Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  The next problem was school. When Tom was six, he was placed in a mainstream class taught by a man with a heavy mustache and beard, and when the Wilsons asked that Tom be transferred into another class, they were told, “We think it’s important he learns to lip-read somebody difficult.” Caro and Richard said, “We think it’s important he learns his nine times table.” The situation was not happy, and it was socially alienating. Tom came home one day and said that for sports, he had been asked to be the goalpost. “So we sent him to a very odd little private school with only fifty children,” Caro said, “because one of the difficulties is that Tom is intelligent.”

  Then came secondary school. They met with the head teacher of the local school, who said, “I know people like you. You’re going to have too high expectations of this child. That’s not fair to you or the child, so you must lower your expectations.” Caro was indignant, but also shaken. “I remember,” she said, “standing at home, leaning on an apothecary chest. I said to Richard, ‘He’ll never read Hamlet and he’ll never say apothecary chest.” They looked at all the schools for which they might qualify, including the Mary Hare School for the Deaf, a boarding school in Berkshire. Although all students there are deaf, they do better on standardized national tests than the average British child. Richard had been miserable at boarding school and had sworn never to send a child of his away; Caro was opposed to private secondary education and was also horrified about having Tom so far from home. In the end, however, he went; Caro joined the board of governors. She said, “Tom was hit by homesickness and cried for the first two terms. I was very, very Tom-sick. In the second, third, fourth year, he was very happy, and sixth form was one of the happiest times he’s ever had. Adolescence needs to be when you start to make lots of decent friends, or you don’t learn how. He had friends there.” There was informal signing, but teaching was spoken, and people were encouraged to use their voice. “An interestingly high proportion are from deaf parents,” Caro said, “including signing deaf parents who want their children brought up orally. It’s a nice place. It’s hated by a lot of the Deaf community.”

  When Tom started, Richard visited the speech therapist and said, “Don’t tell my wife I came. But I need you to teach this boy to say apothecary chest.” The speech therapist thought this was absurd and so did Tom. Caro laughed as she described it. “He said apothecary chest. And he also read Hamlet.” Tom’s love of reading and words has been his common ground with his mother. As she and I talked one afternoon, she flipped through photo albums. There were hundreds of pictures of Caro and Tom walking, sitting, playing, working. Tom’s sister made only an occasional appearance. “Richard’s taking the photographs, but where is Amy?” Caro said. “She will tell you that that’s what it felt like an awful lot of the time. I think it was a very good thing that Tom went to boarding school at twelve, because it gave Amy and me a second chance.”

  When Tom went away, Caro was elected to the board of the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID). She tried to get some signing board members, but the political Deaf movement in England dislikes the RNID (which some say stands for Really Not Interested in the Deaf), and Caro never got anyone to join. Caro found the hostility both mystifying and counterproductive. “I always felt there was something about the signing deaf community that encourages a prolonged adolescence. It’s powerful as a way of experiencing yourself, but ultimately without power in the larger world.” Tom, too, found the politicized Deaf community difficult, but he believed in some measure of pride in deafness—or at least pride in being oneself, with deafness as part of it. “I remember Tom telling me about a boy in his dormitory who prayed every night to be cured,” Caro said, “and Tom saying, ‘That’s very sad, Mum, isn’t it? I would never do that.’ I thought, ‘Well, we’ve done something right.’”

  Tom graduated well from Mary Hare and went to Bath University to study graphic design. He got a first, the top degree category, worked for two years at a graphic design company, then decided he wanted to see the world. He took a year and traveled through Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and South America. He then traveled on his own through Africa. Still, during this period he was somewhat aimless and at times severely depressed. Caro felt both worried and helpless. “Then one day, I heard footsteps coming up the stairs and it was Richard and Tom,” she recalled. “Richard said, ‘Tom’s got some news.’ As a parent, you instantly think, ‘Oh, he’s being prosecuted,’ or something. He said, ‘I’ve been accepted by the Royal College of Art for an MA.’ We didn’t even know he’d applied.”

  The Royal College, London’s preeminent art school, turned out to be full of kindred spirits. For Tom, reimagining himself as an artist conclusively ended his depression, and he gained in both poise and confidence. Tom is still a loner by nature. He once told Caro that he would make an excellent monk if it weren’t for God. “He makes such huge progress, but I still want to help somehow, and it’s hard not to be allowed to anymore,” Caro said.

  Having not engaged with Deaf politics, Tom has no particular affection for his condition; indeed, though he was happy for me to talk to his parents, he opted not to meet with me as he didn’t want to talk to anyone whose primary concern was his “deficiency,” asserting that he saw the deafness as only a small part of who he is. “I can see no benefit whatsoever in Tom being deaf—for him,” Caro said. “But the benefits for me were absolutely huge. If I’d had to deal with a disability where you spend all your time in the swimming pool or a gym, I would have found it very difficult. But my field is literature. So, to have something about language was absolutely fascinating. I’d been brought up among very clever, high-pressure people. For the first time, through disability, I met people who were good. I’d always been taught to despise people who are just ‘good.’ I met a lot of friends. I do a lot of charity stuff now. I wouldn’t have done any of that without Tom, would I? It would have been a quite different life.”

