For the first 28 years of my life my mother worked at a home for the intellectually and developmentally disabled known locally as “The Hill” or “The Children’s Colony.” Some people still called it “The Sanatorium” because when the first buildings went up in 1910 they housed tuberculosis patients. For 60 years the gates were locked, and tens of thousands of TB patients suffered and died there. The mortality rate was around 30%, until drugs and vaccines began to do their work in the 1950s.
By 1972, the year I was born and the year my mother started working there, a few months after she had me, The Hill was two dozen or more ancient limestone and granite buildings atop Potts Hill, two miles south of our small Arkansas town. Most of the buildings were no longer in use. Its history is long and varied, as is the history of tuberculosis, which killed 1 out of every 7 human beings on earth before the bacteria that causes it was discovered in 1882, and the European sanatorium movement began, then spread to the United States.
In 1979 my parents got divorced, and in 1980 my mother, brother and I moved into a rental house owned by The Hill, maintained for the people who worked there. In the mornings we walked across the grounds, past Dorms One and Two, and stood outside The Nyberg Building to catch the school bus. Dorms One and Two housed the intellectually disabled residents of The Hill. The Nyberg was the old tuberculosis hospital. It was 5 stories tall and an 1/10 mile long, with over 500 rooms. In 1941, when construction began on the Nyberg, it was to be the leading TB hospital in the world.
There were over a hundred residents at The Hill in 1980. I knew many of them: Derrick Stegan, Big Jim Brantley, Damon whose last name I can’t quite remember. On the way to the bus my brother and I waved to them standing and smoking outside Dorm One in the morning, and they waved back. Derrick, who had a habit of wearing his pants pulled ridiculously high, stopped us to talk each morning. He told us our mother’s name was Sandra. He said he loved her very much.
I don’t know what Derrick’s diagnosis was, whether Fetal-Alchol syndrome or Klinefelter syndrome or congenital hypothyroidism. I knew it wasn’t Down syndrome, because there were other residents with Down, and I knew the signs. Big Jim Brantley scared me as a child, but he was a gentle giant who waved and smiled when my brother and I went by, and Damon whose last name I can’t remember liked to shoot baskets at the small court beside his dorm, as did Chris, the first Black man I ever met, who had a sweet set shot from the corner, and sometimes rebounded for me so I could shoot, chasing the ball down and passing it to me over and over, nodding when I nailed one from past the 3-point line.
When we weren’t in school, my brother and I played with the other children who lived in the other rental houses. We walked through the woods to the creek, where we found the original well that gave water to the sanatorium in 1911. It’s still there—you can see it in the fall from the road that winds up the hill. Little catfish swim in the deep hole beneath a hand-made dam.
In winter we sledded down the steep hills, winding through the pines that were planted in the 19-teens because the smell was thought to be an expedient for cure. We biked up and down and all around.
We also swam in the pool with the residents. Big Jim wouldn’t swim, but Derrick and Damon did, and Big Jim watched sometimes from outside the chain-link fence. Damon was strong, and sometimes—with my permission and encouragement—would toss me high in the air. I’m smiling as I write that, just before I start crying here in a few paragraphs.
The first day my brother and I rode the bus—the first day of school in 3rd or 4th grade, whatever year it was we lived there, which more and more seems like someone else’s life—a kid from town called the residents retards. I say “from town” to mean “did not live in the rental houses maintained by The Hill,” because that meant something. There was a stigma associated with us kids who lived at The Hill. They called the residents retards and they called us retards for living among them, as if you can catch it.
The kid who said it was Ricky, or so I’ll call him here. He lived past The Hill, therefore not on the grounds. Ricky’s dad had run away long ago and his mom kept her head mostly in a bottle, which made Ricky angry. It was the first day of school and on the way home, as the bus pulled past the gate and into the institute, Ricky sighed loudly and stage-whispered “Look at the fucking retards.”
But let me pause for a moment to make sure I am not making an amateur memoirist mistake. Something JD Vance might do, for example.
When I say there was a stigma attached to us, I do not mean everyone attached it. Nor did they even attach it all the time. For the most part I am talking about good Southern people who, mostly, try to leave other people alone. Mind yer own business, and all that.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an ugly streak in people. Get in an argument with another kid over something stupid and he might call you a retard. Or ask how the retards were doing. Or if your mother (my mother) worked there because she loved the retards so much. (Is your dad a retard? Is that why you live there alone with your mom?)
