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His first step is obvious. He must accept the fact that his existence is a source of discomfort to others. This is not to say that he is not permitted to live with comfort and security; these, in fact, are the very gifts his society is most willing to grant him. The price he is expected to pay, however, is the same price the black man has been expected to pay, at least until very recently: he must accept his "condition," which implies not that he accept his wound but that he never show more of that wound than society thinks proper. He is incapable of defining what selfhood is. His needs will be met, but not as he might wish to meet them.

I was thirteen when I returned to the city after almost two years of life in a rehabilitation home. A rather valiant attempt to rehabilitate me had been made there. I had been taught a number of interesting ways in which to mount a bus; I had been taught to walk on crutches with the least possible strain on my arms. I was a rather lazy patient who lived in the corridors of his own fantasy, but I cannot deny that a great deal of effort was expended upon me by a number of people who were truly interested in my welfare. Looking back, I can do little but acknowledge this and voice my gratitude.

Unfortunately, those people whose task it was to rehabilitate me had also made certain assumptions about me and the world I was to inhabit after I left the home. The assumption about me was; simple: I should be grateful for whatever existence I could scrape together. After all, there had been a time when my life itself had been forfeit and, compared to many of my peers in the ward, I was relatively functional. About the world, the assumption was equally simple -- although here, perhaps, less forgivable. Society existed. Whatever it meted out to the cripple, the cripple accepted. The way of the world was not to be challenged.

I did not know what to expect when I arrived back home in the Bronx, although I sensed that my relationship to others was bound to be that of an inferior to a superior. But I did not know what form that inferiority would take. No one had bothered to teach me -- no one had even bothered to mention -- the position I would occupy in the world outside the ward. No one had told me the extent to which I would find myself an outsider. And no one had told me about the fear, anguish and hatred that would swirl through my soul as I was reminded every day that I was a supplicant.

The experience that scars must be lived through before it can be absorbed. Which is why therapy can only soothe and art can create. The reality remains the thing itself. One can go so far as to suggest that the very existence of language creates a barrier between the reality the cripple faces when he returns home and what has been suggested to him about that reality. Even if those responsible for rehabilitating me had been more forthright, more honest, it would have made little difference. Only the situation itself could absorb my energy and interests, not a description or an explanation of that situation. Once again, the analogy to the black condition is appropriate: the first time the word nigger is hurled at a black child by a representative of white America becomes his encounter with the thing itself, the world as it is.

In my own case, I was rather lucky. Looking back, withdrawal and/or paranoia seem to have been distinct possibilities, neither of which has been my fate. Perhaps what saved me was that I found myself too numbed to be shocked. There were two possible outs, which, in a sense, complemented each other. The first was to fantasize. Both fantasy and dreams are left to the cripple -- and there is a great deal to be said for any possession of one's own. The other was to compete in the world of the "normals."* Obviously, such competition was bound to be false, but it served to make the fantasies somewhat more real in that it fed my illusions of potency. I recall one incident in particular, perhaps my most vivid recollection of the strange sort of humiliation I encountered. I had been arguing -- forget about what -- with a friend. Enraged at something he said, I challenged him to fight. He agreed, but most reluctantly. Fighting a cripple would not reflect creditably on him in the neighborhood, but, true to the obligations of adolescence, he knew that not to have accepted would be a sign of weakness and sentimentality. His compromise was to insist that we wrestle on the ground. We did, and, naturally, he wound up on top of me until his mother arrived to pull him off. Although brief, the fight itself had been highly satisfying. It enabled me to forget momentarily the fact that I was a cripple. We met if not as equals then at least as combatants on the same battleground. But then I heard his mother's shrill scolding as she escorted him away, "You are not to fight with a cripple!" And I knew that, once again, my vulnerability had been seen by all. It had not been a fight between two adolescents. It had been, instead, a fight between a normal and a cripple. I could live with the fight. In fact, until I heard her voice, it supplied me with an illusion of potency I would have cherished. But her words were my reality.