Changing Routes in “An Orange Line Train to Ballston”

By Kenton Rambsy

In Edward P. Jones’s “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” a man with dreadlocks starts talking with Marvella Watkins’s children on the Metro, and Marvella changes the route her family rides across DC every weekday in hopes of seeing him again.

Since her divorce, Marvella has lived in Southeast with her sister, but her family’s weekdays happen in Northwest. Each morning, she rides from Stadium-Armory to McPherson Square and drops her sons at Thompson School, two blocks from her mother’s apartment at Horizon House, where Avis spends the day. Then she walks to work at C&P Telephone.

The man sits beside Marvella on the train and touches her hand, and she starts carrying her phone numbers in case he asks. Guessing he rides only the orange line, she lets blue trains pass, though both stop at McPherson Square. Her oldest son, Marvin, still learning the Metro, asks why they wait when the blue train is like the orange. Embarrassed and frustrated that the man rarely appears, Marvella lashes out at him, hating a scene “particularly around white people.”

Her search covers a lot of DC. The weekday ride runs about four miles, from Southeast blocks that were about 82 percent Black in 1980 to blocks around the school and her office at 37 and 34 percent. On Saturday she circles back through Southeast looking for him, driving her nephew’s car between 19th Street and Potomac, Kentucky and North Carolina Avenues, where she thinks he must live if he boards at Stadium-Armory. The man turns her weekday commute into a search of the neighborhood where she grew up.

Jones shows a mother who crosses DC every weekday to hold her family together, then changes that route, in hopes of seeing one man again.

In Edward P. Jones’s “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” orange and blue trains share the track from Marvella’s station at Stadium-Armory to McPherson Square, and either one gets her family to school and work. Once she meets the man with dreadlocks, she lets blue trains go by and waits for an orange one.

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