See the Forest

Grandfather t. R. Mccravy was born in Tait County, Mississippi, in eighteen sixty six, and he grew up on a farm in really abject poverty, but had a mind for banking and was working in a small bank in Sanatobia, and there met Major Mill SAPs, who was a big philanthropist an entrepreneur in Jackson, and they hit it off real well, even though the major was thirty three years older than my granddaddy, and he made a proposition to him that if he would put up some of his

money that he had matched in several other business associates to form a bank in Forest, Mississippi, which my granddaddy jumped into opportunity, so it was incorporated down here in March of nineteen hundred. The Cravyes now that is Mary's side of the family, and Mary again is Donald Triplet's mother. Beamon Triplet Donald's dad, and of course Oliver. His dad also came from a prominent family. His father served as the mayor of Forrest from and Beamon Triplet Donald and

Oliver's dad became an immense presence in town. And it wasn't just that yea law school graduates were hard to find in small town Mississippi. He was one of those guys. I never saw a photo of him when he didn't have a tie, and he had a very Atticus Finch quality about him. I think that's said Salter. He's a journalist and a historian and actually kind of a local

legend himself. Don's father was one of the pillars of the community, a highly respected, very well educated, well traveled individual whose counsel outside of a legal representation, but whose counsel on many things was He was a longtime Sunday school teacher and had a great deal of knowledge of the Bible, which was respected. Beaman and Mary Triplet had money and they had tremendous influence around the town of Forest for more than fifty years. They were kind of

a fixture in the Scott County Times society pages. They held key leadership positions and things like the Rotary Club and the Girl Scouts and the Garden Club and the local Methodist Church, where they also both sang in the choir. They helped run the pta, the public library and the town legislative committee. Beamon traveled all around the South as

a delegate for the Mississippi State Bar. He was friendly with and respected by the mayor and the judges, and the police, and the local clergy and the publisher of the local newspaper. Pretty much everybody in town new and respected Beamon. Triplet. Here's Sid Salter again. In general society in America, people remember where they were when Kennedy was a Last nighted and nine eleven and all these things.

In this community, one of the flaminal events was when Mr Bayman was killed in a auto accident, because it was such a shock and such an impact on the community. So I think all of that kind of contributed to the fact that there was a protective failing for Don. But you know, your father's reputation only gets you so far. Forest was not actually the scene of much of the physical violence that Mississippi as a state became infamous for during the Civil Rights struggle, you know, the lynchings and

all of that. At the same time, it can't be entirely exonerated of its past as a place with separate water fountains and separate schools and certain assumptions about who counted and who didn't. And that's interesting because Donald came of age in an era when there was not a lot of tolerance for people who were different or who were judged to be in some way inferior. Of course, the most egregious example of that was the Jim Crow system that ruled the South during Donald's childhood there and

well into his adulthood. The whole discussion begs the question of had Don's family not had the bank if there had not been the respect for Mr William and Triplet that the community had, would Don's life have turned out the slime white? So it's also got to be said that one challenge Donald never faced as a person with autism was being a black person with autism. Because autism and race they have their own tangled history. For I

heard podcasts I'm John Dunbent and I'm Karen Zucker. This is Autism's First Child, and I heart original podcast episode four. See the Forest. Forest, Mississippi is located in the middle of the state. It's about forty five minutes east of Jackson, the capital. Here's it. Particularly in the forties and fifties, you had the burgeoning Mississippi poultry industry. The largest cash

crop in Mississippi is poultry and eggs. It gave rise to one point like five poultry processing companies and vertical integrators, and so you had this huge segment of people who worked in the poultry plants, either on the kill line or in cut up. But it's cold, difficult work, even with automation. So you had that. You had a clock factory, sunbeam clock factory here for a portion of that time. The building later was taken over by Hughes Aircraft and

