What makes “An Orange Line Train to Ballston” a story about trains? Why can we not switch the transit method and retain the same story? Having fixed stops and destinations on a train line constrains one to a predetermined path. With cars and taxis, however, one chooses their own path and detours; one cannot choose their company on the train—it just depends on the day and the hour.
The map below shows us the train system in Washington, DC at the end of 1984.
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The orange train line when “An Orange Line Train to Ballston” begins
In Washington, DC, during the time in which this story is set, there existed only five train lines on the Washington Metro system. Since the train system connects people living in different areas, who would not bump into each other otherwise, there are a diverse group of passengers on a given subway car. Both functionally and narratively within “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” trains help people commute between home and work. Thus trains represent the intersection of two worlds: the home and the workplace.
In addition to the intentional connection between the home and the workplace, in Jones’ story, the existence of the orange train line also creates chance connections such as that of Marvella to the dreadlock man. However, the narrator also implies that the evolution of the orange train line disconnects the two when Marvella stops regularly seeing the dreadlock man on her commute. This prompts us to question, what are the implications of an evolving train system?
The train system, a key part of Marvella’s life, provides her with intuition about the lives of her fellow passengers. That is, seeing somebody on the train on a regular basis, at the same time, and traveling to a particular destination gives someone a very unfamiliar yet familiar sense of the other person’s life. Marvella does not know who the dreadlock man is, what kind of job he has, or what he is doing for the time that she does not see him on the train. However, knowing that he takes an orange train line to Ballston at a certain time on certain days of the week, along with his other comments about his life, indicates to her both where he might work and where he might live.
Drawing on that cultural intuition, Marvella drives “along an area bounded by 19th Street, Potomac, Kentucky, and North Carolina avenues, a very wide area that [the dreadlock man] would surely have to live in if he got on the subway at Stadium-Armory” (113). Marvella uses her train intuition and structure of the subway system to try to find out exactly where the dreadlock man lives. But why does Marvella chase this person she has only barely spoken with a couple of times on the train?
“It occurred to her … that the dreadlock man’s finger touch the day before had been the first time a man had touched her … since the doofus she met at the club” (111).
In a very meaningful way, the train system not only brings people together but also creates interesting human relationships. Perhaps Marvella fundamentally goes after the dreadlock man in order to find someone who longs for human connection. She hopes that the dreadlock man will ask for her number, implying that she wants to go on a date with him, and so the train system is connecting two human beings in a romantic way. Towards the end of the story, when Marvella tells her son that “I’m the boss around here, and you seem to be forgetting that,” the narrator seems to demonstrate a yearning for respect that is misdirected in this effort to control her son (114). The obsession with the dreadlock man acts as an outlet for finding a person who might touch her and also respects her. Her reminder—to herself as well as her son—that she is “the boss around here” indicates her longing for independence as well as connection, and the wish to be a “boss” implies a connection between the frustrations of her work and romantic lives.
The further evolution of the train system separates people and severs human connections. At the end of the story, Marvella has stopped seeing the dreadlock man on the commute, the story closes by shifting its attention from the development of characters to that of the train line itself: “By then the subway people had extended the orange line all the way to Vienna” (115).
The map below illustrates that extension from Ballston to Vienna.
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The orange line after its 1986 extension to Vienna
Since Jones implies so strongly that the extension of the orange train line from Ballston to Vienna is related to the dreadlock man’s disappearance, we must ask if the physical structure of the train system is what separates Marvella from seeing him. Even though a linear extension of the train line should not logically change the dreadlock man’s route, the many small side effects of that extension—whether or not the dreadlock man can get to work faster, how it affects the dreadlock man’s final destination, etc.—affect the dreadlock man’s journey, and the entire train system. Jones leaves the reason why Marvella stops seeing the dreadlock man a mystery to the reader. In doing so, he captures the more complex way in which the evolving train system connects and disconnects humans.
Thus “An Orange Line Train to Ballston” wouldn’t really be the story it is without the dynamic of the train system in it. It strives to connect people from different walks of life momentarily, or for several moments, but how far does it really succeed in that regard? Jones’s presentation of the characters draws on and responds to the nature of urban train transportation in general as well as the particular changes of the D.C. Metro in the time he describes.
Works Cited
Alpert, David. “Watch Metro Grow from One Short Line in 1976 to the Silver Line Today.” Greater Greater Washington, 25 July 2014, ggwash.org/view/35397/watch-metro-grow-from-one-short-line-in-1976-to-the-silver-line-today.