  Caro admires Tom’s confidence, and, even more, his courage. “He’s making his soul,” she said. “We live in this society where people are mostly making money or status. Tom would love money, and he’d love status, but that’s not what he’s doing. He’s taking a long, slow time growing up, but life is quite long.”

  • • •

  Shortly after Lexington’s graduation in 1994, I attended the NAD convention in Knoxville, Tennessee, with almost two thousand deaf participants. During the Lexington protests, I had visited deaf households. I had learned how deaf telecommunications work; I had met dogs who understood Sign; I had discussed mainstreaming and oralism and the integrity of visual language; I had become accustomed to doorbells that flashed lights instead of ringing. I had observed differences between British and American Deaf culture. I had stayed in a dorm at Gallaudet. Yet I was unprepared for the Deaf world of the NAD.

  The NAD has been at the center of Deaf self-realization and power since it was founded in 1880, and the convention is where the most committed Deaf gather for political focus and social exchange. At the President’s Reception, the lights were turned up high because deaf people lapse into speechlessness in semidarkness. Across the room, it seemed almost as though some strange human sea were breaking into waves and glinting in the light, as thousands of hands moved at stunning speed, describing a spatial grammar with sharply individual voices and accents. The crowd was nearly silent; you heard the claps that are part of the language, the clicks and puffing noises that the deaf make when they sign, and occasionally their big, uncontrolled laughter. Deaf people touch each other more than the hearing, but I had to be careful of the difference between a friendly and a forward embrace. I had to be careful of everything because I knew none of the etiquette of these new circumstances.

  I discussed the deaf travel industry with Aaron Rudner, then of Deafstar Travel, and with Joyce Brubaker, then of Deaf Joy Travel, who was organizing the first Deaf gay cruise. I attended seminars on ASL usage, on AIDS, on domestic violence. I talked to Alan Barwiolek, who founded the
New York Deaf Theatre, about the difference between plays translated for the deaf and Deaf plays. I guffawed at Deaf comedians. (Ken Glickman, aka Professor Glick: “My blind dates are always deaf dates. You ever been on a deaf date? You go out with someone and then you never hear from her again.”) Over dinner, the acclaimed Deaf actor Bernard Bragg performed lyrical signed translations of William Blake while his pasta grew cold; signers can talk with their mouths full, but they can’t cut up their food while speaking.

  The NAD is the host of the Miss Deaf America pageant, and Friday night featured the competition. The young beauties, dressed to the nines and sporting state sashes, were objects of considerable attention. “Can you believe that blurry Southern signing?” someone said, pointing to Miss Deaf Missouri. “I didn’t think anyone really signed like that!” (Regional variations of Sign can be dangerous: the sign that in New York slang means “cake” in some Southern states means “sanitary napkin”; my own poor articulation led me to invite someone to have not lunch, but a lesbian.) Genie Gertz, Miss Deaf New York, the daughter of Russian Jewish parents who emigrated when she was ten, delivered an eloquent monologue about finding freedom in the United States—which included, for her, the move from being a social misfit in a country that is not easy on disability to being Deaf and proud. It seemed like such a striking and radical idea that one might be deaf and glamorous: an American dream.

  At 2:30 a.m. night after night, I was still up, conversing. One deaf sociologist I met was writing a thesis on deaf good-byes. Before the invention in the 1960s of teletypewriters, or TTYs, which allowed deaf people to type messages to one another pre-Internet, the deaf could communicate only by letters, telegrams, or personal appearances. You could take two days just inviting people to a small party. Saying goodbye was never easy; you would suddenly remember whatever you had forgotten to tell, and knowing it would be some time before you could make contact again, you would keep on not leaving.

  Alec Naiman, a member of the Deaf Pilots Association, was a world traveler until a crash in 2005, occasioned by ground crew who forgot that they were communicating with a deaf pilot, left him seriously injured. When I met him, he was fresh from a trip to China. “I met some Deaf Chinese people my first day, and I went to stay with them,” he said. “Deaf people never need hotels; you are always given a place to stay with other Deaf people. Though we used different signed languages, these Chinese Deaf people and I could make ourselves understood; and though we came from different countries, our mutual Deaf culture held us together. By the end of the evening we’d talked about Deaf life in China, and about Chinese politics.” I nodded. “You couldn’t do that in China,” he said. “No hearing person could. So who’s disabled then?” Disconcerting though it may sound, it was impossible, at the NAD convention, not to wish you were Deaf. I had known that Deaf culture existed, but I had not guessed how heady it is.

  How to reconcile this Deaf experience with the rest of the world? MJ Bienvenu laid the groundwork for the bilingual and bicultural approach, commonly referred to as Bi-Bi, used at both the elementary and secondary model schools on the Gallaudet campus. In a Bi-Bi curriculum, students are taught in Sign, then learn English as a second language. Written English is afforded high priority; many students perform on par with their hearing counterparts. On average, schools employing a solely oral approach graduate students at eighteen who read at a fourth-grade level; students from Bi-Bi schools often read at grade level. Spoken English is taught as a useful tool within the Bi-Bi system, but is not a primary focus.

