Deaf in America

Carol A. Padden, Tom L. Humphries

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1990
• ISBN:
  9780674283176
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Written by authors who are themselves Deaf, this unique book illuminates the life and culture of Deaf people from the inside, through their everyday talk, their shared myths, their art and performances, and the lessons they teach one another. Carol Padden and Tom Humphries employ the capitalized "Deaf" to refer to deaf people who share a natural language—American Sign Language (ASL—and a complex culture, historically created and actively transmitted across generations.Signed languages have traditionally been considered to be simply sets of gestures rather than natural languages. This mistaken belief, fostered by hearing people's cultural views, has had tragic consequences for the education of deaf children; generations of children have attended schools in which they were forbidden to use a signed language. For Deaf people, as Padden and Humphries make clear, their signed language is life-giving, and is at the center of a rich cultural heritage.The tension between Deaf people's views of themselves and the way the hearing world views them finds its way into their stories, which include tales about their origins and the characteristics they consider necessary for their existence and survival. Deaf in America includes folktales, accounts of old home movies, jokes, reminiscences, and translations of signed poems and modern signed performances. The authors introduce new material that has never before been published and also offer translations that capture as closely as possible the richness of the original material in ASL. Deaf in America will be of great interest to those interested in culture and language as well as to Deaf people and those who work with deaf children and Deaf people.

1

Learning to Be Deaf

When we began work on this book, we had collected a store of reminiscences from Deaf adults about their childhoods; many told how as young children they discovered that they could not hear sound or speech. For example, in a story that appears in a videotaped version of a stage production by the National Theatre of the Deaf, Dorothy Miles recalls how, after a long childhood illness, she discovers that she can no longer hear her own voice. These are the expected anecdotes, those which confirm the popular wisdom about deafness—that it is the experience of not hearing. But we also came across stories that, although they were about discovering deafness, seemed only remotely connected to the fact of loss of hearing. One such example came from an interview Carol conducted with two sisters, one five and the other seven years old, as part of a study on language learning in the home. Both girls are Deaf, as are their parents. After an afternoon of tests and conversation, the younger girl, Vicki, brought a toy for Carol to inspect:

Vicki: My friend Michael gave it to me.

Helen: Michael’s her boyfriend, (giggles)

Vicki: Michael is not! Anyway Michael is Deaf.

Helen: No! Michael is hearing!

Vicki: (confused, but not convinced) Michael is Deaf!

Helen: You’re wrong! I know! Michael is hearing.

Carol: Well, which is he? Deaf or hearing?

Vicki: (pauses) I don’t know.

Carol: What do you think?

Vicki: Both! Michael is Deaf and hearing!

The solution was immensely satisfying to Vicki, but her older sister was aghast. No one is ever both Deaf and hearing at the same time. One is either Deaf or hearing. But Vicki had become attached to her explanation. After repeatedly telling Vicki that her solution would not work, Helen threw up her hands in exasperation and complained to their parents. The adults, of course, found the girls’ argument yet another amusing example of the marvelously inventive logic of children.

Let us look closer at the conversation. Vicki believes that her friend Michael is Deaf. And she evidently considers this fact a notable one, since she mentions it when she presents her toy to Carol. She has learned that, in the world of her parents and their friends, when one wishes to say something of note about someone, terms like “Deaf” and “hearing” are obligatory. Even at age five, she knows that in conversations about people one needs to refer to the person’s status. This conversation would have continued unremarkably except for the fact that Vicki was wrong about Michael.

What apparently has impressed Vicki about Michael is that he uses signs. To her, hearing people do not use signed language and therefore lack ways to make themselves understood. To her, Michael’s ability to converse with her in her language is sufficient evidence that he is Deaf. But the older child knows better: there are characteristics other than signing that determine whether someone is really Deaf.

Children are astute observers of the world—they are often “wrong” for the most interesting reasons and “right” for reasons we never expect. This quality makes them revealing theorists. As we see in Vicki’s case, a child’s insight can be useful for bringing out hidden definitions for a supposedly straightforward word like “deaf.”

When Vicki reaches her older sister’s age, she will be able to identify other elusive but important properties from which one can deduce whether a person is Deaf. At age seven, Helen can detect subtle differences in movement contours between native or very fluent signers and those who have learned the language relatively recently; she knows that inexperienced signers often distort circular movements or add wrong movements to signs. She also watches how the person mouths while signing; skilled signers mouth along with signs in characteristic ways, and unskilled signers mouth in yet another recognizable style. And she is better able than Vicki to decipher the meanings of signs; a wrong choice of sign in a sentence might tip her off to the signer’s true status. Hearing children of Deaf parents sometimes confuse her if they sign as well as their parents, but this is a mistake even her own parents might make. And Helen has also learned that another of Michael’s characteristics is his ability to hear.

