from the Caregiver Chronicles
The Battle of Klan Kountry
Race and Autism in the American South
For my dad, house-proud car lover, it was the trailers with trash and broken-down cars out front. For my sister, CEO of a domestic violence shelter, it was the “Do Not Trespass” sign adorned with the image of an assault rifle. For me, freelance musician, writer, and adjunct college professor having recently returned to this red state from blue or at least purple states, it was the house with the Confederate Battle flag flying out front. All votes were nay, with my brother-in-law raised in Philly and nervous in the rural South, casting the confirming vote, like the president of the Senate going on record even though the vote was won in a landslide.
On a sunny Saturday in January, we’d swung along twisty windy roads in Trousdale County, a tiny little area east of nowhere. Named after a former Tennessee governor and Confederate general, it has only one town.
Even if you live in Tennessee, you’ve probably never heard of it unless you keep up with the weather. Every tornado season, Trousdale County, the smallest in the state, is in the news because several of its trailers get blown away somewhere to the far right of Oz. That alone had caused my dad and sister pause, since they keep up with such things. I hadn’t lived in Tennessee in decades, and had put it in my rearview mirror all that time, so I barely even remembered the county where I was raised.
Anyway, we had driven to the back of beyond because the white married couple that cares for our brothers, adult autistic twins, wanted to build a prefab house there. Prefab they said; double-wide, my sister suspected. They would do it with money they earned caring for our brothers, so they needed our consent for the move. Curiously, they had signed papers on the property before obtaining said consent. What could possibly go wrong with moving two autistic black men with sometimes strange behaviors into the backwoods of Tennessee? What could possibly happen if they were living among the demographic Trae Crowder, part of the comedy crew known as the Liberal Rednecks, called “Trailer Americans”?
I’d had to fight my dad about going to see the property because, at age 92 with our mother, his bride of nearly 70 years, dead less than six months ago, he behaved as if his house was coupled to him with an ankle monitor. He didn’t want to go anywhere. Not anywhere. Not anytime. At all. But our weekend caregiver, vaccinated, but apparently not boosted (a tale for another day) got Covid in Alabama among her relatives, so she wasn’t safe to return to work yet. And the trip to and back from Trousdale was a good three hours, not to mention the time spent there. I couldn’t leave him alone that long. He’d had a minor fall recently, even using his walker, so I just couldn’t.
His male career-military ego convinced him that he could take care of himself. So, I went with that and appealed to his ego, saying we really needed his opinion. He agreed to go. Manipulative? Just a tad. After all, my sister and I are our brothers’ legal conservators, their authorized representatives, so we can make any decision, but we still don’t want dad worrying about his only sons.
Of course, we had to stop every 45 minutes because of his bladder issues coupled with his leaving-the-house issues. I had to get out each time to get his walker out of the car, to locate the restroom, and to keep his dangerously diabetic hands off the sweets. In one hot-stop mini-mart, I saw him slip a little sleeve of cookies to the cashier, but he didn’t notice me standing near the ATM machine; I didn’t say anything. Those cookies weren’t too bad for his diabetes, which was under control due to my watchdog bad-cop strategies. But his sugar-is-crack addiction wouldn’t let him leave well enough alone.
After grabbing the vanilla sandwich cookies, he hobbled toward the fresh-baked pastry counter. A well-meaning employee tried to help him with the chocolate donuts smothered in sugar-glaze. That’s when I stepped in. He got the cookies, but not the donuts.
And the kind employee in her uniform-blue clerk’s vest tapped his hand like an elementary school teacher, drawling, “You’ve been bad!” which made him chuckle. “Don’t let your parents get old,” I whispered to two young guys in line to buy Bud Lite, which made them chuckle.
Finally, we get there. Terra incognita aka boondocks, or as my sister says more colloquially, “boondocky.”
So here we are, my sister and her husband in their shiny black Mercedes and my father and me in his nearly shiny black Toyota Avalon. We’ve bumped along the graveled, but unpaved road on sycamore-free Sycamore Lane and now stop to stare at dug-up ground in the Tennessee outback. The rolling hills that are lovely in most of Middle Tennessee seem ominous here, a tree-cleared wasteland. Maybe it’s the silence. Without trees, the birds don’t come. Without the birds, the day is not brightened by their chatter. Rather than get out of the cars, we lock our doors and communicate via cellphone. I have only one word to say. “No.” The caregivers could move anywhere they wanted, but they are not taking our brothers to Klan Central.
Just as we’re ready to leave, a white guy drives up. I briefly wonder if there’s a nearby casting call for a Deliverance remake. He’d have a lock on a part — dusty gray mullet atop a dingy worn-out face in a broken-down pickup truck. Stopping his mud-spattered wreck by my brother-in-law’s pristine sedan, he grimaces and drawls, “What y’all doin’ outchea?”*
*translation: “What are all of you doing out here?”
My brother-in-law, the doctor, smiles that engaging smile, the one that uses the lifelong skills any smart black man develops not long after he begins to walk. My sister, a fast-thinking attorney, leans across her husband and lies through her law-degreed teeth: “We’re having some construction people come out here and thought we’d check out the site real quick.” She adds the colloquial “real quick” and amplifies her accent because too much education in us “coloreds” upsets the good ol’ boys.
