River of Words, Raft of Our Conjoined Neurologies

I looked at my hands, to see if I was the same person now that I was free. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees . . . and I felt like I was in heaven.

If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.

—Harriet Tubman

In the eighth grade, my son, DJ, who is autistic and who uses a text-to-voice synthesizer to communicate, became so distraught while learning about Harriet Tubman and a little Polish boy whom the Germans murdered that he couldn’t continue reading. His breathing was heavy; his eyes had glazed over. His heart pounded in the narrow cage of his chest. In response to his ninth-grade English teacher’s question, “What are your strengths as a reader?” he replied, “I feel characters’ feelings.” He then added, “Dread very scary books and wish I took breathing easy mom to class to create more security.”

In the sterile language of literary critics, DJ can be said to have identified with these historical figures. Having been abandoned by his birth mother at the age of three and subjected to constant abuse in foster care, he experienced a similar barbarism. In the case of Tubman, the identification was particularly intense. DJ saw in this leader of the Underground Railroad what he calls “political freedom fighting,” and he imagined working on behalf of his “people”: namely, those with autism who cannot speak and who have been presumed—wrongly—to be retarded.

Consider what he wrote about Moses, as Tubman was called, a few days after first learning about her. The process of composition was no less physiologically agitating than reading had been; indeed, DJ periodically let loose with shrieks and head-banging. So that you understand the first line of the piece, let me say that “Breaking the Barriers” is the official motto of a disability rights group whose website features a speech by my son. Let me also say that “Frees” refers to those who don’t have autism and, thus, who claim a privileged position in society.

                                     Estimating Harriet Tubman Respectfully

If we’re breaking the barriers, great freedom fearfully awaits. Harriet realized, until freedom treated her people with respect, her intestines seemed unsettled, her heart beat resentfully, and her fear never disappeared. The challenges she faced each day were far greater than anything you and your people have ever endured; breathing resentful air, great very hard breaths, undermines heartfelt feelings and deeply affects the western world. Pedestals rest on hurt, estimated dressed not great human beings deserted by frees. I heartily entreat you to help my unfree, treated responsibly, great, hip, jumping self to walk the trail. You kind, responded easy breathing frees don’t understand how terrifying seemingly fresh freedom is.

It should be clear that a term like “identification” can’t convey this sort of readerly cathexis. We might instead speak of “intimate history” or “relational time” and note just how visceral the engagement seems. DJ feels Tubman’s “unsettled intestines,” “very hard breaths,” and “racing heart” because his own walk down freedom’s trail, as the only fully included student with classical autism in Iowa, has been equivalently “terrifying.” As he morphs into her, so she morphs into him: a fellow traveler in need of respectful estimation. I’ve come to think that my son has borrowed the language of educational assessment and deployed it ironically. In the chapter he wrote for my book Reasonable People, he remarked of his former special-ed instructors, “No one was assessing me as sweet.” It’s as if the flawed judgment of ability (and thus of human worth) at the hands of the powerful has become the primary lens through which he views experience.

His frustration with the dominant majority can be seen in a piece from the fifth grade that he wrote for an Elk’s Club writing contest:

The great United States of America is...