Dangerous Soil

What I first recall is the head-pounding. We were sitting at the dinner table and Lawrence rose, his head thrust forward, and bolted for the wall, banging his head against it as hard as possible. My father flung down his fork and rushed toward him, pressing his hand up against the wall to cushion the blow, begging him to stop, but Lawrence didn't stop, couldn't stop.

Images have been burned in my mind for years: of that tall young teenager, tanned, slim, blonde, outwardly looking like the all-American boy, rising up from dinner where we all were sitting, proceeding to try and hurt himself, and my father repeatedly placing himself in harm's way to try to keep him in one piece.

Lawrence also liked to sit in the living room, pounding his stomach, laughing, a strange hyena-like laugh, or sit and twirl pens or underline the same sentence in a book until the pen broke through the paper. When Lawrence was a young boy, my father remembers that he could put things together and make the most intricate patterns with Legos, or sit endlessly flipping through the pages of the Sears catalogue. While I would sit with the Sears Christmas catalogue every year right after Thanksgiving, circling what I wanted and starring what I really, really wanted (the catalogue was filled with circles and stars), Lawrence simply rocked back and forth, turning the pages over and over, without any seeming desire to possess the bright and shiny toys inside.

Seeing him like that sometimes made me feel small and frightened, the strange sensation that everything was out of control, a feeling that often sent me up to my room to shut the door and lose myself in a book, to try and ignore the strange behavior going on around me.

As I grew older I would come to understand that this behavior had a name: autism, that strange disease first explored in an article by Leo Kanner in 1943. Although many of Kanner's theories have been discredited, he described autistic individuals as being unable to relate to others and shutting others out. Also, they needed predictability and had trouble communicating and understanding other people.


My parents first realized that something was wrong when Lawrence was three years old. My father met my mother in Germany when she was twenty-four and he thirty; they married and came back to the United States to Storm Lake, where he had a job teaching history at the local college. Lawrence was their first child, a beautiful blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby boy. Things were not right with Lawrence, although they didn't realize it at the time. In later years, when Lawrence was grown, my father speculated that the delivery may have gone awry and that may have affected the baby: my mother was kept waiting while the doctors in the small hospital finished working on another patient. Recent studies, cited in Uta Frith's Autism: Explaining the Enigma, indicate a high incidence of birth complications with autistic children. At the time, of course, no one knew of this. What was known were Kanner's theories: how he had interviewed countless parents and decided that they were responsible for the condition of their child. Kanner classified autism as an emotional withdrawal from the world, noting that the parents of autistic children were by and large professional, highly educated men and women. My parents fit this classification. He also felt the parents (particularly the mothers) were cold and intellectual; hence his definition of the mothers as "refrigerator parents" whose inability to love caused their child's emotional isolation.

But when they first drove Lawrence to Iowa City, when he was five or six, wondering why he didn't talk like other children but simply repeated what was said to him, they didn't think of autism. Few people did at the time. Autism then meant being relegated to a mental institution for a lifetime.

My parents often stood around the crib in terror, wondering what they could do to quiet his screaming, hoping that they were doing the right thing. If a shoestring was out of place, Lawrence screamed. If his blanket was not positioned in exactly the right way, Lawrence screamed. He sat and rocked in his crib, he rocked out of his crib, he howled if there was any change in his routine. At the age of three, they took him to the local doctor, who said he was simply slow. They took him to the specialist in Spencer, Iowa, who flung up his hands and said that he might be retarded. The specialist at Cherokee thought he was schizophrenic.

The specialist at the hospital in Iowa City simply didn't believe anything that my parents told them.

"Be careful," my father warned him. "If anything is out of place, he'll scream." The specialist merely smiled coolly.

"Okay," said my father. "Pull his shoestring."

The specialist pulled his shoestring and Lawrence, placid, beautiful, and blonde, shrieked.

"Okay," said the specialist, hurriedly retying the shoe. "I see you're right." But again he was diagnosed as retarded, and my parents were told that Lawrence--who eventually graduated from college with a B.A. in accounting--would not make it beyond the third grade. Years later, my mother told me of her despair at that moment: sitting watching, through the glass, her beautiful blonde baby boy methodically stacking blocks in the intricate patterns he loved, feeling like there was nothing she could do to reach him, no way to help him, and then hearing the words that she would cling to throughout the later years: "There is more to your son than they have told you," the nurse who had worked with him said.

Like my parents, this woman did not believe that Lawrence was mentally retarded. My father, not the professional psychiatrists, diagnosed him. He spent weeks plowing through the stacks in the college library and finally came home to announce that he now knew what was wrong: Lawrence wasn't mentally retarded; he was autistic. My mother responded with joy: he's artistic, how wonderful. Imagine the slow, sinking feeling, upon realizing her mistake, knowing that now nothing would ever be the same. And something so quaint, so lovable in that mistake: that of course someone with an acute artistic sensibility would be hauled off at an early age from psychiatrist to psychiatrist, to be diagnosed with a mental disability, rather than appreciated for what he or she was: a spirit set apart, different, with a heightened vision that can tell us something of who we are. And yet, although my mother's response was wrong, in another sense, of course, she was right, for the very reason that society shuns the disabled is a fear of being different, of being vulnerable, perhaps even of spirit itself.

Instead of sending him to an institution, my parents responded by keeping Lawrence busy, giving him work that clearly had an established routine, something that he craved. He detassled corn and walked beans in the summers and throughout the year delivered newspapers. In our small town in Storm Lake, Iowa, Lawrence had the biggest paper route in the Des Moines Register's history: the papers were all promptly placed at approximately the same time on people's front steps, come rain or shine.

Living with Lawrence made us different as a family, more insular, and made it hard to live in a small town at a time when no one really understood what autism was. Lawrence was viewed as a freak, an oddity, a troublemaker. The public school system wasn't eager to take him.

