I Can Hear You Whisper (33 page)

Stunned, I sat up sharply. What could he be thinking? Inner hearing, he said. Inner
hearing
! This teacher had just chosen Alex to demonstrate an activity that was all about hearing, in front of more than one hundred people. I knew that this particular teacher had taken a special interest in Alex. As a musician, he was naturally interested in sound. Did he know something I didn't know? Had he practiced with Alex? I didn't think so.

The little girl went first. The teacher sang:

Bah, bah, ba-di-di, bah,

Bah, bah, ba-di, ba-di, bah.

The girl picked up her wood block and played it back perfectly. After a round of applause, she returned to her place in the circle.

Now the only child standing in the middle was Alex. The teacher sang a slight variation:

Bah-di, bah-di, ba-bah,

Bah-di, bah-di, ba-ba-bah.

Alex picked up his wood block and played it back a little more tentatively than his classmate:

Bah-di, bah-di, ba-bah.

Slight hesitation:

Bah-di, bah-di, ba-ba-bah.

The teacher started applauding just before Alex reached the end—the only sign that he might have been nervous about putting Alex on the spot. Alex gave a shy smile and trotted back to his seat.

He did it! The lowly wood block was as spectacular to me in that moment as a Steinway grand set up in Carnegie Hall. Around me, everyone was clapping and murmuring approval. “He did great,” the mother sitting next to me said. But I don't have the sense that anyone else quite understood the significance. It was bigger than Alex somehow. It called to mind the decades of work and dozens of people who had made it possible for my child to have this experience.

Not far from the foot of the bleacher steps, Alex assembled with his class, each kid waiting to hug a mother or father before they returned to their room. I was trying to keep myself collected. When I reached the gym floor, he ran into my arms. “I am so proud of you,” I said into his ear and held him for a few seconds longer than normal. Then we said good-bye.

I made for the door, trying to avoid conversation and weaving through the other parents still milling around. Then I saw a woman coming against traffic, heading straight toward me instead of the door. She caught my emotional eye. It was a mother whose son had been identified with moderate hearing loss the year before. He now had hearing aids, and I had helped guide her through the early steps in the process—both bureaucratic and human. She stopped in front of me.

“That was pretty amazing,” she said with a grin. She put her arms around me. “Yes,” I mumbled into her shoulder, “it was.”

T
he Marketplace cafe at Gallaudet University sits at the bottom of a two-story atrium. The large center staircase and the railings above make it possible for students and teachers to communicate across long distances. And they do. From the stair, one young woman is waving, using her entire wingspan, to get the attention of a friend on the floor below. Some students are flirting, a girl coyly showing a boy something on her cell phone and laughing. A young man at another table is telling his friends a story and everyone is rapt. A
Looney Tunes
cartoon is playing on the television mounted to a pillar above me. As I eat my lunch and check my e-mail, I find the soundtrack annoying and, for a moment, I wonder why they don't shut it off. Then I remember that I am one of very few people in the cafe who can hear it.

Since it's a lovely September afternoon and I have time, I decide to find a bench in the sun on the green running through the middle of campus—the whole place is known as Kendall Green after the property's original owner, Amos Kendall. On the way, I pass the community bulletin boards. The postings are exactly the same as at every other college campus (a basketball fund-raiser, coming-out stories, a bike-share program, a religious group advertising a talk entitled “What Am I Doing Here?”) and utterly unique (a Deaf history lecture series featuring Deaf heroes of World War II and the lives of Deaf photographers, a chance to be in Deaf America's Got Talent, a lecture on reducing split visual attention in the classroom, an information session on studying abroad in Italian Sign Language). Among the campus happenings are advertisements that share the theme of accessibility, like a local hairstylist who has learned ASL and a mechanic whose business is called Deafwrench's Garage.

Outside, young people pass me in Go Bison sweatshirts—the mascot was adopted in the 1940s for its power and fleetness. A couple holding hands lets go briefly to communicate and then grabs hold again. A fraternity trying to drum up members is frying bratwurst outside the student center. The student body is notably diverse, with more students in wheelchairs than you would see elsewhere and a few who are both deaf and blind. Cell phones are in everyone's hands, but no one holds one to an ear—they're for texting and e-mail only, exactly as hearing teenagers I know use them. Here, too, I'm aware of how much sound there is. A lawn mower thrums nearby. Sirens blare on Florida Avenue. (Earlier, and alarmingly, I'd seen a student nearly get hit by a fire truck.) There's an occasional bark of deaf laughter from the bratwurst table. Perhaps the noise is heightened by the quiet that otherwise surrounds me.

This was my second visit to Gallaudet. A few months earlier, in the summer, I had spent two weeks on campus in an intensive ASL course. My journal entry the day I arrived says simply: “I am here.” Since those early nights when I was trolling the Internet for information on hearing loss, the place had loomed large as the center of Deaf culture, with what I presumed would be a correspondingly large number of cochlear implant haters. By the time I got there in 2012, I no longer imagined I would be turned back at the front gates, but just the year before a survey had shown that only one-third of the student body believed hearing parents should be permitted to choose implants for their deaf children.

