In May 1945, Leo Kanner traveled to Mississippi to see, for the last time, his Case 1, who was eleven years old by this time. For a few days, Dr. Kanner would be a guest of the Triplett family.
It had been four years since Donald’s last visit to Kanner’s clinic in Baltimore, and seven years since his first visit. Now, sitting on the white sofas in the Triplett living room, near the baby grand piano Mary and Beamon had splurged on, the three had time to ruminate on the ups and downs of Donald’s past few years, including Mary’s attempts to get him to go to school.
In the late summer of 1939, when Donald was about to turn six, Mary had approached the public elementary school with the hope of enrolling him in the first-grade class starting that September. She knew what she was asking. Schools all over the country were flatly refusing children like Donald, and the law backed them up. True, there were special-education classrooms in some public school districts, whose availability varied by region, but even in these, children who did not sit quietly and follow directions readily were quickly expelled. However, in this case the school principal was a friend of Mary’s. A space was found for Donald, and the first-grade teacher was made to understand that she would have to accommodate this somewhat different child.
On the first day, Donald threw tantrums. He was a little calmer the second day, and even more so in the days that followed. Given no choice but to adapt to Donald, his teacher apparently made efforts to accommodate his peculiar ways. Perhaps this meant ignoring or redirecting odd behavior rather than punishing it. Or maybe it meant finding ways to give Donald a little extra attention to help him keep up.
It seems Donald began to adapt as well. A lot of his odd behaviors, to be sure, remained, and were doubtlessly disruptive. In the first few weeks, he randomly broke out in squeals and shrieks, and when he was answering a question addressed to him directly, he sometimes jumped up and down after giving his answer, giving his head a hard shake. But at least he answered questions from time to time. By October, he could keep his place in line, answer politely when called upon in class, and follow along better with the flow of the learning day. In the evenings, he never had anything to say about what he was doing at school, but he put up no resistance to returning there in the morning. For a child with a phobia about changes to his environment, this was progress.
His use of language improved as well. While he had learned to read words aloud earlier than the other children, it appeared he had no idea of the meaning of those words. It was the same with movies. He enjoyed going to them and would recite lines of dialogue for weeks afterward, but he seemed not to understand that the characters on the screen were telling a story. After having been enrolled in school, these deficits showed signs of being corrected.
One day, during his third month in school, on a visit to the classroom, Mary was amazed to see Donald fully engaged in a reading lesson. The teacher had just written a series of sentences on the chalkboard and was explaining to the class that she would be calling on each child one at a time to step forward, find the sentence in which his or her name appeared, circle the name, and then act out the sentence. Mary saw the teacher write the sentence with her son’s name: “Don may feed a fish.” When it was his turn, she watched Donald stand up, accept the chalk, draw a chalk circle around “Don,” and then go over to the side table where the class aquarium sat and sprinkle some fish food into the water. Donald had done it—he had made sense of both the spoken and the written word—without fuss. To Mary, his performance was so momentous that, when she got home, she immediately wrote a letter to Kanner, describing the entire scene for him.
Without a doubt, Donald still lagged behind the other first-graders, but it was obvious that he was steadily changing, growing, and discovering how to connect. Kanner had seen this happening during the family’s first follow-up trip to Baltimore, in May 1939, seven months after their initial consultation and a few months before the school experiment started. Writing up his observations from that time, Kanner reported that Donald’s attention and concentration were showing improvement, that he was in better contact with his environment, and that he was reacting much more appropriately to people and situations. “He showed disappointment when thwarted,” Kanner observed, and “gave evidence of pleasure when praised.” At the same time, there was a big part of Donald’s world that remained out of reach. “He still went on writing letters with his fingers in the air,” Kanner noted.
The first-grade experiment proceeded past Christmas and into winter. By spring, Donald’s use of language had developed even further. At home, he began engaging in a rough approximation of conversation. Mary would ask specific questions about his day, and he would readily answer. But his responses were narrow and concrete; he never opened up about his thoughts and experiences. He did, however, insist one night on making the entire family play a game he had just learned at school. They all went along with it, following his exceedingly precise instructions. Both Mary and Beamon understood how remarkable it was that Donald was entering into a game at all. This was a first in his life—playing with other children.