“Ohhhh,” relaxed mullet man, easily believing that well-dressed, well-spoken black people in a Mercedes were construction managers. I guess it could happen. But followed by a middle-aged woman and elderly man in a Toyota? Not likely.
So he puts his truck in gear and, taking my bro-in-law’s lead, I smile big, adding a perky little wave. He drives off. We take a couple of healing breaths and head in the opposite direction. Back toward the Confederate flag, the trash-fronted double-wides, the assault-rifle graphics, and the hourly stops for my dad’s bladder.
And they want to move my brothers here? Sometimes when people do crazy shit, my mind goes blank. It was officially blank. Tabula rasa. Nulla rasa. Never has been a rasa. But this wouldn’t be the worse part.
We still have to tell the white caregivers, Johnny and Sally, that their Green Acres dream is not to be. Johnny is from Oregon; Sally is from Texas. Both had been living in Tennessee for at least a decade. Neither really gets the race thing.
They suggest meeting at the property to talk, but we demur, preferring their nice brick house with the swimming pool in the nice tree-strewn middle class neighborhood in Lebanon, an actual city, where they’d been living since they’d been caring for our brothers. It’ll be more comfortable chatting indoors, my diplomatic sister says. She’s got skills from living all this time in the South. I’m more direct. Having lived in New York and Boston, my spiritual homes, I just want to roll in, say “Klansville is a no-go,” and move on. Finding new caregivers would be a hassle, but such is life.
“We won’t have to do that,” my sister had told me earlier as we strategized. “Johnny wants that money too much. We’re the only game in town. And he’s lazy. Since Miss Mary died, he doesn’t have to lift her and the chair, bathe her, help feed her. R&D are easy. They’re healthy, don’t need help with bathing and dressing, and they even help with housecleaning. All they need is meals and meds and some outside activities, like that line dancing class and church. Sally does all the work now. You’ll see. Johnny will ditch the property before he ditches the cash.”
I want to believe her, but my sister seems to think everyone is as motivated by money as she is.
“But what about Sally?” I ask. “She really cares about them and really wants her own home.”
This is an ongoing issue. Feisty little five-foot Sally is one of those holy folks with convenient morals. We’d thought she and Johnny were married when they took over our brothers’ care as my parents were approaching their late eighties. But it turns out they were “shackin’ up” as my sister crudely called it, before his divorce was finalized. She was already divorced. In his divorce, Johnny got the house and they’d been living there ever since. But after six years, Sally suddenly decides she can’t live in his wife’s house any longer.
So, on yet another sunny Saturday, my sister and I converge on the nice little city of Lebanon. She rolls up in her gleaming onyx-black BMW two-seater (black is the family car color of choice). At the same time I’m parking my lipstick red VW 5-speed.
“Let’s keep it simple,” she says, “I’ll take the lead.”
Although I’m the elder of us, there’s a reason she’s called “Chief” in the family. I know that she knows I get the last word, but at the moment, I don’t really care. I just want to get it over with, so I agree: “No problem.”
After a quick trip to the bathroom, I’m ready. We gather in the spacious living room where Johnny has the TV on the golfing channel. He doesn’t bother to turn it off until Sally suggests it and even then he keeps in on, but mutes it. Hmmm. Bad sign.
My brothers are sitting on one of the two sofas in the room. Sally, with her intermittent back issues, sits her 5' frame in an upright wooden chair. Separated from her by a side table to hold his Diet Coke, Johnny, whose hair seems to be getting stringier and more mullet-y as time goes on, sits in the most comfortable easy chair. My sister sits on the other sofa facing my brothers as I sit beside my brother, Donald. Younger than his twin by about six minutes, he’s the one who is most likely to be upset by any major change, so I gently stroke his hand to keep him calm.
Usually, I would sit between them, but sister instinct tells me to focus on Donald. Turns out, this was a blessing, because Sally has convinced them that they are moving on a specific date, the anniversary of the March 31 they had come to live in Lebanon. Once a specific date or time is set, it is a major hassle to reorient autistic people like my brothers. Jackie Schuld’s Medium article on “decision fatigue” provides some insight into the autistic mind and the issue of deadlines.
My sister kindly tells the couple that the move won’t work. She sympathizes with their dream and lets them know she understands. Though it appears that her empathy is on overdrive, I remember her Northwest High School days in speech and drama competitions: “I know that sometimes,” she emotes, “sometimes a dream is so powerful it gets ahead of reality.” She shares a time when she wanted something that was not to be. It was at this point that the powers of the ancestors granted me a temporary superpower allowing me to keep my eyes from rolling. I can think of few things my highly determined sister has wanted that she hasn’t achieved.
Then the real battle begins. Sally eyes begin to tear up, talking about her dream and how that dream included our brothers. Johnny throws out the first volley in the full-scale attack he will later launch, asking what our specific objections are. I’m tempted to stop this right now.
