I Can Hear You Whisper Read online

  That had been the goal. When Hays and Bragg and their colleagues started work, they took an entirely new approach. Although pantomime was popular in deaf theater groups in Europe, and it was what Bragg was known for, the group chose to limit its use in their productions. “They decided to make NTD a theatre of language—a theatre that would concentrate on visual language,” wrote Gannon. For Gianni Schicchi and all subsequent performances, they brought theater to a deaf audience who could, of course, follow the signing (it was initially a theatrical version of signed English). But they always included hearing actors who signed and spoke their own roles and interpreted for the deaf actors, thereby making signing accessible to the hearing. Not every critic loved every performance, but some plays were immensely successful. Boston Herald drama editor Samuel Hirsch described the result as “pure art, drawn from a new medium of human expression.” The critic for The National Observer called the shows “exciting, inventive, beautiful, and unusual.”

  In 1971, NTD moved beyond translating existing works when cast members produced their first original play, My Third Eye. It included a biographical segment in which the actors described some of their experiences as deaf children. Bragg told of being taken away to a residential school at the age of four and a half. As he and his mother, who was also deaf, traveled to the New York School for the Deaf, she didn’t reply to his urgent questions about where they were going. Once there, they stood in the superintendent’s office.

  “I was filled with the sickening panic of a washed-away world. My mother kissed me and said, ‘This is the place where you will get all your education … ,’ she kissed me and was gone.”

  Mary Beth Miller said: “I would teach some of the kids who knew no sign language. The teacher would tie my hands together.”

  Ed Waterstreet: “Same in my school, when I tried to sign with my friends the teacher caught me and made me sit on my hands.”

  That they could now be using that same language onstage was an extraordinary turn of events. As Bragg put it: “People used to push my hands down in embarrassment and tell me not to sign in public. Now people pay to see me perform in sign language.”

  • • •

  The change in perspective did not just spring from the minds of these actors. Others had begun to think that sign language deserved more respect. Chief among them was a Gallaudet English professor named William Stokoe. He was hearing, as were many Gallaudet professors in that era, and was unfamiliar with sign language until he got to campus. Fascinated, he enlisted the help of two deaf assistants, Carl Croneberg and Dorothy Casterline, and began filming people as they signed. As he pored over the resulting films, Stokoe began to see patterns.

  Until then, the assumption was that sign language wasn’t a language at all. Beyond being a means of communication, languages had to have, in linguistic terms, rules governing the way their symbols could be used, combined, and transformed. No one had ever looked at sign language this way or seriously considered that it might qualify. In thousands of hours spent studying people as they signed, Stokoe found rules: units of meaning, patterns of word order, and points of contrast. “He was the first linguist to subject sign language to the tests of a real language, and he found that it withstood them all,” wrote Gannon.

  At first, no one was impressed. Even deaf people were skeptical or dismissive. According to Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, the thinking was that communicating in signs was “just something we did.” Many had absorbed the negative view of what they called “the sign language.” In 1965, however, Stokoe, Croneberg, and Casterline got more attention when they published A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles. The book marked the first time the sign language was given the formal name American Sign Language. (Sign languages are no more universal than spoken languages, and each country has its own. Even English-speaking countries such as Britain and the United States use very different sign languages.)

  Instead of describing signs according to pictures, the authors recognized that the signs were composed of smaller parts—such as handshape, location, and movement—akin to the phonemes and morphemes (units of sound and meaning) in spoken language. In the Dictionary, signs were organized according to those smaller parts rather than categories or English translations. Signs in which all five fingers of the hand were spread in the 5 sign, for example, were listed together according to their location: on the chin (MOTHER), on the forehead (FATHER), and on the chest (FINE). Add movement and you get GRANDMOTHER (by bouncing the hand away from the chin) and GRANDFATHER (bouncing it away from the forehead). Stokoe even invented a complicated new system of notation to describe each sign. Though the response to Stokoe’s work was mixed at the beginning, he had planted the seeds for what quickly grew into a science of signed languages.

  • • •

  Meanwhile, the civil rights and feminist movements were unfolding through the 1960s and 1970s, and new ideas of identity and political consciousness began to take hold. By the 1984 publication of Harlan Lane’s history of the deaf, When the Mind Hears, that thinking had matured. The book, from which I learned so much about early deaf education, was a call to arms. Lane called it “a study in the anatomy of prejudice” and claimed that a fear of diversity had led the hearing majority to oppress the deaf minority over the centuries through a series of “sustained outrages against fundamental human values” such as “the attempt to force assimilation, to claim biological insufficiency when assimilation fails, to indoctrinate minority children in majority values through the schools.” The deaf, declared Lane, do not belong to a class of disability but to a linguistic minority.

