Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  Despite the achievements of Clerc and Gallaudet, most hearing people considered sign language to be primitive, an indication of deficient intelligence. This attitude prevailed for more than a hundred years. Not until the 1950s did research begin to show that ASL is a legitimate language rather than a sloppy English-substitute for deaf people who functioned too poorly to learn to talk. But even though Lexington no longer regarded sign language as an abomination, it still prohibited its use in the classroom and treated the whole subject with moody ambivalence.

  So my sister and brother and I did not grow up bilingual. Our lack of fluency in the language did not prevent us from using it among ourselves, however. Just as we scribble-scrabbled with crayons on newsprint when we were preliterate, we played at signing to one another in elaborate gibberish. The signs themselves were nonsense, of course, but other features of the language we reproduced with native perfection: pacing, eye contact, various placements of the hands on the body, facial movements, even the incidental click of lips and teeth. I liked those sounds that deaf people made—unchecked, intimate, like tiny, natural lullabies.

  For the longest time I never fully believed that I wouldn’t eventually become deaf. All around me, children were deaf. I observed the older ones: the wonderful way they chewed their gum and wore their hair and cavorted in the snack bar, and most especially the way they talked, with such enviable panache, such thick rapport. At that time Lexington still adhered to oralism, the educational philosophy and practice that focuses on teaching deaf children to speak and read lips, but outside the classroom the older children signed to each other and no one much bothered them about it. I loved the rapid rhythms of their conversation, the effortless weave of eyebrows and fingers and shoulders and lips, so full of careless grace and yet freighted with meaning.

  Reba and Andy and I could fingerspell the alphabet, sign the numbers up to ten, say I love you and More milk, please. I knew the signs for colors and members of the family, knew apple and ice cream and good and home. But that was about the extent of my signing abilities.

  I played at signing the way other children play dress-up; part of trying on possibilities, practicing for the future, it was laden with excitement and anticipation) even aspiration. I wanted to grow up and be deaf, be a Lexington student, with all the accouterments: hearing aids, speech lessons, fast and clever hands.

  When I was four and five years old, I was one of a few hearing children who attended Lexington’s preschool as part of an experiment with integration. In many ways I seemed no different from any of my classmates, making doll cakes in the sandbox, playing chase outside on the patio, eating just the middles of my bread-and-butter snack, as was our fashion. But I was not the same.

  One afternoon, while playing with my classmates outside, I sought to remedy my most blatant difference. I selected two pebbles—urban pebbles, rough bits of dark gravel—from the ground and set them in the shallow cups of cartilage above my earlobes. When the teacher spied my improvised hearing aids, I was thoroughly scolded. “Never put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear!” was her mystifying admonishment. Puzzling over this helped deflect some of my embarrassment and hurt, but it did nothing to help me fit in with the others.

  I sorely envied my classmates their speech lessons. Whenever I had occasion to peek into one of the closet-size speech rooms along the hall, I drank in the scenery, the exotic paraphernalia—mirrors and flash cards, balloons and balls, feathers and tongue depressors—with a lustful, wondering eye. I didn’t know then that many deaf children loathe speech lessons, experience them as something designed for humiliation and failure. (Once, when I was six and attending public school, I faked a lisp for the speech therapist who visited our class so that I could finally discover what really went on during speech lessons. They turned out to be crushingly dull; the therapist—a beige, squarish woman—presented me with an entire box of plastic drinking straws and directed me to practice saying my s’s around them at home.)

  But the time I remember being most alienated as a student at Lexington was during story hour. The other children and I would pull our little wooden chairs up to the table, and each of them would plug a special hearing aid into the metal box that sat on top, an FM unit that amplified the teacher’s voice as she read the story into a wireless microphone. With their regular hearing aid receivers strapped around their chests on white harnesses and their heads crowned with large blue earphones, the other children leaned together, tightly connected, all joined to the same circuit.

  I never felt so apart. The privilege of being able to hear paled in comparison to the privilege of being close, of sharing that common experience with the other children. The ability to hear, this extra sense through which I received so many signals and that allowed me to process information and make connections on another level, seemed to me at age five a mean gift.

  It was not actually my ability to hear that set me most apart, though. At any rate, it was not my hearing per se, although it could be considered a symptom of my ability to hear: it was the fact that I spoke the teacher’s language. This was my most important feature as a student. This, before anything else about me—personality, cognitive ability, learning style—was what shaped my experience in the classroom: I knew the same language as the teacher and the world at large.

  One of my Lexington classmates had also started school knowing a language system. Like me, he had not been taught his first language; he had acquired it the way we all do naturally, through exposure, by seeing it used by parents, an older sibling, adult friends. However, his parents were deaf; his language was ASL. Unlike me, he knew a language that was not used, nor even condoned, by the teacher, who could not therefore know him or communicate with him in the same way that she could with me. The primary focus of this boy’s education was learning English; everything else came second to that.