now Raytheon. But it was a blue collar, pretty heavy agri business town. But let's back up for a moment to talk about how we met. Said so, after we confirmed that Donald was the child referred to as case number one in the early medical literature about autism, we reached out to Sid Palter because some of our research told us that he was a close friend of the family, and we had a long conversation with him. We asked if you'd introduce us to Donald, and said agreed, but

first said something quite revealing. He said, if we hurt Don in any way, he would make sure we'd pay for it. And you remember the email he wrote to us when we said we were going to treat Donald, Well, I've got it right here. He said, if you are not as good as your word, I will use every means available to me to expose that fact. And I will make it my mission in life to discredit what you're doing. Wow, and Sid wasn't the only person in Forest we heard that kind of thing from. Yeah, and

it came from a kind of love for Donald. Yeah, it was a desire to protect him. And yes, it was love and it was community white. I came to Forest in Night three as a very young publisher of the Scott County Times, the local newspaper. Don was by that time pretty well ensconced in his role at Bank of Forest, and as I came to know the town and the townspeople, Don was one of the characters that I met. Donald made a powerful impression on said he'd

never met anyone quite like him. Well, as a writer, I think what I see in Don is the absolute lack of nuance. Don experiences things at face value, and he doesn't appear to attempt to assign motives or to judge the depth of one's relationship. He just accepts things at face value. Both with his contributions to it and what he receives from others. And that is remarkable quality because I think all of us go through life, even with exchanges as benign as an encounter with a store clerk.

We all go, you know, and we think about am I being treated well? Am I not being treated well? Are they talking down to me? That didn't experience the world in that way? Said was just the starting point. In Forest, we met a community full of people who considered Donald a friend. Like Celeste Slay, you can't help but like him, love him. He grew up here, he went to school here. I mean, everybody loved him because he was special, because he was different. My wife was

in the hospital twice, two three times. One nurse was from Sebastopol, Mississippi, about twenty miles from Forest. I mentioned on, oh we know, we loved on. Another nurse was from Lake, miss All we loved on. He's a most famous personage. And he said, I've known him all my life and we're so proud to have him. That is Reverend Brister Ware, who has known Donald since they were in college together. Many of the people we met in Forest have known Donald for decades. Here is c. Leslie again, I don't

remember not knowing Don. He's always been a member of the Force Presbyterian Church, and so was I. I remember when I was little, he always gave the Sunday school report, and he would tell how many people came to Sunday school and how many people were in church, and he would tell how much offering was given it during the Sunday school hour. So I remember that as a child, he was just a permanent picture, you know, he was

just always around. We never thought he was unusual. I mean we we knew it was a little different for a man with autism. Life in a small community in Mississippi had a lot of advantages. It was predictable, it was tranquil, it was safe. Anyone living there could be confident that one day would be very much like the next. Everyone knew everyone else. After graduating high school in ninety three,

Donald packed his bags for East Central Community College. The school was about forty minutes from Forrest, and Don would not be the only new student from Forest going there. However, remember John Rushing, the teenage football star who looked after

Don in high school. We met him in the last episode. Well, he was headed to East Central and a football scholarship hero in his trying to protect him and the most tripping usually so he called me and was going off Google, which you already knew, and yes we would I like to ride up there with the year We glad to. So he took us up there. At some point you are specific to say I want you to do this. He should I know he will look out for Dawn.

I ward glad to do it. Don you followed me around if were We went on camp which hours that were fine with me, you know me. But Donald got along so well at East Central that, in fact, he never needed John's help. Donald really threw himself into the college experience. He joined a dozen clubs. He found a whole new community there. Once again, Donald's grades were mediocre and it took him three years to graduate instead of the two years it usually takes to finish junior college.

But he thive socially. In fact, we found an old news clipping from that shows donalds with a handful of other students the headline class favorites. A few months after he got his associate's degree in liberal Arts at the Central, Donald enrolled at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. Donald, as usual,

moved along at Millsaps College at his own pace. It took him three years to graduate instead of two, but he got his diploma, and he went back to Forest, moved back into his parents house, and took up residence in the same bedroom he grew up in. When we returned, Donald enters the workforce. It's not totally clear what role Donald's family connections might have played in his admissions to Millsap's College, since his family was so well connected there.

