Points are made by both panelists and audience. Deaf children can’t hear, several speakers reiterate; they must be in an environment where there is visual information. Mainstreaming won’t provide enough of that. There will be a loss in terms of quality of services, and a more insidious loss in the absence of role models. Years ago, someone comments, relating an adage familiar to many in the room, young deaf children assumed that when they grew up they would either become hearing or die, because they never saw deaf adults.
But overturning the popularity of mainstreaming won’t be easy, other speakers caution. After all, mainstreaming came about because some handicapped children were being excluded from public schools. Advocating special schools can be construed as reverting to harmful segregation. And for many, the stigma remains intact: children who do not succeed in mainstream programs are perceived as failures.
The discussion continues for three hours. Oscar has made it clear that the purpose of the seminar is not to spiral into a debate with winners and losers, and this it never does. Various sentiments are put forth, and they accumulate, arrange themselves into a sprawling, multifaceted montage. Oscar himself sits quietly in the front row. As he has become more aggressive in his actions, organizing public exchanges of ideas and information, he has become more thoughtful about his status as a hearing man who has no trouble being heard. His greatest contribution now may be to provide forums in which other voices have eminence, and to spend more time listening.
The last question comes from one of the student ushers, a tall, raw-boned, gangly senior. He stands, his skinny necktie wobbling against his Adam’s apple, and phrases his question solemnly. “As more students are placed in mainstream programs, our culture will decline. We have pride in our culture and want to pass it on to future generations. Don’t you see this as a concern?” He reclaims his seat without taking his eyes from the stage, so as not to miss any of the reply.
“That’s the responsibility of the deaf community, not the schools.” The panelist from the congressional commission chooses to field this question. “The worst mistake the deaf community could make is to give that responsibility to the schools. The deaf organizations themselves should assume responsibility for transmitting the culture.”
But I. King Jordan signals that he would like to field the question, too. First he pours icewater into his glass, innocent of the effect created by the proximity of his microphone: it sounds like a string of pearls being dropped on a dresser, amplified a hundredfold throughout the room. For the hearing people, it provides an unintentionally dramatic preamble to his final comment. “I take the position that you don’t teach culture, you absorb it,” he says. “The center of the deaf community has always been the schools. The importance of their role cannot be underestimated. ”
During the Deaf President Now movement, the Gallaudet students coined a new visual expression that has become the deaf cultural equivalent of clapping hands. Silent, glimmering applause—arms raised, fingers splayed, wrists oscillating—was widely, instantly adopted by deaf communities everywhere. It is easy to forget how recently this tradition was created, so ingrained has it become. Really, it is a perfect example of the way deaf culture thrives in and emanates from the schools.
Oscar looks over his shoulder now to gauge the response to King’s last statement. All over the darkened auditorium, arms are lifting silently into the air, hands shimmying back and forth, like pale underwater creatures responding to an invisible current: a sea of deaf applause.
14
Moving the Boundaries
I went to him for language lessons. Sign language lessons, I wanted, but that first night in his windowless office at New York University he drew a Chinese ideogram on the back of something and asked me to copy it.
My whole childhood I had heard stories about Alec Nai-man. While still in high school he’d gotten his pilot’s license; upon graduation, he had traveled around the world; he had studied in China on a fellowship and driven a taxicab in Manhattan; in the New York State Court of Appeals, he had won the right to serve on a jury by using an interpreter. Every so often, word of his latest exploit would come to my attention, and in this way I grew up with a constant, if peripheral, awareness of him.
I did not know him personally. He had been a student at Lexington when my parents began teaching there, and his parents and mine had become close friends. Alec was fourteen years my senior, and generally off exploring any of a number of distant countries by the time I learned to talk. But over the years his name was invoked with enough frequency and in such a way that it acquired a faintly consanguineous quality, and it was on the basis of this connection that, when I was twenty-one, I asked him to tutor me in American Sign Language, although I had not seen him since I was a child.
