I Can Hear You Whisper Read online

  Resolved to teach the deaf and “to reach heaven by trying at least to lead others there,” Epée had then to consider how to teach the girls. For familiar items, he could show them pictures together with the printed words in French (pain for a loaf of bread), but what about abstract words like “God” and “duty”? For these, he reasoned that if he had been taught to understand Latin in his native language of French, so should the deaf be taught in theirs. He had seen the way they gestured to each other and communicated among themselves. So, the story goes, Epée turned to sign language and thus began the education of the deaf.

  • • •

  My stack of books on deaf history grew, and in every book I read, the story of Epée and the twin sisters appeared. The details varied and were occasionally embellished. Sometimes it was day, sometimes night; sometimes not just dark but stormy. Sometimes the events took place in the French countryside. Often, Epée is described as “inventing” sign language, though that is an exaggeration. Whether the meeting took place on a dark night, that dramatic bit of storytelling symbolizes the significance of the event: movement from darkness into light. The story is really a folktale of the origin of a culture, according to Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, who together have written several books on Deaf history and culture. “It has come to symbolize, in its retelling through the centuries, the transition from a world in which deaf people live alone or in small isolated communities to a world in which they have a rich community and language.”

  Since the time of the ancient Greeks, when feats of memory and oratory represented the height of intellectual achievement, the deaf had been considered ineducable. Aristotle believed that they were incapable of learning and of reasoned thinking. If you could not use your voice, he argued, you could not develop cognitive abilities. Beyond an inability to hear or speak, the “deaf and dumb” or “deaf-mutes” as they were then called, were often thought to have a third problem: mental retardation. In nearly every language, the word “dumb” connotes lack of intelligence. And who could prove otherwise? Imagine the frustration of all those trapped minds. It was this barrier to communication that led Samuel Johnson to call deafness “one of the most desperate of human calamities.”

  At home, with family and those close to them, most deaf people used natural gestures, “home signs,” to communicate basic needs and wants. If they were fortunate enough to have other deaf people nearby, they sometimes had a wider repertoire of gestures, but they were effectively barred from the rest of society. Helen Keller famously said that being blind cut you off from things, but being deaf cut you off from people. For her, deafness was the greater affliction. The wild and uncouth behavior of those who couldn’t communicate could be indistinguishable from that of the mentally ill. Well into the twentieth century, the deaf were still sometimes put in mental health institutions.

  The first to attempt to teach a deaf person any kind of language was not actually Epée but Pedro Ponce de León, a Spanish Benedictine monk born about 1520. In Spain’s aristocratic families, there was a higher than average incidence of deafness, most likely the result of intermarrying. In several cases, considerable estates were at risk, because the law of the time prevented the “deaf and dumb” from owning property or writing wills. But if a deaf person could be taught to speak, the law could be nullified. Lack of speech rather than hearing was the decisive factor. Such families had a lot at stake. For his part, Ponce de León didn’t want to save the fortunes of his students; he wanted to save their souls. If you couldn’t make confession, you couldn’t be saved.

  And so the deaf had to be taught to speak. Extensive details of Ponce de León’s methods haven’t survived, but it appears he first taught pupils to associate written words with objects and ideas, and then moved to articulation of those words. He used some gestures and developed a manual alphabet. The records of his successes do live on. One of his most famous students, Pedro de Velasco, left this account:

  When I was a child I knew nothing, like a stone; but I commenced to learn by first of all writing down the things my master taught me… . Next, by the aid of God, I began to spell, and afterwards to pronounce with all the force I could, although much saliva came from me. After this I began to read histories, so that in ten years I had read the histories of the whole of the world; and then I learnt Latin.

  Teaching the deaf to speak, for Ponce de León and the families with which he worked, was the whole point of the enterprise. It served their legal, economic, and religious purposes. That he succeeded at all was “a breakthrough that shattered for ever the old assumptions,” wrote David Wright, a British poet, in his 1969 autobiography, Deafness: An Autobiography, one of the first books to examine the history of deaf education.

