I’ve read that people with autism think in pictures, but I don’t usually. I think more in feelings and senses. In colors and sounds. Even if I do sometimes see pictures in my mind, they never fit the words that people have for them. Not remembering things might have something to do with not seeing images in my mind. If you said, “Imagine a cat,” I would imagine the way cats make me feel. But I wouldn’t get a picture of a cat. If you said, “Imagine a lake,” I would imagine the way the wind felt blowing across the lake. How the wind tasted. But I wouldn’t get a picture. So, if we took a trip and stayed by a lake, I might remember the wind but not any of the other things that happened. And if you said, “Do you remember when we stayed by the lake?” I probably wouldn’t.
Even when I do remember things, it’s not when I’m trying to. My memories come as random feelings, whenever they decide. Sometimes they’re from some other life before this one. They have no time line; they just jump around. I try organizing them based on colors and tastes. It’s sort of like organizing books in a library based on the way they smell. Except most of the books are not usually on the shelves. A book appears suddenly, and just as suddenly it disappears. An invisible library is what it is. I remember being in the kitchen with Mama while she was cooking. I remember going on a train. I remember getting a beating. I remember having a dog. But I don’t have any clear pictures. The memories come like a breeze, a color, a feeling, and for a few minutes everything is heightened, like television in super HD. I close my eyes and tingle all over. I feel something like the density of colors. But it doesn’t feel like a memory because it’s always in the same moment I’m in. It’s like a backward déjà vu. Memories are flavors. I close my eyes and stick my tongue out. No one calls this an orgasm, but sometimes it feels like one.
When I wake up in the morning, I don’t remember yesterday. Most of the time I’m excited and happy. Everything is so new and astonishing. The sun is still the sun. It hasn’t changed to something else. There are still clouds and the blue sky. There are still such things as closeness and distance. I still have all of my fingers. I can still see myself in the mirror. But I have to remind myself who I am and what I’m supposed to be doing. My mama said once, in concern, “If you ever got Alzheimer’s, no one would know the difference.” People imagine that you have to remember a lot of things to function, but you don’t. You have to remember what’s familiar. You have to remember ideas and rules.
I’m telling you my stories because I have to, for the same reason I have to organize my dishes and my food in the cabinets and the refrigerator. I have to organize the few things I remember. Maybe I won’t forget them if I hear them being told. I’m telling you because I want to put my mind on display, like a painting on a wall. I want to share it the way you share things by talking to each other. This is the only way I know of doing that. The sharing is more the point than the stories. The way that I remember is more the point than the memories. The senses of things are more the subjects than the things. And maybe it will help someone else to hear the stories, someone with autism or someone with a loved one on the spectrum.
But before I begin, you have to agree to three things. First, you can’t interrupt me while I’m talking. If you do, I’ll forget what I was going to say, and it could take me months, or even years, to remember and start talking again. This is another way that ASD affects me. The part of my mind that concentrates is easily disrupted. So you can’t ask me questions or start tapping on the table.
Second, you can’t start looking in my eyes. Most people on the spectrum don’t like for other people to look into their eyes, and I’m no different. They aren’t your eyes; they’re mine. They don’t belong to you, and your gaze hurts. My eyes aren’t public property. You have to ask first. When people start searching in my eyes, I want to run, or scream at them, or mess with them, or hurt them to make them stop.
The third thing to remember is that most of what I tell you is literal to me, even if it seems like I’m speaking in metaphors. People have been trying to take my experiences away from me all of my life by saying things like “You’re so dramatic,” “You exaggerate so much,” “You’re so extreme,” or “It’s all in your mind,” as if their experiences aren’t also in their minds. My mind works differently; that’s all. If you put your hand on a hot stove, your brain would send a signal to your hand to make it jerk back off of the stove. If I walk into a room that’s too bright, my brain would send the same message to my whole body. My descriptions are of what I really experience, not what I imagine. If I say my skin is on fire, I really mean it. If you can bring yourself to hear me literally, to touch my fire the way you touch a book, or water, or an apple, you’ll understand the world I live in so much better. You’ll understand why my real life is such a secret.
