The Secret Life of a Black Aspie

by Anand Prahlad

  I was stumbling along the hallway when a hand reached out and led me into a bedroom filled with raucous laughter. White teenagers were joking and passing around cups of rum and soda. I recognized some of them from our school. “Come on, have some,” a girl with a friendly smile said and handed me a cup. Some of the others whooped, shared laughs, and ignored me. But I was watching them, nervously, as their faces turned redder the more they drank. I had heard that when white people start drinking, the redneck in them comes out. So I should never be around white people once their faces get red.

  But I didn’t know what I should do. So I drank some of the rum someone handed me, like Adam eating the apple. Why not? I was thinking. Maybe it will stop the pain. But I had never even smelled liquor before. It burned so much going down, it burned a path like fire burning dry grasses, and the taste gagged me, like drinking water from a pig trough. There was a moment of lightheadedness, but then came the dizziness, deep purple vertigo. I was watching Jeremiah, Lizzy, and Beulah looking at me with such concern. “Come on,” Jeremiah said, pulling on my arm. “Come on. Let’s go find your room.” But a tiredness overcame me, and I couldn’t move. A hopeless thing moved beneath my skin. I lay down and closed my eyes and listened to the crackling of fire burning all of the trees in the forest.

  I was following the trail of fire when a girl’s voice said, “Here, I’m giving you a squirrel.” A squirrel, I thought, why would I want a squirrel? But then she patted my arm and said it again. “Don’t you want it?”

  I rolled onto my stomach and opened my eyes, and after a minute, I got it. Everything under a girl’s skirt is some kind of animal. I had learned about beavers. Beavers had teeth and they would bite whatever came near them. Then there were furry kittens and cats. They would rub against you and purr. And now there were squirrels. Squirrels were what a thousand black men had been lynched for. But I was in the white castle world now, so what happens?

  A foot away her skirt edged up, and she opened her thighs. I closed my eyes but I could still see it, the cotton, the taboo, the promise. I was still hypnotized. I would stay that way. “You didn’t even look,” she said, smiling, handing me another cup.

  “I thought I was president! I thought I was president. I thought I was president,” I said. She got me up and helped me back to my room and held me as I threw up all night, mumbling and crying out. “You are. Don’t worry. You are the president,” she said and rubbed my head and became my friend.

  I was just trying to be the best president I could, and still live, but a lot of people were treating me like I was a priest. The old people at church were always patting my head and saying, “This boy goin’ to be a preacher,” but I was always saying to myself, “Over my dead body.” I was finding out now that being a leader didn’t suit me. Imagining was fun, but having to be talking and holding myself together all of the time was no fun at all. Inside the white castle, I heard many confessions. I heard prayers. I heard first and last rites. I heard reflections, and hopes, and regrets. I heard them from coaches, teachers, principals, vice principals, janitors, and I heard them from students. I was a blue light lighting things by listening.

  I was sharing this all with the slaves who were in the fields surrounding us, among the cows and blue jays in their tattered clothes, keeping watch. When things were hard for us, the slave children walked across the pastures and moved among us. They moved their hands across our foreheads and caught our tears in the shredded, dingy burlap and cotton of their shirtsleeves and dresses. They leaned close and whispered and sang to us.

  Sometimes I talked to Jeremiah about the people in the white castle. “They are nice people,” I told him, “most of them. But why are they telling me their secrets?”

  “You know why,” he said. “Because someday you’ll tell them.”

  But in the end, I couldn’t save the white castle. I couldn’t even save myself. The white castle was torn apart by what the television called a riot in the spring of 1972. It was bound to happen. Two countries were coming together, but one country wanted to rule. Black students had never sung the “Star-Spangled Banner.” We sang our own anthem, “Lift every voice and sing / till earth and heaven ring / ring with the harmonies of liberty.” I loved the black national anthem. It made me cry sometimes, just thinking about the journeys of black people in this strange country. But it had never crossed white people’s minds that we had an anthem.

  Why would we have sung the anthem of a country that wouldn’t let us be a part of it? That only postponed our genocide so we could slave to make it rich? We wanted to sing both anthems at assemblies. That would have been fair. We wanted the white school to respect our culture and our history, just like we were being asked to respect theirs. But the principal kept saying there’s only one country. There’s only one anthem. So some of us sang our anthem at the next assembly anyway.

  One thing led to another, and another thing led to the next thing, just like in a book. The principal suspended students. Other students protested the suspensions by gathering on the lawn and boycotting classes, like the sit-ins we had seen on television. I had been having such a perfect day. It was so peaceful. Sparrows were singing and flitting around the gutters. Bees flew through the schoolyard drunk with pollen. Cows grazed in the slight distance of fields. The sun was warm, and my bare arms were radiant and tingling. Slave spirits were even resting by the buildings while their children played ring games on the lawn. It was like a festival that was about to explode.