  As for me, I was a language-smitten child, thrilled by the patterns and shapes of words. In my mind each letter of the alphabet had a particular color and personality. Every inanimate object—the wooden door wedge, the saltshaker, the windowsill—hummed with stories on its own special frequency. I related these stories all the time, told them to my brother and my sister, to my socks and my shoes. I dictated the stories to my parents and teachers, who transcribed them in English. Engaging with adults in this way, I could feel that I was the recipient of their delighted attention. I didn’t know how lucky I was to have a vehicle for telling these stories, how lucky I was that my parents and teachers understood and encouraged me.

  The messages my classmates received from hearing adults were altogether different. They did not qualify for most adult praise until they could use English. Most of them were not fluent in any language. They knew bits of English and were just learning to recognize words visually, although those words appeared slightly different in the mouths of their teachers, their mothers, their fathers. They were learning to connect the lip shapes with the concepts. They were being taught to locate their own vocal cords and position their throats and tongues and teeth and manipulate all the muscles just so, and when the teacher told them they had reproduced the sounds correctly, they were praised.

  The process was arduous, and there was so much they continued to miss. They could not overhear. While lining up at the low sink to wash my hands for lunch or gathering my mat for naptime, I was constantly absorbing the banter between teacher and assistant, picking up new vocabulary, cadences, and constructions; the others were not. They were forced to devote a significant portion of their school hours to speech and auditory training, learning to use their residual hearing and read lips. Every bit of time they spent at speech lessons, I spent learning content.

  Because most of my classmates had no contact with older deaf people, they had no opportunity to learn sign language. In the sixties, ASL was still considered anathema. Many hearing parents, typically besieged by grief and guilt over having a deaf child, perceived in oralism an alluring promise. Deaf children who could use their voices and
understand English speech seemed less alien, more intelligent. In other words, more hearing. Normal.

  For more than a century, doctors and educators had typically advised parents not to allow their deaf children to learn sign language and not to learn it themselves—it would impede progress toward mastering English. As long as parents didn’t fall prey, the experts warned, to the manualists—those who believed that sign language was a more appropriate method for instructing deaf students—their children would become fluent in English and be eligible to reap the rewards of the hearing world. The parents, generally new to deafness and eager to salvage whatever relationship with their deaf child was possible, clung to this advice, which offered the hope of communicating on their terms.

  In spite of their good intentions, they ended up withholding from their children the one language that could be acquired visually. And because deaf children do not acquire an aural, spoken language naturally—they must be taught every minute element that hearing children absorb effortlessly—they were sent to school with no language system at all. A bit of English and a few crude homemade signs were the only tools that most of my classmates possessed for making sense of the world.

  Oralists are not willful oppressors. When Lexington, the oldest oral school for the deaf in the United States, began in 1864, it heralded a new option for deaf people. Until then, all schools for the deaf in this country used a manual system of communication. Lexington’s founders were offering a hitherto unavailable choice, one that they believed was better, would grant deaf people more opportunities. But after more than a century (during which oralists had only qualified success in proving the merits of their method), research began to show that ASL is not an inferior language and that restricting its use constitutes a disservice and an injustice to deaf people—educationally, psychologically, and culturally.

  During my lifetime, a civil rights movement has developed among deaf people. Spearheaded mostly by highly educated deaf professionals, its ranks are filled with people from the grassroots deaf community. With the issue of language at its core, the movement has grown influential at all levels, from local school boards to Congress. Political ramifications now apply to everything from personal style of communication to the portrayal of deaf people on television.

  At Lexington, the movement has manifested itself in disputes over the use of sign language in the classroom and over the hiring of more deaf employees. During the past several years Lexington has gone through great changes, and it continues to change, in response to several forces: activism in the deaf community, a steady increase in the number of students of color and immigrant students, a national trend toward mainstreaming disabled children in public schools, and controversial medical technology that is almost certain to reduce the number of culturally deaf people (members of the signing deaf community).

  My father, Oscar, has led Lexington through many of these changes, as its superintendent for the past eight years and its principal for eight years before that. Hearing people, especially those affiliated with oral education and the medical profession, are seen by some deaf militants as members of the establishment that has long oppressed deaf culture and tried to make deaf people assimilate into the hearing world. As a hearing person, then, and as the director of a famous old oral school, Oscar is one of the enemies. But as the son of deaf parents and as a person who grew up signing and has spent his life living and working with deaf people, he is trusted and respected. He is framed by these dual images, regarded suspiciously by some, welcomed warmly by others.

  As I grew up, I was slow to realize that the deaf community I had idealized was fraught with political tensions. I was even slower to understand that my status as a hearing person would forever restrict my membership in that community. For most of my childhood, I continued to nurture a secret belief that I belonged to this special world, and it to me.

  I was seven years old, halfway through the second grade, when we moved to Nyack, a village on the Hudson River about thirty miles north of the city. Our mother no longer worked at Lexington, but our father had become the principal and commuted to Jackson Heights each day. After the compact railroad apartment we had inhabited at the school, our new house seemed vast, echoey. Beyond its cool stucco exterior stood a row of dark, towering fir trees, a perpetually shady back lawn, dense hydrangea bushes—nothing familiar, no one we knew. It was here that I began to use sign language to remove myself, to retreat into a comforting, secluded place.

