by Henry Kisor
Ego-shoring recognition had begun to come my way, in the form of a clutch of plaques and awards from newspaper and literary groups, a few lines in Who’s Who in America, and, one year, a nomination as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. The honor that meant the most to me, however, was an informal poll by the Northwestern University student newspaper that named me one of the most popular teachers on campus.
It had happened in 1982, when I had last stood at a lectern in musty old Fisk Hall, home of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, five years after beginning a moonlighting career there as an adjunct instructor. While we were still at the Daily News, a fellow Panorama staffer who taught Basic Writing—the intensive course in journalistic composition required of all Medill freshmen—suggested that I might have something of value to pass on to students. That appealed to my own schoolmasterish instincts.
It shouldn’t be difficult, he explained. Each section of Basic Writing was small, typically no more than a dozen students, so that the instructor could give each freshman a great deal of attention. It was not a lecture course in a cavernous hall but an evening laboratory in a small classroom, with a typewriter at each desk.
The notion of teaching was so appealing that it temporarily buried my old phobia against speaking out in a group of strangers. I didn’t think of it at all until half an hour before the first class was to begin. Then my heart started to pound, bullets of sweat sprang from my forehead, and my mouth dried into a desert. Hands shaking, coffee slopping from my cup, I stood before the freshmen and began in a high, quavering voice.
That evening luck smiled upon me. The members of the section were among the best and brightest in their class, curious and expectant young people who seemed to assume that the man with the strange speech must have something of value to impart to them—otherwise he would not be standing before them. As I realized they understood what I said, my intestinal butterflies fluttered down and folded their wings.
Soon I happened upon the best strategy for teaching the class. Though it wasn’t a lecture program but a hands-on course, Basic Writing required fifteen minutes or so of preliminary remarks that included an explanation of the objectives of the evening’s lesson and quotations from samples of writing, good and bad. At the best of times I’m not able to sustain enough precision in my speech, especially in extended talks, for unfamiliar listeners to understand more than 90 percent of it.
To my rescue came the electronic copier. Before each class I prepared a typed essay containing the evening’s remarks, lesson objectives, and samples and ran off enough copies so that each student could have one. As I read from the remarks, the students would follow me with their copies. Often many of them would listen intently to my talk, referring to their copies only when a bungled phrase or sentence confused them. I exacted a quid pro quo from my students: if I took the trouble to give them copies of my remarks, they were responsible for taking the contents to heart.
I also tried hard to write as exhaustive a critique as I could of each student’s work, in part because I never could get a lively class discussion going, for reasons I’m not quite certain about. Possibly the students felt I couldn’t follow the bouncing ball of classroom conversation and therefore were disinclined to volley it back and forth. Maybe I simply couldn’t light their fires, although they did give me their undivided attention whenever I spoke. In any event, I figured I would make up for this lack with a handwritten, sometimes typed, personal analysis and mini-lecture clipped to each story each student handed in, praising and cajoling where I could, trying to whet their enthusiasm for the hard work of writing well. It was time-consuming, but the technique seemed as efficient as that of any other instructor. In the end the experience was so satisfying that teaching is now part of my dream for the future: to spend the last decade or so of my career at a university somewhere in the Rocky Mountains that Debby and I love.
I left Medill for one simple reason: part-time salaries were tiny. Inflation was rampant at the time, Colin was just four years away from college, and I had begun another moonlighting career, as a columnist on personal computers. It was more lucrative than teaching.
During the summer of 1982 I bought an Osborne 1, a sewing-machinesized portable that was the first affordable personal computer for many Americans. I wanted to do some freelance writing at home, and the swift and efficient word-processing system at the paper had spoiled me forever for typewriters. Like so many writers who discovered the personal computer at that time, I fell head over heels in love with the technology and even became messianic about it.
I persuaded my superiors at the Sun-Times that this machine would save our declining civilization and that it was their duty to allow me to bring the Word to the needy masses. They thought the proposal noble, but worth just $100 a week. Still, it was a beginning. Within a year I had syndicated the column to half a dozen other newspapers from Seattle and Los Angeles to Orlando, Florida. Colin’s college fund soon grew healthy.
Of course, much of the great personal computer “revolution” was poorly disguised public relations hype, and I am afraid that in my unblinking enthusiasm I contributed a good deal to the fervent drivel written about it. But after the mid-1980s, when the industry matured, the journalists who covered it became more healthily skeptical about its potential, and I was no different. The column ended not long after the bloom wore off the “revolution,” but I still occasionally write about the technology for computer magazines and for the Sun-Times’s book section, where from time to time a new item of word-processing software or hardware seems useful enough to merit a column on “Computing for Writers.” Amid all the fluff and nonsense, however, the coming of the personal computer truly revolutionized my life as a deaf person, not just as a writer. It enabled me to reach out to hearing people in ways I had never dreamed of.
10
If one must be hearing-impaired, one couldn’t choose a better time and place than the last two decades of the twentieth century in the United States. Thanks to a broad awakening of public consciousness about the rights and potentials of handicapped people, it’s easier to be hearingimpaired today than at any other time in history. Not that deafness will ever be a convenience, but things could be much worse.
