I Can Hear You Whisper (6 page)

Finely honed social skills were a good explanation for how Alex functioned in his first two years of life and how he compensated for his inability to hear the words people were saying. In retrospect, it was obvious. At the time, it was subtle. If someone asked him to throw away a piece of crumpled paper, he walked backward toward the garbage can, watching for confirmation that he had guessed correctly what was wanted. Nods and smiles were a pretty good indication he was right. At the child care center he attended a few days a week, the teacher always helped the children wash their hands after playing outside. Armed with a washcloth, she'd ask Alex to hold out his hands. He held out his hands. One day, armed with a washcloth as usual, she noticed a smudge on his cheek and told him she wanted to wash his face. He held out his hands. It was only later, heartsick at having missed the signs, that the teacher remembered the incident and told me about it.

I described these examples to Vouloumanos. With two older siblings and talkative parents, she suggested, “Alex had all the social cues: smiling, interacting, turn taking. The social scaffolding was there. Linguistic input was the thing he wasn't getting. He developed a narrative that didn't have language in it. It was based on his understanding of people as social beings, facial cues, and gestures.”

Just how critical social and visual cues, gestures, and facial features were to Alex was painfully apparent at that first speech language evaluation back in January, when they were taken away. I compared what happened there to a moment a few weeks earlier, at Christmas. Jake had received a marble run as a gift from my aunt Nancy. After putting it together with the grown-ups, six-year-old Jake showed a delighted Alex how it worked. He held out a marble for his little brother and pointed to the spot where Alex should place the marble to start the run. Jake was talking and gesturing all the time.

“Here, Alex, you try. It goes right here. Wait, wait . . . There it goes!”

Alex took the offered marble, put it in the right spot, and clapped with delight as it ran through the track we had constructed.

The problem was that there was only so far you could go with the kinds of cues Alex had been using. Life was not all marble runs and helpful brothers. If Alex couldn't eventually parse out the parts of the language that were swirling around him, he would have a hard time ever making use of those parts himself.

T
here is a story that goes like this: On a dark night in Paris in the 1760s, a priest was making his rounds in a wretchedly poor neighborhood. Well into his fifties, white-haired and portly, and wearing the long black cassock of a religious man, the
Abbé Charles-Michel de l'Epée traveled along a narrow cobblestone street, through a bleak courtyard, and up a steep, worn stair until he found himself in a dimly lit meager room where two teenage sisters clad in dark wool dresses sat sewing on stools by the hearth. “Their lips are still, their eyes averted, their faces haggard” is how one storyteller described them.

“Is your mother at home?” Epée is said to have asked, regarding the girls with his usual penetrating gaze.

The young women did not respond or even look up from their work.

Perplexed, the priest sat down nearby to await the mother. Perhaps they have been taught not to speak to men, he thought to himself.

Eventually, the girls' widowed and weary mother returned.

“My daughters are deaf,” she explained.

Ah! thought Epée. The extent of their plight became clear. In the eighteenth century, to be deaf was to be virtually alone. If you could not hear, you could not speak. If you could not speak, it was assumed you could not learn. The girls did not attend school; they had few friends and no community. Communication with their hearing mother was sparse, limited to gestures. Their futures were bleak; neither real work nor marriage was likely. As one historian put it, deaf children would probably remain a heavy burden to their parents and “endure an idle and uniform existence.”

All that was bad enough, but what distressed their mother most was that without religious instruction her daughters would never be able to take communion. For a time, a kindly neighborhood priest had tried to help by visiting occasionally and showing the girls carvings of the saints, but he had recently died. Now she feared for the souls of her daughters.

As he contemplated the two girls, the abbé knew what he must do. “Believing these two children would live and die in ignorance of their religion if I did not attempt some means of instructing them,” he later wrote, “I told . . . the mother she might send them daily to my house.”

Resolved to teach the deaf and “to reach heaven by trying at least to lead others there,” Epée had then to consider how to teach the girls. For familiar items, he could show them pictures together with the printed words in French (
pain
for a loaf of bread), but what about abstract words like “God” and “duty”? For these, he reasoned that if he had been taught to understand Latin in his native language of French, so should the deaf be taught in theirs. He had seen the way they gestured to each other and communicated among themselves. So, the story goes, Epée turned to sign language and thus began the education of the deaf.

