The Secret Life of a Black Aspie

by Anand Prahlad

  I was in blue listening to the stories of how white men on the plantation were always after black women. How my family had to run or hide or fight back. How they were beaten and prayed for freedom. I was in blue listening to stories about how white people’s houses stank and how they were a race of dirty people. Funny tales about white people were often the evening’s entertainment, as Mama and Granny took turns, and we laughed until our bellies hurt. I could feel white people’s hatred for us written like tattoos across the most private parts of our bodies. It bent the two races toward each other like trees arching across a roadway, filled with the sap of loathing, but also raging with hunger.

  Not all white people hated us, but who did and who didn’t? Some of them seemed to pity us instead of pitying themselves. Some of them were full of small courtesies. Some of them gave Mama and Granny old clothes or books. Sometimes when an older white woman was giving Mama something, she would keep holding the thing she was giving, even after it was in Mama’s hands. As if she didn’t really want to let go of it. And even though they gave us stuff, they never gave us anything they would really miss.

  We had heard about white people who were different, who were decent. Who were ashamed of what white people had done to black people and tried to change things. Some of them were marching on television. But only a few of the different kind of white people seemed to be around where we lived. Mama sometimes worked for people like that. But they weren’t brave. They wouldn’t let other people know how they felt.

  I was thinking about all of this when I was riding the bus way “up the country” to get to Patrick Henry, around curves on Route 54 and past fields and cows grazing. I liked watching the green and cows go by. I was thinking about how what people say about other people is one world. A half-real one at best. And I was thinking about how when you meet them, the people you’ve heard stories about are another world, a realer one. In the stories, there are no scents, tastes, temperatures or colors. But in the flesh, those things are overwhelmingly real. When I was riding the bus, I was curious about how, this time, the two worlds would measure up against each other.

  When I first got to the white castle, I was sad. I was sad because I was hardly ever around black students. I was in all college preparatory classes, with all “smart” students who were almost all white. What happened to all of the black kids, especially the ones I thought were smarter than me. I thought that all of my friends at Gandy were smarter than me, as far as schoolwork went. I got A’s because I could “see” things. I dreamed a lot of my papers. It was the same way with poetry. I had to remind myself again and again that what I dreamt was really mine, that I could use it and put my name on it. It felt a little like stealing, like cheating, because it came so easily, as if some invisible friends were passing me notes with all the answers. But my friends could do things with numbers and letters that I never could. And being smart in school was about the tricks you could do with letters and numbers.

  And what happened to all the black teachers? I didn’t understand then that I would never be around many black students or teachers again. For the rest of my life. I didn’t realize that the world I was accustomed to was gone forever. How could a whole world disappear, just like that?

  Right before integration, I had finally started learning to talk to black people, to have friends. And now I had to learn white talk. White people used different words and expressions. They wore different lines and makeup on their faces. They looked at different places on my body and let their tongues and teeth show more. They seemed to focus on a face an inch in front of the face they were talking to. They wore smiles like peace offerings. Sometimes it was really friendliness and innocence. But sometimes it was “I don’t want you to see the real me. Please just disappear.” It was hard for me to tell which was which. Most black people didn’t trust any white people’s smiles. They knew something I didn’t. For many, the only world was the one in the stories they had heard. They had been shaped by them. They knew what was what in the world. They knew what was possible and what was not. But it was good in some ways that I didn’t know those things. In that way, I was more ready for the new world.

  I was happy in the white castle when I could escape during recess or lunch and sit behind one of the buildings facing green fields and listen to the birds and watch the cows grazing. I could hear the pattern of sounds the students and teachers made, coming and going from one building to another, milling around inside classrooms. Their talking was like the leaves of prairie grass and alfalfa blowing in the wind. I could close my eyes and see their colors. A patch of intense green clustered around the doors to the cafeteria. A patch of red hovering like a cloud near the gym.

