Janna Sweenie

Chapter 3: The Hands Refuse

On the first day of my class at New York University, the voice goes off. I stand at the front of the room and I do not speak, and neither will anyone else for the rest of the semester, because the language we are here to learn lives in the hands and the face and the shaped space between two people, a long way from the mouth, and the room is about to move into that space and stay there until December. Students find their seats and wait for instructions that do not come in the form they have been trained by seventeen years of schooling to expect. A few laugh nervously. One always checks the door number against the schedule. Somebody's phone is away, somebody's pen is ready, and the room slowly understands that the first lesson has already started: you are going to have to watch. Eyes are the ears of this room, and attention is a physical posture. A student who looks down at a notebook to write has just left the conversation, and learns to take notes the way the Deaf take notes, in the pauses, in glances, in a memory trained to hold a sentence whole. When I want a student's attention I tap a shoulder. When I want the room, I flash the lights. A hand waved into someone's field of vision is a doorbell, a knock, a clearing of the throat. Deaf Culture is a large part of what I teach, and shoulder tapping, floor stomping, lights signaling, and hand waving for attention are the culture arriving before the vocabulary does. We use props, everyday objects held up and named in the air, a cup, a key, a photograph of somebody's dog. We use gestures, and even mime, to carry ideas the class has no signs for yet. There is homework, there is group work, there is listening and receiving, all of it in American Sign Language, no English, no voice, and by listening I mean what my language means by it, the taking-in, which the students discover their bodies already know how to do. By the end of the first hour the students have learned perhaps six signs, their own names rendered letter by letter, and one enormous thing: for the length of this class, the Hearing world's assumption that language equals speech has been turned off at the wall, and everything still works.

I run the room this way because a room once ran the other way on me. In the fall when I was five years old, at DeForest Elementary, a mainstream Hearing school in Council Bluffs, Iowa, a teacher called the roll on the first day of class, and one name got no answer. The name was mine. I did not hear it. I had never heard it, or anything else, in my life. My teacher, Mavis Thies, said, "There's something wrong with Janna," and had my hearing tested, and the test found what five years of family life had missed: I was Deaf, and I had been Deaf since the delivery room. One roll call did it. The school year had barely started and my life had been discovered. My mother and father were Hearing. So are my brother and sister, ten and eight years older. Nobody in the house was looking for a Deaf child, and so, for five years, nobody found one, and when my mother was asked, years later, how a family could live beside a child for five years and never know, she gave the answer she had always given, and it is in our own book in her own words: "We thought it was strange how close she sat to the television with her ear pressed against the speaker, but we just thought she was stupid." People flinch when they read that sentence, and I keep it in our books anyway, because that bluntness was ordinary in the 1960s, when the general population knew close to nothing about Deafness, and my mother was reporting the plain state of the household knowledge: a little girl with her ear against the speaker, sorted under stupid because no other category had ever been offered to the family. The category was waiting one hearing test away the whole time, and the test was never ordered, because in that living room, in that decade, in that town, nobody had ever been told to order it.

I was born in 1963, and the cause was blood, an Rh factor conflict between my mother's type and my father's, the kind of incompatibility that can pass the first pregnancy or two and then arrive on the third child, which was me. I was born at the start of the rubella epidemic of 1963 to 1965, and though rubella had nothing to do with my ears, the timing governed my life anyway, because the epidemic delivered thousands of Deaf infants into the American school system at once, and the country, for a little while, built for us. New services, new programs, whole institutions organized around the sudden cohort. Our book calls those years the Golden Age of the Deaf, and I rode the age without belonging to its cause: a blood-type child carried forward by a virus generation, schooled in buildings the epidemic filled, taught by teachers the epidemic hired. For my first five years I had no language at all. No sign, because my Hearing family had none to give me and did not know I needed it; no speech, because speech never once reached me. The paperwork of a childhood like mine counts English as the first language and American Sign Language as the second: a first language I have never heard, and a second language I think in, dream in, argue in, and teach. Call English the language I was assigned and ASL the language I acquired. The assignment came first and the acquisition came whole, and when this book calls ASL my language and English my second, it is counting the way I count.

