by John Donvan
“The whole subject of idiocy is new,” Howe wrote in the text accompanying his data. “Science has not yet thrown her certain light upon its remote, or even its proximate causes.” He was right. Little effort had ever been made to understand the nature of intellectual disability. Society had never seen the purpose in doing so.
Howe himself was not prepared for one of the findings he made on his two-year tour: A good many of the people who had been pointed out to him as “idiots,” he reported, did not seem to belong in that category. Upon close examination, he found many “who have some of the intellectual faculties well-developed, and yet are called idiots.” Far from fitting the label neatly, he said, they “upset every one of these definitions.”
There was the man named Billy, whom Howe listed as Case 27, who “knows, and can sing correctly, more than two hundred tunes…and who will instantly detect a false note in any of them.” Also notable about Billy, whose age was given as fifty-nine, was that ordinary communication appeared beyond him. “If he is told to go and milk the cows, he stands and repeats over the words, ‘Billy go and milk the cows,’ for hours together, or until someone tells him something else, which he will repeat over in the same way.”
Billy was born about 140 years before Kanner began thinking about autism, but much of what Howe recorded—his talent for music, his apparently perfect pitch, and his seeming echolalia—would almost certainly have earned him a place on Kanner’s list.
Howe’s Case 360 might have made that list also: “This man has the perception of combination of numbers in an extraordinary degree of activity. Tell him your age, and ask him how many seconds it is, and he will tell you in a very few minutes. In all other respects, he is an idiot.”
And Howe’s Case 25: “This young man knows the name and sound of every letter, he can put the letters into words, the words into sentences, and read off a page with correctness; but he would read over that page a thousand times, without getting the slightest idea of the meaning.”
Howe went on to list more examples that hint at autism, though with less detail. “What they learn, they never forget,” he reported, of one particular group. Also: “There are cases, Nos. 175 and 192, idiots beyond all question, but who can count not only to 20, but to 20,000, and perform many simple arithmetical operations with a great deal more facility than ordinary persons.” There is Case 277, a girl who can “learn and know letters” but can understand nothing to which they relate.
Howe’s research took place during a period when the majority of “ordinary persons” in the United States were illiterate, with little experience of using the alphabet at all. Neither did most Americans have much exposure to math, beyond counting what was in front of their noses: farm animals, rows of crops, family members. Twenty was a number beyond which few had much occasion to go visiting in their imaginations. The “idiots” were, by comparison, intellectual voyagers, at least in this narrow respect.
Howe was ridiculed yet again when he presented his report to the legislature. For his idealism, he was compared to Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. He prevailed, however, where it counted—with the lawmakers, who came up with $2,500 to fund an experimental school for ten of the children in the survey, with Howe in charge. Three years later, each of the children, previously thought uneducable, had made progress. Howe was thrilled. His report had fulfilled his ambitions in his own time, even as it tucked away something more relevant to our own—his eyewitness accounts of what autism looked like, ninety years before it was “discovered” in a psychiatrist’s office in Baltimore.
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IF KANNER WAS RIGHT, and autism had always existed, then these stories from the past hint at some unpleasant life experiences for those who, during autism’s prehistory, went through their days undiagnosed. If, in the seventeenth century, they were still burning and hanging epileptics as witches—due to their occasional fits of strange movements and sounds—that would not have boded well for a child who tonelessly parroted back whatever was said to him, or whose deep concentration on the movement of his own fingers before his eyes could not be interrupted. If mutism was confused with lunacy, then quite likely nonspeaking people with autism would have been candidates for Europe’s various institutions, which included a tower in the city wall of Hamburg, where the insane were confined to a space known as the Idiot’s Cage.
Samuel Gridley Howe saw a great deal of dehumanizing of the disabled on his tour of Massachusetts towns. He found parents mired in “gross ignorance” of their children’s capabilities. One family kept their middle-aged son in a cage in the parents’ shop. He had been there since the age of twelve. Another man, age fifty, had been chained up for twenty years.
Such outcomes were not inevitable, however. In the eighteenth century, a town of rural Scotsmen proved that through their acceptance of Hugh Blair. So, in the twentieth century, did the people of a small Mississippi town, through the way they responded to the odd child in their midst—Donald Triplett.
5
DOUBLY LOVED AND PROTECTED
In May 1945, Leo Kanner traveled to Mississippi to see, for the last time, his Case 1, who was eleven years old by this time. For a few days, Dr. Kanner would be a guest of the Triplett family.
It had been four years since Donald’s last visit to Kanner’s clinic in Baltimore, and seven years since his first visit. Now, sitting on the white sofas in the Triplett living room, near the baby grand piano Mary and Beamon had splurged on, the three had time to ruminate on the ups and downs of Donald’s past few years, including Mary’s attempts to get him to go to school.
In the late summer of 1939, when Donald was about to turn six, Mary had approached the public elementary school with the hope of enrolling him in the first-grade class starting that September. She knew what she was asking. Schools all over the country were flatly refusing children like Donald, and the law backed them up. True, there were special-education classrooms in some public school districts, whose availability varied by region, but even in these, children who did not sit quietly and follow directions readily were quickly expelled. However, in this case the school principal was a friend of Mary’s. A space was found for Donald, and the first-grade teacher was made to understand that she would have to accommodate this somewhat different child.