  But I was sad, sitting in back of the school or in classrooms, when I thought about the pictures of black children standing outside white schools, while white mobs threw bricks and other things at them. The mobs were like rabid dogs, frothing at the mouths, barely held back by policemen. So, that’s where we stood. Black people said it was what we had to do. It was for a good cause. But I imagined those children’s terror. I felt some of it. I thought it was cruel to send them there. There were no protests when we went to the white castle, but we were so alone. There was no one to talk to because no one else had been through it. All the things that people said were from an older world, but we were in another world now. And no one knew what things to say for the new world.

  In some ways, I was feeling more at home in the white castle than I had at my other school. No one made fun of me. No one assumed anything. I liked that there was more space in which to move. I liked the newness. I was happy that we had to stand farther away from each other and really look. I liked the distance. I liked that there were so many more possibilities for how conversations could go, for what we could talk about.

  I liked being given a blank canvas so I could paint any picture I wanted to. I was feeling good and clean, learning and reading and listening to interesting discussions and ideas. For the first time, I felt that some people saw me as just me. They were not my kin and they knew nothing about my family. All they had was right in front of them—a delicate, black cyborg, a bright, soft-edged Frankenstein, a quiet splotch of rhythmic sound and color. I liked the freedom of the white castle. I liked it so much that I broke the rules I had been given at home. There was a rule that said, “Never tell white people your secrets.” But I liked some of the people I met there so much, I broke the rule to pieces.

  Most of my friends were girls. I was enjoying having conversations with them, learning about new things and different ways of seeing the world. Talking about Van Gogh and Emily Dickinson. Talking about the nature of the universe. Sharing albums like Joni Mitchell’s Blue and books like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Little Prince, The Rubaiyat, On Walden Pond, The Black Poets, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, The Bell Jar, Ecclesiastes, The Song of Solomon, The Family of Man, and The Prophet.

  My friends told me things and showed me things. A lot of them were gay, or lesbian, or bisexual, but nobody used those words back then. People just said, “Oh, he’s ‘funny’” or “You know, she’s ‘different.’” No one had a language for coming out yet.

  One of my best friends I ever had was white, and like with a lot of my friends, her parents didn’t want her talking to black kids. So we had to be secret friends. Her name was Janie, and she used to worry a lot about me. She used to say, “You’re like the Princess and the Pea.” I didn’t know who the princess was or why she had a pea, but I understood that Janie meant I was sensitive, and that everything affected me too much.

  I learned all the paths through the white castle. Sidewalks and hallways and cut-across grass. But I couldn’t get the hang of the social paths. My head was spinning, but I refused to let anybody know it. The biggest thing was that I was somebody instead of nobody. I was very popular and well-liked. I was even admired. But why? I liked being liked, but I also hated all the attention. I was feeling the “real mes” just crying inside.

 
I was being asked to join so many things, like the Beta Club, Key Club, The National Honor Society, and Spanish Club. The thing was, I had no idea what any of them were. I liked the sound of them, and I understood they were honors. When I was a junior, I was asked to run for student government president. But I had never heard of student government. I understood I was being asked to play the role of a leader, and it seemed like an important thing to do. When I thought about it, I imagined that I would have the chance to change things. I was excited that people liked me enough to ask me to run. When people asked me to do things, I often thought that it meant they could see something that I couldn’t—that they could see who I really was and what I should be doing.

  The other person they asked to run was a friend from my old school, Gladys Patterson. I liked Gladys. She was smart and always so poised. White students were trying to welcome us by having two black kids run for president. They were trying to say, this school belongs to all of us. But not everybody felt that way. “The devil never sleeps,” my granny said when a white student protested and insisted that his name be added to the ballot. His motto was “We need to make it fair to white people.” That’s when things in the white castle starting falling apart. I could feel it like the drone of an approaching twister, the blue light and the clouds turning dark.

  On the day of our speeches, I was shaking. I was shaking and talking to Jeremiah and Lizzy. I was shaking until I saw a group of birds flying in a low circle around a cow in a field. Then I joined them. I was in a folding chair, at the front of the gym, along with the other candidates, but I was also in the field. All of the bleachers were filled. The principal, the vice principal, and most of the teachers, coaches, and staff stood against the walls near the entry doors with serious expressions on their faces. It was rumored that students were planning to walk out in protest when the white candidate got up to give his speech. The tension was so thick that it was hard to breathe.