Every Friday night the overseers of The Hill brought a busload of residents to the local movie theater. Once I saw a kid my age get in line behind the residents and pretend to be disabled as well. He stood behind Derrick Stegan or Big Jim Brantley and scrunched up his face and started slapping himself in the chest because the residents got in for free, and he wanted some of that sweet action.
In the balcony kids dropped popcorn on the residents’ heads. They dropped popcorn on smaller kids’ heads too, and if there was collateral damage to the elderly couple sitting close, so be it.
At school we heard the word retard a lot. This was a Christian town, as is most of America, but the jokes we told in the locker room weren’t about Jesus, or any of his disciples, unless they were banging each other.
There was a lot of bullying in the locker rooms as well. Snapped towels. Icy-hot in the jockstrap. Often fistfights broke out, because we were adolescents with a lot of uncertainty, a lot of fear that came out as bravado, a lot of anger that came out as anger. Our parents didn’t have much money. In the Cold War atmosphere of the early 80s we were afraid of the Soviet Union, which, maybe, made us afraid of everything, and every nerdy 80s kid knows what Yoda said about fear, and anger, and the dark side.
On the way to school the kids who sat in the back of the bus often bullied the younger kids, who sat close and tried to suck up their coolness. They turned their class rings downward and thumped us on the back of the head. They bragged of their recent sexual conquests or alcoholic parties or marijuana cigarettes. Some of them had angry fathers or stepfathers at home and some of them had angry mothers or stepmothers and some of them were just angry in the way some people just seem to be, angry and bitter and confused that life hadn’t turned out the way they wanted it to.
When I saw Gus Walz standing on the stage and crying for his father at the Democratic National Convention, I realized how much of my childhood was directed by men with anger in their hearts. With some deep and unfathomable anger that makes them lash out at everything. Who like to bully others on the bus. Who make fun of disabilities instead of seeing the incredible strength and resolve those with disabilities have. How much we can learn from them. How much kinder we can be.
On social media Ann Coulter wrote “weird” to describe the outpouring of emotion Gus Walz, who has a learning disability, felt for his father. Right-wing men mocked his tears. They called him pussy. Faggot. Queer.
But—and this a big but, because I’m not sure how much hope I even have for humanity at this point—their response was a brief outcry. A single little shit-stained shout against a greater tide of love. Coulter took her mean tweet down. Others apologized. One person apologized after losing her job, but still.
And the day Ricky said what he said a kid I’ll call Terry slapped him in the back of the head. He must have turned his class ring downward, because we all heard the thump. We also saw Ricky’s head bounce against the window, and for the rest of the ride he sat quietly looking out at anything except Terry, rubbing his head and wishing, perhaps, that he had been a little kinder, a little more careful about what ugly words he let out of his mouth.
Maybe, in that moment, he understood empathy.
And while I spend a lot of time these days convincing myself that kindness is the only thing that will save us, along with the realization that a rising tide lifts all boats, or buses, no matter who’s sitting in the back seat, I’m also keeping my mind open to the possibility that there’s more than one way to learn a lesson.
I’m keeping my slapping hand ready.
Beautiful post. I was friendly with the developmentally disabled kids at my school, and in high school I volunteered at the Special Young Adults. It’s always been an ugly word, with its roots in eugenics, often given a pass by schools because at least it’s not racist. And I’m afraid that Terry’s method is all that works with bullies, that and ridicule (which is working well against the Weirdo and his Toady, which is why they are so desperate to try to flip it back against the people who are FINALLY fighting back after 16 years of his crap.) These men who are afraid to express any emotion except anger are the weird ones, not Gus Walz and his father. And we need to keep saying so until everyone gets it.
Paul, I never gave the "r" word much thought until my daughter Sarah was born with a rare craniofacial condition. That's when I realized how awful it was.
I never spoke the word even before Sarah came along, and hearing others - especially in middle and high school use it to mean something was undesirable or irritating - made me cringe.
But now I am intentional about calling out those who sling it around without thought, as if it's funny or acceptable just because it's considered slang to some.
Words matter. What we select, and how we opt to speak or write, has incredible power. It's humbling to me as a writer every time I sit down to put thoughts on the screen or paper. It's a responsibility to all of us, I believe, to change the linguistic landscape by modeling kindness in what we deliver through our words.
All that to say, thank you for this thoughtful essay. I am grateful to be sharing this space on Substack with other considerate writers like you.