So the roll call did what five years of family dinners and birthday parties had failed to do, and I have spent my life being asked how I feel about the teacher who failed me. The answer is in the acknowledgments of the book David and I wrote together, and I will give it here the way I gave it there. If not for Mavis Thies, who failed me in kindergarten to make my parents recognize my Deafness and enroll me at the Iowa School for the Deaf, I would not be the well-educated Deaf woman I am today. She was killed in a car crash three months before we finished that book, so she read no page of it, and I thanked her in its opening pages for a lesson everyone knows and few are lucky enough to learn firsthand: sometimes beautiful things are born from failure. I am fond of saying that my kindergarten teacher saved my life, while the Iowa School for the Deaf saved my mind, and I say it because the sentence needs both halves to stand. A failure, honestly recorded, routed me out of a system that would have warehoused me politely in the back row of Hearing classrooms for twelve years. An institution, the kind of residential school the surrounding chapters approach with suspicion, gave me everything: a language, a peer group, teachers who could reach me, a track my mind could finally run at speed.

The two sentences sit together as the hinge of my chapter and the complication in the book's argument. The Iowa School for the Deaf, in Council Bluffs, took me at kindergarten age and kept me through my graduation in 1983, later than the Hearing calendar would predict, because a childhood that begins language at five begins school behind and pays the difference in years, and inside its walls I was never once the problem in the room. Everyone signed. My teachers signed, my classmates signed, the lunch line signed, the dormitory after lights-out signed until the house parents flashed the hallway lights for quiet, jokes and gossip and homework help traveling hand to hand down the row of beds. I could communicate, blend in with my peers, and move on the fast track my mind had been waiting five years to run. Language came in through the eyes like water finding a channel cut for it, vocabulary, then grammar, then abstraction, then jokes, the architecture of thought assembling itself years late and at speed. If you want to know why I have no patience for institutions that delay a Deaf child's language, it is because I lived the delay and then I lived the arrival. I know to the year what the delay costs, and nothing refunds it. When high school came there was an option to mainstream me into a Hearing school with an interpreter carried from class to class, every teacher and every classmate Hearing, and the theory of mainstreaming says the Deaf student gets used to the frustrations of the Hearing world early, one Deaf child alone in a school of the Hearing, her social and academic life routed through a hired adult. I declined the theory. I am grateful to this day that I finished at a Deaf institute where all the students and all the teachers signed, and I keep the gratitude knowing the trend has run the other way ever since, cochlear implantation in infancy feeding mainstream placement, Deaf institutes across the nation closing their doors or merging with schools for the Blind, the buildings that saved minds like mine going dark one legislature at a time, each closure announced in the language of inclusion and costed in the currency of savings. An institution is a tool. Pointed at custody, it is Willowbrook. Pointed at language, it was my school, and the difference between those two buildings is the subject of disability policy.

One more thing about the geography of my childhood, because this book crosses its own path here. The Iowa School for the Deaf sits in Council Bluffs, directly across the Missouri River from Omaha, Nebraska. In April 1974 I was an ISD girl in the middle grades, learning my language on the east bank, and on the west bank that month, Omaha police arrested a man under the city's Unsightly Beggar Ordinance because his scars showed in public. I knew nothing about it; no child on either bank knew anything about it. I put it here because the two facts sat a river apart and belong in one sentence at least once: a state was funding my language on one shore, dormitories and teachers and a signing world budgeted and staffed, while a city was fining a man's body on the other, and neither operation ever heard of the other, and both of them were America doing what it does about bodies that vary, generosity and policing running on parallel budgets with the water in between.