Born with the Spirits
Seeing is believing.
The mind is flame.
The body is a charm.
And neither one of them is yours.
On the day I was born, my mama and daddy were living in a trailer in a small green meadow beneath a tree behind my great-grandmother’s, my granny’s, house. They named me Dennis, after Dennis the Menace, anticipating that I would be a trickster. It was spring, and the yard was full of jonquils, wild onions, sparrows, and robins, with Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds, blue jays in magnolia and thrushes in the thickets. There was a hummingbird in the early crocus and a flock of canaries passing through like a wind too far in from the coast. It was March 12, 1954, in Virginia, the “Gateway to the South,” when I was born, this time in a black body, on the outskirts of Wickham Plantation.
Around the time that I was born, hippies hadn’t been thought of yet. Chuck Berry was crossing over, riding on a red guitar like a black conked trickster. The Brown v. Board of Education case had ruled school segregation unconstitutional. Buckminster Fuller had just gotten the patent on geodesic domes. Martin Luther King, with all that he stood for, was already on fire. Rosa Parks was just about to board the bus. The smoke of Vietnamese jungles had already reached the shores of North America. Disneyland was having a grand opening. Linus was spotted for the first time with his beloved blanket. But no one would have known any of that where I was born, and if they had, it wouldn’t have meant anything.
I was born on Canaan’s Hill in a trailer beneath trees with pea pods and leaves that rustled the wind like feathers, beneath a totem tree—a tree touched by all of our ancestors. I don’t know if Mama and Daddy were smiling the day I was born. We didn’t have cameras yet, so there are no photographs. Our memories were left to our remembering, and I could never remember anything. So most of my childhood is just gone.
I don’t know if Daddy was there in the room, or walking somewhere outside, happy, or pondering the burden of more children. I know they were worried, because the second child, born right before me, had died shortly after birth. They’d named him Baby Folly and buried him in a little white casket at the edge of the woods. When we were growing up, they never talked about it.
When I was home in 2011 for my summer visit, Mama showed me the spot where he was buried. She had hired someone to clear away the bramble and thickets so we could see it. None of us—me or my siblings—had ever seen the grave. He was just a blank space that haunted us like a ghost. My mama wanted me to be there when she cried for our brother. We stood for a while, just looking, saying nothing. Still, the words have an awkwardness to them coming out of my mouth. “Our brother.”
Back when I was born they were nervous that I would also die. There was no doctor to deliver me, or any of us, out in the country. The white doctor sat in an easy chair in Ashland, the nearby town, maybe sipping from a cup of whiskey-tinged coffee. Maybe he was sleeping deeply and dreaming of nurses tenderly stroking his face. Maybe he had insomnia and couldn’t sleep. Or maybe he was sleeping but not dreaming at all. The midwife eased me out. Our navels are marked by the way slaves cut and tied the umbilical cords, which was how our midwife still did it. She eased out two generations of us, birthe
d into her hands, in houses and shacks deep in the woods.
No one bothered much about the minute or the hour I was born. The details of births were not that important for people in those times. Someone ventured out of our jungle and into Ashland, weeks or months later, and scribbled on some papers the rough details of my birth.
I was born a Pisces, and all the things they say about Pisces would bear out, twice and three times over. Pisces is the sign of the mystic. We are old souls. We belong to some other magical, elusive reality. For us, ordinary life has little meaning. In fact, I never knew what ordinary life was.
The first things I remember seeing when I was able to see were the blossoms of a redbud outside the trailer window. I was stunned by their bright pink, pulpy stillness. I thought I was one of them. I thought that my body hung somehow in sea blue, a cluster of soft petals, suspended and still, floating in space.