  MJ, in her early forties when we first met, has signing so swift, crisp, and perfectly controlled that she seems to be rearranging the air into a more acceptable shape. She has been one of the most vocal and articulate opponents of the language of disability. “I am Deaf,” she said, drawing out the sign for “Deaf,” the index finger moving from chin to ear, as though she were tracing a broad smile. “To see myself as Deaf is as much of a choice as it is for me to identify as a lesbian. I am living my cultures. I don’t define myself in terms of ‘not hearing’ or of ‘not’ anything else. Those who learn forced English while being denied Sign emerge semilingual rather than bilingual, and they are disabled. But for the rest of us, it is no more a disability than being Japanese would be.” Deaf of deaf, with deaf sisters, she manifests a pleasure in American Sign Language that only poets feel for English. “When our language was acknowledged,” she said, “we gained our freedom.” Freedom—clenched hands are crossed before the body, then swing apart and face out—was like an explosion as she signed it. “There are many things that I can experience for which you have no equivalent,” she said.

  This is tricky territory. Some argue that if being deaf is not a disability, deaf people should not be protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and should not have the right to various mandated accommodations: translators in public-service venues, relay interpreters on telephone exchanges, captions on television programs. None of these services is automatically available to people in the United States who speak only Japanese. If deafness is not a disability, then on what basis does the state provide for separate schools, and on what basis does it provide Social Security disability insurance? The writer Harlan Lane, who teaches psychology at Northeastern, said, “The dilemma is that deaf people want access and as citizens in a democracy have a right to access—access to public events, government services, and education—but when they subscribe to the disability definition in order to gain access, they undermine their struggle for other rights—such as an education for deaf children using their best language, an end to implant surgery on those children, and an end to efforts to discourage deaf births in the first place.”

  I met many deaf individuals who said that being deaf is of course a disability. They were indignant at the thought of a politically correct group suggesting that their problems weren’t problems. I also met deaf people who subscribed to the old deaf self-hatred, who were ashamed and saddened when they gave birth to deaf children, who felt they could never be anything more than second-class. Their unhappy voices cannot be forgotten; in some ways, it doesn’t matter whether their ears are cured or their self-image is cured, but they are out there in numbers and they need help from someone.

  • • •

  Luke and Mary O’Hara, both hearing, married young, moved to a farm in Iowa, and started to have children immediately. Their first, Bridget, was born with Mondini malformation, a syndrome in which the cochlea is not fully formed. It is associated with degenerative deafness and other neurological impairments, including migraine headaches and, because it impinges on the vestibular system, poor balance. Bridget’s hearing loss was diagnosed when she was two; the Mondini diagnosis came many years later. Luke and Mary were advised to raise her just like any other child, and she desperately tried to figure out oral communication and lipreading without any special education. “My mom labeled everything in the house so I could see what words went with what things, and she made me use full sentences, so I have good spoken English compared to other deaf people,” Bridget said. “But I could never find confidence in myself. I never said anything that didn’t get corrected.” The difficulties in the means of communication intersected with family deficits in the content of communication. “I didn’t know how to express my feelings,” Bridget said, “because my parents and sisters didn’t.”

  Bridget had three younger sisters. “My sisters would go ‘Duh! You’re so stupid!’ My parents’ body language made it clear they thought the same thing. At some point, I just stopped asking questions.” Bridget was so roundly teased for her errors that she came to suspect even her most powerful intuitions, which left her profoundly vulnerable. “I was raised as a Catholic,” Bridget said, “so I depended on whatever adults told me and took it at face value.” We all live in accordance with the norms we pick up socially; stripped of such norms, we can regulate neither ourselves nor others. The only person whom Bridget trusted unconditionally was her sister Matilda, two years younger tha
n she.

  Bridget was the first deaf person to attend her school. Since she had never learned Sign, there was no point having an interpreter, and she had to lip-read all day. Bridget would come home from school exhausted from it, and because she was a good reader in written English, she would curl up with a book. Her mother would tell her to put down the book and play with her friends. When Bridget said she didn’t have any friends, her mother would say, “Why are you so angry?” Bridget remembered, “I didn’t realize that there was a Deaf culture out there. I just thought I was the stupidest person in the world.”

  Bridget and her three younger sisters were subject to their father’s violent temper. He would whip the girls with a belt. Bridget preferred outdoor chores to indoor ones, and she often helped her father in the yard. One day, they came in from raking, and Bridget went upstairs to take a shower. A minute later, her father, naked, stepped into the shower with her. “I was naïve in many ways because I didn’t really have communication with anyone,” she recalled. “But I somehow knew this was not right. But I was afraid.” In the months that followed, Luke began to touch her, then forced her into submissive sexual acts. “At the beginning, I would question my father. He would escalate the physical abuse, and I would get whipped. I blame my mother almost more, for not doing anything.” About that time, Bridget walked in on her mother in the bathroom, holding a bottle of pills. When Mary saw Bridget, she poured the pills down the toilet. “After I got older,” Bridget said, “I realized she was that close.”