The current conversation is much more subtle. It's less about cochlear implants and more about the value and endurance of ASL and Deaf culture and of “a visual way of living.”
In 2000, the National Association of the Deaf revised its position on cochlear implants to declare them “a technology that represents a tool to be used in some forms of communication, and not a cure for deafness.” The number of Gallaudet students with cochlear implants stands at 10 percent of undergraduates and 7 percent overall. But implants still stir strong emotion. As a hearing person paying a few brief visits, I could only hope to scratch the surface of the truth of Gallaudet today. I would try at least to do that.

A place of deep group connection, Gallaudet is also these days a place of internal conflict, full of the sort of hushed, heated discussion kept strictly within the family. In recovery from the protests of 2006 and the threat to its accreditation that followed, the school is trying to determine the way forward. In a world where only 5 percent of deaf and hard-of-hearing children are born into Deaf culture by virtue of having deaf parents, demographics are not in its favor. It's generally accepted that
half of cochlear implant recipients are children.
In 2009, it was estimated that of the nine to ten American children born deaf every day, 40 percent get at least one and quite possibly two cochlear implants before they turn three. In Australia, 80 percent of deaf children have implants. Current statistics are hard to find, but a statewide early-intervention organization in North Carolina called
Beginnings, which offers remarkably evenhanded information about communication choices, has found that the percentage of families it serves who choose listening and speaking has hovered around 90 percent over the past few years, up from 69 percent in 2001. Correspondingly, the number choosing total communication has dropped from 21 percent to 8 percent, and ASL alone is less than that. As for adults, those who lose their hearing later in life are far less likely to ever become part of Deaf culture. I. King Jordan, the Gallaudet professor who became the university's first deaf president, for instance, lost his hearing after a motorcycle accident at the age of nineteen. Someone like that would probably get a cochlear implant today.

Josh Swiller, who wrote a searing and beautiful book,
The Unheard
, on his experience growing up with hearing loss and serving in the Peace Corps in Africa, found Gallaudet
an “uncomfortable” place when he first arrived as an instructor. Mostly appreciative of his hearing aids and then cochlear implant, he didn't learn to sign until he was an adult. His view of the world was different from many of his students'. In one of the first courses he taught at the university, examining minority cultures at times of crisis through history, he challenged the class by telling them: “The world [is] changing and changing away from you. So what will you do? What will you offer? Why should the world care?” Painful though it is, there is truth there. Deaf culture is a small group really, and deaf of deaf—the deaf children of deaf parents—though most interesting to neuroscientists and social scientists, are least representative of deaf people as a whole. At Gallaudet, however, they are the elite. They set the tone.

In a magazine article recounting his first year on campus and specifically his role as a mentor to a brilliant but erratic deaf-of-deaf aspiring writer, Swiller described a place that is roiled in debate over whether survival requires emphasis on communal connection or on preparing students to find jobs. His own view is that economics trump emotion, yet he found Gallaudet's ethos unexpectedly appealing. Despite the many achievements of deaf people as doctors, lawyers, professional athletes, Academy Award winners, he wrote, “the world hears and expects you to hear. . . . At some point, if you're deaf, every accomplishment fades away and you're sitting in the corner, lost. What I saw was that inside the gates of Gallaudet, everyone's been in that corner. Some have raged against it, some have ignored it, some have found spiritual riches in the surrender to limitation, some have felt cheated by it. And from that shared disconnect there has stemmed a connection that is the essence of Gallaudet. It's a gorgeous thing—many people with no hearing loss at all come to Gallaudet to be part of it.”

Few of the people who made up my summer ASL class had any hearing loss. Most were college students studying ASL as a second language. One wanted to be a disability rights attorney, another a speech pathologist, and two men were in seminary studying to be priests. I was the only one there because of my child.

Our teacher, Janis Cole, was a warm and funny woman in her fifties, tall and athletic. I liked her from the beginning. Early on, she held a hand to her mouth and turned a pretend key—
TURN OFF YOUR VOICE
. It wasn't just that we were in an immersion program. There is a code of behavior on campus that requires that all communication be signed—by someone. If you can't do it yourself, you make sure someone is interpreting for you. That was difficult for our class of beginners to pull off and made for limited conversation at lunch (until, to be frank, people gave up). I felt frustration at not being able to express myself fully, and also chagrin for flubbing it so badly in the first day or two, before I really understood the etiquette.

By the last day of class, with enough vocabulary and a smattering of fingerspelling under our belts, Janis thought we were ready for some entertainment. ASL requires expressiveness—some of its grammar is read on the face—but earlier in life, Janis had been an actor with the National Theatre of the Deaf and appeared in
Children of a Lesser God
on Broadway, so her signing was particularly theatrical.