  Everything happening was a first, so no one could play their roles because they didn’t know what they were yet. I often enjoyed those kinds of moments, in spite of my anxiety. People wore emotions on their bodies in deep colors. People left their faces open. When I looked into the bleachers I could see Van Gogh-like splotches of green and blue, here and there, swirling splotches of orange and red. I could see hearts. I don’t remember what I said in my speech. I don’t even remember getting up to give it. I remember the applause. I remember feeling that the cheers were as much for the moment as they were for me. Students did walk out when the white candidate got up to give his speech. The slow exodus was somber as a funeral, as angry and dignified as a civil rights march.

  I won the election and became the new president of the white castle. People wrote their hopes on my body. They wrote notes and tattoos on my spirit. I wanted to heal things, like my mama, Jesus, Martin Luther King, or Gandhi. Other people thought I could do it, so I thought so too.

  But I was feeling too much blue. I was starting to break apart from never being alone. The weight of everything was starting to crush me. I was feeling almost all the time that I was lost in a strange land. The constant anxiety in my belly came roaring out at night, in my room at Granny’s. I broke things on purpose. Precious things. I tore up some of my favorite books. I tore up Go Up for Glory and On Walden Pond. I tried to get meals from the blue of Muddy Waters’s guitar. From his voice. From the blue of Joni Mitchell’s album cover. From her high-pitched moaning. I was lost even among the familiar. I had wandered far into the forest, and I hadn’t left behind any crumbs. I ached so badly from the isolation, but I couldn’t think clearly enough to understand why I was aching. Things were moving too fast, and I was being swept along, like in white water, just trying to grab some air when I could.

  I was doing too many things. I was taking piano lessons, playing for the church choir. I was teaching myself to play acoustic guitar. I was pushing myself to play basketball. I was writing poetry. I was still the A student and the “pet” for all of my teachers. I was a “cool” guy for my friends. I was a fun brother. I was the champion of the animals and plants. I was the echo of my mama and my granny’s second sight. I was a gateway for the spirits, their friend and companion. I was getting so good at “passing” that I didn’t even know anymore that I was doing it. I wanted so badly to believe I was normal.

  I had moved out of my mama’s house to be alone and try to find my real self. It was too noisy, and we had all gotten bigger, and the house felt too small. And I had read Sons and Lovers, and it scared me. I was so content around my mama that I thought that if I didn’t make myself leave, I would end up living there forever. So I moved upstairs at my granny’s house, where I could have a room of my own and quiet. I ate at Mama’s house, used the bathroom there, watched television sometimes and hung out with my sisters and brothers, but like Granny, I retreated to the quiet.

  It worried me that I had no desire, and I felt that I needed to fix that. I would go looking for desire. But I didn’t know where to look. I looked in magazines. I looked in girls’ faces. In the mirrors of their skin. Sometimes I would find it when I thought about the chubby boy in the locker room. Locker rooms were a big thing. It was the first time that black and white kids could legally see each other naked. There were a lot of desires in locker rooms. They were like a sea of flames, in the boy’s locker room. They would sometimes spill out of the girls’ locker room like a giant wave or tear drop and rush through the doorway to the boys’ locker room and swallow us whole. Sometimes I would find desire when one of my sister’s friends stayed over at our house, and playing, took my hand and rubbed it against her breasts. Sometimes desire would find my body when I was missing, when I was deeply asleep.

  I often fell asleep and dreamed that the earth had been scorched by fire. Thousands of animals, dead, their carcasses rotting in fields and on the roads. Piles of Frigidaires and old burnt-out cars littering the streets. The air as orange as sunset all the time, copper, thick, and hard to breathe. In my dreams, we were living in a shelter of wooded overgrowth, extended by an awning made of plastic tarp and held up by poles of cut sycamore. We foraged for food. There was no more time. There was nowhere we had to go and no place we had to be. A pack of crows cawed in nearby oak trees before taking off, hurrying down the southern sky. I was as happy as I was when I was little, and Mama and Daddy and Granny and all of my sisters and brothers were at home. I was walking to get water from a nearby well and turned my head to look back, and suddenly, I was in a meadow, all alone, at dusk, and then I woke up.