First, what I call the “terrible tears” a formidable white-girl weapon doesn’t work on me. I’ve taught college kids for too long. Sally already signed papers for the property before getting our consent. And as for Johnny, he’s blowing poison darts at people with nukes. Without our money, he can’t move. Periodt, as Tyler Perry’s Madea would say. But my sister is still trying the good-cop motif.
“Well,” she begins to enumerate our objections, “the tornados, the remoteness from health services,” but seeing the resistance in Johnny’s expression and disbelief in Sally’s, she digs deeper, “a sign with an assault rifle on it…”
“The house flying the Confederate flag,” I insert, “which is a red flag to any African American…”
“The person who stopped to ask us what we were doing there,” my sister said as she tagged back into the match.
“And he didn’t ask in the mode of ‘Can I help you find something’ but more like ‘What the hell are y’all doing here’,” I added. Our tag team game is strong.
Johnny, used to getting his way, says the neighbor was just protective and that’s a good thing.
“But,” my sister explains, “you would see him that way because he looks at you and sees someone acceptable, what happens if my husband and my son visit?”
Johnny then reveals his frustration, suggesting that we’re small-minded bigots. He clearly equates his baseless initial fears of driving into my parents’ mostly black middle class neighborhood with our concerns about Confederate flags in the back of beyond.
His wild suggestions that we aren’t used to rural areas and that we aren’t used to being in mostly white environments clarified another point. He sees any black neighborhood as a ghetto regardless of social class. And it’s obvious he doesn’t know that our father came from sharecroppers who picked extra cotton in the summers to help one of their siblings go to college and our mother was raised on a farm they owned.
In the near decade he’d known us, he’d seen the diplomas on the walls of our family home, but never processed the fact that both our parents were grad school alums, where neither he nor his parents had gone to college. Likewise, despite diplomas left, right, and center with us in graduate robes all over the place, he blocked out the fact that both my sister and I had gone to schools that were overwhelmingly white. And even though he’d been in her neighborhood to drop off my brothers for holidays, he somehow refused to accept that my sister lived in a mostly white neighborhood. But the pièce de resistance is that we were letting them, a white couple, care for our brothers when we had other options.
Rational thinking not being his strong suit, Johnny then pushed the story that we’re being unfair. Had we been willing to meet at the property he could have shown us its merits.
By this point, my sister reaches the place I had been when we walked in the door fifteen minutes ago. “You can sell a lot of things, Johnny, but you can’t sell us that.” I cut to the chase.
“They’re not moving there.”
That simple declarative statement stops their chatter in its tracks.
My sister reaches over Johnny to hand Sally a tissue as she begins to sob, “But my dream includes them, I’m their mama.” At this point we freeze.
Our mother is dead only six months, the pain is still sharp. My eyes launch a missile at her, as I keep stroking Donald’s hand. She quickly retreats into “I’m like a mama to them.” Not good enough.
My sister tags in and says, “You can move wherever you want, but you’re not taking them there.”
Johnny, shocked that two women, two black women, are not giving into him, keeps trying until I launch a missile at him, with not just eyes, but words, formal words, the kind I use when I’m really pissed.
Your fear of driving into my parents’ neighborhood is irrational. There has never been a sign, symbol, or interaction that threatened you there. I have traveled alone in various parts of the world and have returned safely each time because I trust my instincts about danger. We’re not nervous nellies. Our reactions are based on actual facts, personal experience, and historical realities. We don’t expect you to share our experiences because yours, which are valid, are different and there’s nothing wrong with that. But whether or not you understand our concerns is irrelevant. Our brothers are NOT moving there. Please be clear on that.
He realizes that the battle is lost, he can’t compete with our firepower so he tries to negotiate a treaty to keep what he had before, custody of our brothers.
But then Donald begins to understand that the date Sally has given him, March 31 would not be the day they move. He begins to become agitated. While so many things remain unclear to Johnny, it’s clear to me that Sally has indoctrinated our brothers with that date, thinking we would never upset them with a change. But I have worked with my brothers throughout their lives.
To Donald, I say, “Donald, you’re not moving to Castilian Springs.” To Sally I amass what kindness I have left — after all, I do believe she cares for them — and say,
Sally, I will tell you what I had to tell our mother. I told her that many autistic individuals can’t adjust to change but it is because of how you’ve raised them that they can. I told her this when they moved here. And I will tell you that because of your contribution to their well-being, they can adjust to any change that may need to be made, including new caregivers. We don’t want to make that change, but we will if we have to, and they will adjust, in part because of all you’ve done for them. But after all, we are their conservators and their safety and well-being is ultimately in our hands.
And that’s how it ends. With our bangs, and their whimpers. Sally and Johnny begin to discuss the possibility of a new house in Lebanon. My sister and I hug our brothers and say we’d see them “soon.” We had learned long ago not to put specific dates on things unless they were bulletproof. Then we adjust our coats and leave.
“Do you want to find somewhere to debrief?” my sister asks (we were army brats).
“Yes, somewhere nearby.”
We find a Ruby Tuesday’s and since it’s mid-afternoon when we don our masks and walk in, there are few customers, so we can eat inside without Covid fears, though we both agree, we’ll avoid the open salad bar. We get a booth, order berry sangria, and relax. One more battle fought and won.
