Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  In those days, Oscar wore corduroys to work, and his old denim jacket that flared at the hips. He strove for unity and peaceful solutions. Another print that hangs behind his desk—the one of Martin Luther King standing before a photograph of Gandhi, with King’s famous quote about the descending spiral of violence and only love being able to drive out hate—also dates from his early days as an administrator. Then he believed that he could best accomplish things by being patient and taking a moderate stance.

  So while at home he taught his children the importance of workers’ rights, when the teachers at Lexington went on strike he skirted the picket line and showed up mute and strained at the negotiating table. And while he got obvious pleasure from teaching us to sign at home, when my sister and I found ourselves with a can of green paint one dull afternoon and inscribed “Hi Signers!” on the bumper of his car, he demanded that we scrub it right off. Wounded by his uncharacteristic outburst, Reba and I had no inkling of the oral-manual debate then raging at Lexington, nor of the controversy our salutation could have sparked in the school parking lot. Today, when I remind my father of this story, he looks stricken, mortified. But there it is: in the early stages of his career, in his efforts to accommodate opposing sides and bring them together, he sublimated his social ideals.

  Things have changed since then—both within the community and within Oscar. At Lexington, voices have become more disparate, needs more complicated. The family tree has twisted and thickened, become enhanced and encumbered by new growth. The family has branched into factions that now include the center board, the school board, the parent association, the deaf parents group, the black parents group, the Hispanic parents group, the deaf teachers group, the union, manual students, oral students, foreign students, alumni. Reconciliation among all these groups will not come easily.

  And Oscar has grown weary of playing the facilitator, eliciting the compromises. Last year he turned fifty, or half a century, as his children are wont to remind him, and his sense of time has telescoped. He is less patient, less cautious now. A new print, a gift from his wife, has gone up beside the desk. It features a quote by the civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer: “The history we’ve been getting never happened, baby, and never will.”

  A bald irreverence, an impatience with distortion, have taken hold within Oscar. The agitator is no longer content to work gently, slowly, beneath the surface, but has risen with new urgency. In the eight years since Oscar became superintendent, the composition of the school board has gone from twelve white people, of whom eight were men and only one was deaf, to a group of sixteen, of whom seven are women, four are deaf, three are black, and two are Hispanic. He has established the black parents group, the deaf parents group, and the Black Deaf Children Project. Last year he brought in a psychologist to do ongoing group work with deaf and hearing staff members, exploring the barriers and conflicts that exist between them. Oscar is taking greater and greater risks, with increasing candor, and discomfiting some along the way.

  The discomfiture may derive in part from the fact that he is so obviously in earnest. After all, opposing prejudice and injustice is the implicit responsibility of any good citizen; maintaining this stance is no less than expected. But Oscar has the temerity to disinter issues from his own back yard, bring them to the table, call them by name. Before board members and teachers, in Lexington’s auditorium and at national conferences, in periodicals and on videotape, he has dwelt on particulars, speaking of the gross disparity in academic statistics among Lexington’s different ethnic groups and acknowledging that hearing authorities have long justified their hegemony by keeping deaf people helpless.

  Some find it unseemly that a man in his position, a white, hearing, middle-aged, middle-class professional, should raise these issues with such apparent probity. He is either dangerously naive or annoyingly self-righteous, an idealist who refuses to play by their rules. Among this group, many of whom make up the Lexington Center board, Oscar has provoked enmity, and he sometimes wonders whether his days as superintendent are numbered.

  But for now he is sitting with four elementary school children, and he is gentle with them. Age and gravity have made the skin on his face loose and mobile, so that as his features shift while chatting about Tar Beach, he appears ingenuous, almost childlike. “You know,” he says, “it looks like a very simple book, but when you start thinking about black people, white people, rich, poor, discrimination, the union, dreaming . . . it’s really a book you can think about for a long time.”

  This is Oscar in his element. He leans toward the children, tie hanging forward, pen and eyeglasses protruding from his breast pocket. The children watch his face; his brow wrinkles up like an accordion, and his eyes are wide with the offer of a question. He asks the children, “Do you ever dream like the girl in the book?”

  Oscar leaves the house by six-forty each morning, backing out of the gravel drive in a wide arc, and steers east across the Tappan Zee Bridge. He switches on National Public Radio, heads south on the thruway. He has made this commute five, sometimes six, mornings a week ever since moving to Nyack seventeen years ago.

  He finds it not unpleasant. Depending on the time of year, the mountains across the Hudson hunker down against a purple sky or are backlit by streaky ribbons of dawn. His briefcase, bulging with books and folders, legal pads and articles, maybe a piece of cold chicken wrapped in foil, is slung on the back seat, out of sight. He cannot attend to the items in it now; he faces a whole guiltless hour of time to himself, and his mind is free to tarry over as many ongoing projects and dilemmas as it likes, or none at all.

