ANEW: Reflections in Transit
On Taking the Train and Looking Back (Dedicated to David “Dino” Rohal)
A few weeks ago, I re-read a journal entry from 1992, written as I boarded a train for a cross-country trip. In it, I was already reminiscing about another train ride just a year earlier. Even then, I was struck by how travel—especially train travel—invites a particular kind of reflection, the kind that only comes when we slow down and let our thoughts catch up with us.
I’ve always been a little obsessed with trains. Not the toy kind or the efficient commuter versions, but the long-distance, time-stretching, mood-setting trains that give you a window into yourself as much as into the countryside. In my twenties, I loved them because I didn’t have much money, and they offered a way to move across the world slowly. But even more deeply, I felt connected to them through my family’s history. Like many African Americans, especially those from Mississippi, trains were the arteries of the Great Migration. My relatives—my grandmother included—came up from Mississippi, moving up from Jackson or Kosciusko, traveling north to the Chicago area in the 1920s and ’30s, seeking new lives with little more than what they could carry.
I never got to speak to my grandmother about her trip before she passed in 1991. That same year, I took a train from Boston to Los Angeles to see a friend off to graduate school at Harvard. That trip would change my life in unexpected ways. Her father had just died the year before, and I ended up substitute teaching for her, which began my journey into independent schools. It was all so serendipitous, and it was all set in motion while riding a train.
Those trains didn’t make writing easy—always swaying side to side—but that didn’t stop me. I scribbled in journals, on napkins, on anything I could find. I wrote about my excitement and nervousness about starting a full-time teaching job at an all-girls school in Los Angeles. I reflected on the unrequited love I had for the friend I was dropping off. And somewhere in those pages, I imagined my grandmother sixty years earlier, traveling her own uncertain path northward, full of quiet courage.
That summer, I taught a group of elementary students and gave them the gift of journaling, too. One boy never seemed to write. I tried something: I began sneaking Post-it notes into his journal, every few pages at the end of each week—just a few words acknowledging that someone was reading, someone cared. That small act—my own informal action research—taught me something vital: sometimes we only begin to reflect when we believe someone is listening.
In those early days of teaching, I was also the first Black person ever hired at that particular school, which had celebrated its centennial just two years before. A year later, the Los Angeles Uprisings shook the city and my spirit. I found myself journaling again, questioning why I was in schools that weren’t designed for students who looked like me. The Black and Brown girls I taught put their own reflections into words, sensing their outsider status in ways I understood deeply.
And here I am, thirty-five years later, still traveling—though mostly in my mind now and in the air and on the open roads by car—through those old train rides and journal entries. I’ve learned how reflection bends time. It brings distant memories close and makes present-day realities sharper. Sometimes I fictionalize my past just enough to make sense of it (Manchild at Yale: A Novel, for instance), or to soften it, or to claim it more fully. But even the mundane scribbles I made aboard a train have become stories worth retelling—stories of love and loss, of arriving and leaving, of growing into the person I was trying to become, one station at a time.
Maybe that’s the message I’ve been circling around all along: take the train. Or at least take the time. Sit with your memories. Write them down. Let the motion—however rough—carry you into the quiet spaces where reflection lives.
Because sometimes, the only way to know how far you've come is to pause and look out the window.
Curated Listening:
The best music about riding the rails happens to also be from one of my favorite contemporary jazz artists. Pat Metheny’s “Last Train Home” is that song. Listen to it HERE.