  Our parents had chosen Nyack partly because of its reputation as a well-integrated community, but we soon discovered that almost all of the other children on our bus route were white. There was always a group of big boys, fourth-graders, who would menace us. “Oreo. Zebra,” they would say, seeing Reba and Andy and me together. They would lurch down the aisle of the moving bus and stand over our seat. “You fuck your sisters, don’t you?” they would say to Andy. Andy was six.

  Furious, frightened, I would channel my response into my hands, discreetly spelling passionate words into my lap. Our parents told us that if we ignored the boys, they would stop. They advised Reba and me to sit on either side of Andy, hemming him in for his protection; if he lost his temper and entered into combat, he would surely be beaten. So I sat on the aisle, pressed tightly against my brother, willing us all to remain mute, composed, while in my lap I unleashed silent furies. Fingerspelling, I imagined I was working spells, weaving cryptic incantations around my brother and sister and me. This private language was a kind of power I retained over the awful boys, an invisible shield beyond which they could not go.

  When the taunting eventually subsided, as our parents had predicted it would, I did not stop signing. The habit became ingrained; whenever I was bored or angry or hurt or threatened, my fingers would start to spell. I found in this language a way to absent myself, to grow remote and slip into private, imagined conversation. It was like a tangible cord that stretched from my fingers all the way back to the world I had left behind at Lexington. It was my flying carpet, my trap door. If being able to hear had set me apart when I was a student at Lexington, I used sign language to maintain this sense of separation when I was among hearing people.

  I was not fluent then, but pestered my father endlessly for new vocabulary: “What’s the sign for tuna fish? How would you say umbrella?” Every June, when he brought home a fresh copy of the Lexington yearbook, I would pore over the pages, longing to become deaf and go to Lexington. What I missed most was the closeness of the school, the physical intimacy wrought by sign language.

  Deafness is classified as a low-incidence disability. About two million Americans are classified as hearing-impaired; only around two hundred thousand of those are culturally deaf. For seven years I had lived among members of this minority group, witnessing bonds that transcended language. I longed for the warmth of words left unspoken and nevertheless understood.

  But as I got older I had to reconcile this desire with the fact that I was not deaf. I had become a full-grown hearing person. Although I could (and did) choose to socialize and work with deaf people, I could never be a member of the deaf community. Cultural identity is fixed. No amount of tricycling up and down Lexington’s halls could ever change that.

  And yet, certain details persist. Those were the halls of my childhood. I am Sam’s granddaughter and Oscar’s daughter. I once put pebbles in my ears, once wished I were deaf. These are bits of evidence, facts I can tick off on my fingers, count and possess like objects. Even today, when people ask me where I am from, the answer that comes first to mind is always Lexington.

  2

  Transition Lessons

  Sofiya, Sofie, Sofa, Sophia. They took her name and twisted it every which way, until she decided for herself and it became Sofia. She is eighteen years old and no longer the new girl.

  Two years ago, when Sofia Normatov first came from Russia, she was the new girl, and she was new again last year, when she first entered the high school. In between she attended Lexington’s foreign language
transition class, and on official school documents from that year, written in various sets of authoritative ink, her name, transliterated from the Cyrillic alphabet, appears in a full array of spellings, as if evidence of her transitional state.

  At home her parents persist in calling her Sofa, which she is loath to have any of her school friends discover because then, surely, her name-sign will become couch. So she chooses S-O-F-I-A, which is so deliciously fingerspelled—rapidly, it’s a blur of fingers unfurling from fist to flare to fist again—that she needs no name-sign.

  “Get Sofia,” her friends call across the lunch table, their fists springing open and shut. Someone tugs her sleeve and she looks up from a forkful of lettuce. “You want to go to Pat and Joe’s and get an ice cream after school?” Sofia grimaces apologetically at her salad (she keeps thinking she has started a diet), then nods.

  “Sure. If I can get Sheema to cover the store,” she amends. This year Sofia is the comanager of the school store, as well as being on the volleyball team, the mock trial team, and the staff of the yearbook. But after school today she goes tramping off to Pat and Joe’s with a bunch of schoolmates and fishes deep in the freezer case for an ice cream sandwich. The deli is full of Lex kids, buying soda and chips and gum, the ones with better speech acting as interpreters for the countermen and the cashier, kids signing to each other across the store, lending nickels and swapping candy bars. It feels so good finally to be in.

  This is what Sofia yearned for during her year in the foreign language transition class. Everything seemed awkward and impossible then: learning English, learning how to pronounce things the American way, learning American Sign Language. The latter occurred mostly in the lunchroom, in the halls, on the school bus, in gym, and it was these encounters that decided her so firmly: she must move into the regular high school as soon as possible. The locker room exchanges, the study hall brushes with other students, both fueled and frustrated her. Her world was spinning, and she required ASL for traction; she needed to share the other students’ language and enter their culture. So with a pure, sweet mulishness that would become her trademark, Sofia began to push for a transfer.