In September 2013, Donald Triplett’s friends and family took over an art gallery in Forest, Mississippi, to throw him a party. Everyone in the room was from town, and pretty much all the guests had known him most of their lives. Three years earlier, an article in The Atlantic had told the story of his role in the early history of autism—something most of them had not heard before. It added a mild luster of celebrity to their well-loved neighbor, of whom they were also proud. More than one hundred people showed up that day, including many of Forest’s business and political notables. There was wine and cheese, toasts in Donald’s honor, a cake with eighty candles, and a boisterous rendition of “Happy Birthday.”
It had been Mary Triplett’s most heartfelt wish that life would turn out well for her baffling, complicated son.
That wish came true in almost every way his mother had hoped for, the local boy made good.
DONALD LEARNED HOW to drive when he was twenty-seven, in 1960. After that, the road was his whenever he wanted.
It was Mary who handed Donald the car keys that September. He was living with both his parents then, in the house that would be his home for the rest of his life. His younger brother, Oliver, had left for college four years earlier, and then gone to law school at Ole Miss. Within two years, Oliver would marry and start a family.
The Ford Fairlane, a big boat of a car, was parked as always beneath the tall tree that shaded the gravel driveway just off the side entrance to the house. Mary took on the role of driving instructor. It made sense; she had been Donald’s teacher for so many years now. With the engine off, she talked him through it: how to adjust the mirrors, where to place his hands on the steering wheel, how the brake and accelerator worked. Then she told him to put the key into the ignition and turn it.
No doubt, when the Ford hopped alive, Donald tensed a bit, and his hands slid toward the top of the steering wheel, pulling him forward so that his chin almost touched it. From then on, that would be his preferred pose in the driver’s seat. His mother had instructed him to let up on the gas with his right foot and use the same foot for braking, but Donald didn’t get that part right. As the car moved slowly away from the house and out toward the paved road, he was using both feet, left on the brake, right on the gas. It was a little rough, as the car jolted forward in small surges and hiccups. But it worked well enough that Donald could never be talked out of it. He would remain a two-footed pedal man for the rest of his driving life.
That first day, though, he was still a tentative driving student turning onto the road for the first time. Maybe it occurred then to Mary that this was the same road she had obsessively worried about throughout Donald’s early childhood, fearing that he would run out into it and get himself killed. That was back when her little boy seemed incapable of recognizing danger. But this was one of many things about Donald that had changed. Once she had thought him hopelessly insane, lost to the world. But as the pair of them advanced in fits and starts up and down the road between the pines, she realized how incredibly far he had come.
BACK IN 1953, as he finished high school, Donald had scrawled that one-sentence note to himself beside his picture in the yearbook: “I wish myself luck.” At the time, luck was already rolling his way, setting the tone for the next several decades of his life. A pattern was already in place. One after another, he met the milestones of growing up—finishing high school, going to college, starting a job, learning to drive. To be sure, he did all these things “behind schedule,” often years after his peers. But with help from others, he kept on hitting the marks, in his own way and in his own time.
JOHN RUSHING, the teenage football star who had been one of Donald’s protectors at Forest High School, was home packing for college in the late summer of 1953 when the phone rang. It was Beamon Triplett, offering him a ride with the Tripletts when they drove Donald to college in a few days. Both Donald and John were starting at East Central Community College, about forty minutes by car from Forest. Beamon also asked a favor. It would mean a great deal to the family, he said, if Rushing could keep an eye out for Donald at school. Rushing was a little taken aback, honored to be confided in by one of the most important men in town. He accepted the ride and the role, giving Beamon his word that he would allow no harm to come Donald’s way.
In fact, Donald and East Central clicked so well that Rushing’s unofficial guardianship was never put to the test. This might have had something to do with Donald’s new, unbridled enthusiasm for joining clubs. During his two years at East Central, a more socially engaged side of Donald began to emerge as he packed his days and weekends outside the classrooms with group activity. According to the school yearbook, Donald was treasurer of his freshman class, song leader of the Young Men’s Christian Association, member of the Student Christian Association, member of the Drama Club—and that was only half the list. He was earning mediocre grades—mostly B’s and C’s—but his social life was exploding.
