Educating The Retarded Child

a book about me

The house that my father built for my mother had a wall in between what we called the breakfast room, where we ate all our meals, not just breakfast, and the den, where we had a fireplace and, far more importantly, a television. We had what we called the dining room, but that was only for special occasions. I was only invited to meals in the dining room if my grandfather was eating, too. Otherwise, the dining room was for adults who drank and smoked, which I wasn’t allowed to do.

The wall between the living room and the breakfast room had a bookcase and cabinets built on both sides, with a passage from one room to the next on the ends. The architect was Fred Craig. I’m sure he was very pleased with himself.

My father was actually in the book business. Our family shipped textbooks to every child in Mississippi and Louisiana. Besides that, he was a voracious reader. He read everything there was written about World War II, the war with the communists, and the space race. He also read everything about economics that was recommended by Malcolm Forbes, as did his best friend, Rowan Taylor, and they would argue the points in the book and fire angry letters off to Forbes, who would sometimes write back letters that were obviously written by one of his secretaries.

My mother was also a voracious reader. She read at least one murder mystery a week, sometimes two or three if she was on vacation. My mother also dealt with the problems she faced in life by reading about them. When she took over the Stewpot, she read every book she could find about feeding large groups of people. She also read about dealing with the problems of “indigent people.” When my brother became ill, she read several books on psychology and schizophrenia. She even returned to college at Millsaps to earn a psychology degree.

In the first grade, it became clear that I couldn’t read. I could read individual words most of the time but couldn’t read sentences for anything. Mrs. Keys, who, to me, looked exactly like Agent 99 on Get Smart, suggested that my mother read to me more, so my mother read to me more. Every night, she read to me. I asked my father to read to me, too, but he decided that was my mother’s work, so I read to him. Sitting on the big leather sofa, I read my storybooks to my father, who was ever so pleased with me.

“Look, he can read it fine.” My father said.

“No, what he’s saying doesn’t match up with the words on the page. He’s memorized the story from me reading it to him; he’s not reading it himself,” my mother said.

By second grade, it was clear that I was just not reading. My father blamed it on the turmoil caused by changing teachers when the Department of Justice took over Jackson Public Schools to integrate it. The outgoing superintendent of Jackson Public Schools, Dr. Walker, told my grandfather, “Jim better get those boys out of public schools. I don’t know what’s going to happen with the federals coming to Jackson.” My father had always been an advocate of the Jackson Public Schools, but he was more of an advocate of his child learning to read, so they pulled me out of Casey, which I loved, and sent me to St. Andrews, which I feared.

My neighbor, Mrs. Kroeze, tried to assuage my fears by telling me how good the lunches Mrs. Holeman at St. Andrews made, especially her rolls and her green beans. The green bean thing I later learned was a trick. They were just canned green beans, but the mothers colluded to build them up in our minds and make us think they were delicious. If you believe something is delicious, then it is.

At St. Andrews, Mrs. McIntyre, who was to be my third-grade teacher, thought the best plan was to hold Boyd back a year and send him back to second grade. My second-grade teacher, Mrs. Wills, who was beautiful and had a magical air about her, thought they should send me to a woman at UMC to be tested for all sorts of things, and from those tests, they would know how to move forward with me.

After being tested at UMC, my mother developed a plan to teach me to read and keep up with my friends in school. I had ADHD, which made it very difficult to teach me, and I had Dyslexia, and that was the culprit in the “why can’t Boyd read” mystery.

After two years of special training and intensive help and love from my mother, I was able to read everything my classmates could, just not nearly as quickly. I also mostly mastered my stutter, at least until I got nervous or was around someone else who stuttered. My sister had a friend named Laryn who also stuttered. She was beautiful and very intelligent, but we could never communicate because as soon as we tried, we both would st-st-st-stutter until nothing at all came out.

When I was younger, I would marvel at all the books on my father’s bookcases. All these books, all these colors, ideas and things, rocketships and jet airplanes, all these things I couldn’t ever grasp because I couldn’t read, and I couldn’t read even the names on the covers. By the time I was ten, though, I could read. I could read and work out the title for every book on the bookcase, which I did. Books meant important things, and I wanted important things.

My mother’s habit was to put the dinner dishes in the dishwasher, then smoke a cigarette, drink a tab and scotch (which is about as gross as it sounds, but she loved it), and read her murder mystery in her immaculately clean kitchen.

I took a book off my father’s bookshelf and took it to my mother in the kitchen. It had a green cloth cover and black lettering. I handed it to her and then sat on the counter across from where she sat with her book, my legs folded up Indian style. I don’t know if Native Americans ever actually sat that way, but in the Indian Guides, we called an awful lot of things “Indian” that weren’t.

“That book is about me, isn’t it?” I said.

My mother held the book and brushed her finger across the title. “Educating the Retarded Child” by Samuel A. Kirk and Orville Johnson. “It’s not about you.” She said, not looking at me. “It’s a book I had to read when I wanted to be a teacher when we lived in Germany. It’s a very old book.” It was a very old book, 1951; I was born in 1963, and it was then 1973.

I slipped down from the kitchen counter and walked across the floor to where my mother was sitting on her stool, with her tab, scotch, and cigarette, with her murder mystery novel turned upside down on the counter so she wouldn’t lose her place. I sat on the floor beside my mother’s feet and leaned my head into her thighs like I did when I was a baby and wanted to get in her lap.