  And then I would lie awake the rest of the night, listening to tires singing on Interstate 95, several miles away. When the night was clear, the sounds roared through the trees like waves of a tsunami, and we were buried, like Atlantis, beneath volumes of seawater. The spirits of diesel truck engines were merciless and blindly obsessed with motion, with the demolition of stillness and reason. They were on fire with a foreign fever that frightened me. The spirits of cars were enraged, obscenely discontented. Out there, everyone had to get somewhere in a hurry. They couldn’t wait. They hadn’t seen us yet, because they were so self-absorbed, so delighted with the power of their noises, with their speed. But I knew that eventually they would notice us.

  They would find us, and this time, they would be more careful than they had been during slavery to make sure that none of us survived. They would find the butterflies, and the moths, and the sparrows, and the thrushes. They would find the crickets in the meadows, and the blueberries, and the apples, and the cherries, and the corn. They would find the spirits in the begonias and hollyhocks, in the Sweet Williams and roses, in the sweet gum and dianthus and morning glory and peas. But I would fight for them. I would fight with everything I had, even with my body. I would be a guerilla fighter if I had to and live in the wilderness. Or I would wear disguises and fight them from the inside. I would fight them until my dying breath.

  In my room at my granny’s house, I was looking in the mirror and seeing a Frankenstein. I was tryi
ng to stitch myself back together at night, where I was coming apart. I was burning candles and losing myself watching the flames. I was turning on my black light and staring at my mushroom poster. I was praying to the universe. I was reading Emily Dickinson and Han Shan. I was listening to the blue of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Jimi Hendrix, and Roberta Flack. I was cutting myself and bleeding on pages of a girlie magazine I had found beneath knee-deep layers of old newspapers in the old abandoned chicken coop. I looked in the mirror again, and who did I see standing behind me, smiling, but the devil, stubbled and unshaven. I hugged my pillows and whispered to Jeremiah and Lizzy and waited for the spirits of old people who once lived in Granny’s house to start coming out of the walls.

  I was so deep in blue that I thought I couldn’t go any deeper. But as it turned out, there was no bottom to colors. As president, I had to keep doing things. I had to keep holding on to my form. There was a student government conference in a hotel in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I had to go to it.

  I had never been in a hotel before. To me, it was really fancy, like something on television. There were so many big rooms, nice carpets, and chandeliers. The halls were a buzzing, spastic sea of white bodies. I was feeling lost in the whiteness, in the noise. The brightness of the lights made me dizzy. In the close crowds in the hallways and lobby, I was elbowed and shoved, and sometimes fondled. Curious eyes peered through me, like I was a window. Hostile eyes scowled at me. Soft pink lips spat “nigger,” and sneers and laughter waited around every corner. A girl looked at me and licked her lips, as if I was a piece of candy. I wanted to curl up into a ball. The sounds ripped me from the banks and swept me out into cold waters. And the waters replaced my bones. The waters ate through me.

  I got so dizzy I started falling, like in a dream. Jeremiah, Lizzy, and Beulah sang to me. They were holding tightly to my hands and trying their best to break my falling. Lizzy was wearing an orange dress with flowers. Jeremiah was wearing a green T-shirt. Beulah had her hair in bangs. The spirit of Emily Dickinson was holding my hand for a while, but we got separated in the crowd. I was searching for her turquoise glow in the packed corridors and lobby, but I couldn’t find it. Then someone announced the results of an election in a large assembly hall, and I was devastated to hear that someone else had been elected president. I didn’t understand that these were regional offices, not school ones. “I thought I was president!” I said to myself, thinking I must be the victim of a cruel joke.