Standing in the middle of the circle of desks, she rubbed one fist on top of the other twice with her forefingers half-crooked.
JOKE
. “A lumberjack goes into the woods,” she signed. “He sees a tree, chops at its trunk, yells ‘Timber!' and the tree falls down. Then he chops another tree, yells ‘Timber!' again, and the second tree falls down.” Janis placed her right arm upright on top of her left hand and wiggled her right fingers.
TREE
. Then her right hand fell to her left elbow as the tree fell. “The lumberjack tries to cut down a third tree, but this time the tree won't fall. ‘Timber!' he cries. ‘Timber!' Nothing. So he goes to find a doctor. ‘Doctor, I chopped down a tree but it won't fall. What's wrong with it?' The doctor joins the lumberjack by the tree and examines it. Then he looks up at the tree and fingerspells
T-I-M-B-E-R
. The tree falls. The doctor turns to the lumberjack and says, ‘The tree is deaf.'” We all laughed and I realized it was the first deaf joke I'd experienced as it was meant to be received—visually.

 • • • 

In my class, I was a parent. But on campus, I was also a journalist. Before arriving, I had written to several faculty and administrators asking to meet with them while I was there. For a variety of reasons I could mostly only guess at, many said no, including unfortunately the scientists heading up the Visual Language Visual Learning laboratory, known as VL2, who work with Rochester's Peter Hauser and whose research on how the brain processes visual language was of great interest to me.

Stephen Weiner was different. Although he has held jobs elsewhere, Weiner has spent more of his adult life than not at Gallaudet since he first arrived in the 1970s. He has been a student, residential advisor, guidance counselor, professor, and dean. Today, he is the university's provost, the chief academic officer. His brother, Fred Weiner, also works for Gallaudet and was one of the alumni leaders of the 1988 Deaf President Now protest. From his first e-mail, Steve Weiner was friendly and approachable, eager to fill me in on all that is going on at Gallaudet, such as VL2 and the push for Deaf Space, architecture designed with natural light and good sight lines in mind and exemplified by the new Sorenson Language and Communication Center. A self-described “Jewish kid from Flatbush,” he was happy to talk about his own experiences, too. He closed that first message: “Welcome to Kendall Green.”

In person, greeting me with a hearty handshake and a breathy “I'm Steve,” he ushers me into his office, with its view of the United States Capitol. We settle around the coffee table with an interpreter by my side, and we start at the beginning. It is clear that Weiner has seen the good and the bad of deaf education. His parents were the children of Orthodox Jewish immigrants. His grandmother became a powerful local politician in Brooklyn who was strenuously opposed to having her son, Weiner's father, use sign language. Instead, the boy moved through various New York schools, such as Lexington and P.S. 47, a public school for the deaf, missing much of what was said. “My father's education ended at third or fourth grade,” says Weiner. “He [also] went through his Bar Mitzvah knowing bubkes about what was going on.” Like so many deaf children, Weiner's father learned to sign from deaf friends. “My father is not educated, but I thought he was one of the smartest men I knew. He can sign, but he didn't have the vocabulary to express things. He told me later how frustrating that was.”

When Stephen was born, his grandfather, having sat back and watched his son struggle, decided to do things differently this time. “My grandmother was a politician, my grandfather was pragmatic,” he says. “He did not want to make the same mistakes with me that he made with my father. He saw me communicating with my parents with some signs. He made a private decision to teach me Hebrew, which is easier than English. There aren't so many rules and exceptions.” By five, Weiner says, he was using ASL, English, Yiddish, some German, and some Hebrew. He and his grandfather spent Wednesday and Thursday evenings going through the Talmud and “talking about philosophy, physics, math, everything.” Weiner wasn't challenged in most of the deaf schools he attended and ended up at a public high school that had a resource classroom for deaf students. “During class time, I stuck comic books inside my textbooks. I got nothing from lectures; I succeeded by reading.” Until she saw him doing his calculus homework, his grandmother assumed he would learn a trade like most deaf men, says Weiner. “At her funeral, the rabbi said the proudest moment of her life was seeing me go to college.”

Originally an engineering student at Hofstra University, Weiner gave that up and moved to California, where what is now the California State University, Northridge, deaf education program was getting off the ground. There, he discovered the perils of poor interpreting. “One time, there was a word in a biology class: ‘phosphorylation.' I remember because the interpreter didn't spell the entire word, just
P-P-T
,” he says. “I stopped and said, ‘Wait, what's the word?' The professor was angry at me. Half of the next exam was on that word.” He routinely fell asleep in a class on Shakespeare until the usual interpreter fell sick and a substitute arrived who used to teach at Gallaudet. “I was, like, ‘Holy Day!'” he says. “I became a very important part of the class that week. I was able to express myself fully. I learned that the other students weren't that hot. The teacher said, ‘Steve, you have comments?' And I said, ‘Yes, I do.'” The experience turned his sense of the world on its head. “My mother and father were taught that hearing people knew more, and they taught me that, too. It wasn't until I could see for myself that I knew that's not always true.” When his regular interpreter returned to the English class and things went right back to the way they had been, Weiner threw up his hands. “I said, ‘That's it, I'm going to Gallaudet.'”