One might expect that characteristics other than signing would be important in distinguishing Deaf from hearing persons: the ability or the inability to speak, or even the ability or inability to hear sound. But these seem irrelevant to Vicki. There may be an easy explanation for this: Deaf children cannot hear, thus perhaps they do not appreciate the ability of others to perceive sound.

We think this explanation is too simple. We do not believe that Vicki’s conception of the world simply lacks an “auditory” sense and that her view of the world is consequently limited to what remains. Instead, we believe her “error” is typical of young children her age who are forming hypotheses about how the world works. Vicki’s error is an attempt to formulate an analysis of the world within the set of assumptions and ideas to which she has been exposed. The assumptions and ideas in this case involve her family’s ways of determining the status of visitors, such as whether Michael is Deaf or hearing. A hearing child would have an equally restricted range of possible guesses about the world, based on the beliefs shared by the family. For example, white middle-class children understand that black people have some distinctive physical characteristic, but they are sometimes confused about who is to be called “black”; we know one young child who refers to all dark-haired men as black.

Sam Supalla once described to us his childhood friendship with a hearing girl who lived next door (this account also appears in Perlmutter 1986). As Sam’s story went, he had never lacked for playmates; he was born into a Deaf family with several Deaf older brothers. As his interests turned to the world outside his family, he noticed a girl next door who seemed to be about his age. After a few tentative encounters, they became friends. She was a satisfactory playmate, but there was the problem of her “strangeness.” He could not talk with her as he could with his older brothers and his parents. She seemed to have extreme difficulty understanding even the simplest or crudest gestures. After a few futile attempts to converse, he gave up and instead pointed when he wanted something, or simply dragged her along with him if he wanted to go somewhere. He wondered what strange affliction his friend had, but since they had developed a way to interact with each other, he was content to accommodate to her peculiar needs.

One day, Sam remembers vividly, he finally understood that his friend was indeed odd. They were playing in her home, when suddenly her mother walked up to them and animatedly began to move her mouth. As if by magic, the girl picked up a dollhouse and moved it to another place. Sam was mystified and went home to ask his mother about exactly what kind of affliction the girl next door had. His mother explained that she was HEARING and because of this did not know how to SIGN; instead she and her mother TALK, they move their mouths to communicate with each other. Sam then asked if this girl and her family were the only ones “like that.” His mother explained that no, in fact, nearly everyone else was like the neighbors. It was his own family that was unusual. It was a memorable moment for Sam. He remembers thinking how curious the girl next door was, and if she was HEARING, how curious HEARING people were.

When Sam discovers that the girl next door is hearing, he learns something about “others.” Those who live around him and his family are now to be called “hearing.” The world is larger than he previously thought, but his view of himself is intact. He has learned that there are “others” living in his neighborhood, but he has not yet learned that others have different ways of thinking. Perhaps others are now more prominent in his world, and his thoughts about the world now have to acknowledge that they exist in some relation to himself, but it does not occur to him that these others might define him and his family by some characteristic they lack.

In fact, in almost all the stories of childhood we have heard from Deaf children of Deaf families, hearing people were “curious” and “strange” but mostly were part of the background. The children’s world was large enough with family and friends that the existence of “others” was not disruptive. At the age when children begin to reflect on the world, we see an interesting positioning of the self with respect to “others,” people like Sam’s playmate and her mother. Sam has not yet understood that the outside world considers him and his family to have an “affliction”; to him, immersed in the world of his family, it is the neighbors who lack the ability to communicate.

But before long, the world of others inevitably intrudes. We can see children learning about the minds of others in stories Deaf adults tell about their childhoods. A Deaf friend of ours, Howard, a prominent member of his community, made a revealing comment to a mixed audience of hearing and Deaf people. All members of his family—his parents and brother as well as aunts and uncles—are Deaf. He told the audience that he had spent his early childhood among Deaf people but that when he was six his world changed: his parents took him to a school for Deaf children. “Would you believe,” he said, pausing expertly for effect, “I never knew I was deaf until I first entered school?”

Howard’s comment caused the intended stir in the audience, but it was clear to us that some people thought it meant that Howard first became aware of his audiological deficiency when he was six—that he had never realized before that he could not hear sounds. But this was not his meaning at all.

