Donald Triplett was 89 when he died, and for most of his life he was anonymous outside the small town of Forest, Mississippi. But when he was laid to rest this week, the news of his death traveled around the world.
In 1943, he was the boy identified only as “Case 1, Donald T” in the set of case histories that formed the foundation for the diagnosis of autism. He was, effectively, the first child diagnosed with autism.
We first wrote about Donald in The Atlantic in 2010 and explored his story in depth in our book and recent PBS documentary, both called In a Different Key. Readers were surprised to learn that the diagnosis was so new—and we were surprised to find how inspiring his story proved.
Many people on the autism spectrum still struggle to belong—in all senses of the word. To be sure, society has come a long way this century regarding awareness. No longer are parents misheard as having said their child is “artistic” and getting congratulated for it, which used to be common. But in important ways, the non-autistic majority still doesn’t seem to get how to make room for autistic difference.
It’s not just the big systemic stuff, such as lack of housing options, inadequate social services, and high unemployment among the neurodiverse. And it’s not just police misunderstanding autistic behaviors as suspicious (leading to unnecessary altercations), or the long legacy of racism in diagnosis (which has led to misdiagnosis for children of color).
It’s the fact that being different so often leads to being lonely—a result that plays out within day-to-day interactions between autistic and non-autistic people. By definition, that covers all of us: neighbors, work colleagues, classmates, and strangers at ball games, restaurants, or the beach. Being bullied for being different is obviously bad. It’s not nice to be called “weird.” But it’s also alienating to be seen first and foremost as “fascinating,” even if the term is intended to be positive. What pushes autistic people apart from everyone else is that their differences tend to be seen as so very different as a matter of unconscious routine.
No one wants to be seen that way, but it happens to autistic people all the time. Stressing their differences, however, obscures the ways in which they’re also perfectly ordinary.
One British newspaper this week made a point of labeling Donald a “savant,” because he was pretty good at doing arithmetic without a calculator. No harm was intended, but Donald was so much more than a party trick.
The people he lived among all his life knew that. They, along with Donald, were the inspiring surprise we discovered when we set out to learn how his life had turned out. Back in the 1930s, his well-to-do parents initially buckled under the pressure of doctors and placed him in an institution, following the advice typically given to families of a certain class when a child appeared too inconveniently different. But then Donald’s parents rebelled and brought him home, sending a message to the people of Forest that, as far as they were concerned, he belonged there.
The message took. By the time we first met Donald, his generational peers and those who followed had all experienced a lifetime of knowing that Donald was different without thinking that it was a big deal. He was as welcome anywhere as anyone else in the community. Any club, any sort of celebration, any community gathering—he had an invitation and a good seat. He was blessed with friends, whose explanation for their fondness or love for Donald was always, simply, that he was a great guy. The entire town, in fact, was unaware that he had an autism diagnosis until we first brought that news in 2007. After that, the community became extra proud of the minor celebrity in its midst.
His friends and neighbors weren’t oblivious to his differences. They saw them, and they simply rolled with them. They could josh about them with Donald in a way he was comfortable with, teasing him about his habit of walking around town shooting rubber bands at people. His response: to keep shooting rubber bands. In his way, he was kidding them too.
They did make one concession, however, to the reality that autism could also disadvantage him. They saw themselves as his shield. Donald was probably too trusting of strangers, and therefore vulnerable to being manipulated or deceived. But he had a community of protectors ready to stand between him and any outsiders who came into his life. That included us the first time we showed up in Forest. We received more than one warning that we were on probation in our efforts to get to know Donald. We were told we’d better be careful, or the people of Forest would make sure we’d regret it. Not only did we take the warning to heart; we built out of it our understanding of what it looks like when the guy who is different really gets to belong.
Donald’s story traveled beyond Forest during the last years of his life because it showed that communities can learn to do it right, giving hope to autistic individuals and their families. It demonstrated that being accepting of someone who is different is not, after all, that hard to do. It made all the difference in the life of autism’s “first child” for almost 90 years.