That first night I sat in his office, rain-damp and shy, and stared miserably at the Chinese character before me, unsure of the purpose of this little test. My raincoat, which I had not removed, dripped over a stack of workbooks on the floor. I picked up a pen and copied the figure.
“Not bad,” said Alec, picking up the paper when I had finished. Speaking aloud, with no signs, he proceeded to point out all the details I had missed. I nodded with what I hoped looked like humility. I needed a tissue, badly. He said something else. I couldn’t understand his speech. I nodded again, and wiped my nose on the back of my hand.
After that first night we met once a week. On these winter evenings, after almost everyone else had gone home to supper, Alec and I faced each other across a heavy wooden table in Shimkin Hall and dispensed with English. The rule was no voice, no mouthing of words. The only sounds came from the hissing radiators, a vacuum cleaner humming out by the elevator, and us: the click of teeth, the damp patter of lips, the muted percussion of hands.
“Don’t worry about vocabulary,” Alec advised right away. “You’ve got a good base there. Concentrate on grammar.” In ASL, grammar occurs in the eyes, the brows, the tilt of the head, the lips. We practiced near and far.
“Where’s the water fountain?” he queried.
It was near. I pointed in the general direction of the hall. He showed me how to make it precise: eyes narrowed, lips pressed tightly against teeth, shoulder raised, chin tucked in, wrist near body as one finger traced a tight angle— “Just around the corner to the right.”
Mindful of the Chinese ideogram with all its essential lines and dashes, I tried again, attempting to replicate each of his movements with equal grace, but managed only a feeble imitation. “I’m so hearing,” I lamented in mock despair.
“Let’s break it down,” Alec suggested. “Watch just my mouth.”
He would indicate either near or far by moving only his lips, and I was to say which. Far lips were pursed and sometimes parted with an intake of breath; near lips mashed together near the teeth. I sat back and watched, chewing the embarrassed smile from my own mouth as I interpreted his. He had a black mustache, rather winsome and offhand, and now it tucked in. “Near,” I signed. He gave a short nod. To his entire string of examples I then responded in quick tempo: “Far far near far near near near.” Alec nodded yes.
This proved a portentous early lesson; as we evolved into conversation, we nearly always talked of travel. Alec told me about his experiences working on a farm in Australia, packing shoes in a warehouse in New Zealand, smoking opium in China. In turn, I told him all the places I wanted to explore. He showed me how to make mountains and forests, carve meaning from space, open up new territory with my fingers. He made pictures of my very thoughts. With the uncanny accuracy of a compass, he seemed to know where everything belonged, and I began to absorb the conventions and behaviors of ASL unconsciously.
Still, between thought and expression my hands often failed me. Once, faltering for the means to channel what I meant to say into signs, I let my gaze drift to the place where ceiling met wall, my hands still working as my face tilted away.
“Leah.” Alec shook his fingers gently within my peripheral vision until I looke
d back. “Always maintain eye contact while you’re signing to someone.”
And when I dropped my eyes for a moment to study an unfamiliar sign on his hands, he chided, “Remember always to watch the eyes. Use peripheral vision for my hands; the eyes are most important.” I blushed and pressed my fingers to my cheeks and earlobes, cooling them inarticulately. (I thought the university was unconscionably overheated; I had noticed that my face was always warm during our sessions, my palms a bit damp.)
Each time we met I slipped deeper and more easily into this place with no words. There were moments, watching him, when I no longer mentally translated what he said into English but lapsed into unmediated comprehension. As a non-native user, I would always be somewhat clumsy in expression. Still, I found myself able to converse more intimately in sign, without all the euphemistic vagaries of English. Threads that had previously bound my thoughts to the rigid, linear grid of English loosened and came undone; I began to trust what I could see. Tactile and explicit, with language passing like liquid between us, we engaged in uncommon communion.