  Once, bent on making more efficient use of his commuting time, he bought a little tape recorder in order to dictate thoughts that struck him while driving, but the habit never really took. More recently, Lexington purchased him a car phone (making him the target of merciless ribbing from members of his immediate family), which renders his commute somewhat regularly a matter of business. But when the phone is dormant and the radio news turned low, Oscar dwells in the sovereignty of his own thoughts. Often this is the most productive time of all.

  Once he arrives at school, he may be approached with any number of problems—“We need to borrow your necktie for senior yearbook pictures”; “One of the kids’ mothers had her purse snatched and she needs car fare home”; “A big German shepherd has gotten into the main lobby.” And he will relinquish the tie, extract thirty dollars from his wallet, see to the dog. In the natural mayhem of a regular schoolday, underlying politics and principles are obscured, forgotten.

  In the haven of the car they rise to the surface. The dramas of the day arrange themselves against the larger backdrop of the field as plainly as scraps of fabric laid out along the dashboard. Here Oscar mulls over the connections, considers the relationships. His mind works piecemeal, as a quilter does. The pattern that emerges is one of paradoxes, inconsistencies. The most puzzling of these is that while Lexington has held the longstanding belief that English should be both the language of instruction and the ultimate goal for its students, after more than a century the school is still unable to teach its students to read at grade level, and children of deaf parents, who have been exposed to sign language from birth, tend disproportionately to be the student leaders and achievers.

  Recently, Albany decided that ASL satisfies the foreign language requirement in high schools. There is great excitement among deaf people over the potential job opportunities this will create—even though most of them will not be eligible for these jobs, since few deaf people hold the qualifications the state requires for teacher certification.

  Then there is Lexington’s implementation last spring of mandatory sign language classes for teachers who do not meet minimum levels of proficiency, which yielded indignant reactions from the union and from those teachers who were told when they entered the field that signing to children would prevent them from ever learning English.

  And perhaps most urgent to ponder, there are the Lexington stud
ents themselves, newly awakened to the idea of deaf pride from their mandatory deaf studies class, who resent their parents for never having learned to sign; and the parents who were told when their babies were diagnosed that the most loving thing they could do was not to learn sign but rather to speak and speak and speak to their children.

  Now, with “Morning Edition” playing on the car radio, Oscar thinks of how effortlessly he absorbs information about the world, of how he will walk into Lexington this morning with a wider breadth of knowledge, a greater ability to make connections, than his deaf colleagues. Of course, they can receive similar information through the newspaper or television, but that entails carving out an extra portion of time and spending less time doing something else.

  How to compensate for that? His deaf colleagues will always have to work harder to keep up. They will always have to make sacrifices and choices that hearing people do not. Given deaf people’s limited exposure to information, can there ever be parity? Like Tantalus in Hades, reaching for the apple that remains eternally just beyond grasp, educators may be pursuing the impossible.

  The inequities, after all, begin accumulating at birth. Even the small pool of deaf children with deaf parents—children who grow up signing and who live in language-rich homes—are at a disadvantage. Even they are deprived of myriad opportunities for communication that hearing children have. While hearing children are being pushed in their strollers, they can hear their parents talking to them from behind. While bent over coloring books, they can overhear phone conversations, and while lying in bed, they can eavesdrop on disputes going on in the next room. In instances of both direct address and peripheral contact, the sheer quantity of interactions is far greater for hearing children. It is difficult to conceive of any circumstance in which a deaf child could receive comparable amounts of exposure to language.

  These are not the biased opinions of hearing chauvinists. They are facts that affect children’s development. But many deaf people contest these facts, as well as the idea that deaf people are disabled. The National Association of the Deaf rejects the representation of deaf people as having an impairment; it characterizes them instead as having enhanced vision.

  If we lived in a society that did not regard hearing people as the norm, these differences might not constitute deprivations. In fact, in a society that regarded deafness as the norm, it is likely that hearing people would be at a disadvantage. But hearing people dominate our society; it is hearing people’s gaze that determines reality. Within this reality, deaf people are disabled.

  No matter how Oscar looks at it—from every angle, in every season, his feet working the clutch and the gas, one hand absently kneading the cords at the side of his neck as he spins south along the Major Deegan and north along the Palisades, through traffic jams and puddles, blue winter mornings and violet summer nights—the fact remains inescapable: deaf people are disabled. They will always be at a disadvantage. In order for that to change, society’s definition of “normal” would have to change.

  Perhaps the weight of this disadvantage accounts for the importance of congregation within the community. It breeds a special need for coming together, sharing information. Through contact comes knowledge, and the transmission of culture. Deaf people use their special schools and clubs to gather vital missing pieces, not only in terms of education but also in terms of group identity and self-esteem.

  But for all of the tensions festering among various groups within Lexington and the deaf community, the greatest threat may lie outside, from the advocates of mainstreaming, who believe that this practice constitutes more equitable treatment for deaf people. As mainstreaming contributes to the dissolution of schools for the deaf, it may cause more harm than good. For many deaf people, parity with hearing people can be approached only through separate schooling.