The second thing I remember seeing was a slave spirit named Jeremiah. Jeremiah was a child it seemed, around eleven years old. He was standing beside the bed. When I looked away from his glowing, I could see his body in my head. He was brown and had bruises on his calves, a smile that warmed my soul, and a sadness that whistled through his bones. So then I thought I was like Jeremiah, a glow holding a body inside it like a book holding a story. Nothing touching nothing. Something plus itself.
The third thing I remember seeing when I was able to see was the brightness of my mama’s face. I closed my eyes and the brightness still shone through, eclipsing all mirrors. It was so familiar. I would never grow tired of studying it. Its contours. Its many seasons. And then I thought my mama’s body was my body, and her face was my face. A maple-brown expanse of garden glowing, with lips that moved on her whispers and breath like a butterfly’s wings when it sits on a blossom.
Everything was still and quiet when I was born. There were no televisions. There were no sounds of radios. We had electricity, but only the most basic plumbing. There was a well in the yard with a crank wheel and a tin bucket that lowered slowly down the darkened well tunnel as you turned the crank, settled into the water, and ascended slowly when you turned the wheel in the other direction. When it squeaked I felt like dancing. Sometimes I did in my mind or with just my fingers. There was a pump house beside the well with a pump that moved water through pipes that Daddy buried in a trench leading to the house. The pump house was about three feet tall, eight feet square, and made out of cinderblocks. It covered a dug-out space, about the same dimensions, that housed the electric pump.
Water came trickling through the kitchen faucet. I could hear the water. I could feel it flushing through copper. I could hear it sit and wait, for hours, for days, like water in a lake, until we turned the handle on the faucet. And then it laughed like a trickster. Sometimes the pipes seemed angry, though, and they screamed at the water, roared as it rushed through them. I wondered about the water, what it felt like climbing up from so deep below the ground. I wondered if the water was where I came from.
Eventually, we had a bathroom, with a sink and faucets, but no toilet. We still had an outhouse and white porcelain buckets under our beds to pee in at night. Our pee sang in them at all hours. Our outhouses were always two-seaters, with dirt daubers buzzing in the ceiling corners near spider webs. White, powdery lime was sprinkled over the floor and periodically sifted down through the seats to cover the dark, soft mass of excrement six to eight feet below. We always ran a stick around the smoothed-down plywood underside of the seat hole, for spiders. The fear of black widows biting us when we sat down was as intense as the fear of any bogeyman.
The outhouse was like a little throne. A little cathedral. A little temple. A little meditation room. There was no time in the cathedral. I could sit and hear the web of bird voices take my body into a thousand directions and turn me into a listening pulse. A tingling. I could hear an airplane, hundreds of miles away. I could hear all the words my mama and granny and daddy and sisters and brothers and cousins blew out of their mouths, holding me. The screams of some girls. An axe splitting wood. Bees exploding with insistence. I could see the blue of the sky through cracks in the warped boards. Clouds. At night, I could disappear into the darkness, into the shower of stars, and I could feel them touching me with chilly hot fingers.
People had just started to get cars when I was a boy. One man still drove into town with his horse and buggy. I remember one day Granny saying that he had been hit by a car. The buggy had been flipped upside down, and he had been thrown into the grass-filled ditch that ran along Route 54. Granny and Mama were serious for a minute but then laughed, recalling stories about the man. They often laughed at others’ misfortunes, with little sentiment, especially if the things that happened resulted from stupidity. They couldn’t abide stupidity and had little sympathy for people who had difficulties because they didn’t use common sense or because they fooled themselves into believing things they knew deep down weren’t true. I think that this was the way the slaves looked at people.
In the soil around our houses were the broken bodies of great-great-great-great, great-great-great, great-great, and great relatives. Were the bones and ashes of my family who had been slaves. Small fires smoldered on green mounds in the yard, at the edges of the woods, in clearings, among the fruit trees in the orchard and the young green rows of corn, and in the many yards of houses hidden back through the woods. Lost spirits walked back and forth, floating among the leaves of maples and dogwoods and oaks. Some of them were lost, and others were just watching over things. I could see them pass through the sunlight. Under elms. Under the clothes hanging on the line. Under the tall trees with leaves that were always in glory. Every path we walked on was worn smooth, like the carved wood of a walking cane. All the trees were also rubbed slick in places, first by slaves, when they touched against them, rounding curves in the paths, and then by the later generations.