The winter evenings yielded to spring evenings, flush with the heady sweetness of warm winds, of plaintive street musicians and lengthening dusks. I took plums and apples to our sessions. We spoke of exploring other cultures. Alec showed me the signs for Japan, Austria, Egypt, Thailand. He promised to take me flying someday.
In April I left New York to travel around the country. At the end of our final session, I gave him a flat package wrapped in colored paper. Inside was a map, a Peters Projection of the world. On this map, all the continents appear shrunken or distended into unfamiliar shapes. Europe and Scandinavia, for example, are compressed into neat lavender parcels, while Africa and South America stretch across the water like giant mustard-colored cocoons.
The Peters map is a redrawing of that which we thought we understood. However ridiculous or blasphemous the altered landmasses seem, they are, in fact, cartographically superior to those we’ve grown up believing. On this map, impossible distances shrink. Boundaries shift.
I enclosed a card. “Thank you,” it read, in a message that I hoped was clever and subtle. “See you around.”
It was a hot night in Central Park, late June, the duskier end of a crazily long dusk. We sat around on a couple of bedsheets outside the Delacorte Theater—a dozen graduate students, Alec, and I. The students had brought crackers, cheese, grapes, sardines, wine, pickles, cherries. In two days, Alec would lead the group abroad, where they would earn college credits by studying deaf rehabilitation in England and Sweden. For now, they laughed and drank and practiced their sign language while waiting to go into the theater. Alec had managed to get the whole group tickets for Twelfth Night.
There was an interpreter with us as well, a woman who would accompany the group abroad. She was the first interpreter I’d ever met socially. She had generous features, pale, quick eyes, and lots of teeth, and she and Alec talked effortlessly and abundantly, signing beyond my skill. He had taken his shoes off. Awed and jealous, I drank a cup of wine and turned to watch the soccer game in the dusty meadow behind us.
Shortly before we were to go inside the theater, a large man with whiskers came on foot down the bicycle path, swinging a cowbell. Alec looked up right away, and we all followed his gaze. The man wore a T-shirt that did not quite cover his stomach and carried a basket on which was fastened a sign: WISHES $1. We watched as he wended his way among the picnics laid out between the trees, soliciting wishers. For the said price, a customer could make one wish; when he or she was finished, the man would ring his bell, presumably ensuring that the wish would be granted. Alec sort of yelped at the man to get his attention and removed a dollar bill from his pants pocket.
We had been seeing each other around all month, Alec and I, ever since I had gotten back from my travels. He had taken me flying nearly every weekend, in a small plane with blue-and-white wings. He rented it from an airfield out in New Jersey. We’d meet at the field early in the morning, and while Alec signed papers in the office I would wait outside, watching other planes take off. They were as neat and plump as sparrows. One minute they bustled along the runway, models of practical efficiency; the next they were airborne, luminous and miragelike in the haze. Eventually I’d hear a screen door smack and there would be Alec, sloe-eyed and bearish, standing behind me. He’d flip his cigarette onto the gravel, give me a nod, and head toward the field.
I was proud not to get sick in the air. Alec went in for acrobatics, making the plane tilt and sink so that the ground spiraled. “It feels so strange!” I told him breathlessly after the first time. “Look, why are my hands shaking?”
He said something about centripetal force, something about blood rushing to the body’s center. I had a terrible time understanding him in the airplane. For one thing, the noise of the engine obliterated what little voice he sometimes used; I hadn’t realized how much his speech gave me clues as to what he was saying. For another, he wore dark glasses to block the glare; I could not see his eyes.
“I’ve never felt anything like that.” I was still lightheaded.
“Were you scared?” he asked.
“No. I trust you.”
He smiled then, quite a pleased smile, and pulled up on the throttle.
I did trust him; his control, his ease with the whole contraption, was evident. There was nothing up there to listen for. He watched the whole sky, pointing out other planes and helicopters long before I made them out. He had had his first lesson when he was twelve, his first solo at sixteen. Every cent he had earned, his allowance and birthday money, had gone toward breaking gravity’s hold.
