Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  What has yet to be considered is the social component of deafness, the cultural status of someone who has received an implant. Even with implants, a deaf person will not be able to function like a hearing person. It is incorrect to assume that implants will enable a deaf person to “pass” as hearing or to be “cured” of deafness; it is incorrect to assume that the recipient will miraculously travel from a world of loneliness and isolation into the heady warmth of vibrant communication.

  Deaf people, as long as they are not deprived of contact with the deaf community, already have access to warm and vibrant communication. Within their community, identification of oneself as a deaf person and pride in being deaf are both highly valued. Cochlear implant surgery is often perceived as denigrating to the group, as a step toward trying to “be more hearing.” For some, it conveys the same messages that straightening one’s hair or medically lightening one’s skin might convey within the American black community.

  When doctors recommend cochlear implants for deaf people whose social identity is already rooted in the deaf community, they must have the awareness and sensitivity to ask themselves, at what cost? Does the potential of enhanced speech detection outweigh the potential loss of identity with the group? Will the overall quality of life in fact be bettered or worsened? Unfortunately, during their professional training, most doctors (as well as most audiologists and speech therapists and many educators) learn to treat deafness purely as a pathology, and they cannot begin to formulate questions that treat it as a culture.

  Finally, in the examination room, the nurse turns to James, splays all ten fingers, and flips her wrists once. “Finished!” she announces. James relinquishes his seat and follows her out the door. He exudes the tranquillity of one who long ago ceased trying to guide his life. He allows the nurse to escort him to the elevator, allows the elevator to convey him to the street.

  Outside it is quite white and wet, with monotonous rain sliding onto the streets like condensation dripping down the inside of a kettle. The clouds have sunk low, impaling themselves on the tops of buildings. Smoke from shish-kabab carts, moist and pungent, blows in shredded veils across the sidewalk. James draws the hood of his sweatshirt up over his baseball cap and heads for the subway.

  On Sixtieth Street, a tall white man in a sopping windbreaker approaches him. “Want to buy a token for a dollar?” he asks, squinting as rivulets of rainwater course down the creases of his face. Drops splash against his mouth; his speech is impossible to lip-read. James hesitates for a fraction of a second, evaluating the man’s appearance. Is he dangerous? panhandling? preaching? asking for directions? Then, jaw tight, eyes polite and cold, James shakes his head tersely and keeps walking.

  On the subway steps, transferring from the D train to the Queens-bound E at Seventh Avenue, he is approached again, this time by a young black man in a business suit. “The uptown number one?” the man asks pleasantly, his body tensed as though in a rush. Once more James hesitates, his posture slightly guarded, his eyes working to understand what the man is asking. “The uptown number one?” the man repeats. James continues to stare at him, his own lips open in the effort to parse the words. The man thinks he’s being mocked; the corners of his mouth tuck down sourly and he hurries away in disgust. James continues to the lower platform.

  When he gets back to Lexington, the audiologist will look at his medical form, laugh at the doctor’s misguided recommendation, and realize that the scheduled hearing aid exam, through some misunderstanding on the part of the hospital staff, never took place. James’s trip today has been a waste. “You’ll have to go back,” the audiologist informs him while he stands in the doorway, his face a mask. “Did you tell them what you were therefor?”

  “They never asked me any questions!” he exclaims in a rare burst of frustration, then drops his hands to his sides and looks away, his stony gaze skimming over a row of green ear mold impressions set out to dry on a paper towel before being cast in plastic.

  For most of the spring James will remain outside the banana. It will be March before he gets another appointment at Roosevelt. On that day he will walk to the bus stop in Jackson Heights, remember the green Medicaid card he left in the dorm, double back two blocks to get it, and arrive late at the hospital, with time for only half of the hearing test. It will be April before he can schedule a return appointment to complete it, June before the new aids finally arrive. In the interim, James will borrow another loaner and promptly lose it, this time on a dorm field trip to see the Knicks at Madison Square Garden.

  He doesn’t ask for the new loaner today, though. He leans against the office door, his strong back accidentally crushing a few Christmas cards taped there. The audiologist gently scolds him for the mix-up at Roosevelt. His face draws shut like a pouch.

  This is a kind of betrayal. In return for letting the professionals make decisions about his life, he is supposed to be absolved from responsibility for it. When the audiologist presses— “But James, why didn’t you tell them what you were there for?” —he can only repeat, ”No one asked me anything!" His role is to defer to authority, not to question it.

  It is as though ever since the first spill, that remembered hurtling down a flight of stairs, he cannot reach out to catch himself. He will not grab for the banister. He will not scrape his knuckles against the plaster walls. His stomach will not even clutch in fear; fear has no use when he cannot hope to halt the descent. All he can do is let himself fall.

  8

  Tower of Babel

  Before the meeting of the communications committee even begins, the deaf staff members get up and move their table. Curving one tip of the giant U inward, they create a marked separation between themselves and the hearing committee members. Their re-angling is motivated by only the most practical considerations. They must clump together because there is just a single interpreter; from their newly jointed leg of the U, they are afforded the fullest possible view of the committee’s proceedings.