Two thousand years ago the Romans gave full rights only to the deaf who could either speak or read and write. The great majority—those who were deaf, speechless, and illiterate—had few privileges. That half loaf did result in the success of some deaf people, such as Quintus Pedius, whom Pliny considered one of the most eminent painters of Rome. (Quintus was the grandson of the consul of the same name who was co-heir to the will of Julius Caesar. Then, as now, coming from the right family never hurt anyone.)
All the deaf lost their rights during the Dark Ages, when the Church forbade them to receive communion because they could not confess their sins. Only in the fifteenth century, after the German scientist Agricola had discovered and celebrated a deaf and speechless man who had learned to read and write, did Europeans again accept the idea that those who could not speak or hear could be elevated to literacy. During the next century the Benedictine monk Pablo Ponce de Léon claimed success in teaching deaf Spanish aristocrats to speak, read, and write. There is considerable evidence that he did so by first teaching the children to write—an idea that would have pleased Doris Mirrielees immensely.
All that has undergone a sea change. In the United States today, a great deal of thought is being given to different ways of teaching the deaf to communicate and to help them take their rightful places in society. Thanks to such upheavals as the one at Gallaudet University in 1988, the deaf are even beginning to take their future into their own hands. They are aided by federal and state equal-access and entitlement laws that have established public funding of sign language and oral interpreters for the deaf who need them in courtrooms, hospitals, schools, and other public institutions. Private organizations for the hearing-impaired often provide interpreters for social occasions. In some states, it’s c
ommon—even unremarkable—for interpreters to attend lectures with deaf students at hearing colleges, for the law requires federally funded agencies such as schools and hospitals to provide them. The same laws give deaf people with hearing-ear dogs the same rights of access to hotels, restaurants, and public transportation as the blind with seeing-eye dogs. Equal-opportunity statutes are designed to ensure that the deaf get a fair shake at employment.
In practical terms, most of these things haven’t been of great benefit to me, except in the general awakening they’ve encouraged, both in the United States and abroad. People do seem to be a bit more patient and understanding today; in fact, I am often struck that strangers frequently react without surprise to my announcement of deafness. Thanks in great part to the publicity the mass media have given the world of the deaf in recent years, it’s rare to encounter the kind of thoughtless ignorance that makes a deaf person feel as if he is being treated like a pitiable subhuman.
Young people especially seem to accept the deaf as something more than “weirdos,” possibly because so many deaf youngsters are being mainstreamed in public schools. I’m often startled and gratified when a perky teenaged fast-food server takes my order, then smiles, looks me in the eye, and repeats the order, not in a painfully exaggerated way, but slowly enough so that I can understand readily.
Others who serve the public—salespeople and waiters, ticket agents and bus drivers, police officers and vendors—also seem to be much less taken aback by the idea of dealing with a deaf person, especially one who communicates with them in their own fashion. All in all, I don’t feel as conspicuous as I used to whenever I open my mouth in public. And the little confrontations of each day don’t seem quite so daunting anymore. Occasionally they do happen, but I’ve learned simply to brush them off, or perhaps add them to my store of anecdotes on the sometimes amusing, sometimes vexing pitfalls of lipreading. It is a wonderful knack to have, and it will always get me through the day, but at times its inadequacies try my soul.
One evening not long ago, for instance, a plainclothes policeman loomed in the front doorway of my home. He displayed his shield and asked sternly, “Did you buy gasoline today?”
“Yes,” I replied, startled. Then, because it’s always good sense when dealing with officials of any kind, I added the customary announcement: “Officer, I’m deaf, but I can read lips.” The cop was courteous but blunt. “The attendant at the station where you bought the gas,” he said, clearly enunciating each word, “says she gave you too much change—five dollars—and you ran off with it.”
“She did not and I did not!” I replied indignantly. With a sinking feeling, however, I realized that I’d often been careless about counting change. That afternoon the attendant had handed back a few bills and coins, which I didn’t bother to check, and she had added what I thought was the ubiquitous “Thank you. Have a nice day.” I had smiled back, walked out to the car, and drove off—while she called the police with my license number.
“Uh . . . she may have,” I told the cop. “She said something I didn’t understand.”
“Let’s go talk to the fellow who owns the station,” said the policeman, who by this time had sized up the situation. Evanston policemen have become knowledgeable about deafness, for there are quite a few hearingimpaired people in the community. “You understand you’re not under arrest?” he asked solicitously as we walked out to his cruiser. I nodded, hoping the neighbors peering from their windows understood, too.
At the gas station I shamefacedly explained what had happened. The owner, a bit embarrassed himself, replied that his attendant had been “ripped off once too often and had wanted to nail a thief, even for a lousy five dollars.” He wasn’t sufficiently abashed to refuse the money I proffered.
When we returned to my house and the five-dollar desperado alighted from the police car, the cop leaned out the window and said with a thin smile, “Next time, count your change.”