In the air were echoes of their calls and cries. There was a forlornness, a shadow we breathed. A numbness. Always something in the air like the leftover smoke of a house fire. Like charred wood. Like warm cinders. Like the leftover smoke of a lynching. The lingering scent the next day, the next week, the next month, the next year, and the next. Something like burnt nothing else. Not wood. Not grass. Not old rubber, or clothing, or tar, or plastic. Something bitter mixed with the sweet scents of honeysuckle, forsythia, and moist earth.
It takes so much longer than anyone wants to admit to get over being a slave, to get over being the grandchildren of people who were in bondage. Because everything still remembers. The earth remembers things. DNA remembers. Objects and things remember. So we walked in a not belonging. A not being known by anything else other than the plantation. There was a sea of time without waves. But the waves would slowly ripple in, as the outside world did. Going to school was a ripple. Television and radio were ripples. Daddy going off to work as far away as Richmond was a ripple. But meanwhile, the old folks washed clothes, canned fruits and vegetables, walked with walking sticks, spat tobacco, laughed and cried, raised gardens, raised hogs and cows and chickens. Meanwhile, all of this was water whose surface never undulated, never broke, until later, when I was older.
People walked in shell shock. The shell shock we walked in would grow inside us and deepen, like oak and maple and sweet gum, elm, locust, and crepe myrtle seeds until one day we would be a forest of trees, trapped between time and no time. Aging and having children. And having the grandchildren. And the great-grandchildren. And the great-great-grandchildren. And the cousins. And the aunts. And the uncles. And the nieces. And the nephews. And the shell shock would keep washing over us like waves as we struggled to manage the modern world. It would wash over us like the sea over seashells, while outside the world would move on, imagining we did not exist, pretending we never existed, shoving us as deeply into the corners of its closets as possible. Now and then someone would pick us up, like a seashell, and put us to their ear, and they would hear the waves of ironic laughter that helped us to survive.
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My community was located on the outskirts of Wickham Plantation, in Hanover County, Virginia, right in the middle of the state. Perhaps you’ve heard of Hanover. It’s famous for the deep-red, fat tomatoes that grow there in the summer. And of course you’ve heard of Virginia. It’s famous for its salt-smoked ham. It’s where the first British colonies were formed and the first African slaves touched American soil. In Virginia, the air is always ripe and foggy with history. Each year, our school classes would take field trips to places like Monticello, Ash Lawn, the Washington Monument, and Jamestown. In school we learned the speeches of Patrick Henry—“Give me liberty or give me death”—the preamble to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and so on. Statues of the Confederacy litter the landscape of cities and towns like Petersburg and Norfolk and Richmond.
In Richmond, “the capital of the Confederacy,” there’s a long cobblestone street called Monument Avenue that is lined with statues of Confederates. In the park at Virginia Commonwealth University, where I would eventually enroll, there’s a statue of Captain Wickham, the man who “owned” my great-great-great-great- and great-great-great-grandparents, along with those of everyone else in my community.
Wickham was a descendant of Robert “King” Carter, one of the richest slaveholders and landowners in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His mother was Robert E. Lee’s first cousin. In fact, Lee’s mother was born on Shirley Plantation, of which Hickory Hill—Wickham’s 3,200 acres—was only a small part. Wickham’s family on both sides were among the “First Families of Virginia” going back to the first colony. They sat in all the seats of power. They were founders of settlements, like Yorktown. They sat in governor chairs. Lawyer desks. House of Delegates rockers. In drafting and signing rooms for the Declaration of Independence. To us, though, they were slave owners, one step above the lowest form of life, slave drivers.
The Secret Life of a Black Aspie Page 2