It is clear, however, that his name had everything to do with his getting and keeping a job after he graduated. Donald's family they had plenty of money. He didn't need to work, but he took a job at the bank in nine. That job was part of the life that Marion Beeman were determined Donald be able to live. He just brightens her day. I mean he comes to the bank every day at two o'clock, you know, makes his round.

He has a special name for everybody, minus Celeste, your celest He's always called me that Hey Shelby, Welby, Hey, not the cat Hey, rc hey kh Hey all right, Hey big Dabby, all right, good to see you too, Hey, Tricky Nick all right, Hey, Jan with a plan. Alright, I got somebody famine me this time. He's good at telling jokes, you know, he makes a little funny remarks. You say, Hey, selest, I don't care what Denise says about you. You know, I like you anyway. Hey, Denise Darling,

are you all right? You're all right, Denisia, I don't care what Jan said about you. Yeah, it had to be good. This, which Donald's family owned, was part of

the fabric of the community. In nineteen twenty seven, the greatest natural disaster yet to hit the United States happened in the Great Flood of seven, and within six months one fourth of all the land in Mississippi was sold for taxes, and so nineteen seven, the stock market crash in nineteen twenty nine, the beginning of the dust Bowl in nineteen thirty, all of these economic forces came about. The bank survived all of that and was an anchor

in the community. I think the combination of the bank of the respect that his family had earned went a long way toward the community realizing that here's this family with a great deal of stature in the community who have a son that's causing them a great deal of struggle,

and you don't keep secrets in small towns. There was general knowledge that they had gone to Baltimore and had sought extraordinary help for him, and in the initial stages it didn't appear to be going very well, and they were having to make hard decisions, and I think the

community respected that. I actually moved here in December of nineteen seventy nine, hired by Bill mccravy, who would have been Don's uncle, that would be Don's mother's brother, and actually hired to come in as chief executive officer at the time just you know, everybody falls in love with Don almost immediately. He's just such a genuine guy. And you know, the longer we were together, the more we understood each other and relate, And you know, he was always DT and I was always g W. You know,

that was basically it. That's Gene Walker. He was hired to run the Bank of Forest and at that time Don was happing out in bookkeeping, doing statements and collecting the mail and those type things. But that was my first association with Don. Donald's uncle, who of course was one of the bank's owners, had a special request for Gene early on. He kind of explained Don's situation, and he made the statement to me, Jean, I always will appreciate you if you'll have a place for Don, and

you know always did. And the customers accepted him, the community obviously accepted him, and just um he's I have always considered him an asset to the bank. So what that granted to Donald was a job he could never be fired from, a job for life. One of Donald's first jobs was as a teller, and when people came into the bank, he'd greet them by their account number. He'd say, Hi, three two one, your balance is four

d and seventy six dollars. So that job didn't really turn out that well, but the gift was that Donald was allowed to make mistakes until he found the job that was the right fit. And that goes a long way to really accommodating the challenges that a person's disability might present in the workplace. And being accommodated in the workplace is still really rare for people on the spectrum, but Donald shows us how good it can be for

everybody when the effort is made. He did his job at the bank, he found a whole new community there. They gave him friendship, and he gave it back. We talked with a lot of people who were in school with Donald back in the nineteen thirties and forties and fifties, all the way through to college, and the thing that everybody told us when we would ask stories about Donald, they would always say, you know, he's kind of a genius. And that was the idea that really stuck to Donald.

I think the mistake people mike when they first encounter Don is that there's some impairment of his intelligence. That's absolutely not the case. But in conversation, he's going to come at almost everything from the side. He doesn't discuss feelings, not gonna be a lot of eye contact. You get short snippets of very direct, sometimes brutally honest answers. But it's just how he processes information. We saw this happening in a conversation with Donald's one afternoon when Karen asked

him about his father's death. Do you remember remember the day that your dad was in the car accident? Yeah? Sure, that was in How was your m She was all right, she accepted that tragedy. Do you remember, Don, what your dad was like? Yeah, I's right, I remember, I totally was. She had white hair, was about five eight. What about your mom? She was two anchies shorter, two or three inches shorter. Her hair turn great too, just like Key.