David and I met at a play contest in North Platte, Nebraska. I was starring as Sarah in Children of a Lesser God, the great Deaf role of the American stage, and he had written and directed an original play of his own, a Hearing Nebraska boy with a script and opinions, KOLN credentials from his teenage years, and no idea what he was about to spend his life learning. He says the moment he saw me he was in love and knew he wanted to be with me forever, and I let him keep saying it. When the contest ended a classic Nebraska blizzard blew in and socked in both casts, and David took the snow as a sign. For three wintry days we wrote back and forth on Holiday Inn stationery, sheet after sheet, two strangers building a conversation with a hotel pen because we did not yet share a language, and the stationery ran out before the things to say did. I was uncertain about mixing Deaf and Hearing lives; I had seen the mixture fail around me my whole life, in marriages where one person did all the interpreting and the other did all the deciding. He was persistent. And when the roads opened I set the terms, and the terms were the ones I still teach by: I would not use my voice, and ASL would be the shared language of whatever we became. I can use my voice; I sometimes used it on the telephone with my mother in Iowa, who raised me hearing my voice, and there are many shades of Deafness, and I still call myself Deaf in every one of them. That choice of voice has cost me. There are people in my own community who have taunted me, at times, as Not Deaf Enough, because a voice used at all reads to some as the first mark of Hearing thinking, and because I married a Hearing man rather than a Deaf one, and for some that will never be forgivable no matter what I have built for the Deaf with my whole working life. My answer has stayed the answer for decades: people decide who and what they are and how they want to belong. I decided. Nobody's audit of my ears or my marriage or my telephone gets a vote. With David the voice stayed off because a marriage should happen in the language where both people can be whole, and I knew which language that was for me, and I was right. He agreed without negotiating. That told me something. He bought a TTY so he could reach me directly, the machine chattering out his sentences on paper tape, and I began teaching him my language, a course of study he reports is still running decades later, the curve rising the longer he climbs it. That is what fluency in my language costs, and the cost is fair. We piled into a car, everything we owned in the back, and moved from the Midwest to Washington, D.C., where I attended Gallaudet University for the year, the second Deaf institution of my life, and the year we were there was the year the students shut the campus and the Deaf world marched. We marched too, down to the Capitol, two people in a crowd that was about to change the law of the country, my hands in that air with everyone's. That week gets its own chapter ahead, and I will hold my memories of it until then. Four months later we married in New York City.

New York gave me the fight I did not know I was carrying. At Lehman College of the City University of New York, where I went for my degree as a married adult, the catalog would accept French or Spanish or Italian for the foreign language requirement, and it would accept them from me, a woman who had never heard a syllable of any of them. What it would recognize for that requirement was any language on its list, and American Sign Language was on no list at Lehman then, because a college can hold a language in front of its own eyes and rule it a gesture. So I petitioned the dean's office to have ASL accepted, my second language and my first mind. I brought the linguistics: since the 1960s, when William Stokoe at Gallaudet published the structural analysis that embarrassed a century of assumption, the scholarship has held that signed languages are languages entire, acquired on the milestone schedule of any mother tongue, processed in the brain's language centers, capable of poetry and pun and lie. The petition ran on the argument this chapter runs on, that ASL is a language in full, with its own grammar and its own syntax and its own literature carried hand to hand, rooted historically in French Sign, and American down to the bone. The petition prevailed. I graduated as one of the first Deaf graduates of Lehman College, a first I should not have had to be, and I took a master's degree in Deafness Rehabilitation from New York University after that, teaching American Sign Language at NYU from 1991, through those years and across the decades since, every level, beginning to advanced, while working days for the State of New York helping disabled people find jobs, two careers run in parallel, the classroom where the language is given and the caseload where the arrangements either hold for a disabled person seeking work or fail one, and after decades on both sides I can report the language has never once been the problem. In 1996, before most universities had a working website, I began teaching ASL online, among the first anywhere, because the classroom cannot reach everyone and the language should; the portal took its own name, HardcoreASL.com, in 2005, and the Hardcore ASL book followed. I list the résumé in one breath because a résumé is an argument. Every line of this one was supposed to be impossible for the little girl with her ear against the television speaker. The distance between that living room and this paragraph was covered by one language, and the language was the one a congress of Hearing men once voted out of the world's classrooms. I will get to them.