  Oscar created the communications committee last spring. He circulated a memo throughout the school that posed a series of provocative questions on both sides of the oralmanual debate:

  Are we delaying deaf students’ access to participation in the deaf community by not providing an exclusive sign environment?

  Are we embarrassing students or otherwise hurting their self-esteem by requiring speech?

  Are we being paternalistic or showing lack of respect when we expect certain behaviors (e.g., the use of hearing aids) from students?

  What is the message to deaf students, especially to below-average achievers, when the majority of deaf visitors invited to speak to them are persons of high oral skills who often maintain an anti-oral posture?

  What will be gained or lost by yielding to certain factions within the deaf community?

  Are we sufficiently promoting choice?

  To what extent, if any, does being “pro-speech” mean being “anti-deaf”?

  Then he recruited thirteen staff members from different departments to form a committee that would address the problem at the heart of these questions. The committee met once before the summer holiday, at which time its members set themselves a goal for the coming year: to formulate a school-wide communication policy.

  Inherent in this goal is the admission that Lexington’s current communication policy is nonexistent; within different departments, and even different classrooms within the same department, it is the teachers’ own abilities and ideological preferences that tend to dictate the communication practices used in instruction. Political camps exist but are not discussed formally. No clear definition of “sign language” exists for staff or students; everything along a vast continuum from pure ASL to a sort of clunky creole of signs combined with English gets used indiscriminately. The students receive a mishmash of languages and contradictory messages about how they are expected to communicate. Students come to the school with different communication systems, so one classroom might contain oral and signing students
who are unable to understand one another. In short, it’s a mess, at least as far as policymakers are concerned.

  Lexington bears no special shame for finding itself in this nebulous position. For nearly a hundred years it thrived, secure in its identity as a purely oral school. Only recently have two external factors arisen to challenge the appropriateness of this old system, and like schools for the deaf across the country, Lexington is changing to accommodate them.

  The first factor relates to the politics of ASL, which was only “discovered" during the late 1960s, when hearing researchers determined that it was not a primitive system of coded gestures, as had hitherto been supposed, but a valid language with its own grammar and syntax, capable of expressing abstract thought as well as the most esoteric detail. These findings filtered out into an educational community that for a hundred years had viewed signing as unbecoming, imbecilic, virtually bestial. Schools had commonly forbidden the use of signs, and not only in the classroom—students were not allowed to sign among themselves on the playground; they weren’t even supposed to sign with deaf houseparents in the dormitories at night. At some schools, children caught disobeying these rules sometimes had their hands struck with a ruler, or even bound together in an effort to force them to use their voices.

  In the late 1960s, whenever Lexington’s superintendent, Dr. Leo Connor, spotted groups of students signing on the sidewalk in front of the building after school, he used to dispatch Oscar, the brand-new director of child care, to send them on their way, as if they were engaging in an unseemly act. Oscar, who had grown up bilingual, who had ASL for a mother tongue, whose own parents communicated in ASL, never balked. Twenty-six years of living in a deaf household were no match for the voice of hearing authorities, the declamations of his professors at Teachers College, or the doctrines of Lexington School, that famous bastion of oralism. If they said signing reduced people to the level of animals, then it did. In his youthful disposition to please, Oscar accepted this credo so unflinchingly that when his parents came to visit our family at Lexington, he would ask them not to sign until they had crossed the threshold of our apartment and shut the door behind them. Sam and Fannie honored his request, traveling through the halls of the school with their hands at their sides, incommunicado.

  If Oscar, with a college education, a family, a job, and a lifetime of exposure to deaf adults who signed, could internalize this negative view of sign language so deeply, then deaf children of hearing families were even more susceptible. Even as they learned sign language (for most did, of course—no number of rules, no system of enforcement could prevent that), they learned to devalue it. If they loved the language, if they found a kind of freedom in it, it was a shameful love, and the freedom was tainted with guilt. Many students from oral schools learned to look down on manualists in childhood, only to stumble upon the signing deaf community and find it exciting, appealing, in adulthood. It is not unusual for oralists who come late to ASL to experience frustration over not signing well enough to have immediate access to the community, as well as resentment over having been excluded from that community their whole lives. The passage from a strictly oral environment to a world of choices can be overwhelming.

  Lexington has come to a crossroads no less overwhelming. When linguists validated ASL as an authentic language twenty-five years ago, many schools for the deaf made efforts to incorporate signing into their curricula. But instead of using pure ASL, they borrowed ASL signs and tried to fit them into English grammar and syntax, inventing clumsy hybrids, such as Manually Coded English (MCE), Signed Exact English (SEE), and Pidgin Signed English (PSE), that had little inner logic or integrity. (The latest studies suggest that there is not even any such thing as PSE. Pidgin is a simplified form of speech, usually a blend of two or more languages, with its own specific grammar and syntax. But there is no single PSE; the fact is that deaf people use a variety of “contact languages” that fall all along the continuum between ASL and English.) When Lexington began introducing variations of these sign systems in many classrooms two decades ago, it was more through happenstance than decree.