Yet he retained all his quirks: not looking people in the eye, an odd way of walking, abrupt exits from conversations—if they could even be called conversations. He began every utterance with the two-syllable warm-up “Uh, uh—” followed with a single sentence, at most two, and then lapsed into silence. If he was ever curious to know the thoughts or feelings of the person trying to speak with him, he never let it show in a conventional way. He wrote his mother often from East Central, sharing details of activities like coursework or shopping, but never about what he was thinking or feeling.
Donald still had autism. His fellow students at East Central were reminded of that during a pep rally held before a key game against a longtime basketball rival. As the cheers and speeches went on, the crowd chanted for Donald to be summoned from the stands and onto the gym floor, where he was handed a microphone and asked to predict the outcome.
“Uh, uh! I think East Central will lose that game!” Donald declared, literal-minded and truthful to a fault.
This produced a stunned silence, followed immediately by an explosion of booing and catcalls. The reaction threw Donald off balance. He understood what booing signified, but he did not grasp what he had done to provoke it—it had to be explained to him. The razzing was, in fact, good-natured, but Donald was unable to tell that he was still liked by the people in the stands—that they understood that he was different, and that they accepted him.
ON A FRIDAY NIGHT in September 1955, close to the dinner hour, the brothers of Alpha Lambda Chi—a fraternity at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi—gathered in their redbrick chapter house to perform a solemn ritual. Clean-cut and conservatively attired, the young men worked down a list of fifty-four Millsaps men seeking to join their exclusive membership. That night, the brothers were generous in their judgments. Only four men were turned away. Fifty were invited to join. One of them was Donald, who was then a twenty-two-year-old junior.
Donald’s years at Millsaps College were one of the best things to happen in his life. As with everything else, he ambled into this phase belatedly. At twenty-two, most students have already graduated or soon will. But Donald had only just arrived at Millsaps, after two years at East Central Community College, where he earned his associate degree in liberal arts. At Millsaps, his grades were again middling, but his social understanding continued to flourish, enhanced by his fraternity brothers’ willingness to roll with his oddities. He was befriended by a nineteen-year-old named Brister Ware, a freshman from Jackson who came from a family of doctors and had an instinct for protecting vulnerable people. When he met Donald, Ware saw a decent, guileless, honest young man who could perhaps use some help in parts of his life where his skills were poorly developed. He was concerned that Donald’s speech, perpetually flat-toned and stiff, might prove a detriment to his success, and he began pushing his friend to pump more variety and energy into his conversation. He tried to teach him bits of slang. And when he learned that no one had ever taught Donald to swim, he hauled him to the nearby Pearl River, where for forty-five minutes they floundered through the muddy water. This effort flopped; Donald was too uncoordinated to get the hang of it. But Ware kept looking for other ways to help Donald. This was not charity, at least not in Ware’s eyes. He felt grateful to have Donald as a friend.
While at Millsaps, Donald once again moved at his own slower pace, taking three years to graduate instead of two. He majored in French, an ironic choice given his inability to hold a true conversation. He survived in part by scoring well on the vocabulary portion of his exams, where he could count on rote memory to get himself through.
In November 1955, a school dance appeared on the calendar, and Donald wrote his mother about going out to buy a tuxedo “and things that go along with it.” In the same note, he informed her, “The Lambda Chis are expected to bring dates, so I will be taking some girl.”
Donald did not sound enthusiastic about the prospect. Whether that date ever took place is unknown; Donald did not write to his mother about it. But it was known that Donald did not have a girlfriend while at college or afterward. Well into his twenties and thirties, his deepest relationship with a woman—with anyone—continued to be the one he had with his mother. Mary seemed unperturbed by this. She reported in a letter around this time: “He takes very little part in social conversation, and shows no interest in the opposite sex.”
Donald’s family had close ties to Millsaps College. Beamon was a star graduate, and president of the alumni association while Donald was a student there. And the college’s founder, a Major Millsaps, was once business partners with Mary’s grandfather. That may or may not have facilitated Donald’s admission to the school, especially with the less-than-stellar grades he’d earned at East Central. However, his family connections were unambiguously helpful in securing a job for him after graduation. Donald returned to Forest, where he went to work as a teller in the family-owned bank.
Donald’s mother and father were committed to securing their son a place in the world, and the family business was the vehicle for doing so. He was allowed to make mistakes—more than any other employee—and some were notorious. When handling customer phone calls, he had been known to put the phone down on a counter while the customer was still talking and walk away to work on some other task. For a while, he also fell into greeting bank customers by their account numbers, which, for some people, was off-putting. Over the years, as one job or another proved too much for him, he found himself doing more clerical work, which required less face-to-face interaction with customers. As long as the Tripletts controlled the bank, no matter how erratic his performance, Donald had lifelong tenure.