First, my classroom, because the classroom is where the argument gets settled one student at a time. Students come to ASL wanting to reach across, to have conversations with the Deaf they cannot have without training, and some of them come because the language looks like fun and an easy grade, and those students are in for a semester of correction. ASL carries its own grammar, its own syntax, its own memes; the body is deeply involved; meaning lives in space, in the face, in the brow line, in the direction of a palm. Students arrive believing ASL is English performed on the hands, and the language dismantles that belief within a week. They arrive believing ASL is fingerspelling, and fingerspelling is a sliver of the language, a tool for names and loanwords; you sign concepts, and a signer who only fingerspells at the Deaf is asking the community to do all the work, and the community's patience for that is short, because it is not a two-way street. Some arrive with the letters m and n folded over the thumb the way an old chart taught their grandmother, and I jut their fingers outward the correct way, one small inheritance repaired. And some believe they can miss class and study from video alone, and they learn that missing one class puts their grade in jeopardy, because you cannot recreate a full classroom learning dyad on your own. You are missing what happens between the signing, and that's where the real learning begins. Receptive skill is the half of the language students underestimate, reading the signer in front of you at speed, and it grows fastest in person, in a room where students can mingle their talents and practice on one another; the screen versions of my language are better than nothing and worse than presence. I teach to learn; my students have taught me how to teach for as long as I have stood in front of them, and when the students I teach go on to teach others, we have created concentric circles of brighter minds. That sentence is mine and I will let it stand as the whole of my teaching philosophy.

Now the sign names, because two stories a decade apart taught me what my language is up against in the institutions that claim to host it. A sign name is conferred, never self-invented; it is given to you by the Deaf community, usually marking something true about you, your look, your habit, your story, and it functions as your name inside the language, the thing your friends call you in the air. The linguistics of name signs fill a scholarly literature of their own, and every Deaf schoolchild learns the custom without a textbook, in the dormitory, the way I did. The community conferred them on presidents the way it confers them on everyone. Ronald Reagan's sign name, in the usage my community handed me and our curriculum recorded, is an R handshape that moves like a gun, because Reagan was shot, and the community's memory keeps what happened to a man in the name it hands him. Bill Clinton's sign name is the sign for affair, because the community watched the same news everyone watched. Donald Trump's is the sweep of improbable hair. Nobody sat in a room and voted these. They rose from use, the way Hearing nicknames rise, and they stick because they are true. A president has no more veto over his sign name than over his editorial cartoons. In 2010, when David and I were starting the ASL program at the CUNY School of Professional Studies, our program director, a Hearing administrator, saw the Reagan and Clinton sign names in our materials and was outraged, and accused us of inventing them, of smuggling a gun and an affair into the curriculum as some editorial of our own. We explained conferral, the way Deaf children at the residential schools have received their names for generations, the way I received mine. We explained that the community makes the names in common use and that no individual, least of all the two of us, authors a president's sign name, any more than a single English speaker authored the nickname Honest Abe. She did not believe us, and the disbelief outlasted the meeting. A person running a language program refused to believe the language had speakers who make it, and she held it against us every day from then on. I tell the story without her name because the name does no work; the role does the work, and the role is common. The role was gatekeeper of a language she did not know, certain that the people who did know it were making it up.

Two years later, a school district ran the same disbelief at a three-year-old. In August 2012 in Grand Island, Nebraska, about two and a half hours west of Omaha and a straight shot down the Platte from where David and I met, the public school district told the family of Hunter Spanjer, a Deaf preschooler three years old, the age I was when nobody yet knew what I was, that the way he signed his own name violated the district's weapons policy, which barred any instrument that "looks like a weapon." Hunter's name sign was the registered Signing Exact English sign for the word hunter, the H handshape driven forward for the hunt with an R crossing the fingers, personalized a little by his family the way families personalize, and to an eye that has decided to see a gun, two crossed fingers on a three-year-old are a gun. His parents had given him a name that meant hunter in his own language, and the district read the name as an armament, which is a sentence I have now written in a country where the actual armaments arrive at schools by the carload. Nobody at the district spoke his language. Somebody at the district watched his hands and saw a threat, which has been the Hearing institutional reading of signing hands since before Milan: motion they cannot parse, assigned the worst available meaning. The National Association of the Deaf condemned the district and said it knew of no other school anywhere that had ever banned a name sign; the Nebraska ACLU sent a letter; the family's petition and their Facebook page gathered the country; and the district retreated the way institutions retreat, by denying the event, announcing that it was not requiring and had never asked any student to change a sign language name. The first station to carry the story was KOLN out of Lincoln, the station where David had worked as a teenager, his old newsroom now broadcasting a Nebraska school district's discovery that a Deaf child's name could be contraband. I want the shape of the decade held plainly: in 2010 an administrator told two ASL teachers they had invented the language's names, and in 2012 a district told a three-year-old his name was a weapon. Both authorities were certain. Both were wrong in the direction that authority errs about my language, which is to assume the Deaf are doing something to the Hearing world rather than living in their own.

