endlessly patient, but «endlessly’ is all too easily written. No one’s patience is endless, and one expects more from a fourteen-year-old, even from a handicapped fourteen- year-old, than from a child. Not everyone — no one — can stand everything all the time. It is not always possible to call on emotional reserves when so much effort, so much affection, is rewarded only with a hostile „Go away!“ Though anger is always regrettable, it is more than rationalization to recognize that it may convey, in the only way it can be conveyed, the important social knowledge that people do have limits, that actions can have unpleasant consequences, and that there are good reasons to undertake the hard work of self-control.
Nirvana was increasingly under siege. It had been a long time coming, but Jessy, now thirteen, was at last in her local public school — not for a short morning but for a full school day, with teachers who, however bewildered (few had even heard of autism then), tried every way they could think of to teach. It wasn’t easy, for them or for Jessy. There were bells that outraged autistic ears, demands that infringed autistic aloneness, changes that disturbed the autistic routines that kept her world in order. At home, though banshee shrieking could be more than we could bear we had learned to bear it; school could not be so tolerant. At home there was no boundary between teaching and play, we knew her capacities and kept within them; she knew little of the frustration of failure, and lessons stopped when her attention wandered or she refused to answer. Now there were errors that must be corrected, scoldings when she veered into nonsense or something set her dreaming. „Why are you smiling?“ We had played for years at reading and writing; now she must work.
Jessy’s books from these years are very different. I did not realize how different until I emptied the suitcase and found nine different Books About the Bump. As Jessy explained later, „Somebody bump me, hit me, kick me back“. Because she did kick people sometimes, and hit them too. And she was hit. A schoolmate bumped her. A companion bumped her „because I scribbled“. Her sister bumped her „because I threw a tantrum“. Her father bumped her. I bumped her. And each bump was memorialized in a book.
Rooted not in derivative and stereotyped plots but in daily experience, the books of Jessy’s adolescence were far more creative than the books of childhood. Page numbers were pressed into self-expression: she designed a font of „silly-looking“ numbers for bad days, contrasting with „fancy numbers“ for good days and „a little bit fancy for fairly good day and regular day I wrote down a regular number“. Grotesquely tall and narrow, bad numbers reached from top to bottom of a large page, while bumper and bumpee climbed up a 2 or hung from a distorted 3. The title of one book was made entirely out of small leaves, gathered for the purpose and carefully taped down. In another, every letter of both title and the final THE END was itself composed of neatly lettered BUMP’s, in another, of 70003 s.
Some books were neutral records of events — there are three about local fires. But more typical were the books about anxieties or obsessions. There are three books about seeing the light in the science building. In the books Jessy kicks the building; at home she screamed and screamed. Shadows were an obsession of an opposite kind. They were „too good“ to walk through — she had to squinch her eyes shut — and there are many books in which shadows, of buildings, of furniture, of numbers, even of stick figures, are shown with a startling realism.
Though most drawings are in ink or pencil, one is striking for its color. Jessy wrote Book About the Shadow when she was fourteen. The first three words are in her newly acquired cursive. SHADOW, however, is in my capitals; it was „too good“ for her to write. The shadow of the penciled house on the cover is too good» indeed, its emotional intensity conveyed by a surreal harmony of concentric rectangles in shades of blue and lavender and green. Inside pages (with «fancy numbers») show nine different buildings with their shadows, each as it appeared on a particular date at a particular time of day. All are done from memory; three years later she supplied the dates and times. Usually Jessy appears alone, eyes tight shut, walking in the shadow. In one drawing, however, I am with her. She, not I, recalled that building in a distant city, and how we walked through its shadow together. But I know when we took that trip, and her date is correct. I am glad it was a good day, and that no cloud covered the sun. «I used to care about that. It was important for me having a good day. It isn’t anymore».
There were other good days. Stars were becoming «too good», and Thanksgiving 1971 produced a Book About the Star, a star enclosing each page number. On one page a bowl of star-filled soup is set ready, each bit of chicken and carrot carefully colored in. «Chicken and stars mean too good to eat».
But another book for a good day shows the peculiar doubleness that haunted Jessy’s obsessions. The Book About the Record was «good because I heard the song called ‘The Hangman’» and the hangman was good — too good, as we were to learn. Page numbers are fancy, and both title and THE END are made of phonograph records. The drawings show a record player as its tone arm progresses through the record’s two sides. The hangman song is on side 2, but the record could bring sadness as well as pleasure. «I used to fuss about not hearing the first three songs on side one».
It was the hangman that inspired the most arresting of Jessy’s pictures, one of thirty-two made on a companion’s suggestion that she illustrate each of the songs they sang together. To see the rendition of «God gave Noah the rainbow sign» is to realize the meaning of autistic literalism; on a signpost is an actual sign, striped with the rainbow. But it is the illustration for «Hangman» that grips the attention. Against a purple sky, a figure, flesh- colored, naked, hangs on a brown cross. His large eyes are wide open, and startlingly blue. Jessy had not forgotten the crucifixions in The Treasury of Art Masterpieces, but «Hangman» is not about Jesus. «Hangman, hangman, slack your rope, slack it for a while.
I think I see my mother cornin’, cornin’ from many a mile». Jessy drew no hooded executioner, no «gallows pole»; she knew nothing of these things. The hangman is quite simply a man who hangs, as a rainbow sign is a sign.
The hangman song was good in the Book About the Record; in the Book About the Songs it was weirdly neutral. But there was trouble ahead. A hangman might hang on a cross. He might hang on a tree. He might hang on a clothesline, suspended from an accurately drawn clothespin. He might not hang at all, but skip and jump, depending on. well, what it depended on was so strange that it requires a paragraph to itself.
The hangman, drawn to illustrate a favorite song.
For years we had tried to get Jessy to say «please» and «thank you». As she grew older we tried harder: good manners are even more important for a handicapped person than for the rest of us. Jessy hated to say «thank you». She would overcome her resistance for birthdays and Christmas, shutting her eyes and rushing the words out as fast as she could. Soon she reacted to the very sound of what she called «politenesses». She would refuse to offer a guest a plate of cookies, lest she should hear a «no thank you». A «late politeness» could ignite a full-blown tantrum, while the bewildered guest wondered what he’d done wrong. «The hangman makes a sad face and this makes me go wild».
«Every time there is a late politeness hangman will hang on the tree and every time a mistaken politeness» — I still don’t know what that might be — «hangman will skip around. How about latest politeness ever? Hangman will hang on the largest tree. How about late mistaken? First skip around and then hang! How about high politeness?» (I.e., spoken in a high voice.) «Hangman will jump way up high».
In short, a system; her drawing shows eight levels of late and/or mistaken politenesses in which eight color-coordinated hangmen jump higher and higher on successively bigger trees. A late «you’re welcome» has its own picture. «The hangman hangs by the clothespin because of new politeness». Jessy, who had understood so few words, was now verbally alert — in her way. On the drawing she lettered YOU’RE SO WELCOME, YOU’RE QUITE WELCOME, YOU’RE VERY WELCOME, YOU’RE MOST WELCOME, YOU’RE SURELY WELCOME, YOU’RE CERTAINLY WELCOME, YOU’RE MOST CERTAINLY WELCOME, and YOU’RE MORE THAN WELCOME. Eventually she told us why she didn’t like politenesses, why she had to shut her eyes. It was so she wouldn’t see the hangman, there in my eyes, in anybody’s eyes, hanging on a pole.