  A few decades later, another Spaniard, Juan Pablo Bonet, worked for the same aristocratic family as Ponce de León: the Velascos. Bonet seems to have learned some of Ponce de León’s techniques from them and was the first to publish a book on educating the deaf. In it, he included a chart of handshapes for individual letters—the manual alphabet thought to have been created by Ponce de León. Many are the same shapes used in French and American sign language today.

  Epée had a copy of Bonet’s book as well as a German book on language and articulation. He considered signs and gestures the native language of those born deaf. Though he thought sign language lacked grammar, he saw in it the “shortest and easiest method” to reach the deaf. “What we cannot cause to enter by the main door,” he said, “we can send in through the window.” He learned and then codified sign language by devising rules about combinations of signs. That resulted in a manual version of French called Methodical Signs, which followed French rules of grammar and included signs for tense, prefixes, suffixes, agreement, and negation. Epée’s system was unnecessarily complicated and actually limited what his students could understand, but that didn’t diminish his standing. In the view of psychologist Harlan Lane, who wrote a groundbreaking, if highly opinionated history of the deaf, When the Mind Hears, Epée’s willingness to ask the deaf to teach him signs and his recognition that he could use them as a vehicle to educate was an “act of humility that gained him everlasting glory.”

  What’s more, Epée prevailed upon the French state to bear the cost of educating deaf students. After his death, the school he founded in Paris in the 1760s became the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes, a haven where students were housed, clothed, and fed, and where they were fully educated in sign language, although some had articulation lessons as well. The school became a model; teachers came from all over Europe to be trained in the “silent” system. After Epée’s death in 1789, his successor, the Abbé Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard, published Théorie des signes, a grammar and dictionary of sign language. In Epée’s lifetime, twelve more similar schools for the deaf were created. Under Sicard, the number rose to sixty.

  Sicard’s most famous pupil was Jean Massieu. One of six deaf siblings, Massieu began life as a shepherd in a village outside Bordeaux. After coming to the National Institute along with Sicard, who had been running a school for the deaf in Bordeaux, Massieu became a teacher himself, the first deaf man to do so. To fund the school and to convince the world of the capability of sign language to express abstract thought, Sicard and Massieu put on public demonstrations on the third Monday of every month. Sicard interpreted questions from the audience. Massieu answered in sign language, often writing the answers in French on a chalkboard to make clear that they were his own.

  “What is hope?” a member of the British parliament asked at one such event.

  “Hope is the blossom of happiness,” Massieu answered.

  “What is time?”

  “A line that has two ends, a path that begins in the cradle and ends in the tomb.”

  “What is intelligence?” Sicard asked.

  “It is the power of the mind to move in the straight line of truth,” Massieu wrote, “to distinguish the right from the wrong, the necessary from the superfluous, to see clearly and precis
ely. It is the force, courage, and vigor of the mind.”

  • • •

  In other parts of Europe, a different approach to educating the deaf was taking hold. Beginning with Johann Conrad Amman, a Swiss doctor living in Holland, and John Wallis in England, a group of teachers emerged for whom teaching the deaf to speak was the first priority. Their reason was not so much legal, as it had been for the Spanish aristocracy, but religious; they thought it was God’s will that man should speak. “The breath of life resides in the voice, transmitting enlightenment through it,” wrote Amman. “The voice is a living emanation of that spirit that God breathed into man when he created him a living soul.” Amman worked with just a handful of students, all of them the children of wealthy families, and he did teach them to talk, though it sometimes took years. In Britain, Wallis focused on teaching written words.