He showed me pretty things. We flew into New York Harbor and circled the Statue of Liberty, right up close to her huge green face. Boats glittered like bits of chewing gum wrapper beneath us. We flew along the beach at Coney Island and up the East River, crossing bridges, now the size of cake decorations. We found my parents’ house up the Hudson River and dipped our wings while my mother stood in the yard and flapped a yellow tablecloth.
“Do you mind my being up here with you?” I asked him once. “I mean, is it — it’s not your private place?”
“It feels nice to share it,” he said kindly, but I don’t know that we were sharing it. He was the most alone person I had ever met.
One night after flying we drove back across the river to Manhattan and walked into the East Village for blintzes. We talked incessantly along the way, with me periodically interrupting myself to ask him the signs for things (“How do you say squirrel? What about stereotype?”) and him periodically grabbing my elbow to steer me clear of various obstacles (fire hydrants, oncoming traffic). I was not yet accustomed to conversing in sign language while walking on a crowded city sidewalk, and even after more experience it seemed as if he were forever rescuing me from crashing into things whenever we went out.
At supper Alec spoke a little of his former wife. He had been married for eleven years to a hearing woman from New Zealand. He had met her while managing a youth hostel over there and they had come to live in New York. Soon after the divorce she had gone back to her country. They had had no children. Alec rarely talked about it; I didn’t ask. Something like 90 percent of marriages between deaf and hearing people end in divorce. That night in the restaurant he said he would think twice before marrying another hearing woman.
But so much of his life existed in the hearing world. He had left Lexington after five years and graduated from a hearing high school. Really bright deaf students were supposed to do that: mainstream, assimilate. At the time, Lexington was entirely oral, so he hadn’t even learned to sign until he was in his twenties. He read voraciously, everything from Shakespeare to Kerouac to the Bhagavad-Gita. His college degrees were from a hearing university. And all of his fluency in English did nothing to help him fit in with the deaf community.
The first sign Alec ever taught me was strong-deaf. “He’s deaf,” he signed, indicating an imaginary person off to his left, and then, point
ing at an adjacent phantom, he repeated the sign with great emphasis.
“Ahh . . . you mean like the first person is just hard of hearing and the second is really very deaf?” I suggested.
He smiled and explained that it had nothing to do with degree of hearing ability; rather, it was about attitude, a measure of political and social involvement in the deaf community. “If you want to learn ASL, you should know these cultural idioms,” he advised. Then he showed me another, this one the antithesis of strong-deaf, the cultural equivalent of Uncle Tom: think-hearing —literally, one who thinks too much like a hearing person, functions too much in the hearing world.
This one I recognized immediately, because I had seen it said about Alec.
That hot night in Central Park, Alec did not make a wish. He turned to the interpreter. “Call him over. Ask for a poem.”
“A poem?” She laughed.
“Just call him over. I know him.”
The Wish Man was currently preoccupied with a sardine-and-cracker sandwich that one of the graduate students in our group had prepared for him, but he made his way rather unsteadily around the circle when summoned by the interpreter.
“He wants a poem,” she said, pointing at Alec, who grinned up at the man and dropped his dollar into the basket. The graduate students hushed expectantly. The Wish Man looked at Alec for several seconds, then cleared his throat and launched into an original recitation, very loud and fast and furious, imbued with impressive sprays of saliva.
The interpreter made a valiant attempt to keep up with the lyrics—something about John Lennon, psychedelics, Superman, and hippies—but there were so many words to fingerspell and such erratic phrasing that she stumbled and made faces as the poem continued. Still, her hands pieced the verse together with a kind of lucid intelligence. Alec glanced up occasionally at the Wish Man, at his damp red face and meaty, gesticulating hands, then back at the interpreter. With a final moist wheeze the poem ended, and the students sort of mopped their brows and shook one another’s hands and someone poured the Wish Man a drink.
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