“The books about me, isn’t it?” I asked again. “I’m retarded.”

I knew what retarded meant. At school, somebody called somebody retarded fifty times a day. I did, too, but I never thought about whether it applied to me or not, but I suppose it did. My mother had a book about how to educate me.

My mother tapped off the ash on her cigarette and stabbed it out in her ashtray. She ran her fingers through my still blonde hair and pulled me closer. “Nobody uses that word anymore. You shouldn’t either. You’re smart, Buddy, you’re so, so smart. You’re what they call developmentally delayed. It means you can’t do some things as fast as other children. You’re not retarded. That’s an ugly word. I should have thrown that book away.“You understand, don’t you, Buddy? Do you want some ice cream? I have some ice cream if you want it.”

“No, I want to listen to Hans Christian Andersen.” Hans Christian Andersen was an LP Album by Danny Kaye. I played it on my toy record player. The record made me feel better about life and things. The songs on it were from the movie of the same name. I loved it because the songs weren’t songs; they were stories. “Thumbelina, Thumbelina, tiny little thing. Thumbelina dance. Thumbelina Sing.” “There once was an ugly duckling with feathers all stubby and brown, and the other birds said in so many words, Get out of town!” My entire life, I’ve listened to Hans Christian Andersen to make myself feel better.

By ten, I was smart enough to use a dictionary. I looked up, “retarded.” Everything it said, I didn’t want to be. Then I looked up, “retard.” It’s an Anglo-French word. I knew what that meant. “to delay or impede the development or progress of to slow up, especially by preventing or hindering advance or accomplishment.” As I understood it, with this information, retarded meant exactly the same thing as “developmentally delayed,” but it sounded nicer, I suppose.

I want to say that I was so impacted by this that I never used the word “retard” and never called anyone that again, but that’d be a lie. As long as nobody knew I was retarded, I’d call it with the best of them.

Because of my ADHD, most people just thought I was a bad kid, and my grades were bad because I was a slacker. I was ok with that. I’d rather they think I was a bad kid than know I was retarded. In Junior High School, I spent so much time in Mimi Bradley’s office, waiting to be disciplined, that I told people she was my homeroom.

When I went back to college, Brent Lefavor was my academic advisor, in addition to being my best friend, fellow artist, and cast member. One day, he asked a fairly logical question for an academic advisor: “Why was my grade point average so low?” I lied to him. I blamed my drinking, my dad’s death, heartless and feckless women, anything but the truth, which I was “developmentally delayed.” You know, retarded. I could read anything my classmates could read; I just couldn’t read it as fast as they did. I always read my assignments but often read them far too late to receive credit for them, so my grades were always bad. I loved Brent. I would rather he think I was a drunk than a retard.

Invariably, whenever anyone tried to talk to me about this problem, they would say something like, “But you’re so smart!” When they tested me at UMC to find out what the hell was wrong with me, it included several different kinds of tests to discover my IQ, my “Intelligence Quotient.” That’s something I don’t talk about very often because it makes me sound like an asshole, but yeah, mine is pretty high. You may not know this, but there are an awful lot of retards who are also geniuses. I’m not a genius, but I’m pretty smart, despite being a retard. Some people wear their IQ score as a badge of courage given by the president himself. I’m not impressed.

A few days after I talked to my mother in her kitchen, I decided that it may take a while, but I was going to read “Educating the Retarded Child” and see what Samuel A. Kirk and Orville Johnson had to say about me. When I went to fetch it, it was gone. My mother had either hidden it or thrown it away. I’m sure she thought, “Boyd is ten; he’ll forget about this in a few weeks.” I’m sixty, and I still haven’t forgotten it.

There have been several times through the years when I looked up “Educating the Retarded Child” on eBay or Amazon, thinking I would finally read it. The reviews all said the book was laughably bad, and their descriptions of “retarded” children sounded an awful lot like normal children. I keep reading it as an option in the back of my mind. The book is on eBay as I write this. I haven’t availed myself of it yet. Not yet. I found out that Kirk and Johnson also wrote a book called “Educating the Exceptional Child” about children who were “gifted.” Thanks, guys; I feel ever so much better now. Asshole.

It would break my mother’s heart if she knew I remembered that night and that book. She wanted more than anything for me to feel like and believe I was “normal,” whatever that is. I never again mentioned it to her. Life would eventually make cracks in the impenetrable bond between my mother and me. Then life would drive wedges into the cracks, and we grew farther and farther apart. The last year of her life, knowing she was dying, made it very difficult for me to talk to her. It was becoming very difficult for me to talk to anyone. Before long, I withdrew from everyone and everything for almost a decade. That’s another story.

“Developmentally delayed” is a more polite word than “retarded.” I’m not, either. I can’t read as quickly as you can, and I can’t focus on one thing the way you can, but that’s about it. My mind is as good as anybody’s. My mother read everything she could find to try and help me, including a twenty-year-old book written by two guys with questionable credentials who called children like me “retarded.” I’ll be retarded if you want me to be fella, but I’ll bet anything I can understand things you can’t even imagine.

My mother loved me and would have done anything to help me. Sometimes, though, a boy has to find his way through the thorns and brambles to get to the other side. I’m completely bald now. My mother’s been dead for more than a decade, but I can still feel her fingers in my hair.