I was about 15 and there was this girl at the children's home named Mary Dee Yung (that's not her actually name but its awfully close and I often and especially then think of people wit their full names, all three or more of them if I know them).
Mary Dee Yung was a girl also about 15, a Black girl with big bushy eyebrows and very very stark eyes with eyelids that made them more that way, like black dots for eyes and these folded creased eyelids. Mary Dee was crazy. Officially.
She was schizophrenic, of the paranoid sort and very very violent and very capable of being very violent when she was.
Something I should explain about the children's home if I can here is that for many people including myself this was the last stop, last hope before being deposited warehoused and sentenced to a life in Hell in a place called Northern Indiana State Home (that's not its name either but its awfully darned close. That place is closed and no longer exists now).
I have come to understand that its my father's doing that kept me from being placed directly into NISH, he knew a court order was coming that I would be taken from our family and placed somewhere and barring being able to pre3nt that, was able to negotiate my being placed at this children's home instead. This is one of those life changing crossroads in life, for which I owe my father much. I don't know the particulars, but I know the children's home (which had only been converted from a proper orphanage 1.5 years before my arrival) had yet to see a kid anything like me. I was definitely their first autistic and their only autistic during my stay there.
At the dreaded NISH the children's home (with its claimed 85% success rate) sought to keep us from, people with every sort of problem, mental or severely developmentally disabled could end up in segregated wards depending on their disabilities at NISH as it was called for short, and everyone at the children's home feared it, even I understood enough to know this and to fear the NISH.
The other girls murmured about it amongst themselves, spoke extra softly of it when they did.
in my entire teenage life I lived at the children's home only 2 people ultimately actually make their way to NISH. You had to be really bad off.. really really REALLY bad off to be one of those two girls to fail at the children's home and wind up at NISH. Mary Dee was one of those two girls.
Before her I had seen a very few Black people, and the ones I had seen weter either severely DD or teachers at the school I had gone to when I still lived at home in the city several hours north of where the children's home was.
Mary Dee was intensely Black in skin color and had these very piercing eyes and crazy behavior, and for some reason people do tend to think Black people can fight better than white and are a bit more scared based on Blackness (this has been my personal experience and I have felt it myself, seen others respond to it, and I have no explanation for it, just that it is).
I was undersized, the smallest person on our unit and the only one living there with my particular set of disabilities (autism, non verbal, my particular set of behavioral and mental handicaps etc) when Mary arrived. I will never forget how she arrived.. screaming and kicking and being dragged, I watched from our unit's solarium as this flailing dot among many was deposited in the 'DC Unit" (lockdown, diagnostic unit. Most didn't stay there long at all. I had been there at an all time record of 9 months before finally making my way to the unit I was on. there were only 4 units total. one for boys, the DC/startup/lock-down unit where you were never left alone not even for a minute, the girl's unit downstairs from where I was, and our upstairs girls unit).
It wasn't too long after that that Mary Dee appeared on our unit and managed to decide I was beholding magical powers,just me, nobody else. I could see through walls and so forth according to Mary Dee Yung and I was using this power to peep at her.. I guess.. I was never clear on this.. but she decided this means war and it took the entire of 12 girls plus staff (house paarents) to keep her from getting her hands on me and ripping me apart, and she could have, I'm going to be honest. I've seen a few things in my life, and Mary Dee Yung was not one I'd want to tangle with even today, either in her teenage form or whatever adult form she may have today, if she's still alive.
Anyway, she would go down the hall glowering and scowling and posturing whenever she saw me.. there was the incident in the cafeteria where she was seated across from me and announced something that started out incoherent/inaudible but ended in ".. wash yer FACE!" and chucking an open milk carton at me which I responded to by mimicking (what I do in an argument or heated issue I tend to parrot back what I think I'm seeing or hearing for lack of better way to respond) and chucked my milk carton at her.. failing to open mine first (later another girl named Kathy who wa at the next table with her back to us would say she wondered about that flying closed milk carton whizzing by her elbow, what that was all about) and it took about 1.5 nano seconds for that answer to come:
Mary Dee reached across the table grabbing me by the shirt and I attempted to poke at her with a fork and the staff broke us apart, but not before the table was collapsed food was all over the place, and they were dragging Mary Dee away while I was just standing there.
Just standing there.. one staff's hand on my arm and shoulder. I have to always stop and think about how I was not dragged away.. there were a couple of instances where there were altercations and the other got dragged away but I just stood there and I wonder at those...
As I started to say, Mary Dee would be menacing at me going down the hall whenever we had to pass one another and I remember a girl who was a friend of Mary Dee's really working hard to keep Mary Dee out of trouble (and off of me), and I would just look, kind of like riding a roller coaster, you're scared but you keep your eyes open, or you keep your eyes open BECAUSE you are scared, and yes Mary Dee scared the hell out of me.
Thats why I will always find it amazing and confusing whenever I think back on the day Mary Dee left the children's home..
She was in the hallway by the laundry bin, alone, and I had rare occasion to be alone and entering the unit and saw her there and instinctively tensed.. this was bad, very bad.. to be alone one on one with Mary (who could not be trusted to take a shower or use the bathroom at the same time they had me in there even with staff around, this girl could fight, really *really* fight like few can), but she sat there at the end of the hall by the laundry thing and looked up at me as I was having to walk towards her to get past to where I was going (my dorm) when she looked up at me and said right to me and at once in her tone i could hear it, her acknowledging that people were just scared of her, but this incredible question came
"why weren't you scared of me?"
Even if I'd had speech I don't know if I'd have been able to respond.. I know what feelings I had and the words to pair off with them I know now would have been:
"what on earth ever made you think I wasn't?"
Mary Dee Yung left that day, never to be seen again because unbeknown to me she had already knocked one of our male houseparent's teeth right out of his mouth.. like a dental procedure she literally just knocked his teeth right out, lots of them and when I saw her was after the fact of this, she was waiting for her departure to NISH. Apparently she knew she was going.
