A girl rides west toward a new stepfather, a yellow bedroom, and a life she hadn’t asked for.
June 1972
The train pulled out of the station in New Orleans at dawn and headed west over Lake Pontchartrain on a long stretch of track that led to Benson, Arizona. Our new home. At least for the summer.
The day before, Grandmama had hauled me and my older brother, Bobby, by Greyhound from our home in Macon, Georgia, to the Crescent City. We rattled through towns with names like LaGrange, Opelika, and Slidell. Lunch was mushy tuna sandwiches and hot Co-Cola’s sweating in a Piggly Wiggly sack.
Nobody talked much on the ten-hour ride. I kept my nose in a book on teenage decorating, the kind a twelve-year-old girl ought to study when she was fixing to have her own room. Bobby had his comic books. Grandmama picked at her fingernails, a sure sign she was nervous as hell.
“Oh, me, me, me.” She sighed, rocking in her seat. “Me, me, me.” That was her shorthand for Lord, help me now.
By the time we rolled into New Orleans, my stomach was sour and my nerves shot. Mama met us at the station and whisked us straight to a hotel on Bourbon Street. Folks whooped and hollered outside all night long. I thought they must be drunk as fiddler’s bitches, a phrase I’d heard but didn’t exactly understand.
A slurred voice barked, “You lookin’ at me?”
Then another: “I said give me my damn keys.”
Glass shattered. Grandmama flinched.
“That’s enough of that,” she said, pulling the curtains closed and fastening them with a bobby pin. Her lips wound tight as Dick’s hat band. Drunks made her skittish unless she’d had a belt or two herself.
Morning came too quick. One minute we were trying out chicory coffee and hashbrowns with our eggs, and the next we were saying goodbye to Grandmama at the train station. I didn’t know where to look – at Mama, or at Grandmama standing there stiff and straight as a Georgia pine.
“You young’uns behave yourselves.” Grandmama’s voice shook. She gave each of us a side-hug and turned to go. No fuss, no ceremony. Her heels clicked on the pavement as she walked away to catch her bus back to Macon.
I watched until she disappeared into the terminal. The air felt empty without her, like she’d died or slipped off into a place I couldn’t reach.
Good-bye.
Good-bye.
Good-bye.
Wiping my eyes, I followed Mama. A porter showed us to our car on the Amtrak Silver Crescent, a great galloping heifer that belched and huffed and made the outside air smell like Bobby’s dirty feet.
Inside, we sat side-by-side in a passenger car, Mama at the window, Bobby in the middle, me on the aisle. Mama flirted with the young porter, flashing her teeth like she was selling something. I wasn’t sure why she was sweet-talking a stranger when she had Dale, her brand-new husband, waiting for us in Arizona.
I didn’t have the nerve to ask.
I wondered if Dale had my room ready, if he’d painted it yellow like I asked, if I could tape my David Cassidy posters to the walls. Mama married Dale a few months back, and he seemed ok when he visited in Macon. He brought me an eight-track player and a bootleg Doobie Brothers tape. So far, I liked him best of all Mama’s husbands.
Excitement tangled with the mopes. I missed Grandmama. The train had already started moving, or I would have jumped out and run after her.
We’d lived with Grandmama more than we ever had with Mama. She was the one who packed our lunches, dragged us to church, and kept the lights on. Mama floated in and out, usually on the tail end of some man or some mess. Maybe I wouldn’t have caught up with Grandmama, but at least I wouldn’t have been stuck on this train with a woman I didn’t know and didn’t much like.
Rolling, rolling, rolling. The rhythm of the rails stuck in my head like an old cowboy song.
We chugged through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. I watched the scenery shift from kudzu-covered roadsides to dusty alien places I’d never seen before. The land cracked open into red rock and scrub brush. Boulders sat stacked like forgotten toys, some big as compact cars—tilted and sunbaked—as if God had been playing with Lincoln Logs and walked away before He was through.
Bobby’s eyes bulged. “Good-God-all-mighty, look at that.” He jabbed a finger at three boulders hunched together like they were whispering secrets. “Looks like Flintstones furniture.”
I pressed my forehead to the window, trying to take it all in. None of this seemed real to a Georgia girl used to pecans, pollen, and pine trees. These rocks didn’t hide or soften anything. The boulders just sat there daring you to make sense of them.
The South reminded me of a green velvet sofa with its guts spilling out. Arizona looked like someone had colored it with crayons named Copper, Mustard, and Burnt Orange. How could that be? I’d figured a desert meant sand dunes and camels and Lawrence of Arabia galloping around with a dish towel on his head.
About an hour north of Benson, the train jerked hard. Heads turned. Coffee spilled. The train ahead of us had jumped the track. The Silver Crescent came to a stop, and we were told to get off, claim our luggage, and wait for a bus to take us the rest of the way.
Somehow, Mama got in touch with Dale. He drove us home in his Oldsmobile Toronado, the biggest, slickest brown car I’d ever seen. Mostly, we’d ridden around in second- or third-hand cars with squeaky wheels and lots of breakdowns.
Mama leaned in and whisper-talked like I couldn’t hear her from the back seat. “There’s no excuse in Cindy being so fat.”
Dale didn’t say anything. He kept his eyes on the road and his mouth shut tight. I stared at the back of her head and swallowed hard.
Bobby and I were quiet, too. We didn’t know where we were going or what to expect when we got there. Tires slapped the two-lane pavement, lulling me to sleep as we traveled toward a future we couldn’t see.
Miles and miles behind us, Grandmama turned on the porch light, in case we ever found our way back home.
Cindy Sams is an award-winning journalist and creative nonfiction writer based in Georgia. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Reinhardt University. Her hybrid and narrative memoir work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue Mountain Review, Plentitudes Journal, The New Southern Fugitives, and others. Her current project, Reverse Migration, blends traditional and experimental forms to trace a Southern girlhood shaped by upheaval, hunger, and fierce resilience. With an ear for dialogue and a sharp eye for contradiction, she writes stories that dig into the cultural and emotional soil of family, memory, and reinvention.