 • • • 

My stack of books on deaf history grew, and in every book I read, the story of Epée and the twin sisters appeared. The details varied and were occasionally embellished. Sometimes it was day, sometimes night; sometimes not just dark but stormy. Sometimes the events took place in the French countryside. Often, Epée is described as “inventing” sign language, though that is an exaggeration. Whether the meeting took place on a dark night, that dramatic bit of storytelling symbolizes the significance of the event: movement from darkness into light. The story is really a folktale of the origin of a culture, according to Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, who together have written several books on Deaf history and culture. “
It has come to symbolize, in its retelling through the centuries, the transition from a world in which deaf people live alone or in small isolated communities to a world in which they have a rich community and language.”

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, when feats of memory and oratory represented the height of intellectual achievement, the deaf had been considered ineducable. Aristotle believed that they were incapable of learning and of reasoned thinking. If you could not use your voice, he argued, you could not develop cognitive abilities. Beyond an inability to hear or speak, the “deaf and dumb” or “deaf-mutes” as they were then called, were often thought to have a third problem: mental retardation. In nearly every language, the word “dumb” connotes lack of intelligence. And who could prove otherwise? Imagine the frustration of all those trapped minds. It was this barrier to communication that led
Samuel Johnson to call deafness “one of the most desperate of human calamities.”

At home, with family and those close to them, most deaf people used natural gestures, “home signs,” to communicate basic needs and wants. If they were fortunate enough to have other deaf people nearby, they sometimes had a wider repertoire of gestures, but they were effectively barred from the rest of society. Helen Keller famously said that being blind cut you off from things, but being deaf cut you off from people. For her, deafness was the greater affliction. The wild and uncouth behavior of those who couldn't communicate could be
indistinguishable from that of the mentally ill. Well into the twentieth century, the deaf were still sometimes put in mental health institutions.

The first to attempt to teach a deaf person any kind of language was not actually Epée but
Pedro Ponce de León, a Spanish Benedictine monk born about 1520. In Spain's aristocratic families, there was a higher than average incidence of deafness, most likely the result of intermarrying. In several cases, considerable estates were at risk, because the law of the time prevented the “deaf and dumb” from owning property or writing wills. But if a deaf person could be taught to speak, the law could be nullified. Lack of speech rather than hearing was the decisive factor. Such families had a lot at stake. For his part, Ponce de León didn't want to save the fortunes of his students; he wanted to save their souls. If you couldn't make confession, you couldn't be saved.

And so the deaf had to be taught to speak. Extensive details of Ponce de León's methods haven't survived, but it appears he first taught pupils to associate written words with objects and ideas, and then moved to articulation of those words. He used some gestures and developed a manual alphabet. The records of his successes do live on. One of his most famous students, Pedro de Velasco, left this account:

When I was a child I knew nothing, like a stone; but I commenced to learn by first of all writing down the things my master taught me. . . . Next, by the aid of God, I began to spell, and afterwards to pronounce with all the force I could, although much saliva came from me. After this I began to read histories, so that in ten years I had read the histories of the whole of the world; and then I learnt Latin.

Teaching the deaf to speak, for Ponce de León and the families with which he worked, was the whole point of the enterprise. It served their legal, economic, and religious purposes. That he succeeded at all was “
a breakthrough that shattered for ever the old assumptions,” wrote David Wright, a British poet, in his 1969 autobiography,
Deafness: An Autobiography
, one of the first books to examine the history of deaf education.

A few decades later, another Spaniard,
Juan Pablo Bonet, worked for the same aristocratic family as Ponce de León: the Velascos. Bonet seems to have learned some of Ponce de León's techniques from them and was the first to publish a book on educating the deaf. In it, he included a chart of handshapes for individual letters—the manual alphabet thought to have been created by Ponce de León. Many are the same shapes used in French and American sign language today.

Epée had a copy of Bonet's book as well as a German book on language and articulation. He considered signs and gestures the native language of those born deaf. Though he thought sign language lacked grammar, he saw in it the “shortest and easiest method” to reach the deaf. “What we cannot cause to enter by the main door,” he said, “we can send in through the window.” He learned and then codified sign language by devising rules about combinations of signs. That resulted in a manual version of French called Methodical Signs, which followed French rules of grammar and included signs for tense, prefixes, suffixes, agreement, and negation.
Epée's system was unnecessarily complicated and actually limited what his students could understand, but that didn't diminish his standing. In the view of psychologist Harlan Lane, who wrote a groundbreaking, if highly opinionated history of the deaf,
When the Mind Hears
, Epée's willingness to ask the deaf to teach him signs and his recognition that he could use them as a vehicle to educate was an “act of humility that gained him everlasting glory.”

