I was eight years of age. The school I went to was quite modern, at least as I remember it, certainly much more so than the schools down south I later attended. Though an elementary school we had a regular gym and locker rooms for changing and there was a regular theater (instead of just an auditorium) for staged presentations. The playground was large and had a concrete area for certain types of games and then a lawn equipped with playground equipment.
To the side of the school, between it and the playground lawn, there was what looked like a very small one room schoolhouse.
At morning or afternoon recess, I forget which, a little boy would be placed outside the one room schoolhouse. He was left there unattended. I was only eight and didn’t know what exactly his disability was but assumed he had cerebral palsy and was perhaps intellectually disabled. He may have only had cerebral palsy. The child of a friend of my mother had cerebral palsy, went to school elsewhere but had been over a few times to play and could communicate. This boy couldn’t.
It bothered me that we were all out playing with each other and that he sat alone in front of the little one room schoolhouse. So I started going over to talk to him. I was on my own and didn’t know exactly what to do. There was no adult to tell me what to do. He couldn’t talk with me, I remember that, and sometimes perplexed and helpless to know what to do I would just sit with him. I didn’t spend all my recess time with him as I wanted to play with my friends as well, but I always made sure to go over and spend some time with him. He never responded a lot to me in a way that at least I could understand. He made sounds when I was sitting with him, which I couldn’t understand, and I felt bad about that, that I couldn’t understand them. I felt like it must be frustrating for him, just as it was confusing to me in that I knew his sounds and gestures had meaning but I couldn’t interpret them. But I meant well. We communicated to the extent that I’d ask questions and he’d seem to nod his head yes or no.
We were nearing Christmas vacation. This time his teacher made a brief appearance. All I remember is that she smiled and that she gave him an apple which sat in his lap. Then she went back inside the little schoolhouse. I was doing as I usually did, sitting next to him. He made some gestures like he wanted me to come closer to him, next to his face, as if he was going to try to tell me something. Then when I was close enough, one of his hands took my hair and with ferocious strength pulled on it. It was terribly painful. I tried to pull away but was unable. I’d no idea he’d that kind of strength. I also didn’t want to do anything that would hurt him, and not knowing what would hurt him or not I sat there with my head in his lap. Every time I tried to pull my head away, he’d pull my hair again. Until he just stopped, and released my hair. I was breathless, at the point of crying, as I stood and looked at him to try to figure out what he was feeling. His face was red. He wouldn’t look at me. All I could reason is he must have hated me that entire time perhaps, and I’d never known it. I was not only shocked, I felt ashamed and guilty as I walked away. I felt I must have done a great wrong to him somehow, but I didn’t know how. Did he prefer to be by himself? Did my going over and sitting with him make him feel I was doing this because I thought him a sympathy case and he was enraged with me for this? Had my going over there and sitting with him just been painful for him, to the point of enraging him? I’d been an untenable presence without knowing it?
He wasn’t there after that, after Christmas vacation, and I didn’t know why and didn’t ask. He was no longer in front of the little schoolhouse, and as far as I could tell it was now unused. I was left with such a deep sense of shame and guilt, not knowing what I’d done wrong but aware I’d somehow screwed up really bad for him to pull my hair, that I did my best to avoid thinking about the event at all, and that he’d ever been there and that I’d used to sit with him.
When I was fourteen, in the early 70s, I became aware there was a group of volunteers who worked with institutionalized, intellectually disabled individuals at a hospital outside of town. I don’t remember the name of the group. But I had this interest…I don’t know why. I had thought about it for months and that this was something I might like to do. To volunteer. So I called them up and said I was interested. It took them a couple of months to return my call and invite me to a meeting. A couple of months for a fourteen year old is a long time, but I was still interested. I went to a meeting and later went on a half day tour of the hospital with the group. Most of the time was spent with our visiting the children’s area and playing with the kids in a room like an ordinary schoolroom. When the visit was nearly ended I’d decided, yes, this was volunteer work I’d like to do. They’d stressed its difficulties and for all I could tell they seemed less intent on encouraging than discouraging. I thought maybe because this was because they had many people who wanted to volunteer but then realized the difficulties and were discouraged and lost interest, so perhaps this was why they were more discouraging then encouraging. Still, I wanted to volunteer. “I won’t be one of those people who says they’re interested and then disappears,” I told myself.
Then they took us downstairs…
To the basement. Though that was not an area where they used volunteers, they took us down to the basement where there were no windows for outside light. It was dark. It felt like a basement, with the coolness and humidity of a basement. There was no attempt at camouflaging this was a basement. It was god-awful quiet except for occasional moans. And it was so dark. The walls were lined with cribs. There had been no preparation, no warning for what we were going to see. In the cribs were individuals who looked like infants and little children, all lying there, and here I was being told this one was twelve and that one was seventeen and this person was twenty-eight and that they would never grow, they would never change, they would always be like they were, as if frozen in time. Looking on the faces in the cribs, I was stunned. Shocked. By this basement. By these cribs. By these little individuals laying there in the dark, who looked like children, and who ever held them. One of the guides leaned down and cooed at one of the adult-children, and the adult-child made a small cooing noise in return. I tried to fathom decades of lying there in the very dim light of the colorless basement with no sunlight. I was told they would never progress beyond the intellectual capacity of infants, and I tried to fathom an infant lying day after day, for years in the dark. How did they survive?
I was not made of as strong a stuff as I’d imagined. I was so shocked by the basement and its cribs that I never returned. It was as if walking through a door into a back closet in hell that I’d never begun to imagine. Had I been prepared, had I been forewarned, and had the environment been different, I don’t think I would have been as overwhelmed as I was. But it was too much for me.
Reading this account, of a woman named Anne McDonald, I wondered how many individuals I saw that day in the basement of the institution were fully aware and unable to communicate that awareness.
A riveting, brief account of what institutionalization was like for Anne is here.
Anne McDonald’s story is about as amazing as they come. I would have liked to get her book, but it seems, sadly enough, to be out of print.
