In 1851, Dr. Samuel Cartwright called it drapetomania:
It creates within the Negro an uncontrollable desire to escape. It is a disease firmly bound to freedom.
My mind sets sail toward Levi.
Ten years ago, the neurologist cast autism like a giant fishing net over his brain. Took the entire family under the tide with it.
Never said gift. Never suggested maybe my Levi’s words weren’t rusty anchors like the rest of ours. They’re jellyfish:
You think you can see right through them, but it’s because you’re only watching the surface.
His mind is more like the world’s most extravagant circus all trapeze and lion teeth drum beat and riotous laughter
Every sentence a staccato hymn in the midst of a world that has forgotten how to value silence.
When did we start doing Dr. Cartwright’s work for him?
Christopher Baker, a boy from Lexington, Kentucky— his teacher stuffed him in a duffel bag and left him there for twenty minutes.
When his mother burst through the classroom doors his name fell like a tiny revolution from her mouth
overturning the silence
Levi they will come for you too.
They will tell you to work, and lift, and laugh on cue be human
smile big, smile pretty be quarterback point guard catcall courageous bicep and jackhammer spark Call the pretty girls ugly and mean it with all of your heart.
Your scribbles are just scribbles Levi don’t dare call them art. Don’t dare be enigma.
There is no space for your kind of beautiful here.
No room for those Nat Turner visions spinning shackles into vapor.
We have seen what can happen when a mind goes unchained.
He’s not sick. His mind is an unmapped archipelago every idea a former slave gone free
When they say your neurons are a crime, little brother tell them this, for me.
Tell them that Levi is shorthand for levitate.
That your calling is to the clouds and you are simply too busy having a conversation with God right now.
—a genius with jellyfish for words, a divine poem destined for the sky—
Smile for them. Smile big, smile pretty. Teach their wounded souls how to fly.
—Joshua Bennett
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