But Lawrence was not mentally retarded, and so my parents fought to get him into class. This was before the days of handicap accessible classrooms. The teachers eyed him warily, tried to ignore him as best they could. Lawrence was like a space alien, sitting with his square sixties glasses, twirling his pen in the middle of class and laughing oddly while solving math problems. There was no telling what triggered his odd responses, quirks and tics: someone may have looked at him funny; a sound may have frightened him. He often developed strange obsessions and as he grew older, he sat in his room and cut articles out of the newspapers about shootings and crimes committed in the community until sometimes my mother and father would lie awake at night and wonder what provoked this fascination, whether he would grow up to be one of those people you read about in the newspaper who suddenly snapped and tipped in the other direction.

For me, the hardest moments were not defending him at school against taunting and jeers, or even the nights around the family dinner table, where he would try and hurt himself. The hardest times were the family therapy sessions. I was eight when we started going to Cherokee and I remember clutching my mother's hand very, very tightly as we walked up the sidewalk into the brown brick building with the bars on the windows. I remembering hearing screaming down the foul-smelling corridors, the squeaking of rubber-soled shoes, smelling the strong institutional stink, and squinting in the harsh fluorescent lights. I remember hating the psychiatrist as he sat there with his clipboard, asking me who I loved more, my mother or my father, asking me to walk over and sit beside my favorite parent. I knew that he was out to get my mother, to prove that she was responsible for Lawrence's condition. I knew nothing of Kanner and his theories. I didn't really understand what was wrong, but I could sense his feelings towards my mother. I don't remember how I knew, but I hated him, and I refused to say anything. My mother left the sessions with her eyes dim and red-rimmed and I held her hand even tighter.

Years later, after the Freedom of Information Act was passed, Lawrence wrote and requested his files from Cherokee and read the doctor's report. When Lawrence announced that he had requested those records and read them I saw my mother's face blanch. She knew what was in them; she knew what he would have read. But he patted her on the shoulder and said in his big, booming voice, "I know it's not your fault, mom, they said it was your fault, but I know it wasn't your fault." And her eyes filled with tears.

When I think of the burden of having to live with that sense of guilt, year after year, as the one who damaged your child, I feel tremendous anger. Over the years, the psychiatric profession has not only harmed the mentally disabled by locking them up, filling them with drugs that strip them of their humanity, but they have looked to blame the families. Granted, Kanner's theory has been discredited, but the damage still remains in hundreds of women who must still live with the knowledge that they may be responsible.

Ironically, autism does occur in first-born boys more than girls, and autistic children appear more likely to be the children of academics and other highly educated people than any other group. However, it has yet to be proven whether this is simply due to the fact that highly educated professionals are more likely to seek out the specialists who can diagnose them more accurately. Today, it seems quite clear that the only thing we know for sure is that we do not yet know what causes autism and that it equally afflicts all races, classes, and nationalities. Movies like Rain Man, and books such as Temple Grandin's Thinking in Pictures and Oliver Sacks' essay on Grandin, "An Anthropologist on Mars," have done a great service in helping people understand what autism is and what autism is not. Star Trek's "Data," who thinks logically and does not understand what emotions are, is a character that many autistic people relate to, and has also helped the public identify with autistic traits and think less fearfully about autistic people.

Lawrence loves Star Trek. He has seen every Star Trek movie and has all the books and every Christmas he buys my mother (also a Star Trek fan) a Star Trek movie and they sit and watch it together, Lawrence rubbing his nose, something he always does when he feels happy. When he comes to visit me in Nebraska, I take him country-western dancing, and he moves around the floor, somewhat stiff and labored, his sneakers squeaking, but a huge grin splitting his face, for he is doing what other people, normal people, do. He is, ironically, more willing to dance than the shy cowboys with their hats pulled down over their faces, standing with their back against the wall.

In the seventies, when Lawrence was a teenager, my father and mother took us to Germany to visit my aunt, uncle, and cousins. Lawrence loved reading about Hitler and asked in his obsessive way everyone he met what he or she thought of the Führer. It was one thing to do this in Storm Lake, but quite another in Germany. My father said: don't ask about Hitler. We all nodded, our eyes big. Lawrence said, "No, sir, I won't ask anyone about Hitler." When we got on the German tour bus, Lawrence sat next to an elderly German man behind my father and promptly asked him, "So, what do you think about Hitler?"

Now that I am older, there seems something almost fitting about this story. Bruno Bettelheim, in The Empty Fortress, compared the autistic to victims of torture and of war, linking the emotional trauma of concentration camp victims to those of children raised by emotionally scarred parents--particularly mothers--who could not love their children and so their children could not love. But Lawrence knows love and fear and joy and defiance, those very qualities that make us human beings and not automatons. On that same tour, he grinned and took a tiny step, setting his foot on Czech soil, despite the huge towers across the border with the men with their rifles standing on patrol, ready to shoot anyone who crossed over.

Lawrence is not a person behind bars. It is the rest of us who are hidden in that prison, trying to get out, trapped inside by our own fears of difference, of our own inability to embrace a different way of living and of thinking. He is the one willing to step on the dangerous soil, to ask the difficult question, to try to dance, and his is a life that asks us to do the same.



Works Cited

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self. London and New York: The Free Press, 1967.

Frith, Ute. Austism: Explaining the Enigma. Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Grandin, Temple. Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from my Life with Autism. With a foreward by Oliver Sacks. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

Sacks, Oliver. An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

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Debra Cumberland is an assistant professor of English at Winona State University in Winona, MN. Her work has appeared in Hurakaan, American Literary Realism, The Nebraska English Journal, and The Omaha Reader.

She can be reached at debcumberland@yahoo.com.

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