Unlike most others around me, though, I never took the knowledge as real or absolute. I knew that to get a good grade, I needed to remember things and put them down on paper. I knew that getting a good grade was important. Adults liked you better if you got good grades. It made them happy. But I fit the information into my private world.
I considered almost everything I learned in school to be made up, and I made up my own parallels. It was one of the things that made learning so much fun. I remembered things by remembering what I made of them. The stars were babies trapped in the milky darkness of space. Someone had given them names to be nice, to hold them in place for us to name them for ourselves. Venus was my cousin Betty Rose. The skeleton system was the oak at the edge of the woods. The western hemisphere was the nearby town of Ashland. Stamens were the yellow ribbons in Janet Jones’s hair. When we learned to tell time, twelve o’clock was the chimney of an old house that had fallen down in the woods, a long walk from our house. It whispered and was full of spirits. The woods were full of old wells, and China was a well that Beulah saved me from falling in. England was another well. No matter what the teacher said about the clock, or what I wrote down on papers, I knew that there was no quarter past or half past. There was twelve, and then vapors. The time was something someone else made up, and so I could also make up my own, one that would suit me better.
I had trouble with time, with what people called minutes, or hours, or days. There could be a lot of minutes in what people called a minute, depending on what was happening. It wasn’t a short thing at all. The same thing with hours and days. If I was trying to put my shoes on and somebody yelled hurry up and the birds were asking me to listen and the things on the bed weren’t straight and the pillows were moaning and the water inside my body was sloshing from side to side as if I was on a boat and I started to cry and get maddened and then my head caught on fire, I couldn’t see anything anymore and I didn’t know where I was. I wanted to scream at somebody and hurt somebody or break something against the wall to reset the day. And then my mama might come in the room and say, “Red, we need to leave soon. Just take your time and put your shoes on, honey.” Mama’s voice and her not yelling would stop time. And then I wouldn’t hear anything at all. And I would be exhausted, like at bedtime, but it wouldn’t be night yet. I would put my shoes on, and I would wash my face, and I would straighten out the things on my bed, and I would hug my pillows. And then it would be a different day, but people would say that it was still Monday.
2 + 2. But what is 2? Where is it?
“D-o-g” spells dog. But “dog” isn’t a real dog. “Dog” is a word someone made up. So why can’t “d-o-g” spell cat, if you want it to? I learned to grow masks for school. I had to be careful there. Covering up was like instinct, though. Like a brown walking stick turning green when it sits on a leaf. Watch. Watch. Watch. Watch hands. Watch lips. Watch eyebrows. Watch the paths that come down beside noses and curve out and around. I grew masks like extra thumbs. Like a flower sprouting the wrong blossoms. I had learned a lot from insects about how to live around people. I had learned a lot from growing up in the shadow of slavery. Slaves had to have six senses. They had to pay attention to small things, to small routines, to other people’s view of things. They were always strangers, ready for the next trauma.
But sometimes at school, I forgot to cover up. Mostly after naptime. My favorite time in elementary school was naptime. I could lay my head on the desk and cover my ears with my arms, fall asleep, and be back at home. I could feel for a little while that I was not yet split apart.
At naptime I often dreamed about my mama and my granny back at home. The green grass in our yard. The birds talking to each other in the damson plum trees. Mama was hanging out clothes, and I was standing beside her, holding on to her apron. I awoke from my nap, laughing and talking to Mama. When I realized where I was, and that others had already awoken and had heard me, I felt as embarrassed as I did in dreams when I went to school in my pajamas.
At school, we were supposed to just see things like looking across the surface of a lake. We weren’t supposed to dive or float, just keep looking across. When people talked to us, I was supposed to look at them and just see the surface of their faces. Not even that, really. Because I wasn’t supposed to notice the lines, or spots, the moles, dislocations, textures, or asymmetries. I was supposed to just hear their words and to believe them.
But I found doing these things very difficult. I wanted to listen to people’s bodies and their spirits. I wanted to look at them without the awkward, burning pain of them looking back. I had no interest in their words the way they meant them. So often they seemed to mean something else anyway. I was interested in the sounds they made when they spoke. In their smells, in their movements. Sometimes I frightened other children when I looked intensely at them. It made them uneasy. They sometimes joked with each other about my weirdness, wondering what I was looking at.
“Today, class, we’re going to work on writing.”
“Robert, stop that talking. Janet, stop writing on your desk. Pencils down, please. Pencils down, please! I don’t think I said anything about picking pencils up, did I?”
Silence . . .
“Did I!?”
“No, ma’am.”
“All right, then.” More silence as she sternly looks over the classroom, making sure she has everyone’s total attention. “Now you may open your notebooks. Do it without talking, please. Without talking.”
I focused hard on my teacher, Mrs. Roberts. I learned her. I was used to watching, listening from the shadows, and learning people. I watched everything, or at least the things that I found most fascinating or necessary for survival. The leaves of plants. The looks in animals’ eyes. The way they moved. How they regarded other species. Spiders. Wasps. Clouds. Mama. Daddy. Sisters and brothers. When I was young, I didn’t think of people as different from other things. I didn’t quite get that I was one of them. When Mrs. Roberts talked to the class, the sound of her words was gray, like the gray sound of a heavy oak desk sliding across the tiled floor. No wonder she was tired by the end of the day. When she talked to me, though, the sound of her words was like the color of pink hibiscus.