Can you tell me anything else about her? No. One thing we always wondered about was far Ast being this really amazing exemplar of acceptance and tolerance during Donald's youth. Yet at the same time, in race terms, it practiced Jim Crow segregation. Sid told us a story about that, and I guess one story that best illustrates how ason civil rights transpired here. Probably the most famous African American citizen of Forest was a blues singer named Alfred Big

Boy Crudup. Just for the record, Big Boy cred Up recorded under a few different names. His given name was actually Arthur. There's a marker at that intersection now that outlines his life. But also very near that marker, Forest had a really nice city pool, and travelers would invariably

north southeast west they would see that beautiful pool. Probably the most pronounced demonstration of civil rights strife was the decision that the city made when Supreme Court decisions began to steer the use of public accommodations to open use and fairness to both races. Far Us did what a number of towns in Mississippi did. They simply got to back oh and filled in the pool. And so you went from having this nice pool that they would rather cover up and not have access to than to integrate

the use of the poop. How do we reconcile again, going back to Jim earlier, I reconcile, you know, lovely women that we've interviewed, seeing we were a small spe of town. We're just nice to each other. That's why we were nice to Donald. While at the same time the community had separate drinking counting's what's our way to drop that? Well, as I say, I grew up, you know, County Northeast, in Cheby County, which had some real racial atrocities. But I am of an age that I remember separate

drinking fountains, separate waiting rooms in the doctor's offices. I remember every my twin sister and I, every white kid would be seen by the doctor. Even if you had a SnO a full and you had an African American child that was sicker, there was still that pecking order. So yeah, with a story like that, we find this seeming anomaly of acceptance and intolerance side by side in this little community back in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties.

And yes, that tells us that things would have been very different for Donald's growing up there. Instead of being a white boy with autism, he had been a black boy with autism. Race has been tangled up with autism for a long time, and not just in Forest, and not just in Mississippi, and not just in the South. After the break, we'll hear how differently children of color with autism retreated compared with white children with autism, disparities

which continue today. A lot has changed since Donna was a child, but there's no doubt that a black kid with autism growing up when Donald was young would have had nothing like his advantages, especially when it came to getting diagnosed in the first place. And let's be very clear about this, it's not just the South. For black children,

getting diagnosed with autism has always been a challenge. When Karen and I started looking at old documentaries about autism from the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, we noticed that almost all of the kids in these movies were white.

And that's partly because for a long time psychiatry had this idea that autistic children were only born to parents who were highly educated, and that belief was seen to rule out the possibility of an autism diagnosis for black children because their parents didn't have access to higher education.

Total logical fallacy, but it ruled. I think something to be considered about Donald Triplett is that he's in a homogeneous space for him, not meaning that black people don't exist in the same town, but meaning that his social circle was predominantly and he came from a family of a certain class, which means that the family had means an access and power. That's Stephanie parks. She studies anthropology

and teaches it to undergraduates. We can never talk about race without class, and for Donald Triplett, that meant that his parents were able to shape a group of people by saying, look at our very wealthy, powerful family, who is doing whiteness extremely well, and we accept this child as he's perfectly beautifully made. We were surprised to learn that she talks about Donald in her lectures using the stories we've written about him. Stephanie, we want to note

is African American. Now, a lot of this is personal for Stephanie, and the story she tells her personal experience is how hard it was to get her concerns about her son listened to. So we always have to be careful about generalizing from any one person's experience. But what Stephanie was encountering fit a pattern that held for decades, where it was far more difficult for black and Latino children in the US to get a diagnosis of autism