Donald survived the first grade and returned to school for a second year, and then a third. In a way, the routine of the classroom may have suited his need for sameness: he went to the same building every day, at the same hour, for the same length of time. His seat was always where it was supposed to be, and a bell rang automatically, and reliably, to start and stop activities. One afternoon, when he was nine and a half, he walked into his classroom not knowing that classes had been canceled for the rest of the day. His parents were also unaware of the change. Donald spent the next few hours alone at his desk, writing in a notebook, waiting for the dismissal bell. When it rang, he packed away his things and headed home as usual. His ingrained habits had served him well.
Ultimately, however, school became more demanding, and the difference between him and the other children became more pronounced. Around the time he turned ten, the gap between what the school expected and what Donald was capable of—both academically and socially—grew too wide.
By the spring of 1943, when his original first-grade classmates were making their way through the fourth grade, Donald was back at home, helping his mother with simple chores in return for money for the picture shows he loved. At the same time, his natural skill in arithmetic was strengthened when he made a hobby out of calculating the publication dates of Time magazine. By chance, he had come across a copy of Time’s first issue. On the cover it said “Vol. I, No. 1” and the date, “March 3, 1923.” He was fascinated, and became obsessed with figuring out the exact dates on which every subsequent issue was published.
This led to an obsession with calendars. Once, when visiting his mother’s friends, the Rushings, he pulled up a chair in their kitchen so that he could stand up high enough to study their big wall calendar. By the time he was done frantically rifling back and forth through its pages, it was so much the worse for wear that they took it down after he and Mary left.
Donald was stretching his mind, but the seeming impracticality of his efforts was overwhelming. What he was good at did not fit in the classroom anymore. What he was not good at—making sense of reading and history lessons—increasingly got in the way of everyone else’s learning. His adjustment to life, while progressing, was not progressing quickly enough.
With Donald at home again, Mary experienced the full burden of loneliness, frustration, and exhaustion that crushed other mothers in her situation. For the second time in his life, Donald was sent away.
IT WAS NOT an institution this time. And in no way was Donald abandoned. The setting, in fact, was a home—a real family home, and getting there from the Triplett residence took all of eighteen minutes by car. Located in the deep Mississippi countryside, well past the last road sign, and at the end of a network of unmarked dirt roads, it was a house on a hill where no electricity or phone lines ran. The place did not even have running water; the toilet was outdoors. But Donald’s parents hoped the couple who lived there would be kind to their son, and that the outdoor setting would be good for his development.
Their names were Ernest and Josephine Lewis. They were poor farmers, without much education, but townspeople said they were decent, hardworking, and honest. Josephine was in her early forties, and Ernest was in his mid-fifties. They had no children of their own, and they lived off the land they worked themselves. The amount of money Beamon paid the couple to take in Donald was never disclosed, but their treatment of him was a matter of record, thanks to Leo Kanner.
Donald had already started living with the Lewises when Kanner came to visit the Tripletts in May 1945. He was interested in seeing how it was working out, and, of course, most curious to see how his Case 1 was doing. As it was, Donald came home to Forest many weekends and all holidays, and he was there for Kanner’s visit. But at some point, they all piled into Beamon’s car and hit the dusty road to visit Ernest and Josephine.
By this time, the Lewises had become almost like family to the Tripletts. Mary’s father’s appreciation of the couple and their way of life was apparent in a letter he sent his grandson in 1943: “Now I think Mr. & Mrs. Lewis are the very best people in the County. They are trying to train you to be a useful man. They are out for you and you must reciprocate by minding them. Bring in the stove wood for Mrs. Lewis, get the hatchet and fix the kindling wood for the kitchen fire.” Granddaddy McCravey had grown up on such a farm himself before setting out at the age of twenty-two and striking it rich in finance. He respected the discipline of chores. “It is by far the best training a boy can get,” he told Donald. “To live in a place like Forest is not comparable to it in any sense. You are near nature, and nature’s God.”
Granddaddy signed off by reminding his grandson, “I have loved lots of folks, but I love you as much as anyone I have ever known.”
