Each day she brought Boo but would not come inside. If I waited outside for her she always had an excuse to hurry off. If I called her at home, she never could talk. By mid-October it was no secret that Mrs. Franklin was avoiding me.
Parent-teacher conferences occurred the last week in October just before Halloween. The children were excused from school for the last two days. Because of all the resource students, I had a huge number of conferences. I did not worry about squeezing Lori’s father into one of the fifteen-minute conference slots; he and I communicated regularly. But with Mrs. Franklin it was a different matter. If I could get her there at all, I did not want to scare her off by giving her only fifteen minutes to tell about seven and a half years. So I slotted her in the last place on the second day, about 3:00 p.m.
She did come.
A small, delicate-boned black woman, she had wide fear-stricken eyes. I wondered, as she took the chair opposite me at the worktable that afternoon, who else had talked to her about her dream child. And what they had said.
“How’s my boy been doing?” she asked, so quietly that I had to ask her to repeat herself. “I want him to learn to talk. Like other boys. Have you been able to teach him to talk right yet?”
“I think Boothe is doing nicely in here, Mrs. Franklin.” I tried to sound reassuring. “We have a lot to do. Boo and I, but I think we’re working hard on it. I’m glad he’s in my class.”
“You ain’t getting him to talk straight either, are you?”
“I think perhaps it’s a little premature for that just yet”
“You ain’t getting him to talk straight either, are you?”
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
Her head dropped and she fidgeted in her chair. I feared she might leave.
“I –” I started.
“I don’t want them to take him away,” she interrupted, still looking down at her hands. “I don’t want them to put him in no insane asylum. I don’t want them to take my boy away.”
“I can’t imagine anyone will, Mrs. Franklin.”
“Charles, that’s my husband, he says so sometimes. He says if Boothe Birney don’t learn to talk straight like other boys, they’re going to lock him away in an insane asylum when he grows up and we can’t take care of him no more. Charles, he knows those things. He says Boothe Birney’s sick and they don’t let no sick boys stay with their folks.”
“Boo isn’t sick. He’s just different.”
“Charles says they’re gonna take him away. The doctors, they’ll do it. They told Charles. If Boothe don’t learn to talk straight.”
I found Mrs. Franklin difficult to reason with. She was so frightened.
“They ain’t good places, miss, them insane asylums. I seen one. My mother’s brother, they put him in one once in Arkansas. And I seen it.” She paused and the silence stabbed through me. “There was this big boy there,” she said softly. “A great big boy, ’most nearly a man. With yellow curls. Big curls, like my Boothie has. And he was standing naked in his own piss. Crying. A great big boy. ‘Most nearly a man.” She brought a hand up to stop a tear. “And that boy there, he was some mother’s son.”
Her fear was so intense and perhaps so warranted that I could not easily calm her. We talked a long time. She had come at three and now the October dusk was settling. Outside the partly open window behind me, the wind blew, startling up brown, fallen leaves and carrying them high as the roof. Autumn freshness pressed through the opening to dispel the heavy, humid weight of emotion. As twilight came, the brilliance of the fall foliage in the schoolyard muted to a rosy brown. And still we talked. Back and forth, quietly. I pushed us off into tangential conversation because it was still too scary to speak the truth. I learned of her favorite hobby, quilting, of how she had won a ribbon at an Arkansas state fair, of how her grandmother had left her a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Lone Star quilt made in a slave cabin. In turn I told her of my haunted love for far-off Wales, my homesickness for a country not my own. At last the conversation turned back to her son.
Boo had been an unplanned and initially unwanted child. His parents were not married. That Mr. Franklin was white and she black had been a major issue with their families and in the small Southern community where they had lived. She and Charles eloped and finally fled north to our community in an attempt to build a better life together. Charles’s family had ceased all communication with their son. Mrs. Franklin had never seen her mother since the day she had left eight years before; her father had since died. However, her siblings had all resumed a positive relationship with her.
During the early months of Boo’s life, he had seemed normal to the Franklins. He had been an inordinately placid baby but their pediatrician had told them not to worry. Boo was a little slow to learn to sit up and to walk but he still did so within normal limits. He never did crawl. During those first years he even learned to say a few words. Doggie. Bye-bye. Cracker. A few nursery rhymes. Yet never once did he say mama or daddy. Then at about eighteen months of age, the changes first began. He started to cry incessantly. No one could comfort him. He rocked in his crib at night and banged his head against the wall. Lights, reflections, his own fingers began to hold more fascination than the people around him. He ceased talking.
The Franklins never knew how wrong things really were until Boo was over three. Up until then they were still taking him to the same pediatrician, who continued to reassure them it was all “just a stage.” Boo was a slow developer. He would outgrow it. Then at three, prior to the birth of his sister, Boo was enrolled in nursery school. There someone recognized the earmarks of autism.
The years between the first diagnosis and Boo’s arrival in my class had been ones of heartache and financial devastation while the Franklins searched for a miracle cure. Selling their small house and possessions, they left with Boo and a newborn baby for California where they had heard of a special school for children like Boo. After nine long months of no improvement, the school gave up. Back home they came, this time armed with vitamins. Then off to Pennsylvania to a school for the brain-damaged that programmed children so that they might reexperience the womb, birth, growth. Back home again, broke. Three years had passed. Mr. Franklin had worked at twelve different jobs, often three at a time to meet family expenses and keep them together. The marriage, the emotions, the finances all were sapped. Boo still showed no improvement. Indeed, now more than ever he perplexed them. At every new school it had been a new label, a new method, a new diagnosis of why they failed. And the same old blame. For all that effort the Franklins did not know any more now about their dream child than they had known in the beginning. Exhausted and discouraged, they had come home for the last time and enrolled Boo in the public school system. That had been the year before.
Poked and prodded and racked, the marriage which had gotten started on such shaky ground still survived. Neither of the Franklins was well educated; neither knew how to cope with the problems this boy had given them. When things got bad, Mrs. Franklin said wearily, it was hard not to blame someone for this child. Especially when everyone else was willing to blame too. Yet … yet, they loved him. To be sure.
I think I hated these stories worst of all. Worse than the ones of brutal abuse, worse than the ones of neglect and suffering. I loathed these stories where there were no answers. Innocent people in innocent circumstances, where little more had happened than the day-to-day agonies of being human, and a child like Boo was produced. My sense of fair play was always badly bruised when I heard such tales, as I did all too frequently.