  Jeremiah sat beside me in a classroom, whispering, “Don’t worry. Don’t worry.” A minute later the gray, state trooper cars descended on the school grounds like locusts, lights blinking, and with their guns and batons, black boots and sunshades, they dragged students to buses. The heavy tastes of hate and fear overwhelmed me. The sounds of people being handled by rough white hands made my head feel like it was being battered in a boxing ring. I could taste pee, soaking jeans. I could taste the thick, salty floods from hairy sweat glands, tears, and shock. I could hear the whispers of terror like fine hairs standing on flesh. I could taste our whole past in that moment when they told us they were taking students to jail.

  Parents were storming the front office. Every feeling that belonged behind bars, every thought that didn’t need to be spoken, walked back and forth across the school grounds and through the office. It became a different place, a new place, with colors like in late autumn the day before the colors disappear. Television stations were getting it on camera, and the newspaper crews were writing it in their notebooks. Black parents were screaming at me, “This is all your fault!” “You’re supposed to be keeping things in check!” White parents were screaming with their looks. Reporters were shoving microphones in my face. Everyone was forgetting I was still a child. I was too numb to think. I wanted to keep staring at the light on the station’s camera, but before I knew anything, it was gone. I saw myself on the evening news. I was saying, “We had a good thing going.” And then I was saying, “The problem is the parents. If parents would mind their own business and leave the kids alone, we could work things out. We could go forward.” Then the telephone started ringing.

  I watched something shattering inside the white castle, and it was so sad. The egg cracked open, prematurely, and fear rushed out. I watched it eating the magic. It was like watching a werewolf in a shadow-covered alley, nothing but a shadow himself, feeding on human flesh. And then it was gone. What could have been, but now will never be.

  I watched a blue depression settle on us, like a soft rain. “Where the tree falls,” my granny said, “there it must lie.” What happened broke people. We came to class and wept. Some of us were getting drunk and high. Even the “good” students. It was sometimes hard for some of us to look at each other now. We didn’t speak. We didn’t know what to say. The old words didn’t fit. And because we didn’t speak, we sank deeper. A silence came. The birds stopped singing in the tall grasses behind the buildings. Cows moved farther off, into the distance. There was no one
to turn to or to talk to. Lizzy and Jeremiah and Beulah could put their arms around my soul, but they couldn’t cradle my body. We were in a new world our parents had never known. They didn’t know what to tell us. Their helplessness was an extra weight. We had seen people shoot the good leaders, Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. We had seen the Black Panthers stalked and imprisoned. Was there really no standing up without being beaten down?

  I was rocking back and forth on my bed. My body often stopped working and a glass I was holding would fall to the floor and shatter. Sometimes I would just slump to the floor. One half of my face and body drooped like objects in a Dali painting. My spirit kept leaving my body, soaring and looking down at myself, soaking wet under blankets and patina sheets. I was reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Emily Dickinson. I was writing a poem and then bursting into tears and then writing another poem and then bursting into tears. Granny said maybe a bad witch was riding me. She put pans of water under the bed and sprinkled salt around it. Mama prayed. And prayed, and prayed.

  I was wondering why I ended up with a bad witch following me. There were plenty of good witches. But my witch didn’t just ride me in my bed; she took me to her house. It was always freezing. The floor and the walls were made of cold stone. Nowhere was there any heat. She kept me in a room like a jail cell. I could dream the world my body walked in back home, but I couldn’t feel it. In the daytime, I would take my shirt off and lie down on the ground, trying to rediscover the real. Trying to stop the pain moving up and down in my belly, like there was a pig trapped beneath the skin. Trying to get the world to stop spinning. Trying to catch up with where I was and what I was feeling.

  One day, I just resigned myself to living in the witch’s house. I hated it, but it started to be familiar. As soon as I fell asleep, she came into the cell and got on top of me. Sometimes she whipped me for hours and sank sharp teeth into my flesh. She leaned over and whispered in my ear, and I could smell the stench of her breath and the fetid odor of black gossamer and cotton. I began to stink and my ribs started poking through my skin. I didn’t know anymore what was dead or what was alive. I knew I could never go back home. I knew that I would never be the same person. I knew that no matter how hard I tried, I would never get my old life back. I would have to learn to live all over again, as some other person.

  The Big Yellow House

  You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

  When I got to college, I was like a black boat floating in a white ocean, like a black bird flying in a white sky with nowhere to land. I was so disoriented. There were too many islands, and I was getting lost in the waters between them. The first year I lived at home, and each time I traveled the gray stretch of asphalt and concrete on Interstate 95 to Richmond, I lost my focus. I lost myself. I wasn’t anywhere. My self was like a person in a movie whose hands and feet are tied to four horses, and the dictator gives the signal, and the soldier slaps the horses, and they bolt in different directions, and just keep on running. I knew the islands in the black sea. Granny’s and Mama’s houses, and the church down the road and through the woods, where I played the piano for the junior choir and taught Sunday school. But I had to learn the islands in the white sea. This building and that building. This department and that department.