Before long, I knew what my teacher would say and when she would say it. I learned to always keep one eye and one ear open for my teacher. At the same time, though, I folded myself into an origami kite and flew above the trees, landing in green places, and with my other eye I watched blues and greens go by. With my other ear, I rode waves of sound, far and near. Someone yelling down the street. Someone talking in the hall. The giant arm of a garbage truck straining to lift and bend itself into a half moon. Birds. Oh, the birds! A door slamming.
If my teacher had sweat on her forehead, she would be stern. If there were fine beads of sweat gathered on her fleshy brown arms, in the stretch marks, she would smile at me and touch my head. If the scent of her perfume was thick, like women in church, she would speak in all declaratives. If she looked out the window a lot, she would shower us with interrogatives. “Did I say anything about talking?” “Did I ask anyone to write on the board?” “Did I tell anybody they could leave yet?”
I watched and listened when she and the other teachers would whisper. Sometimes they whispered about kids and laughed at them. I wondered if she ever laughed at me. I knew that she liked rose-scented lotion and that she pulled it from her desk drawer whenever there was a recess and spread it on her arms and hands. I knew that breathing roses made her feel better. Breathing roses made me feel better too. So after recess I always got as close to her as I could, walking slowly, getting happy. I knew when her mind wandered, like Mama’s did sometimes. I knew when she worried. When she was happy. When she was happy she gave off soft breezes. I knew when she was sad. When she was sad she gave off too much heat. She felt like fire.
I sat in hard chairs at school and half listened. I could figure out how to do most things before the teacher finished explaining them. Then I could daydr
eam. I watched the other kids and learned them. I found my groove. The ideal spots. I was fine as long as nothing disrupted the daily routine. As long as no one bothered me. Although a headache was always right around the corner, hovering above me, like a cloud. I loved my fat, yellow pencil and the big lines on easily torn pages of paper. I loved my notebook. My eraser. My crayons. My cubby. My old, worn wooden desk. I loved them partially because I had to, though. They were what I was left with, away from home.
I loved my shoes. My clothes. I loved having them. I loved the idea of being a person, but I loved it partially because I had to. Until first grade, we never really had many “nice” clothes. Not that we had a lot of them once we started school. But school brought a sense of “mine-ness” that I had never felt much. At home I was just a limb of a whole body. People seemed to see the five kids as one person with five heads. Even my mama and daddy, sometimes. Everyone had trouble telling me and my brothers apart. We wore the same clothes. We were always together. The inch difference in our heights was our only separation. We were taught to always think of ourselves as one thing, that thinking about our separate selves was selfish. We were the “Follys,” and we were proud of it.
A few rows back from the teacher’s desk, near the window, was the best spot in the classroom. I could bask in the openness of seasonal skies and feel the fall, spring, and early summer breezes that blew in the window. I could smell the leaves and grass, jonquils or rained-on earth, doughnuts baking at the bakery down the street. The sounds of other children, passing cars, and conversations of teachers who stood against the wall to talk at recess or when their classes were having PE settled in my ears. I could see Jeremiah waiting for three o’clock, when I could come home. In many ways, school was like water over a duck’s back. I mastered it. I grew to love its structure, routine, and safety. I grew to love Janet Jones’s smile and her light-brown upper arm. Sometimes when my head ached or when my stomach was sinking so fast I couldn’t breathe, I stared at her arm to feel better. But school didn’t sink into me very deeply. My soul still lingered at home, in the house and in the synapses of my family and kin.
I remember looking so forward to learning to write in cursive. It was so pretty. So magical and secret. It was like the curves in flowers, in someone’s song or dance. But I missed those weeks from school when they were learning cursive. I was so sad. It was like missing the flocks of canaries when they passed through in the spring, and for moments the trees were filled with delicate, yellow flecks, and the air was filled with a light, sweet singing. Weeks went by in bed, in and out of delirium. In and out of time, as Mama and Granny’s voices were the touchstones, and my brothers’ and sisters’ clatter, like light and dark, sunshine and starlight, came and went. This was the way it was. I would go to school for a little while, and then I would get sick again and disappear.
Going to the Moon
Rule number 33: Never let people know that objects are alive.
By the time I was eleven, my clairvoyance heightened. If someone was going to pass away, I could feel it. If someone was coming. If someone was going to have a baby. If someone was going to be in an accident. I knew too much. I still felt too much. If it was going to rain in one or two days, I could feel the air shifting. It tilted my bones. It moved the light to a different part of the yard, from the begonias to the shade beneath plum trees. But the shade wouldn’t budge for anything, and so the light was hiding now, the way the shade often did. Everything turned maroon. The water dropped two degrees inside of me, and so I huddled inside, even though everybody said, “But it’s so warm!” I could smell the coolness of the rain days before it came, me and the cows and dogs.