  Of course, here in America—and Lexington is nothing if not in the thick of the melting pot—segregation is supposed to be reviled. The mainstreaming movement is backed by the full weight of democratic ideals. The irony strikes Oscar with sudden vividness, comes to him with hopeless clarity. Mainstreaming may be as American as motherhood and apple pie. But whose motherhood? Whose apple pie?

  I. King Jordan, the first deaf president of Gallaudet University, arrives on the eleven o’clock Trump Shuttle. Oscar meets him at the airport. It is early April and the day, neither warm nor cold, glistens with a pearly dampness.

  King flew up from Washington this morning to participate in an educational leadership seminar that Oscar organized at Lexington. The whole question of “whose apple pie?” fermented in Oscar’s mind all winter and grew into the premise for this seminar, called “Mainstreaming Deaf Children: When Reality Conflicts with Social Policy.” This afternoon deaf and hearing people from around the city will converge in Lexington’s auditorium to hear a panel of experts explore the topic.

  The panelists include two deaf and two hearing people. Besides King, who is perhaps the most renowned, having achieved a kind of folk-hero status during the Gallaudet uprising, they include the chairperson of the Congressional Commission on the Education of the Deaf, the assistant commissioner for special education in New York State, and the director of special education in New York City; the moderator is a former deputy commissioner for the New York State Education Department. It took some effort to assemble all these people on one afternoon, and Oscar was gratified when the project finally came together. Now, when so many schools for the deaf are bogged down in political strife, he would like to see Lexington provide a forum that will keep the issues in focus and generate intelligent discussion. Rather than trying to provide the answers, Lexington will try to frame the questions.

  “So how are you?” Oscar signs once they are in the Lexington van and headed toward the school.

  “Good!” King replies, cheerily emphatic, and then, “Sort of,” he qualifies, chuckling, tipping a flat hand back and forth. They both use simultaneous signs and speech. King, a tall, thin man, frank and personable, lost his hearing as a young adult; his English has the clarity and inflection of a native speaker. “And you?”

  Oscar parrots King’s response, gently oscillating one hand.

  King laughs. “These are exciting times — perhaps a little too exciting.”

  “There’s a Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’”

  Again King laughs appreciatively, the rich sound of recognition. Both men are deeply embroiled in deaf politics. With a mixture of warmth and concern, they brief each other on the ride. They touch on the current status of the ASL-only rule at Gallaudet; after a barrage of complaints, it has been suspended and the policy is under review. They discuss the J.H.S. 47 movement, the protest of the New York Board of Education’s decision to split the only city school for the deaf in two, with a new principal to run the elementary division. The deaf community has interpreted the change as a step toward closing the school and mainstreaming its students; it has held public demonstrations and gone to the press with cries of injustice. Oscar and King talk about the brewing tension over the hiring of a new superintendent at Saint Francis de Sales, the school for the deaf in Brooklyn; letters from the deaf community urging that the position be filled by a deaf person have not met with a favorable response. They mention Lexington’s own imminent vacancy; a new president must be elected for the center board this spring, and the vast majority of the board’s members do not appreciate suggestions that the time has come for Lexington finally to have a deaf president.

  Everywhere indications of anger and frustration crop up, on both sides, on all sides. Oscar and King commiserate knowingly. They are not close friends, but they are plagued by similar polemics, each kept abreast of the wider situation by various sources along the same grapevine.

  Beyond the rain-spattered windows of the van, the scenery uncoils: the droning gray rectangles of Jackson Heights, the sidewalks lined with a mishmash of interesting trash—rolls of carpet, fireplace fenders, old coffee tables and lamps piled topsy-turvy
along the curb, as if in evidence of mass home improvement. But the neighborhood never changes. Blocks from Lexington, King brightens. “Congratulations on Atlanta!” he says. ”I heard that went very well.”

  He is referring to the Black Deaf Experience Conference that Oscar cochaired last month in Georgia. The first of its kind, it drew more than 340 people from all sectors of the deaf community, from all over the country, for three days of presentations, public hearings, and focus groups. Preparations are already under way for a Hispanic Deaf Conference, to take place next fall in San Antonio. Slowly, the different perspectives are being brought to light, shared among the different groups.

  “I think that’s the main issue we’re facing now,” continues King. “The problem is, politics keeps us so busy that we can’t. . .” He trails off, hands lingering helplessly, inexpressively, in front of his chest. It’s as if the energies of the community are being pulled in opposite directions: toward challenging the paternalism of hearing authorities and toward understanding the differences within the deaf community. Some militants see the latter as undermining the former.

  “We have to do both,” says Oscar. The two men are quiet for a moment under the weight of this precept.

  “That’s right,” agrees King. The van pulls into Lexington’s lot. “We have to do both.”

  The seminar convenes in the auditorium after lunch. Student government representatives, turned out in touching finery, act as ushers. The panelists sit at tables covered with royal blue cloths and outfitted with microphones and pitchers of icewater. Three interpreters have been hired for the event: one onstage signs to the audience, one in the front row signs to the deaf panelists onstage, and one with a microphone voices questions that are signed from the audience. Both deaf panelists speak and sign for themselves.