Leo Kanner didn’t idealize country living quite as much as Granddaddy McCravey, but after getting to the farm and spending a few hours there, he formed just as high an opinion of the Lewises. Ernest and Josephine walked the psychiatrist all around the place, showed him Donald’s room, and talked him through the chores Donald did regularly. As Kanner took it in, he realized that the couple had stumbled upon a kind of therapeutic solution to Donald’s deficits. On the one hand, there was a rigid structure to days on the farm—the same pattern every morning, every night, every season. Donald had no choice but to abide by the schedule.
At the same time, they showed creativity and flexibility in how they accommodated his obsessions and strengths and fit them into farm life. As Kanner watched, for example, Donald ran into a cornfield, took up the reins of a heavy plow horse, and successfully put the animal through its paces—plowing one long row, then turning the horse around to begin another. As he looked on, amazed, the Lewises explained that this had all begun when Donald had started walking the cornfields, obsessively counting the rows. Then Ernest had put the reins in his hand and showed him how to control the horse and maneuver the plowshare. In this way, he was able to count the rows while working them. Kanner watched Donald pass back and forth with the horse half a dozen times and cut half a dozen field lengths in the earth; it seemed to give the boy pleasure.
Donald had also become entranced by the process of measurement and had been taking a yardstick to whatever he could find around the farm, keeping track of how long, tall, deep, or wide everything was. Again, Ernest thought about this, and when the farm needed a new well, he recruited Donald to help dig it, presenting it to him as a measuring project: How deep is the well now? How deep should it go?
Josephine and Ernest also made allowances for some of Donald’s less practical preoccupations. For a time, Donald went through a phase when he was obsessed with death and brought every dead bird or bug he found back to the house. The Lewises could be tough with Donald, and they did take a switch to him when he misbehaved. But with the birds and the bugs, they understood that Donald was trying to figure out something important. Instead of punishing him for dirtying the house, they pointed to a little parcel of open ground near the house and told him he could lay all the creatures to rest there. Donald built his little graveyard enthusiastically, not only burying every deceased thing he found, but doing so with an air of formality.
When Kanner strolled into Donald’s little cemetery, he saw that he had given names to all the creatures buried there, erecting small wooden markers over each grave and making them all members of the Lewis family. The one that stuck in Kanner’s mind was inscribed “John Snail Lewis. Born, date unknown.” For the date of departure from this life, Donald listed the date on which he’d found the snail’s remains.
Donald flourished under the regimen of farm life. In Kanner’s estimation, living there for a period of time was one of the best things that ever happened to Donald. The farm offered an ideal balance of restrictions and freedoms. Donald became more verbal, more creative, and more accomplished at completing complex tasks. He also basked in a kind of freedom he never had in town: the freedom to explore, to go over to the next field to find birds and bugs, without giving anyone cause to worry that cars might run him down.
After a while, the Lewises began bringing him to a nearby country school every day to resume his education. It was a better fit for Donald than the school in town for one simple reason: it was a one-room schoolhouse. By its very nature, it had to tailor itself to children learning different material on different schedules. As for Donald’s social peculiarities, they were accommodated without too much fuss—another benefit of being in an environment that was less caught up with appearances.
In this setting, Donald began writing letters home, using complete sentences and correct spelling—mostly—and sharing concrete details about his days with the Lewises. A few days before Mother’s Day in 1944, he picked up a pencil and wrote to Mary that he had been to the town of Salem to make a purchase. “Mr. Ernest told me that I have to have a rose for Mother’s Day,” he wrote. “He told me that a red rose was to show that the mother was still living. A white rose is to show that the mother is dead.” He also mentioned that he had been playing ball and that “the score I made was…5/74.” He signed it “Donald G. T. Lewis.” Mary preserved this letter for the rest of her life.
Donald would always remember those years as happy ones, when he belonged to two families. It was an arrangement in which he was doubly loved and doubly protected, and was spared the awful things happening to so many other children like him—children who were stuck in large institutions, often neglected and sometimes abused, because, unlike the Tripletts, their parents lacked the resources to create something better.
Kanner was thrilled to see Donald growing and learning so much. While the boy’s overall improvement could be labeled “moderate,” moderate in the context of Donald’s development was like a leap across an abyss. Donald was proof that at least some children could leave the most debilitating aspects of autism behind, and that it was worth trying to encourage that process.