  I was feeling so overwhelmed and desperate. I didn’t even really know what college was. What were the rules? There was a cobblestone alley near the main campus plaza, and I would go there a lot to get away from the rivers of people rushing all around me. The alley was full of old spirits and shadows that danced like reeds in the wind. It was filled with separate paths. Each path went up and down differently, had a different temperature, a different wind, and made different music when I stepped on it. I closed my eyes and tried to walk from one end of the alley to the other without changing paths. I could hear the echoes of my footsteps vibrating between the buildings on either side. I was sitting in the alley one day, holding my hand a fraction of an inch away from the sunshine and wondering, How did I get here? What is this place? No one had told me anything about college. Mama and Daddy didn’t know anything to tell me.

  I would look out from the alley, or the top window of a building, and see all the people going places and doing things. They were going to classes and to the library. They were going to restaurants and parties and meetings and clubs. They were going home and coming back and going home again. They were throwing Frisbees and catching buses and riding bicycles. There were tides of talking and laughter, of heels on sidewalks and asphalt. I was seeing them like Frankenstein peeping around a corner.

  What I really wanted to do when I got out of high school was go and live on a commune. That was more where my heart was, but I was afraid of letting go of everything I knew. Guest speakers had come to our high school for a cultural program, and they told us all about their commune. It sounded like such a peaceful place. I wanted to get out of the hard things, like concrete, or classrooms with headaches. I wanted to lie in grass and gaze up for hours at the clouds. But I was used to doing the safest things, the things I was supposed to do. I was black, and I was “different.” And so I came here, even though I couldn’t remember coming.

  When I got to college, I still hadn’t recovered from high school. I hadn’t had time to heal. I was so tired of having glass things slip from my fingers and fall and break. Of spiraling downward all night. Of cold sweats and weakness in my body that seemed to deepen. Of feeling doomed. So I secretly decided to leave, to go somewhere else. Anywhere. To try and find something to keep me going. I didn’t realize yet that there was nowhere else to go.

  At first I planned to ride a freight train, like the men in blues, but I couldn’t find the train. So, I hitchhiked to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, because I had met someone who lived there and the words were in my mind. A black man picked me up going out of Richmond and dropped me in South Hill, Virginia. Another older black man picked me up there and took me to Chapel Hill. It was like the men were angels who were waiting for me. The last angel looked at me like a deacon in church and said, “You be careful now, young man” as he put me out. I hummed one of my granny’s spirituals, and I watched for a long time as his car disappeared. It was only after he had gone that I realized I had nothing to eat, no money, and nowhere to go. I was so hungry that I thought I would fall and not be able to get up. I was feeling like someone had scooped out some of my insides.

  In an abandoned field not far from a gas station, I sat down under darkening skies and prayed that no policemen would see me. But what was I going to do? Where was I going to go? Where was there to go? I would never be free in America. I was black. I was slow in a world that was getting faster. I was soft in a world that was getting harder.

  I thought about the girl in the movie Carrie. She was like me. When I saw the movie I cried for two weeks. I didn’t talk for seven more days. It was worse when I saw The Elephant Man. I almost had another nervous breakdown. I remember thinking that being black and slow in America was like being a caveman in a land of dinosaurs. Always hunted. Always hyper alert.

  I started walking, looking for a bright spot. A color that would touch me in the right place and make me feel better. A shape that would steady the spinning. Something I could taste that would turn all of the bitterness sweeter. And then I saw it. It shone out of the darkness like a star. Like a window with the sunshine and the bright-blue sky on the other side of it. A big yellow house on a hill in the distance, surrounded by blue-black darkness, by a night sprinkled with little lights and occasional headlights winding around curved streets. The motion-detector lights had come on in the front of the house, and there was a silver-blue car in the driveway. The yellow smiled at me, like the answer to a prayer. The yellow of canaries. The yellow of spring jonquils. The yellow of saffron. The yellow that vibrates in waves of light, that is never completely still, and so it makes stillness out of whatever is around it. Yellow framed by white trim, and that framed by deep-green grasses and trees. I imagined what it might
be like living in the big yellow house, having a “normal” life. Having parents who could take care of me and protect me. Having friends and the warmth of a happy family.

  For a long time I stood there, smiling back at the big yellow house. Feeling better. Breathing. And then I found another field and huddled in my sleeping bag and wept. I wept as I had been weeping almost every day since high school. I wept for my friends who had passed away. I wept for warmth I longed for but didn’t have. I wept because I hadn’t escaped. The witch had found me. I could hear her laughing and rubbing her hands together, like a woman’s legs rubbing against a skirt. I could hear dogs barking in the distance and cars and truck tires whining on the highway. I could hear Muddy Waters’s spirit in the voices of frogs, in the distant rumbling of an airplane. It blanketed me like a fog. Through the fog I saw Jeremiah’s eyes as big as the sky, filled with stars, and gazing into them, I fell deeply asleep.

  I don’t remember how I got back. But then I was lying in bed at my family’s house. I don’t know what happened in between being in the field and being in the bed. Daddy was looking down at me and crying. He hugged me for the first time since I was about seven years old. “Don’t you want to live in the world?” Daddy asked me.