The Secret Life of a Black Aspie: A Memoir

by Anand Prahlad

They never believed they had done anything wrong. To us, that was the essence of whiteness.

far as freedom went, they had the freedom to leave, penniless, broken, uneducated, and alone. Or to stay and keep working on the plantation.

So I tried to try. I opened my mouth and tried to speak but could only grunt. I watched my mama and my granny’s mouths closely, but after a few words, my attention would wander to the shapes of their teeth, the little holes on their tongues, or the sounds of other things, like my baby sister crying, a rooster, a cow, the dogs.

But talking would never come easy. It would never feel natural. I felt as if words were stones attached to threads of my body. As soon as they left my mouth, they sank into invisible waters, slowly unraveling the

And this was the thing about

talking. Some of the parts of me that are most me have still never talked. They can’t. I don’t know exactly how to explain it. If I was sitting in a room sorting rocks, or pieces of bark, or lost in splotches of light, or reading a book and someone came in and started talking, a part of me might turn and say something to them. It might say something and then say something else. But a part of me would keep its back turned. It couldn’t help it.

But there were plenty of other people talking all around me, a matrix of talk. So no one missed my voice. And

We are still astonished just to be alive. To have the liberty to own houses, drive cars, go shopping in white stores, wear good clothes, watch television. To curl up on a couch or bed, pull the blanket up, and exhale.

Growing up, we had never sat down at a desk; in fact, we didn’t own one. There were no spaces in our house for printed pages, for writing or reading. The shapes that the body gets into when the eyes are feasting on print were foreign and uncomfortable. Just to sit up straight in a chair all day, or to bend over a table for hours, was hard. What to do with the motion in our bodies? It was daytime, but we had to put our bodies half to sleep, to contort them and hold them like little Houdinis.

There were a few books in our house, some that my mama had when she was a girl, with yellowed and brittle pages. Pictures of Mary and her little lamb. Words my mama had written in cursive on delicate paper. My mama’s writing was so pretty. It flowed like waves of music. It led like blue-lit tunnels under oceans, through forests, invisibly through cities. It came off the page and touched me.

People thought so differently at school. Instead of letting things come to them, sifting through invisible threads, they went out and attacked things and then dragged them back home. There was never time to wait. They shot thoughts and tied them on the rooftops of cars and trucks. People outside our tribe were hunters. People in my tribe were gardeners and carpenters. They grew things. They built things from visions. I had to learn to hunt if I wanted to live in the world, whether I liked it or not.

I had an insatiable appetite for learning and for “getting” things, and A’s came easily. But it wasn’t the actual information that usually captured and fascinated me. It was the beauty of how things had been ordered, organized, named.

learned to grow masks for school. I had to be careful there. Covering up was like instinct, though.

had learned a lot from growing up in the shadow of slavery. Slaves had to have six senses. They had to pay attention to small things, to small routines, to other people’s view of things. They were always strangers, ready for the next trauma.

remember looking so forward to learning to write in cursive. It was so pretty. So magical and secret. It was like the curves in flowers, in someone’s song or dance. But I missed those weeks from school when they were learning cursive. I was so sad. It was like missing the flocks of canaries when they passed through in the spring, and for moments the trees were filled with delicate, yellow flecks, and the air was filled with a light, sweet singing.

Black people in Ashland weren’t as free as we were. They had yards but not fields, not woods. They

They weren’t getting fed every day from touching the ground that echoed with their ancestors or where spirits still moved in the trees. Listening to Mama and Granny, living in town was a fall from grace.

Malcolm explained it to me like this: Black life is so hard and so precarious. People are thinking about food and clothes. And here you are with your poems.

As the house changed and there was more noise, I got more headaches and nausea. I wandered outside more often to get away from the sounds, in search of cool air to make my headaches disappear, and to hear nothing.

There was something wrong with the television. It was a gray, hungry space. It ate and ate and never got full. It stared at me like a hungry wild dog. So we fed things into it. We gave it pieces of our hearts and livers. We gave it pieces of our brains, and we fed it the most sacred thing of all—our attentions.

Black students had never sung the “Star-Spangled Banner.” We sang our own anthem, “Lift every voice and sing / till earth and heaven ring / ring with the harmonies of liberty.” I loved the black national anthem. It made me cry sometimes, just thinking about the journeys of black people in this strange country. But it had never crossed white people’s minds that we had an anthem.

Why would we have sung the anthem of a country that wouldn’t let us be a part of it? That only postponed our genocide so we could slave to make it rich? We wanted to sing both anthems at assemblies. That would have been fair. We wanted the white school to respect our culture and our history, just like we were being asked to respect theirs. But the principal kept saying there’s only one country. There’s only one anthem. So some of us sang our anthem at

the next assembly...

Learning to meditate was a turning point. Without it, I don’t know how I would have survived. The university degrees wouldn’t have saved me. They wouldn’t have centered me or given me inner refuge in the storms of life.

But, inside, I was drowning. I couldn’t focus, because I had no routine or structure. Sannyasin relationships were like streams of water, flowing all of the time. How well we could flow was supposed to be a measure of our commitment to Bhagwan. But I was already water. I needed land. And

I have had girlfriends who tried to stab me. Or to set me on fire. Or to run me over with their car. Or to turn the gas stove on when I was sleeping. Or to kick me out of their car, hours away from civilization, and leave me. They weren’t Robert Johnson’s black blues women, poisoning him. Or Al Green’s soul women throwing hot greens on him. Or the insane. Or psychopaths. They were middle-class, educated, mostly white women. But it wasn’t just my girlfriends I drove crazy. It was also friends and people I didn’t know. I’ve had waiters, storeowners, and people working in stores go into fits and embarrass themselves, throw things, or break their own glass counters in response to conversations with me.