Thus ensconced in work, his family, and the bedroom he had known since childhood, Donald moved through life protected from the hardships faced by so many other people with autism. In 1956, he discovered golf and became somewhat obsessed. Throughout the 1960s, the 1970s, and on into middle age and then late middle age, it was a given that, whenever Donald was in town, there was only one place to find him in the afternoon. Golf was a lifelong pleasure he could never explain in words.
Donald was a sight to see on the golf course of the Forest Country Club, noticeable even from the rockers on the clubhouse porch. His stroke was stodgy, stiff, and awkward, but it was consistent, highly choreographed, and entirely his own. It began with his thumbs. While standing a little too far from the ball, his legs in a wide A-frame, Donald would lick the pad of each thumb in turn—first right, then left—before taking his full grip on the club handle. That done, he would lift the club entirely over his head, until he had his arms nearly straight up in the air, like someone holding a sign on a pole. He would hold that pose a moment and then commence a full rehearsal of the downstroke, heaving the club head in an arc back to earth until it landed between his feet, in the general vicinity of the ball. After a beat, he would yank the club back up into the pole position, pause, and then bring it down again—just as before, only faster this time. Then a third round of up and down. At this point, with the club head approaching full swing velocity, he would inch forward, his eyes fixed on the ball, his body bending toward it, his wrists rolling the right way. When he finally made contact, Donald could almost always get a good crisp thwack! out of it as the ball took off, generally in the right direction.
His follow-through after hitting the ball was also one of a kind. Rather than let his club and body twist, lose momentum, and come to a stop on their own, he came to a shuddering stop the minute he made contact, and then immediately began to bounce up and down at the knees, scanning the sky for his ball. Only when he spotted it did he truly come to rest. Then he headed for his golf cart and his next swing.
Despite his rituals—or perhaps because of them—Donald’s golf game was not half bad. He had no trouble getting around the course, could handle the different kinds of clubs, and sank putts from ten or fifteen feet out now and then. It probably helped that proficiency in golf hinges on a certain mechanical repetitiveness. He was a man who was, more than anything, comfortable with sameness, and there are plenty of things about golf that never vary. The basic swing stays the same. And the ball is always sitting still at the moment the golfer has to do anything about it. And while golf is generally seen as a social game, it always comes down to the golfer against the course. If Donald wanted to, he could simply play alone.
And that was what he did. He almost always went golfing by himself, and was content to do so.
TO HIS MOTHER, part of Donald would always be a mystery. “I wish I knew what his inner feelings really are,” Mary wrote in her last letter to Kanner, when Donald was thirty-six. But the letter was also full of optimism. All in all, Mary wrote, things for Donald had turned out “so much better than we had hoped for.” She had attained the goal every parent dreams of—to raise a child who would be just fine when she was gone from this world. “If he can maintain status quo,” she said, “I think he has adjusted sufficiently to take care of himself. For this much progress, we are truly grateful.”
Mary was a few months short of sixty-six then. She became a widow ten years later, when Beamon was killed in a car accident. She died five years after that, at the age of eighty, of heart failure. At neither funeral did Donald show any particular emotion. He later said, in answer to a direct question about losing his mother: “It was rather expected. I wasn’t really downhearted or weeping or anything like that.”
Yet when Donald was truly happy, it showed. His contentment registered in the smile that often lit up his face. Though he remained an enigma to his mother, she and anyone else who knew him could say with certainty that Donald was a happy man.
And how that came about is not much of a mystery, actually. Much of it was because of where he lived—Forest, Mississippi.
FOR A MAN with autism, life in a small community in Mississippi offered a number of gifts: familiarity, predictability, tranquillity, and safety. Forest was a place where the pace was slow, the noise level low, and where Donald could be confident that one day would be much like the next. There was also the embracing web of relationships endemic to small-town living, where everyone knows more than a little about everyone else.
Not that Forest was a paradise. The town was never without poverty, substance abuse, political disputes, or crime, including the rare murder every few years. It enforced segregation into the 1960s, and saw most of its once-charming downtown die a slow death in the 1970s. But Donald didn’t need to live in paradise to be happy. In Forest, he lived within a circle of Mississippians who were simply not bothered by the ways in which he was different. They were unbothered, hence he was unbothered, by fear, by ridicule, or by cruelty. And the more his social deficits were overlooked, the more they lost their relevance, while his strengths and abilities continued to develop and expand.
