In 2018, my mom and I had been watching Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities whereas I curled her hair. I knew she had attended Southern University, an HBCU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. But because the reminiscences bubbled up, she talked about how she’d spent the summer season after her freshman yr in Switzerland.
I paused with the curling iron in my hand. How on the earth had my mom, a younger Black girl and the eldest of 4, raised by two mother and father who had by no means completed highschool in a segregated city in southwestern Louisiana, spent a summer in Europe within the 1960s?
“We traveled around Switzerland for two months and the trip changed the course of my life,” my mother stated, nostalgia in her voice. It was a part of a program referred to as The Experiment in International Living program, she defined, and thru the help of an encouraging professor, donations organized by way of the college newspaper, and a automotive wash that she hosted with fellow college students, my mom raised the $1,500 wanted to take part and she or he was off to Switzerland on the age of 19.
She hadn’t been again since. Naturally, I checked out her in that second and vowed to return collectively. We may retrace her steps; we may revisit the locations that had silently loomed so massive through the years that adopted. Nearly seven years after that dialog, we made it occur.
It was September 2025. We had one week, and two Swiss Travel Passes, which might enable us to journey by practice (and bus and boat) eastward, from Geneva to Zurich. We would revisit cities she had recognized—St. Gallen, Lucerne, Zurich—whereas including in some she dreamed of, like Geneva and Interlaken. The aim wasn’t to recreate her journey precisely, however to pay tribute to key locations, and to see which forgotten reminiscences surfaced themselves alongside the way in which. What had as soon as felt like merely a pleasant thought had additionally develop into one thing extra pressing: My father had handed away since we first dreamed up the journey, after years spent struggling with dementia. I grieved not solely his demise but in addition the reminiscences that he’d by no means shared. I used to be decided to protect a few of my mom’s tales whereas I may.