  In Germany, a man named Samuel Heinicke, a former army officer and a contemporary of Epée, worked as a teacher and took on a deaf student around 1754. Using Amman’s book as his guide, he opened the first German public school for the deaf. Heinicke believed the deaf had to master speech in order to participate in society. The first “pure oralist,” he rejected any type of sign or gesture, even the manual alphabet used by Ponce de León and Bonet, on the grounds that sign language hindered the acquisition of speech. He limited his teaching to lipreading and articulation, forgoing a broader education, and had several impressive successes. Heinicke considered his school a family business and wanted to protect his son’s livelihood, so he was secretive about his methods. One, though, was to ask students to feel the vibrations in his throat as he spoke, a common practice. Heinicke’s will revealed another, more unusual, technique: taste. He coated his students’ tongues with different tastes to “fix” vowel sounds: pure water for “ie,” sugar water for “o,” olive oil for “ou,” absinthe for “e,” and vinegar for “a.”

  That strategy probably died with Heinicke. His underlying philosophy, however, is still appreciated in oral deaf circles. In the history section of AG Bell’s website (the site has since been changed), I found Heinicke listed as the man who “developed the foundations of modern oral deaf education. He believed that language was essential to the process of thinking, and felt that it was critical for children who were deaf or hard of hearing to learn to use spoken language in order to have access to the wider world.” He was also, they noted, the “first advocate” of what we know today as mainstreaming.

  • • •

  From the start, the two systems, oral and manual, were in opposition. In 1782, Heinicke sent Epée an extensive argument in favor of oralism. Epée returned fire and the battle was launched. Their disagreement was submitted to the Zurich Academy, which found in favor of Epée, largely, says David Wright, because Heinicke wouldn’t reveal his methods. Of course, that didn’t settle the matter. For generations to follow, the debate simmered and flared as educational philosophies, scientific thinking, and deaf identities shifted and evolved.

  Why so inimical? Any language that fostered communication had to be an improvement over isolation. One would think that the few who were willing to try teaching the deaf, who believed in those early centuries that they could be taught, would find common cause. The hostility seemed to spring from a combination of evangelism, egotism, and economics (nearly everyone involved had a vested interest). If you clear away the religious fervor and personal stakes, though, the basic arguments for and against sign and speech established in the eighteenth century were potent enough to persist for another two hundred years.

  Learning to communicate through sign was faster and easier than learning to speak. It was, therefore, more widely accessible, putting education within reach of all deaf people, no matter their level of hearing or family circumstances. Epée believed in the importance of helping the deaf as a class rather than working with a few high achievers. By formalizing sign language and putting it in the classroom, he didn’t just create a new form of deaf education, he also sparked centuries of questions about the signs themselves. Could they really be considered a language? Were they inferior to spoken language? (Epée himself thought they were.) What were the limitations, if any, to signing? Jean Massieu’s vigorous mind notwithstanding, most hearing people—and plenty of deaf people, too—considered sign language primitive, concrete, and pictorial. Those fallacies wouldn’t disappear until the 1960s and 1970s, when linguists began studying the language formally. In the eighteenth century as in the twenty-first, there was also the problem of numbers. Was sign language worth pursuing if it meant one could only communicate with other signers? By definition, it seemed, the deaf would be limiting themselves to conversing with one another.

  Learning to speak was a more difficult process, sometimes even impossible for those who had been born profoundly deaf. To learn to speak, you must not just hear those around you, you also need to hear yourself. Imagine trying to learn Japanese through a soundproof window, suggests one audiologist. Those in the signing camp were always suspicious of oral successes, wanting to know when and how they lost their hearing and whether any remained. Manualists also argued that the sheer effort involved in learning to talk crowded out educational content. On the other hand, some, especially those with usable residual hearing, were quite capable of speaking. If they could also read lips, properly referred to as speechreading and a skill that is not easily mastered, they could sometimes manage surprisingly well. An oral education could provide access to the hearing world, pushing deaf people not inward but outward.