  The second factor influencing Lexington to address its communication policy relates to a shift in its student population. As an oral school, Lexington once bore the reputation of possessing a sort of country club air. Oralism has long been linked with high socioeconomic status, since members of the privileged classes tend to have more resources to channel into their children’s education and more choices about what form that education will take. Wanting their deaf children to have access to the same privileged circles they enjoy and perceiving the deaf community to be a step down, they have tended to favor oralism as the method that will best keep their children out of contact with the deaf community and on a par with hearing people.

  Oralism’s very inception was, in fact, a byproduct of socioeconomic motives. The systematic education of deaf people began in Spain in the mid-1500s, when word spread that Pedro Ponce de León, a Benedictine monk in San Salvador, had taught a young deaf man to talk. At that time the church barred deaf people from Holy Communion because they could not confess aloud; moreover, they were prohibited from inheriting their family’s wealth. Spain had a small, wealthy nobility that was anxious to preserve its lines of succession; however, because of inbreeding, deafness was not uncommon among these families. When they heard of the work of Ponce de León, they sent their deaf heirs to him to learn to talk and thereby become eligible to inherit.

  Lexington’s existence does not stem from such blatantly economic motives; still, it is linked to social privilege. Recognizing this part of the early history of oralism is important now, as the old systems are being questioned or dismantled or rearranged, in understanding the deep-seated attitudes on both sides of the debate. In the basest stereotype, speaking has been equated with the higher classes and higher intellect, signing with the lower. Even though many people, deaf and hearing, understand intellectually that this stereotype is inaccurate, they still carry its emotional residue.

  Lexington was founded by Hannah and Isaac Rosenfeld, an educated, affluent, well-traveled German Jewish couple whose daughter, Carrie, became deaf in infancy from a bout of scarlet fever. The Rosenfelds did not want their daughter to be educated manually—the only method that had ever been available in this country. They traveled to Germany, where they were put in contact with Bernard Englesmann, a teacher of the famous German method called articulation, which taught deaf children to speak and lip-read. The Rosenfelds hired Mr. Englesmann to begin a school in New York City where Carrie would be a student. In 1864 the first class, with six deaf children, began its studies in the Rosenfelds’ home at 367 Broadway, below Canal Street. No one had any inkling that this gathering, which began the first oral school for the deaf in the United States, was planting the seed of an enormous controversy that would rage well into the next century.

  Within three years, the Rosenfelds formally incorporated their little school as the Institution for the Improved Instruction of Deaf-Mutes and enlisted a group of community leaders to form a board of trustees. Word of the school’s success spread and enrollment multiplied, necessitating moves to ever-larger spaces, until the Lexington Avenue building was constructed in 1880. In 1868, the New York City Board of Education donated two large chalkboards and three dozen desks and chairs to the school, marking the beginning of public aid. Two years later, the school applied for and was granted full state support for pupils’ tuition and board. Private funds continued to fund teacher training, research, building additions, field trips, summer camps, and the like. A state-private school cooperative arrangement had evolved.

  Meanwhile, Lexington was holding public exhibitions that showcased its top students’ ability to lip-read and respond orally to questions posed by members of an astounded audience. The popularity of oralism was catching on all over the world. In 1880, 164 delegates met at an international congress of teachers of the deaf in Milan, where, “considering the incontestable superiority of speech over s
igns in restoring the deaf-mute to society,” they passed a declaration that “the oral method ought to be preferred to that of signs in the education of the deaf and dumb.” By the end of the nineteenth century, virtually all schools for the deaf in the United States had switched to pure oralism. Sign language was occasionally permitted but never taught, and only among older students who were considered “oral failures.”

  The very concept of “oral failures” is a giveaway to the imperfection of the oral method, or at least to its inappropriateness for some deaf students. It would be equally naive to suggest that oralism is entirely without merit, or that its proponents are strictly motivated by chauvinist hearing ideals. The inherent value of ASL notwithstanding, English is the dominant language in this country; the ability to get along in English is helpful for anyone who lives here. Deaf people who are good lip readers, are literate in English, and have intelligible speech will almost certainly have an easier time with everything from getting a job to giving a cab driver directions to reading a newspaper to buying a carton of milk.

  In fact, oral skills, originally taught to deaf children of the nobility and the upper class, are equally if not more crucial for children from less privileged backgrounds, who may not be able to rely on their family’s financial support or social connections, who may not get prestigious jobs where an interpreter is provided, but who must fend for themselves in the hearing world. Despite Lexington’s former country club reputation, it has educated children from all social strata ever since state funding began in 1870. Being in New York, it has always enrolled a large proportion of immigrants; today that proportion is growing. The city’s urban problems have always found their way into the school also; as homelessness, drug use, violence, and unemployment worsen in the city, so they are reflected in the student body.