I was still sick a lot, but not as much. I didn’t miss as much school. I could feel sick but still manage to do things sometimes. I still cried a lot, but my body didn’t jerk as much from the smells and sounds of things or from too much light. I still sulked, and I was still prone to long silences and meltdowns. I still missed a lot of what was going on with people, but I laughed more, even at things that others didn’t think were funny. I laughed a lot to myself, at people. How they were. How little sense they made. I started to become more aware of my difference and to resent people, to hold the harshness of the world against them.
I began to notice the people around me. I started trying to be more of a person. I started to like school. To feel safe there. Before then, I had been mostly waiting to die. I was like a traveler stranded in a foreign airport, absorbed with the strangeness of everything around me. I still looked into the sky a lot and imagined a ship would someday be coming. My favorite book was You Will Go to the Moon. In the book, a boy is taking a journey into space on a rocket ship, stopping off at a space station and then continuing on to the moon. I read it over and over, spending hours just looking at the pictures and imagining I was the boy. I read it even when I was older. I dreamed of being inside the space station, which was round, like a giant doughnut, turning ever so slowly, a muted carousel among the stars. It must be so quiet and cozy in the spaceship, in dark space among the planets.
I would meet other beings in space who would be like me, who would talk to me like plants or spirits, without any words. The way flowers talk, quietly humming. The way the stars talk, with patterns of light. Beings who would not look at me. Who would just do whatever they were doing, and I could do whatever I was doing. And there wouldn’t be any hurry or any time. And that would be all right.
My other favorite books were about nature, and about a boy with an animal who was his best friend, like Old Yellow or Black Stallion. One whole set of books was all about the animal kingdom, and another was all about the plant kingdom. They were small books, about five-by-seven inches, with lots of pictures, and they fit perfectly in my hands. They don’t make books like those anymore. The pages were slick and shiny and felt good to touch. Light would bounce off of the pages when I turned them and take me in. The colors were so deep they came alive. I would carry one of the books around with me or fall asleep with one of them next to my head. It was fun deciding which one to carry on any given day. There were so many beautiful rules for deciding. If Mama cooked bacon for breakfast, carry the book with butterflies. If Daddy talked to Mama before leaving, carry the book with fruit trees. If my sister Jean said something to my sister Thelma and she laughed, and then the man on the radio said something with three words with long e’s, carry the book of lizards and snakes. Sometimes deciding was as much fun as carrying or reading the books.
The six volumes about animals were about reptiles, insects, mammals, birds, fish, and amphibians. Along with the color photographs of each type of animal was information about them. Birds and insects were probably the dearest to my heart, and then amphibians and mammals. I spent days reading and gazing at the photographs, studying every detail, trying to absorb their spirits.
I spent days searching for animals, watching them, getting to know them, losing track of time. I was fascinated with how they ate; how they drank; how they moved their heads, their tails, wings, legs, mouths; how they stayed still. With what their sense of the minutes, hours, and days might be. With what kinds of houses they built. With when and how they slept, and what textures and colors they liked most. With how they regarded the other lives around them, especially people.
Of all the insects, wasps, bees, hornets, and yellow jackets seemed to be the most aware of people and to dislike us the most. Them, and the arachnids. Spiders watched us. I could feel their stares. Some of them might back up when people came along, but even then they never conceded. Bees lived in a world that floated somewhere in another dimension, in a forest or a field we never went into or ever touched. According to their laws, a few of them come into our world, but not many. They never let us know where they lived, how many of them there were, or what they were like when they were at home.
There was an ongoing war between us and wasps. If they built nests around the house eaves, or in the corners of the outhouse, or in the chicken coop, the barn, or in he
dges near the house, Daddy would take a cup of kerosene and douse them. Then we’d run as the gasoline dripped from the nest and the wood it hung from, and they came furiously buzzing out, looking for someone to sting. Every time I got stung, I could feel their hate and anger. I could feel them saying, “Why don’t you creatures go back to where you came from!?”
I loved praying mantises for the sheer beauty of their color, for the way they clung almost frozen to the branches of hedges. For the way they moved so slowly and the way they used their eyes to sense as much as they used them to see. They were like little dinosaurs, still recovering from the ice age, slowed to the speed of the sun, moving across the heavens.
Then there were the dirt daubers. If wasps were angry soldiers, dirt daubers were nervous sentries. They didn’t fight. They watched out of the corners of their eyes, busily coming and going and adding bits of mud to their houses. I loved the black of their shiny, parchment-like blue-black wings with rainbows in them, like the blue-black of some chicken feathers. Their wings made me laugh. They were never still, moving rapidly, anxiously, even when they were not flying.
I kept a lot of insects and reptiles and amphibians for long enough to watch them, to listen to them and whisper to them. Then I would let them go. I had many turtles, snakes, tadpoles, and frogs. I kept them in crates and boxes I made from scrap wood and chicken wire, old pieces of glass and plastic and straw. I kept them in big jars. I kept them out behind the barn, on the shady side, unless the ground was damp—because I hated to walk on damp ground. Other times I moved them behind the back of the barn, facing the orchard and woods, where it was sunny.
The Secret Life of a Black Aspie Page 7