It could all have been otherwise, and there is an American island that proves it. Families from the Weald in Kent carried a recessive gene for Deafness to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s, and in 1694 a carpenter named Jonathan Lambert settled on Martha's Vineyard, where two of his seven children were born Deaf, the first of generations. In the isolation of Chilmark, the western end of the island, cut off by swamp and rock and habit, the gene concentrated across generations of intermarriage, and Deafness became ordinary, one neighbor in some stretches for every handful of households, and the island did the thing this entire book keeps asking institutions to do: it adapted the environment instead of the person. Everyone signed. Hearing parents signed, Hearing children signed, fishermen signed boat to boat across the water, farmers signed across fields too wide for shouting, and the language ran so deep in daily life that it stopped being remarkable at all. When the anthropologist Nora Groce interviewed the island's elders in the late 1970s and asked what the deaf people had been like, the question itself confused them, and one woman's answer became the title of Groce's book: "You see, everyone here spoke sign language." The elders could barely sort their neighbors into deaf and hearing at all; the ledger the mainland keeps by default, the one this book is about, had simply never been opened there. On that island, in those centuries, my condition did not disable anyone, because the community had declined, without ever framing it as a decision, to build the barrier. The last Deaf islander born into the signing tradition, Katie West, died in 1952, the isolation long since broken by improved ferries and marriage off-island, new blood thinning the old gene until Deaf births grew rare, and the language itself dissolved into ASL and into speech, a tongue that died of integration rather than suppression, the gentlest death a language has ever had. The Vineyard is gone as a fact and permanent as a proof: deafness sits in the ear, and disability sits in the arrangements, and arrangements are chosen.

Milan is where the other choice was made, the mainland choice, and it was made in a single September week. From the sixth to the eleventh of September, 1880, the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf met in Milan, Italy, and voted on the future of children like me. The delegates were educators of the deaf, gathered from the capitals of Europe with a small American contingent, almost to a man hearing; the resolutions had been prepared and would be approved with no Deaf people involved in the preparing or the approving; James Denison, a deaf teacher in the American delegation, sat in that hall and watched. On the final day, the eleventh of September, the congress adopted its first resolution, and I will quote it in full, because my community has been living inside this sentence for a century and a half: "The Convention, considering the incontestable superiority of articulation over signs in restoring the deaf-mute to society and giving him a fuller knowledge of language, declares that the oral method should be preferred to that of signs in the education and instruction of deaf-mutes." The second resolution pressed further, declaring that using speech and sign together injured articulation and the precision of ideas, and that the pure oral method should be preferred. The first resolution carried with four votes against, the Americans dissenting and outnumbered. That was the whole machinery: a hall, a show of hands, a week in Lombardy. Within years, sign was banned from deaf classrooms across Europe and America, Deaf teachers were purged from a profession they had helped build, their share of the teaching corps collapsing from something like half toward a remnant, and generations of Deaf children were seated on their hands, some with their wrists tied down or rapped for signing, and drilled hour upon hour to make sounds they could not hear, lipreading a language that hides most of itself inside the mouth where no eye can follow, measured forever against a fluency the method itself made impossible, their educations spent on articulation while arithmetic and history and literature waited outside the drill. The number of children processed through that century of method has no census; every Deaf family carries its share of them, the grandparents with beautiful hands and stunted diplomas. It took the field one hundred thirty years to say sorry; the twenty-first congress, meeting in Vancouver in 2010, formally repudiated Milan while I was petitioning nobody and teaching everybody, my whole career, the petition at Lehman, the portal, the classrooms, the corrected fingerspelling of ten thousand students, conducted inside the long shadow of that show of hands. The victory was sealed against the Deaf Community in Milan; we just didn't know it yet. And the ADA and the Deaf President Now movement were just stones skipping across the top of a much deeper and darker lake that has been there since the beginning.

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