  Most of the deaf were far less politicized than Lane, but he was right that, like many minorities, they had long found comfort in each other. They knew they had a “way of doing things” and that there was what they called a “deaf world.” Largely invisible to hearing people, it was a place where many average deaf people lived contented, fulfilling lives. Lou Ann Walker depicts it beautifully in her memoir of growing up with deaf parents, A Loss for Words. In her father’s work as a newspaper printer, with their deaf friends, and at home with their three hearing daughters, Gale and Doris Jean Walker were loving, intelligent, and capable people. When their deaf world collided with the hearing world, however, they nearly always came away bruised. Walker describes hearing relatives who didn’t want to be seen in public with her parents. Her non-signing maternal grandfather attempted late in life to tell his daughter he loved her, but afterward Doris Jean asked Lou Ann what it was her father had said. Children of deaf adults (CODAs) like Lou Ann Walker are uniquely able to pass between the two worlds, but they absorb some of the pain of their parents with each border crossing. Near the end of her book, Walker describes interpreting the funeral of that same grandfather for her parents:

  As I signed the service, I tried not to think of the words on my hands. I didn’t want to get emotional as I conveyed my grandfather’s funeral sermon to my mother and father.

  Standing there, taking the invisible words from the air and placing them for my mother and father to see, I searched my mother’s face for echoes of the face of the man lying in the box a few feet behind me.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We come here to bury Chester Cooper Wells.” I signed “bury” with two open hands lowering him straight down into the earth—but gently, gingerly. I didn’t want to hurt my mother any more than I had to.

  No one had ever tried to name the world that people like Gale and Doris Jean Walker lived in. They were part of a grassroots deaf community. Beginning in the 1980s, however, deaf people, particularly in academia and the arts, “became more self-conscious, more deliberate, and more animated, in order to take their place on a larger, more public stage,” wrote Padden and Humphries. They called that world Deaf culture in their influential 1988 book Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture. The capital “D” distinguished those who were culturally deaf from those who were audiologically deaf. “A large population, established patterns of
cultural transmission, and a common language: these are all basic ingredients for a rich and inventive culture,” they wrote.

  “The traditional way of writing about Deaf people is to focus on the fact of their condition—that they do not hear—and to interpret all other aspects of their lives as consequences of this fact,” Padden and Humphries wrote in the introduction. “Our goal … is to write about Deaf people in a new and different way… . Thinking about the linguistic richness uncovered in [work on sign language] has made us realize that the language has developed through the generations as part of an equally rich cultural heritage. It is this heritage—the culture of Deaf people—that we want to begin to portray.”

  It was a time of soul-searching within the deaf community. The hearing population got a taste of the internal debate when Marlee Matlin won an Academy Award in 1987 for her performance as a troubled young deaf woman in Children of a Lesser God. For the deaf to have one of their own so honored and to have her sign her acceptance speech to millions of viewers was exhilarating. But it came as a shock to Matlin and some of the hearing observers when she was criticized for using her voice (something she rarely does) for part of her acceptance speech.

  The message of the emerging deaf civil rights movement was this: Deafness is not a disability; it is a difference. It is not something to be “cured” or “fixed.” It is even something of which a person can be proud. The new consciousness found its greatest, most powerful expression in the Deaf President Now protest at Gallaudet University in March 1988.

  • • •

  WE STILL HAVE A DREAM! read the banner. It was so big it took up most of a city street and required more than thirty people to carry it. In a nice bit of historical solidarity, the banner had been borrowed from the Crispus Attucks Museum in Washington, DC, and had last been used to rally for a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. But this time, on March 11, 1988, it was carried by deaf students from Gallaudet University. Although the rounded dome of the Capitol Building is visible from the upper floors of buildings on the Gallaudet campus, the students were borrowing another tradition from previous civil rights protests and marching on the Capitol as the culmination of a week of tumult and emotion. They were now carrying their concerns beyond their own community and out to the wider world.

  All week, the students had demanded that Gallaudet’s board of trustees appoint a deaf president. In its 124 years of existence, that was something the university had never had. Over time, more and more deaf administrators and faculty had been appointed, but the president and most of the board members, including the chair, Jane Bassett Spilman, were hearing. What’s more, Spilman and most of the hearing trustees had never learned to sign. In the eyes of the Deaf community, that lumped them squarely in the paternalistic tradition of hearing people who think they know what’s right for deaf people without having any idea what being deaf is all about. The notion that deaf people were not capable of managing their own university was deeply offensive.

  When the previous president, Jerry Lee, stepped down in 1987 and a search committee was formed, members of the Deaf community had made clear their preference for a deaf president. By early 1988, they were sure it was their moment. “It’s time!” read an invitation to show solidarity at a rally on March 1. “In 1842, a Roman Catholic became president of the University of Notre Dame. In 1875, a woman became president of Wellesley College. In 1886, a Jew became president of Yeshiva University. In 1926, a black person became president of Howard University. AND in 1988, the Gallaudet University presidency belongs to a DEAF person.”

  But on Sunday night, March 6, the trustees announced in a press release that Elisabeth Ann Zinser, the only remaining hearing candidate, vice-chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, would be the next president. Shock, anger, and disbelief raged through campus. An angry crowd of students, faculty, and alumni set fire to copies of the press release and then, gathering outside Gallaudet’s main gate on Florida Avenue, they decided to march into the center of Washington to the Mayflower Renaissance hotel, where the board meeting had been held, to demand an explanation from Spilman.

