In 2018, while I curled my mother’s hair and we watched a documentary about Black colleges, she mentioned something I had never known: the summer after her freshman year at Southern University, she had spent two months in Switzerland. My hand froze on the curling iron. How had she, a young Black woman from a segregated town in southwestern Louisiana, raised by parents who never finished high school, managed to travel to Europe in the 1960s?
She told me the trip had been part of The Experiment in International Living. With help from an encouraging professor, fundraising through the university paper and a car wash she and classmates organized, she raised the $1,500 needed to go. “We traveled around Switzerland for two months and the trip changed the course of my life,” she said, nostalgia in her voice. She hadn’t been back since. I promised then we would go together.
Nearly seven years later, in September 2025, we made that promise real. With one week and two Swiss Travel Passes, we planned a rail journey east from Geneva to Zurich, revisiting places she’d known—St. Gallen, Lucerne, Zurich—and adding Geneva and Interlaken. The trip was not meant to be a precise recreation but a tribute to the places that had loomed so large over the life she built. Time felt urgent: my father had died since we first dreamed up the trip, after years with dementia, and I was determined to preserve my mother’s stories while I could.
We arrived in Geneva to a bright afternoon and the shimmer of Lake Geneva dotted with boats. In a taxi, my mother told our driver, Alberto, about the trip we were making; he told us he’d grown up near Lugano. She then told me something I’d never known: before leaving for Switzerland at 19, she had planned to marry her boyfriend and expected an engagement on her return. Walking along Lake Lugano, faced with the Alps, she realized her life could be different. “The world is mine to explore and I don’t want to get married,” she told me. That decision set her life on a course that ultimately made me possible.
In Geneva, a city she hadn’t visited on her original trip, we reconnected with the feeling of being citizens of the world. We toured the Palais des Nations and sat in the Human Rights Council meeting room, ate at Restaurant Les Armures, and celebrated her birthday with a mother-daughter massage at our hotel’s Guerlain Spa, where pastries spelled joyeux anniversaire in Swiss chocolate. Seeing her 19-year-old self collide with her 76-year-old joy was a gift.
As we took the train east, the landscape shifted from urban streets to green hills, meadows dotted with cows, waterfalls and alpine lakes. Months before the trip she had dropped a battered photo album on my kitchen table: small, fading snapshots of her host family, an open-air bus ride through Basel, murals and the cathedral in St. Gallen, a cheese factory visit, sledding in St. Moritz, and candid shots of students tossing luggage out of train windows to make sure they disembarked in time. Her journal from that summer had been lost in a fire years later; the album was all she had left. Watching the real landscapes slide by the train window, it felt like moving through those images in real time. My mother filled page after page in a new journal on the train, determined not to lose these memories again.
In Interlaken she marveled at flower beds and luminous lakes with a kind of childlike wonder. In Lucerne we visited the Grand Casino on a whim and she explained the rules of roulette—unexpected and delightful. In Zurich we indulged in Lindt chocolate and watched hardy locals swim in chilly waters from our balcony at La Réserve Eden au Lac. When she dwelled on years she hadn’t returned, I insisted the present mattered: we were here.
Her memories were most vivid when we arrived in St. Gallen, where she had lived with a host family. “Ohhh I remember this!” she squealed as the train pulled into the station. Church bells chimed as we walked to Hotel Einstein to meet our guide, Antoinette. She recalled attending mass with her host family at the cathedral and immediately bonded with Antoinette. We visited the Abbey of St. Gallen’s library and monastery archives—a book lover’s dream with tomes dating to the early Middle Ages—and stopped in the cathedral to pray. I wept on my knees from grief for my father’s absence and gratitude for the chance to take this trip with my mother. That evening, walking through Gallusplatz at sunset, my mother stopped, twirled and sang the first verse of “The Way We Were.” I put my phone away and simply watched her be.
Seeing her move through those moments, excitement sometimes giving way to regret, I understood she carried a responsibility greater than herself. My parents taught me to be a traveler from a very young age. My father’s life—born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, driving people during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, working alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Reverend Ralph Abernathy, then traveling the world as a parachutist and later as a political strategist—was extraordinary. Together, my parents showed me how to move through the world with courage, purpose and curiosity.
For my mother, going to Switzerland at 19 had been an act of bravery: leaving a segregated town for a place she had only imagined, stepping into the unknown and finding a version of herself. Returning together years later was more than nostalgia. It was an opportunity to reclaim and share that younger self—the choices that shaped her, the curiosity she passed to me, and the family history I might otherwise lose. Her greatest joy, she said, was sharing this part of her life with me: letting me see, through the lens of her 19-year-old eyes, an experience that changed everything.