And next time you don’t catch the words, I told myself ruefully, ask the person to repeat what was said . . . even if it turns out to be a ubiquitous inanity such as “Have a good one.” Of course, I haven’t kept that part of the resolution, at least not with store clerks, for life is too short to waste on polite noises. Someday, I’m certain, I’ll be found out again. But now I always count my change.
Each year I spend a week or two in Europe or the Far East on assignment for the Sun-Times’s travel section, usually with a group of journalists but sometimes on my own. I’m often surprised at how nonchalant European restaurateurs and hoteliers are about deaf people as guests. (Their American colleagues certainly aren’t clumsy about it, but it often takes a Manhattan or Los Angeles desk clerk a brief instant to recover from the surprise.) Often I have to awaken at an early hour to depart for my next destination, and when I explain to foreign desk managers that I am deaf and cannot receive a wake-up phone call, they’re quick to understand that a bellhop must be sent to my room at the appointed hour to unlock the door and turn on the lights to rouse me. I leave the night latch off not only for this purpose but also so that someone can get into the room in case of fire. I am less afraid of burglars than I am of burning to death.
Just once, in Rome, did I have a problem. It was a brand-new hotel and, while the clerks’ English was not as bad as my Italian, they simply could not seem to understand why they could not telephone me to awaken me. I didn’t have the Italian for “I can’t hear anything. I’m stone deaf, deaf as a post, deaf as a whatever the Romans say.” Only when a passing scrublady, who evidently had heard our confused exchange, spoke up did light finally dawn on the clerks.
I’ve often found that Europeans understand even the most wretched accent in their own languages better than they do Deaf American English. “Have you got a laundry service?” I once repeatedly asked a Paris desk clerk. He peered at me in concerned puzzlement, trying hard to achieve a breakthrough, but just couldn’t. But when I pulled out my American Express phrase book, riffled to the right page, and recited, “Y a-t-il une blanchisserie?” a bright and benign light of understanding swept over his countenance, and he replied, “Oui. Just drop eet off here in ze morning.”
Just once or twice have I needed rescue from official misunderstanding in a foreign land. One day on Barbados, Debby and I had just debarked from a cruise ship and were waiting for our luggage to clear dockside customs so that we could hail a taxi for the airport and return to the United States. An arrogant customs agent kept us cooling our heels while she alternated long, lazy pulls from a cigarette and a bottle of beer in her office. Time shortened, and we grew nervous about missing our plane. Finally the agent emerged from her office, and I waved anxiously. She sauntered over and said, “Have you anything to declare?”
I did not understand—it may have been her unfamiliar Barbadian accent—and hesitated. Immediately her eyes glittered with scorn and triumph. She raised her arm, pointed an accusing finger, and (Debby said later) bellowed, “This man doesn’t know if he has anything to declare!”
As I peered confusedly at the agent, visions of roach-infested Caribbean jails marched across Debby’s mind. She immediately shouted back, “My husband is deaf! He didn’t understand what you said!” Her vehemence flustered the agent, who immediately passed our luggage without examining it, as if to get rid of an unwelcome embarrassment, and Debby hustled it and me out of the customs shed into a taxi. We made our plane with moments to spare.
Later I told Debby in a wounded tone that I thought I could have handled the situation. “Yes,” she replied soothingly, “but by the time you got everything straightened out we’d have missed the plane.” But I had my revenge. As we approached U.S. Customs at Kennedy Airport, she said, “Now let me handle this.” “No, let me handle it,” I insisted, dragging our luggage to the agent at the counter. Handing him our passports, I pointed to my ear, looked woebegone, and said, “I’m deaf.” Not my usual brisk and businesslike “I’m deaf, but I read lips,” but a slow and desolate “I’m de-e-e-af.” (I
f I’d thought of it, I would have limped and scuttled like Igor.)
With a nod and smile—and no questions—the customs agent waved us through. That was, it appeared, easier for him than struggling to communicate with a deaf man. I could have smuggled in a fortune in diamonds. American immigration and customs agents almost always assume I’m above reproach once I announce my deafness. Europeans, however, take nothing for granted, and the single time I passed through Tokyo a cadre of white-gloved agents answered me by carefully examining every shirt, sock, and shoe in my luggage.
Now, when dealing with immigration and customs agents of any nationality, I make sure they know I can’t hear. I’m proud of my independence, but in commerce with bureaucrats it’s smarter to avoid the game of seeing how long I can go without letting the other fellow know I’m deaf. (Sometimes, especially if I have no difficulty understanding people, they just think my gravelly and nasal deaf man’s speech is the result of a dolorous bout with the grippe, and the game can go on for a surprisingly long time.)
The most unpleasant traveling experience I have ever had occurred at home, aboard an Amtrak train from Chicago to New York, and I’m not certain what, if anything, anyone could have done to prevent it. On this trip I was traveling alone in a sleeping-car roomette, whose door cannot be opened from the outside if it is locked from the inside. Too much shaking, rattling, and rolling goes on aboard a train for me to feel the vibrations of a knock at the door, and I always pulled the roomette or bedroom door to but left it unlocked in case a conductor knocked. A deaf person never can lock himself off completely from the outside world. In an emergency there has to be a way for someone to get in to announce the presence of danger.