I knew how to take care of myself better than other people knew how to take care of me. I made my own rules all the time, in almost everything. I didn’t understand neurotypical rules. Too often they didn’t make sense. They wouldn’t protect me. I didn’t feel like they applied to me. I would never have survived just following neurotypical rules. The same way a black person coming from a plantation wouldn’t have survived following white people’s rules. But my rules weren’t necessarily the best ones to follow in a relationship. For example, my rules said disconnect the minute I’m overwhelmed. Stop listening. Find a good feeling wherever I can whenever I need to. Keep my secrets. Don’t bring certain things up because I’d never be able to explain them.

The gray concrete kept the children safe for a few hours of daylight.

I had the greatest teachers everywhere I went, not just in classrooms. Famous teachers. Philosophers and mystics, scholars and poets. I met teachers on the way to school and on my way back home. I met them at the back of the bus and on the street corners, in stores and restaurants. I met them at bus and train stations, in homeless shelters, in the lobbies of fancy hotels and halls. I met them under trees in the park, in gardens, in beds of linen and cotton and flannel and down. I must have been doing something good in another life to have such great teachers in this one. All my teachers nurtured and took care of me as if my mama and granny had called them up and said, “Can you please look after our child?” They passed me invisible things. They helped me to keep my dignity.

I didn’t know it then, but being in gray concrete at UC Berkeley was one of the highlights of my life. I was feeling like I had security. “Security” meant not having too many things to think about or to do. It meant having everything done at the end of the day, and no anxiety, and no guilt. It meant not having to worry about money. Having people helping me, and having a place to live with a nice bed. Having the perfect routine, a routine like a room with the perfect light, and a window opened just the right amount, with just the right amount of breeze, of green leaves and sunlight, at just the right temperature. When I was in gray concrete at Berkeley, I was often relaxed. I was writing poetry. I was meeting people, and having friends, and trying to have relationships.

I would be going to the folklore building, “the bunker,” as I called it, but inside, florescent lights buzzed and flickered and the small spaces of offices and classrooms were packed with other people.

When I was in the gray concrete of UCLA, I didn’t realize it was so prestigious. I was being practical by going there. I was doing what I knew how to do to stay safe and function. I wanted to keep studying folklore, and they had a folklore program. I wanted to have time to keep writing poetry and get published. I wanted to stay in California. And I wanted to make my granny famous by writing about her.

Virginia also loved the blue and green. She loved being in nature and camping and hiking. But going camping, I did feel danger. It’s not something most black people would want to be doing. First of all, it’s a luxury. But second, once you leave the city, anything can happen. It doesn’t matter what state you’re in if it’s still in America. A lot of racists live out of the city, even in California. Skinheads, KKK members, survivalists. That’s why on the West Coast black people say, “If you want to stay alive, stay on the I-5.” That’s why when I went camping I never saw another black person. In the city, you have some safety; you have communities and numbers. But once you leave that behind, you’re in the wilderness on your own, and a black man with a white woman in the jungle outside the city might never be heard from again.

Once, a deaf African man sat beside me on the bench. He showed me his notebooks filled with poems and dazzling otherworldly watercolors. They were so beautiful! He would paint the pages first and then write words here and there, over the paintings. He wrote words like Ashanti, heart, rise, red, dye, and magnificent.

mud and water across her floor. My sisters and my brothers are in my skin. Diffused through pores and corpuscles. They are like melanin, like rhythm. Like tones, like a tune. They are the flesh of my flesh.

I needed so badly to feel human. To stop feeling like a rabbit, running and hiding, panting, hyperventilating and out of breath.

The first rule was to always wear a mask.

But professors are paid to stand out, and so they do. They wear different clothes. They look like they’re carrying heavy weights, and at any minute, they could topple over. They look like their bodies are there, but their minds are some other place.

The second rule was, don’t speak everyday talk. Otherwise, people think you’re stupid. I had been used to street talk, Rasta talk, sannyasin talk. Therapy talk. I was used to talking as a way of revealing myself, of sharing feelings. But the rule was don’t share feelings in the silver town, and use only intellectual words that mimic thought.

So I had to put away the words I loved the most, the ones that made me feel that I was beautiful, and whole, and good.

The third rule had to do with the body.

rules number four and five. Don’t dance with my body. Don’t hang out with rhythm in public.

The sixth rule was to be a single gender. Pick

And there were more rules. Consider yourself blessed, privileged to be here. You are being watched. Always being watched. Be polite. Appear logical. Be plain. Don’t let your disabilities show. Never cop to any mental illness.

I learned that tenure was the golden apple, and at the same time, it was the apple that Adam and Eve ate. The formula was simple for me: Say yes to the devil and forget my old lives. Forget life. Forget about meditation and spirituality, hot tubs, redwood trees, yoga, exercise, friendships, movies, concerts, dancing, hugging, reading for pleasure, camping, or laughing. Forget any leisurely thing. Work all of the time.

I understood that time was against me. I understood that I needed to publish a book, but I couldn’t write anymore. I had abandoned all the things that fed me. My poetry couldn’t get through all the costumes and masks. I had no space in my mind, or any peace, and so poems stayed as far from me as a butterfly from a hive of bees.

I found it difficult always having to explain everything, and never being able to make a statement without talking about what someone else had already said.

She reminds me of things that need attention on earth but understands that I am often in my spaceship.

I can understand better now how hard it is for neurotypicals to understand Aspies. I know now that the difference is more profound than most neurotypicals can imagine, but I don’t really know how to explain it.

His mother, LuAnne, lives five minutes away, and we work in the same department at the university. I met her at a folklore conference in Louisiana, shortly after being released from a mental inpatient facility.