On the first day, Donald threw tantrums. He was a little calmer the second day, and even more so in the days that followed. Given no choice but to adapt to Donald, his teacher apparently made efforts to accommodate his peculiar ways. Perhaps this meant ignoring or redirecting odd behavior rather than punishing it. Or maybe it meant finding ways to give Donald a little extra attention to help him keep up.
It seems Donald began to adapt as well. A lot of his odd behaviors, to be sure, remained, and were doubtlessly disruptive. In the first few weeks, he randomly broke out in squeals and shrieks, and when he was answering a question addressed to him directly, he sometimes jumped up and down after giving his answer, giving his head a hard shake. But at least he answered questions from time to time. By October, he could keep his place in line, answer politely when called upon in class, and follow along better with the flow of the learning day. In the evenings, he never had anything to say about what he was doing at school, but he put up no resistance to returning there in the morning. For a child with a phobia about changes to his environment, this was progress.
His use of language improved as well. While he had learned to read words aloud earlier than the other children, it appeared he had no idea of the meaning of those words. It was the same with movies. He enjoyed going to them and would recite lines of dialogue for weeks afterward, but he seemed not to understand that the characters on the screen were telling a story. After having been enrolled in school, these deficits showed signs of being corrected.
One day, during his third month in school, on a visit to the classroom, Mary was amazed to see Donald fully engaged in a reading lesson. The teacher had just written a series of sentences on the chalkboard and was explaining to the class
that she would be calling on each child one at a time to step forward, find the sentence in which his or her name appeared, circle the name, and then act out the sentence. Mary saw the teacher write the sentence with her son’s name: “Don may feed a fish.” When it was his turn, she watched Donald stand up, accept the chalk, draw a chalk circle around “Don,” and then go over to the side table where the class aquarium sat and sprinkle some fish food into the water. Donald had done it—he had made sense of both the spoken and the written word—without fuss. To Mary, his performance was so momentous that, when she got home, she immediately wrote a letter to Kanner, describing the entire scene for him.
Without a doubt, Donald still lagged behind the other first-graders, but it was obvious that he was steadily changing, growing, and discovering how to connect. Kanner had seen this happening during the family’s first follow-up trip to Baltimore, in May 1939, seven months after their initial consultation and a few months before the school experiment started. Writing up his observations from that time, Kanner reported that Donald’s attention and concentration were showing improvement, that he was in better contact with his environment, and that he was reacting much more appropriately to people and situations. “He showed disappointment when thwarted,” Kanner observed, and “gave evidence of pleasure when praised.” At the same time, there was a big part of Donald’s world that remained out of reach. “He still went on writing letters with his fingers in the air,” Kanner noted.
The first-grade experiment proceeded past Christmas and into winter. By spring, Donald’s use of language had developed even further. At home, he began engaging in a rough approximation of conversation. Mary would ask specific questions about his day, and he would readily answer. But his responses were narrow and concrete; he never opened up about his thoughts and experiences. He did, however, insist one night on making the entire family play a game he had just learned at school. They all went along with it, following his exceedingly precise instructions. Both Mary and Beamon understood how remarkable it was that Donald was entering into a game at all. This was a first in his life—playing with other children.
Donald survived the first grade and returned to school for a second year, and then a third. In a way, the routine of the classroom may have suited his need for sameness: he went to the same building every day, at the same hour, for the same length of time. His seat was always where it was supposed to be, and a bell rang automatically, and reliably, to start and stop activities. One afternoon, when he was nine and a half, he walked into his classroom not knowing that classes had been canceled for the rest of the day. His parents were also unaware of the change. Donald spent the next few hours alone at his desk, writing in a notebook, waiting for the dismissal bell. When it rang, he packed away his things and headed home as usual. His ingrained habits had served him well.
Ultimately, however, school became more demanding, and the difference between him and the other children became more pronounced. Around the time he turned ten, the gap between what the school expected and what Donald was capable of—both academically and socially—grew too wide.
By the spring of 1943, when his original first-grade classmates were making their way through the fourth grade, Donald was back at home, helping his mother with simple chores in return for money for the picture shows he loved. At the same time, his natural skill in arithmetic was strengthened when he made a hobby out of calculating the publication dates of Time magazine. By chance, he had come across a copy of Time’s first issue. On the cover it said “Vol. I, No. 1” and the date, “March 3, 1923.” He was fascinated, and became obsessed with figuring out the exact dates on which every subsequent issue was published.
This led to an obsession with calendars. Once, when visiting his mother’s friends, the Rushings, he pulled up a chair in their kitchen so that he could stand up high enough to study their big wall calendar. By the time he was done frantically rifling back and forth through its pages, it was so much the worse for wear that they took it down after he and Mary left.
Donald was stretching his mind, but the seeming impracticality of his efforts was overwhelming. What he was good at did not fit in the classroom anymore. What he was not good at—making sense of reading and history lessons—increasingly got in the way of everyone else’s learning. His adjustment to life, while progressing, was not progressing quickly enough.