  When she finally met with the student leaders that night, they understood her to say, “Deaf people are not ready to function in the hearing world.” She later maintained that she had not said that and never would have, and that her interpreter had misunderstood her. But the damage was done. The statement fueled a fire of frustration and resentment that had been smoldering for years. A few days later, Spilman again embodied the problem when she stood at the podium at Gallaudet’s field house as angry, jeering students refused to pay attention.

  “We will not sit here if you are going to scream so loudly that we cannot hear you and that we cannot establish a dialogue,” said Spilman.

  As her words were interpreted, the students replied that there was no noise for them. Later they set off the building’s fire alarms, just for good measure.

  By the end of the week, the demonstrations had succeeded completely. Elisabeth Zinser resigned before she ever set foot on the campus, and the board appointed I. King Jordan, a deaf psychology professor, as the new president.

  The protest had been heard far beyond the gates of the university and the meeting rooms of the Mayflower hotel. On March 11, the day of the march on the Capitol, ABC News named the Gallaudet student government president, Greg Hlibok, as its Person of the Week.

  “This week, millions of us have had the chance to sit forward in our chairs and watch a group of young people as they break down some very out-of-date stereotypes,” said ABC’s anchor Peter Jennings in his introduction.

  Then Hlibok, a slim, clean-cut young man in a jacket and tie, appeared. “Deaf people are capable of anything except that they can’t hear,” he said through an interpreter.

  Jennings recounted the events of the week, the “test of wills” that had brought down a university president and raised the national consciousness for hearing people. For deaf people, he said, it amounted to “a national catharsis.”

  “It seemed as if there’d never been such an opportunity,” said Jennings, “to tell the world that deaf does not mean defeated.” For the first time ever, it was hearing people who had come away from a collision dented.

  Into the turbulence of nascent deaf civil rights dropped the cochlear implant.

  10

  LANGUAGE IN THE BRAIN

  It was about eight months after Alex got his hearing aids and started at Clarke, and Mark and I were sitting anxiously in an exam room at New York Eye and Ear Infirmary while Alex, now two and a half, played with the pale green vinyl footrest of the exam chair. We were waiting for Dr. Simon Parisier. Medically speaking, we had graduated to the big leagues.

  “We need to implant him,” Dr. Parisier said soon after he came in.

  A few months earlier, at the beginning of September, Alex and I had returned to Jessica O’Gara for what we thought was a routine appointment to fine-tune the settings on his hearing aids. We got an unwelcome surprise: All of the hearing in his right ear was gone. He was now profoundly deaf on that side. Through the summer, we had watched obsessively for bumps on the head that might worsen his hearing, but nothing had happened. Or so it had seemed. Perhaps, as Dr. Dolitsky had warned, Alex’s remaining hearing had been lost from something as seemingly minor as a sneeze. If the right ear had dropped so precipitously, it was likely only a matter of time before the left ear followed. Then came a speech and language evaluation at the beginning of December—a year after the first one. Alex had moved from the second to the sixth percentile for receptive language and was still in the eighth percentile for expressive language.

  “Single digits? Still?” I gasped when I got the results. “But he has more than two hundred words now! That can’t be right.”

  It was right. Alex had been working hard and learning every day. But so was every other two-year-old. No one was going to stand still and wait for him. That is why achievement gaps are so stubbornly hard to close. The
learning curve for children who start behind can’t simply parallel that of typical children. To catch up, their progress requires the steep trajectory of a rocket. Alex’s new drop in hearing was at least a reasonable explanation for why he was moving slowly. His right hearing aid was no longer providing useful sound. He was down to one ear, and a limited one at that.

  Immediately, Dr. Dolitsky had sent us to see Dr. Parisier, one of the pioneers of cochlear implant surgery. As a younger doctor in the 1970s at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, Parisier had embraced the potential of the new technology from the start. Back when he graduated from medical school in 1961, the introduction of antibiotics had just radically changed the field of ear surgery. Before that, he says, “it wasn’t uncommon to die from an ear infection. In the 1950s, doctors hadn’t been concerned about hearing, but with saving lives. There was nothing you could do about nerve deafness.” With the introduction of implants, Parisier felt there might be something he could do to help previously unhelpable patients. He found meningitis survivors particularly compelling. “Meningitis was the single largest cause of deafness in kids,” he told me. “Ten percent of those who survive become profoundly deaf. It was very painful. A child goes into the hospital able to speak at two or three years old and within days, that speech goes. When they wake up, they don’t talk anymore.” Even six-and seven-year-olds struggled and lost their language. The experience taught Parisier about the importance of getting language early. It worried him that Alex was already two and a half.

  A new round of tests ensued, this time to see if Alex was a candidate for a cochlear implant. Mark and I began to investigate what this would mean. At Clarke, which serves children through age five at the New York campus, I already knew many kids with implants. Some spoke intelligibly, some much less so. I knew the device didn’t bring instantaneous success, but also that Alex would be starting with the advantage of having some hearing in the other ear.