Yes, his family had money, which had a lot to do with his circumstances and the way he was received. As a Mississippi newspaperman observed, in relation to how Forest responded to Donald: “In a small southern town, if you’re odd and poor, you’re crazy. But if you’re odd and rich, all you are is a little eccentric.”
But there was another part to it, where Donald was concerned. People just liked him. As he approached old age, it was fair to say that, in his little community, he was beloved.
CELESTE SLAY, A regular congregant at the First Presbyterian Church of Forest, sat prayerfully among her fellow worshippers, attending to the minister’s parting words, her husband, Mervyn, at her side. Suddenly, she was stung in the back of the neck by a rubber band.
Celeste turned around, but she already knew who did it. Donald Triplett, from some rear pew, had just zipped a “howdy” through holy space, aimed at one of the ladies he liked. It was not the first time, and it was not just her. There was a small group of people in Forest—fewer than a dozen—whom Donald, in his seventies, had taken to pinging by rubber band, whenever and wherever they went. Some had been hit in church, some high up in the stands at a Forest High football game, some while turning the corner of an aisle at Walmart.
Donald’s rubber-band stunt was his way of flirting. Mary had misread him all those years ago, when she said that he took no interest in the opposite sex. Either that, or Donald had changed. Because when he was well past his middle years, he had begun, in a rather naïve way, to let women know when he liked them. Because it was Forest, where everyone knew him, no one’s feelings were hurt, and no one was offended. The women Donald tended to plink with rubber bands—all employees of the bank, and all middle-aged—knew what they were dealing with: a friend who was working out a mild sort of crush. They were charmed by the nicknames he came up with for each of them. Jan Nester—one of his favorites—was “Jan with a Plan.” Celeste Slay, the woman in the church, was “Celestial Celeste.” There were presents too. Donald would show up at one of their desks with a clumsily wrapped trinket of some sort—a refrigerator magnet or a spatula. Often the items carried their original price tags. Sometimes he would give the gift, and then request immediate cash reimbursement for it. Some steps in this dance he would never master.
Still, in return for his exertions, Donald received something real: attention, which he had come to prize. The women mothered him, called him “Don darling,” and made him feel welcome and needed at the bank, where he dropped in every afternoon. By the early 2000s, he had not officially worked there for many years. In fact, Mary’s family no longer ran it. After the bank encountered financial difficulties in the 1980s, day-to-day control passed to a twenty-seven-year-old named Gene Walker, who gave his word to the family that he would always find something in the bank for Donald to do. For the next thirty years, Walker kept his word. He saw to it that new employees were briefed on Donald’s status in the office, and ensured that Donald never encountered anything but full respect. Though his job responsibilities grew smaller with the years, and income from a trust fund replaced a paycheck from the bank, Donald never stopped having a place at the Bank of Forest. In his seventies, he began referring to himself as “retired,” but he still came by daily to see his bank friends, who were nearly family to him in his later years.
WHEN DONALD WAS about seventy-nine, Jan Nester from the bank insisted that he get a cell phone, and she showed him how to send text messages. Donald was hooked. It was as if some sort of interior barrier fell. Suddenly, he was tapping out words constantly, communicating with real fluency for the first time in his life. Nonverbal children with autism experienced a similar breakthrough when the iPad was introduced in 2010. By manipulating images and characters on the screen, some were able to express themselves without relying on words and grammar, which had always been obstacles. Likewise, when Donald texted, he could forget about the complex visual and physical requirements of spoken language, such as eye contact, facial expressions, and the neurological gymnastics of turning thought into sound. While texting, he “spoke” in a different voice.
Most of his texts were directed at his rubber-band friends. Once, in 2014, Donald texted Celeste from Texas:
DONALD: Is it pretty in MS like it is in TX, Celestial Celeste?
CELESTE: It is sunny and 80 degrees. Very pretty. Glad you made it safe…
DONALD: See u on June 16
CELESTE: Have fun and be careful Don!!
DONALD: I shoot u with a rubber band Sunday
Sunday meant church, which Donald never missed unless he was out of town.