With Donald at home again, Mary experienced the full burden of loneliness, frustration, and exhaustion that crushed other mothers in her situation. For the second time in his life, Donald was sent away.
—
IT WAS NOT an institution this time. And in no way was Donald abandoned. The setting, in fact, was a home—a real family home, and getting there from the Triplett residence took all of eighteen minutes by car. Located in the deep Mississippi countryside, well past the last road sign, and at the end of a network of unmarked dirt roads, it was a house on a hill where no electricity or phone lines ran. The place did not even have running water; the toilet was outdoors. But Donald’s parents hoped the couple who lived there would be kind to their son, and that the outdoor setting would be good for his development.
Their names were Ernest and Josephine Lewis. They were poor farmers, without much education, but townspeople said they were decent, hardworking, and honest. Josephine was in her early forties, and Ernest was in his mid-fifties. They had no children of their own, and they lived off the land they worked themselves. The amount of money Beamon paid the couple to take in Donald was never disclosed, but their treatment of him was a matter of record, thanks to Leo Kanner.
Donald had already started living with the Lewises when Kanner came to visit the Tripletts in May 1945. He was interested in seeing how it was working out, and, of course, most curious to see how his Case 1 was doing. As it was, Donald came home to Forest many weekends and all holidays, and he was there for Kanner’s visit. But at some point, they all piled into Beamon’s car and hit the dusty road to visit Ernest and Josephine.
By this time, the Lewises had become almost like family to the Tripletts. Mary’s father’s appreciation of the couple and their way of life was apparent in a letter he sent his grandson in 1943: “Now I think Mr. & Mrs. Lewis are the very best people in the County. They are trying to train you to be a useful man. They are out for you and you must reciprocate by minding them. Bring in the stove wood for Mrs. Lewis, get the hatchet and fix the kindling wood for the kitchen fire.” Granddaddy McCravey had grown up on such a farm himself before setting out at the age of twenty-two and striking it rich in finance. He respected the discipline of chores. “It is by far the best training a boy can get,” he told Donald. “To live in a place like Forest is not comparable to it in any sense. You are near nature, and nature’s God.”
Granddaddy signed off by reminding his grandson, “I have loved lots of folks, but I love you as much as anyone I have ever known.”
Leo Kanner didn’t idealize country living quite as much as Granddaddy McCravey, but after getting to the farm and spending a few hours there, he formed just as high an opinion of the Lewises. Ernest and Josephine walked the psychiatrist all around the place, showed him Donald’s room, and talked him through the chores Donald did regularly. As Kanner took it in, he realized that the couple had stumbled upon a kind of therapeutic solution to Donald’s deficits. On the one hand, there was a rigid structure to days on the farm—the same pattern every morning, every night, every season. Donald had no choice but to abide by the schedule.
At the same time, they showed creativity and flexibility in how they accommodated his obsessions and strengths and fit them into farm life. As Kanner watched, for example, Donald ran into a cornfield, took up the reins of a heavy plow horse, and successfully put the animal through its paces—plowing one long row, then turning the horse around to begin another. As he looked on, amazed, the Lewises explained that this had all begun when Donald had started walking the cornfields, obsessively counting the rows. Then Ernest had put the reins in his hand and showed him
how to control the horse and maneuver the plowshare. In this way, he was able to count the rows while working them. Kanner watched Donald pass back and forth with the horse half a dozen times and cut half a dozen field lengths in the earth; it seemed to give the boy pleasure.
Donald had also become entranced by the process of measurement and had been taking a yardstick to whatever he could find around the farm, keeping track of how long, tall, deep, or wide everything was. Again, Ernest thought about this, and when the farm needed a new well, he recruited Donald to help dig it, presenting it to him as a measuring project: How deep is the well now? How deep should it go?
Josephine and Ernest also made allowances for some of Donald’s less practical preoccupations. For a time, Donald went through a phase when he was obsessed with death and brought every dead bird or bug he found back to the house. The Lewises could be tough with Donald, and they did take a switch to him when he misbehaved. But with the birds and the bugs, they understood that Donald was trying to figure out something important. Instead of punishing him for dirtying the house, they pointed to a little parcel of open ground near the house and told him he could lay all the creatures to rest there. Donald built his little graveyard enthusiastically, not only burying every deceased thing he found, but doing so with an air of formality.
When Kanner strolled into Donald’s little cemetery, he saw that he had given names to all the creatures buried there, erecting small wooden markers over each grave and making them all members of the Lewis family. The one that stuck in Kanner’s mind was inscribed “John Snail Lewis. Born, date unknown.” For the date of departure from this life, Donald listed the date on which he’d found the snail’s remains.
Donald flourished under the regimen of farm life. In Kanner’s estimation, living there for a period of time was one of the best things that ever happened to Donald. The farm offered an ideal balance of restrictions and freedoms. Donald became more verbal, more creative, and more accomplished at completing complex tasks. He also basked in a kind of freedom he never had in town: the freedom to explore, to go over to the next field to find birds and bugs, without giving anyone cause to worry that cars might run him down.