What's more,
Epée prevailed upon the French state to bear the cost of educating deaf students. After his death, the school he founded in Paris in the 1760s became the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes, a haven where students were housed, clothed, and fed, and where they were fully educated in sign language, although some had articulation lessons as well. The school became a model; teachers came from all over Europe to be trained in the “silent” system. After Epée's death in 1789, his successor, the
Abbé Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard, published
Théorie des signes
, a grammar and dictionary of sign language. In Epée's lifetime,
twelve more similar schools for the deaf were created. Under Sicard, the number rose to sixty.

Sicard's most famous pupil was
Jean Massieu. One of six deaf siblings, Massieu began life as a shepherd in a village outside Bordeaux. After coming to the National Institute along with Sicard, who had been running a school for the deaf in Bordeaux, Massieu became a teacher himself, the first deaf man to do so. To fund the school and to convince the world of the capability of sign language to express abstract thought, Sicard and Massieu put on public demonstrations on the third Monday of every month. Sicard interpreted questions from the audience. Massieu answered in sign language, often writing the answers in French on a chalkboard to make clear that they were his own.

“What is hope?” a member of the British parliament asked at one such event.

“Hope is the blossom of happiness,” Massieu answered.

“What is time?”

“A line that has two ends, a path that begins in the cradle and ends in the tomb.”

“What is intelligence?” Sicard asked.

“It is the power of the mind to move in the straight line of truth,” Massieu wrote, “to distinguish the right from the wrong, the necessary from the superfluous, to see clearly and precisely. It is the force, courage, and vigor of the mind.”

 • • • 

In other parts of Europe, a different approach to educating the deaf was taking hold. Beginning with
Johann Conrad Amman, a Swiss doctor living in Holland, and John Wallis in England, a group of teachers emerged for whom teaching the deaf to speak was the first priority. Their reason was not so much legal, as it had been for the Spanish aristocracy, but religious; they thought it was God's will that man should speak. “
The breath of life resides in the voice, transmitting enlightenment through it,” wrote Amman. “The voice is a living emanation of that spirit that God breathed into man when he created him a living soul.” Amman worked with just a handful of students, all of them the children of wealthy families, and he did teach them to talk, though it sometimes took years. In Britain, Wallis focused on teaching written words.

In Germany, a man named
Samuel Heinicke, a former army officer and a contemporary of Epée, worked as a teacher and took on a deaf student around 1754. Using Amman's book as his guide, he opened the first German public school for the deaf. Heinicke believed the deaf had to master speech in order to participate in society. The first “pure oralist,” he rejected any type of sign or gesture, even the manual alphabet used by Ponce de León and Bonet, on the grounds that sign language hindered the acquisition of speech. He limited his teaching to lipreading and articulation, forgoing a broader education, and had several impressive successes. Heinicke considered his school a family business and wanted to protect his son's livelihood, so he was secretive about his methods. One, though, was to ask students to feel the vibrations in his throat as he spoke, a common practice. Heinicke's will revealed another, more unusual, technique: taste. He coated his students' tongues with different tastes to “fix” vowel sounds: pure water for “ie,” sugar water for “o,” olive oil for “ou,” absinthe for “e,” and vinegar for “a.”

That strategy probably died with Heinicke. His underlying philosophy, however, is still appreciated in oral deaf circles. In the history section of AG Bell's website (the site has since been changed), I found Heinicke listed as the man who “developed the foundations of modern oral deaf education. He believed that language was essential to the process of thinking, and felt that it was critical for children who were deaf or hard of hearing to learn to use spoken language in order to have access to the wider world.” He was also, they noted, the “first advocate” of what we know today as mainstreaming.

 • • • 

From the start, the two systems, oral and manual, were in opposition. In 1782,
Heinicke sent Epée an extensive argument in favor of oralism. Epée returned fire and the battle was launched. Their disagreement was submitted to the Zurich Academy, which found in favor of Epée, largely, says David Wright, because Heinicke wouldn't reveal his methods. Of course, that didn't settle the matter. For generations to follow, the debate simmered and flared as educational philosophies, scientific thinking, and deaf identities shifted and evolved.

Why so inimical? Any language that fostered communication had to be an improvement over isolation. One would think that the few who were willing to try teaching the deaf, who believed in those early centuries that they
could
be taught, would find common cause. The hostility seemed to spring from a combination of evangelism, egotism, and economics (nearly everyone involved had a vested interest). If you clear away the religious fervor and personal stakes, though, the basic arguments for and against sign and speech established in the eighteenth century were potent enough to persist for another two hundred years.