In fact, Donald was out of town a lot—probably more than anyone else in Forest—the result of a streak of wanderlust he had developed in his thirties. It was then that world travel became one of his two full-time hobbies, alongside golf.
Donald never went anywhere for long. The maximum length of his trips was usually six days, because he tried to be back in Forest for Bible class on Sundays at Forest Presbyterian. But at least a dozen times a year, he left town for points elsewhere. Traveling via highway, air, rail, river, and sea, by the time he was in his late seventies, he had been to at least twenty-eight American states—including Hawaii more than fifteen times—and more than thirty-six places abroad, including Germany, Tunisia, Hungary, Dubai, Spain, Portugal, France, Bulgaria, and Colombia. He took snapshots of the pyramids, went on safari in Africa, and wore a muumuu to dance opposite a belly dancer on a cruise ship off the coast of Morocco. Wherever he went, he went solo.
Notably, Donald made no friends while traveling. Doing so would have required small talk, for which he had no talent or interest. Rather, he appeared to travel with the aim of making contact with things—with all the iconic structures and statues and mountaintops he had seen in books, on the Internet, and on TV. When he got home from his trips, he organized all of his photos in thick albums, until his bookshelves were crammed with dozens of them. In the late 1990s, after he learned to use a computer, he went back through them all, assigning numbers to each of his trips, and creating a database and an index that made it easier to find specific photos. That was how he tended to his memories. As he approached eighty, he was still on the road several times a year, collecting more of them.
WHENEVER, DURING HIS later years, Donald needed to be well dressed for an event, Jan Nester, from the bank, took him shopping for clothes. He needed the help. Without any intervention, he would wear his pants extremely low, beneath his protruding belly. To keep them from falling down, he cinched his belt as tightly as possible. Because this often proved insufficient for the task, Donald usually went around with one hand reaching around to his backside, fidgeting with and tugging at his belt. Now and then, he wore suspenders, which solved that problem. But when he did wear suspenders, often as not, they were twisted in the back.
As for colors and patterns, Donald seemed indifferent to how they played together, and even choosing the right size was a hit-or-miss affair. Once he put on a particular shirt and pair of pants, he was as likely as not to keep wearing the same outfit for several days running. He was oblivious to staining, tattering, or accidental rips. Usually, it took a gentle suggestion from Jan to get him to realize that a well-used polo shirt, or a pair of Bermuda shorts, were too dingy to be worn in public. “Don, darling,” she would say, “you really do not need to wear that shirt anymore.”
Usually she took him to Burns Clothing, in Forest’s downtown. Burns happened to adjoin the building that housed Donald’s dad’s old law office, where Beamon wrote his letter to Leo Kanner in 1938. And it stood on the same courthouse square where Donald had once made the rounds memorizing license plates. Tom and Margaret Burns, the mom and pop of Burns Clothing, had hung on, even as most of the businesses around them had been shuttered. They were still thriving, thanks to their knowing how to cater to customers’ particular preferences.
Tom Burns was, for example, well acquainted with Donald’s low-belt situation, and took that into account when he positioned Donald in front of the double mirrors and knelt to get a waistline-to-shoe measurement. Burns knew that whatever trousers this customer bought, he would have to remake them, taking in the waist, cutting off the cuffs, and hemming the bottoms. But he was happy to do it for Donald. And happy to help him get ready to celebrate his eightieth birthday that coming Friday.
IT WAS A late-afternoon event. Everyone from the bank was there. And his brother, Oliver, and Oliver’s son’s family. And a good many people from the country club.
Donald smiled throughout the gathering, but as ever, he gave no speech. “I’m just glad I made it to eighty,” he told a newspaper reporter who covered the event. If the reporter was hoping for something more emotional, Donald disappointed. Of course, since it was a daytime party, Donald was missing that day’s golf. But he did not seem to mind. As he put it to the reporter: “The reception was a good idea…I sure thought a lot of everyone who put it together.” For Donald, that was a lot of sentiment.
Besides, he knew that on the next day, and the days to follow, he would be back on the course again, back on schedule, playing through the dwindling light of those September afternoons. Donald was embarking on his ninth decade. And as that autumn advanced, and on those days and hours when the sun dipped behind the pines along the fairways, and his shadow on the greens lengthened, it would be easy for anyone watching from the rocking chairs on the clubhouse porch to guess who was out there, in the dusk, playing golf by himself. It was autism’s first child, using the remaining light given him to get in a few last holes before dinner.