than it was for white children. Very recently, as in within the last year, that gap closed dramatically, and eventually Stephanie's son, del did get a diagnosis when he was three, but she kept going with her work trying to understand what's been driving this disparity. My academic work stems directly from my own experience being a mother of a child

with autism. I used to sit in our clinic during my son's therapies and wonder why we were one of the only black families there, and that started a question that necessitated answers for me, and that meant taking my degree all the way to u c l A To get a PhD to answer it. I have always been interested in language and how we think about the world,

but once my child was diagnosed. I started to understand that there were things happening in the clinic that seemed outside of our cultural norms as Black Americans, and that kind of set me on my path to think about how do clinics and hospitals function in a way that creates health care disparities. Is that about Black Americans cultural ideas about medicine, or is that about the way in which biomedical clinics themselves work. There's a little bit of

push and pull. I would say that a lot of the healthcare inequity is based on race and racism within biomedicine. And when Black American families have experienced this since the beginning of our time here on this continent, it also means that we have our own ideologies that exist as well about our safety and our well being in those spaces. And I knew entering into medical space that those would

be very, very important. But when I began on my research, I was thoroughly shocked by how incredibly insidious racism is in these situations. I asked Stephanie about some of the situations she's referring to, and she said that in many instances, they're not necessarily overt what are some of the examples of things that you saw. I was watching a clinic in a major metropolitan area, and I think that's important because we often stereotype these areas as being more diverse.

But in this particular observation, I watched several families go through an autism diagnostic process and one of the black parents was asked about disciplinary practices. She explained to the clinician how her child was doing things that had scared her. He would get a weapon so he would understand not to do them again, And the clinicians became very concerned and decided that this parents response was concerning and they

wanted to call Child protect of Services. But the next appointment, we had a white family come in and the child expressed having been hit by their parents in response to being naughty. In the situation of the white family, the clinicians framed her as being emotionally unavailable and needed help

with resources such as respite care. You know, somebody to come in and give her a break and take care of the child while mom caught a break and refreshed herself the child, the white child using the words panking, the black mother using the word whoopen. There are two similar words, but ideologies about race, how we understand how

people talk right makes a difference. And white clinicians looking at a black mother using the word whoopen necessitates a call to child protective services, but a child white child

expressing having been spanked does not. And that's a problem. Literally, back to back, back to back APPOINTMENTSIA, So that was one appoint It got to a point where Stephanie was seeing a therapist right after these sessions just so she could leave her fear and frustration in a safe place, because I couldn't take that home and then be an effective parent. I saw too much and it was really it scared me to my core when I saw it.

Stephanie shared a particularly powerful story about an experience she had with her son del my son was modeling an autism diagnostic process for a group of graduate students that I happened to be a part of, and the clinician happened to ask him what he liked, and my son responded by saying, I like big butts and I cannot lie, which is if you're unfamiliar or a popular rap lyric that every eleven year old in the country probably knows and laughs at well, the clinician laughed, and they went

on into the room. And once they got into the room, the clinician began reading a story. And if you're familiar with this particular test, there's a book that they bring out that has no words. The idea is that the clinician and the child being assessed are supposed to go through the pages and create a story together. And in the book, the sun is setting, and the clinician says the sun is setting, and my son sings, yes, it's going down for real, which is another popular lyric, especially

at that point in time. But the clinician finally does something that's quite interesting. He code switches into black language and says, oh, I'm the best hip hop dancer ever dropped the mic and Dell just looks at him like he's a little funny. I know. His intention was to try and build a bridge between him and Dell in any way possible, to be able to gain access, to

make del comfortable and to have a conversation. Right. And when we get to scoring the actual test, the clinician references the fact that Dell has used these rap lyrics and he calls them inappropriate, disruptive, and ecolec and ecolelic being a feature of autism that some people have where they echo back certain things, and it's true that happens. But if the clinician new Black culture better, he would have identified this as kind of one of our linguistic

