to be found. The manuscript explicitly frames that compromise as the substitution of efficiency for fidelity while calling the result mercy. 

Quantrill’s Lawrence raid and the smoke of history

The forms around the arms resemble clouds, smoke, debris or engulfing darkness. In the context of the Lawrence raid and the Civil War, the hands may be those of people trapped within fire, massacre and social collapse. The image therefore joins the novel’s two principal historical subjects:

• children lost within institutional systems;
• civilians lost within organized violence.

Both are consequences of adults creating structures that become indifferent to individual lives.

Solidarity

Unlike the first three medallions, I decided to not make Emmy a dominant figure. Her spirit remains present, but the moral center has become collective. Little Gangs is intended to explore how vulnerable people survive when the expected protector is absent.

The answer is: they reach for one another.

The Greek-key border I selected reinforces the idea of continuity. It is an unbroken path that turns repeatedly but never terminates. It suggests endurance, the recurring patterns of history, and the interdependence of one generation with another. It may also subtly evoke a maze: the institutional labyrinth through which Emmy, Doyle and the children must travel to find one another.

The dedication I chose, “to the Resilient,” provides the most direct interpretive key for the medallion as well as the novel itself. These are not merely hands of desperation. They are hands that continue to rise. 

Central symbolism

Anonymity versus individuality. Faces are absent, but each hand remains distinct.

Mutual rescue. The abandoned do not only await salvation; they sustain one another.

The right to be found. Every reaching hand asserts a connection that bureaucracy has failed to preserve.

Resilience. The hands rise through—not above or outside—the darkness.

The evolution across all four medallions

From named characters to collective humanity

I am pleased with the progression in the medallions:

1. Widow Walk depicts five identifiable characters.
2. Isthmus depicts four principal figures and an antagonist’s divided psyche.
3. The Fairness of Beasts condenses Emmy into an archetypal angel surrounded by anonymous dead.
4. Little Gangs removes named identity almost completely and gives us a community of reaching hands.

The circle widens. The first book asks, What happens to this family?
The second asks, What governs the human soul?
The third asks, What does war do to a people?
The fourth asks, What do societies owe every vulnerable human being?

Emmy’s changing symbolic form

Emmy appears, explicitly or implicitly, in every medallion:

• Dove-hawk — nurturing mother and fierce defender.
• Madonna over the serpent — maternal virtue confronting corruption.
• Avenging angel with torch and saber — truth, judgment and determined intervention.
• The reaching or rescuing hand — fidelity expressed through human contact.

Her evolution moves from the personal to the archetypal. She begins as one mother seeking one child. She gradually becomes the saga’s embodiment of an ethical principle:

No person entrusted to love may be abandoned merely because rescue is difficult.

In Little Gangs, that principle is no longer confined to her body. The children themselves have learned it.

Changing treatments of “the beast”

Each medallion also gives a different answer to the question: Where does savagery reside?

In Widow Walk, animal imagery is not inherently evil. Raven, Beaver, Eagle, Dove and Hawk express powers, temperaments and cultural identities.

In Isthmus, beastliness becomes psychological: the monstrous figure and three-headed serpent represent appetites and wounds that dominate the human will.

In The Fairness of Beasts, beastliness becomes institutional. Armies and nations produce carnage while decorating it with medals and rhetoric.

In Little Gangs, the beast is almost invisible. It is neglect, anonymity, bureaucracy, war and social indifference—the forces below and around the reaching hands.

I believe this is one of the strongest visual arguments of the series thus far: the more “civilized” the setting becomes, the less easily the source of brutality can be represented as a single animal or monster.

The significance of the circular form

The medallion format unifies works that otherwise move through markedly different cultures and visual traditions. A medallion can be:

• an amulet;
• a commemorative object;
• a coin;
• a seal;
• an award;
• a relic;
• a compact historical narrative.

All of those associations matter. For me, each image feels like an artifact recovered from the world of its novel, but also like an emblem placed upon the story after history has judged it.

The circle also implies recurrence. Violence creates displacement; displacement creates searching; searching creates unexpected bonds; bonds are threatened by new violence. Yet the circle is not purely fatalistic. It also represents fidelity—the refusal to let the broken parts of the family or community disappear beyond the frame. This will become ever more important if Book Five of the Saga

Overall interpretation

The four medallions can be understood as a single visual sentence:

Human beings are bound together by forces of kinship, appetite, violence and historical circumstance; when formal civilization fails, moral survival depends upon those who continue to search, witness, protect and reach for others.

The first medallion says: We are bound.
The second: We are divided within ourselves.
The third: We make hell and call it glory.
The fourth: We survive by reaching through the darkness toward one another.

As I continue with the fifth novel in the series: The Nine Figs, I would welcome other interpretations of the medallions.