Howard certainly knew what “deaf” meant. The sign DEAF was part of his everyday vocabulary; he would refer to DEAF people whenever he needed to talk about family and friends, in much the same way as Vicki mentioned that Michael was DEAF. When Howard arrived at school, he found that teachers used the same sign he used for himself at home, DEAF. But it did not take him long to detect a subtle difference in the ways they used the sign.

The child uses DEAF to mean “us,” but he meets others for whom “deaf” means “them, not like us.” He thinks DEAF means “friends who behave as expected,” but to others it means “a remarkable condition.” At home he has taken signing for granted as an activity hardly worth noticing, but he will learn at school that it is something to be talked about and commented on. Depending on what school a child attends, he may be forbidden to use signed language in the presence of his teachers. He will then have to learn how to carry out familiar activities within new boundaries, to learn new social contexts for his language. Skills he learned at home, such as to tell stories with detail about people and events, are not likely to be rewarded by teachers who do not know the language. His language will be subordinated to other activities considered more important, notably learning how to “use his hearing,” and to “speak” (Erting 1985b).

The metaphor of affliction, as it is used to describe deaf children, represents a displacement from the expected, that is, from the hearing child. Howard and Sam were used to a certain mode of exchange at home, certain ways in which Deaf friends and family acknowledge each other. But the alien organization of the school, from its hierarchical structure and its employment of hearing people to its insistence on speech, makes plain to the child that an entirely different set of assumptions is in force. Even the familiar—adults in his school whom he recognizes as DEAF—do not and cannot behave in the same ways they do in his community; their roles must change in the face of the demands of an institution that largely belongs to others (Erting 1985a).

The child “discovers” deafness. Now deafness becomes a prominent fact in his life, a term around which people’s behavior changes. People around him have debates about deafness, and lines are sharply drawn between people depending on what position they take on the subject. He has never thought about himself as having a certain quality, but now it becomes something to discuss. Even his language has ceased to be just a means of interacting with others and has become an object: people are either “against” signed language or “for” signed language. In the stories we have collected from Deaf children of Deaf parents, the same pattern emerges over and over: “deafness” is “discovered” late and in the context of these layers of meaning.

It is not surprising that the school is often the setting for this kind of discovery. School is not the only place where Deaf children meet others, of course, but the realization that others have different ways of thinking, and that these ways of thinking are influential in the school, is forced upon them when they arrive.

Bernard Bragg, in a personal story about his Deaf mother, represents in spatial terms the vast distance between the home and the world of others. We have translated this story from a videotaped record of the National Theatre of the Deaf’s original production My Third Eye (1973):

I asked again where we were going but she gave no reply. For the first time I began to feel a sense of fear and foreboding. I stole glances at her face, but it was immobile and her eyes were fixed on an unseen place somewhere ahead. We rode for a long time, and then we stopped and found ourselves in front of an enormous building … We walked into the building, and once inside I was immediately struck by a medicinal, institutional smell. This did not look like a hospital, or like any other building I had seen before. My mother bent down, turned me toward her, and said: “This is where you will get all your education. You will live here for a while. Don’t worry, I will see you again later.” Then she couldn’t seem to say any more, she hugged me quickly, gave me a kiss, and then, inexplicably, left.¹

The spotlight dims and Bragg disappears in the darkness. The audience feels a brief but powerful sense of loss. For generations of Deaf people who have left home for school, this story evokes intense images of encountering more than just an unknown place. Bragg chooses powerful triggers: his mother’s unusual inarticulateness, the looming size of the school building, the cavernous halls, and the sharpest image of all, the unfamiliar, faintly threatening institutional smell. The smell wraps around him, frightening him, and when he reaches for his mother she is gone. Her parting words, about education and school, are hardly comforting.

We have been discussing Deaf children of Deaf families, but deaf children in hearing families face an equally unusual and complementary dilemma. Compare Howard’s and Sam’s stories with that of Tony, a child of a hearing family who learns that, as a result of medical treatment of childhood diseases, he has become deaf at age six.

I don’t remember any one moment when I thought to myself, “I can’t hear.” Rather it was slowly assimilating a combination of different things. I had been ill for a long time. I remember the repeated visits to the doctor, until finally somehow I sensed a permanence to what had been happening to me. I remember my parents worrying about me, and at some point everyone seemed concerned about my illness. It was at that point I felt changed, and when I thought about how I was changed, my thought was: “I’m the only one like this.”

When this child referred to himself as “deaf,” he meant an intensely individual and personal condition. The illness had affected him and no one else in his family. There were no others like himself:

I had a second cousin who was deaf but I...