ways of being. So for us, what del was doing looked wonderful, like he was being culturally appropriate, which is what we want for him. But for the clinician, what it translated to was a different autism score. Not problematic for Dell in particular given the way autism affects him, but for Black kids in particular, who bear the brunt of this massive autism inequity that we're facing, that kind of scoring process leads to something that could turn out to look like, oh, he has a d h D

or another disorder that's not autism. Clinical diagnosis is important not only in understanding how to approach the treatment and service as a child will receive, but without it, a child with autism will not have access to the many resources that are critical for them to be successful in the world. When kids are miss or underdiagnosed, and black kids significantly more misdiagnosed, meaning a label that precludes them

from getting access to services medical or educational. Black children make up I believe of our special education students, we don't make up of the population. So what I'm telling you we are missing underdiagnosed. We are also overdiagnosed with things like learning disability and then placed into special education when instead maybe it's not learning disability, maybe it is autism, and maybe they need different supports to help them succeed

in these spaces. Right, a correct diagnosis has the potential to completely change the outcome of a person's life. But for a correct diagnosis, the trajectory of a child changes immediately once you're placed in a classroom with your typically developing peers, in a community of support, surrounded by the correct services. And what you found is that the experience that black families have in a clinical setting isn't necessarily

dependent on socioeconomic factors either. Okay, So in my particular study, I'm an anthropologist, and I study quite small, and so my master's degree work is a collection about twenty families. They all have a bachelor's degree or above. They are all two parent households with the exception of one. They

are many military families. They basically meet all of the things that Black people have been told that if you do these things, you will have access to the American pie and the American dream will be yours to write. They've done everything they can to get there, their kids were still misdiagnosed, and one of the things that I

aimed to challenge was this idea of just class. And so for my work, what I have found is that family's biggest identifier for if they're going to have trouble in a clinic, if they're going to fall into inequity, is if they show up in their black If you are a black person and you walk into a hospital, that's it. It doesn't matter how beautifully you think you speak English, or what degree you have, or how much money you have, how nice your home is, nothing matters.

At this point, Stephanie says, what they're encountering systemic racism. They encounter racism pure and simple. And again this we have to start thinking about racism quite differently. I know that we often think about racism in really big ways, like we think about it in terms of like you

know again, like the KKK or these big stereotypes. But the truth is that racism is incredibly powerful because it exists in these tiny, tiny space, and these families are encountering this, and while a significant number of the clinicians doing the assessments and diagnoses are white, Stephanie feels there's more to it. Stephanie says, the inherent biases that come with the experiences she's describing aren't always so obvious in the way that many people might think about racist behavior.

I would also say that I have never walked into a clinic or watched a family get treatment, or made an observation where I saw a clinician do anything other than the moral appropriate what they believe to be the moral appropriate thing. But we do have to work incredibly hard about pulling apart race in these spaces, and that's going to take a lot of work and a lot

of reflectivity on part of the clinician. You know, of course, none of this relates to the life that Donald lived, and that's that's sort of the point of telling this story. And we have found when we speak with people who know a lot about autism, a lot about its history, about diagnoses, about the science behind it, that the reality that Stephanie's talking about it still comes as a surprise to them. On the next episode of Autism's First Child,

Donald Triplett travels the world. If you're enjoying Autism's First Child, help us spread the word with the rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Autism's First Child. It's a production of School of Humans and I Heart Podcasts based on our book and our documentary film. In a different key, I'm John don Vent, I'm Karen Zucker. The podcast is produced by Alexander Ritchie, written by Alex French, senior staff writer at I Heeart Originals. Story editor is

Matt Riddle. Editing an Assembly by Kareem ben Yago. Original score composed and mixed by Alice McCoy, Scoring, mixing and mastering by Ryan Peoples. Special thanks to Sid Salter, cir Less Slay, Reverend Rister Ware, Gene Walker, Stephanie Parks and all the people of Forest, and to Ray Connley, Ernie Injurdout, and Will Pearson. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, Elsie Crowley, and Jason English. School of Humans