  • • •

  When a young American carried Epée’s sign language to the United States in 1816, the argument over its merits caught a ride on the same ship. A few years earlier, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet had visited his family’s Connecticut home during a brief vacation from his studies at Andover Theological Seminary. Studious, modest, a little frail, and deeply religious, Gallaudet stood in the garden under an elm tree one afternoon and watched his youngest brothers playing a game of fox and hounds with the children of Mason Fitch Cogswell, a prominent local physician who lived next door. Gallaudet paid particular attention to eight-year-old Alice Cogswell, who had lost her hearing completely after contracting “spotted fever” (cerebrospinal meningitis) as a toddler. Despite the Cogswells’ best efforts, Alice was not thriving. She had lost what language she’d had, and her family knew that she understood little of what went on around her.

  Gallaudet’s concern for Alice was “immediate and deep,” one of Alice’s relatives later wrote. “He at once attempted to converse with and instruct her.” Taking the hat off his head, he placed it on the ground and wrote the letters H-A-T in the dirt. Then he pointed from the object to the word repeatedly. When she seemed to understand, he erased the letters and wrote them again farther down the garden. Alice picked up the hat and placed it by the new letters. Gallaudet was thrilled with his success and it marked the beginning, wrote Harlan Lane, of a “consuming interest in deafness.” After finishing seminary, Gallaudet spent much of the following year working with Alice.

  Though schools for the deaf—both silent and oral—had been springing up across Europe, deaf education in America was nonexistent. A few wealthy families sent their deaf children to Europe, but that option wasn’t open to many. Nor was it always desirable. Preferring to keep Alice at home, Mason Cogswell gathered a group of Hartford businessmen to discuss establishing a deaf school. The men resolved to send someone to study European methods and didn’t have to look far to find the man for the job. Thomas Gallaudet still lived next door.

  Gallaudet set off for Britain in the summer of 1815 intending to combine the best of the oral and manual systems. In London and Edinburgh, he sought out the leading deaf educators, the Braidwood family and their protégés, but they continually put him off and finally suggested an apprenticeship with unacceptably severe restrictions. Meanwhile, the Abbé Sicard arrived in Britain with Massieu and another of his most successful students-turned-teachers, Laurent Clerc. Gallaudet attended one of
their fund-raising demonstrations, and Sicard invited him to Paris.

  Frustrated by his lack of progress in Britain, Gallaudet eventually took Sicard up on his offer. For a puritanical New Englander, Paris was somewhat horrifying. Gallaudet found the French frivolous and lacking in religious fervor. (“Oh! how this poor heathen people want the Bible and the Sabbath!” he wrote to Mason Cogswell.) But at the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes, he was welcomed with open arms. Massieu and Clerc taught him sign language. He observed any class he wanted. By the summer, Gallaudet had been converted to the idea of using sign language to educate the deaf. He asked Laurent Clerc to return with him to Connecticut.

  The American Asylum, the first school for the deaf in America, opened in Hartford in 1817 with Gallaudet as principal and Clerc as head teacher. Like Epée’s Institute, the Asylum, which today is called the American School for the Deaf, was a residential school. Clerc and Gallaudet sowed the seeds of American Sign Language by blending Epée’s sign language with the many signs already being used by the American deaf. Other schools modeling the Hartford approach soon opened elsewhere. By 1868, there were twenty-seven in the United States, and the number continued to grow. As the name Asylum implies, the schools were designed with the Victorian ethos of public charity in mind. Children lived there from very young ages, and were cared for, but were also kept away from the general public.

  Gallaudet’s son, Edward Miner Gallaudet, later became the first superintendent of the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind, which opened as a school in 1857 in Washington, DC, on the property of a businessman named Amos Kendall. By 1864, Edward Gallaudet and his supporters prevailed upon Congress to authorize funding for the first National Deaf-Mute College. The Columbia Institution thus became the first center of higher education for the deaf. Today, it is Gallaudet University, still located in the same spot in northeast Washington. It remains the only higher education institution for the deaf in the world that has the right to confer degrees.