The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
Maya Angelou
My third year at Central Institute for the Deaf turned into the Year of Terror. Rusty and I, now age seven, moved to the second-level dormitory. Our time of relative security and peace with Mrs. Morton, the housemother, was over. In the new dorm, we found ourselves in close contact with a boy who turned out to be the troublemaker of the school. Even more disturbing was finding ourselves in the care of a sterner and less congenial housemother, Mrs. Hilton.
Housemothers at CID were paid poorly. They were mostly poorly educated women who knew little or nothing about deafness. The school could have been more careful about the women they hired. After all, housemothers had to supply surrogate motherly love and make the children feel at home, thus the name “housemother.” Mrs. Morton, though she lacked the desire to understand her deaf charges, was at least congenial.
Mrs. Hilton was another story. Rusty and I had Mrs. Hilton for two years, and our friendship suffered by her presence in our lives. We didn’t have the time to enjoy each other’s company as before. We were too busy watching out for our own tails, making sure that Don, the dorm troublemaker, and Mrs. Hilton didn’t run us down. Don tended to get into fights, and as is true of many underpaid and underprivileged overseers, Mrs. Hilton tended to punish all of us instead of the real troublemaker. Don was nearly always the aggressor and didn’t care if the conflict was tied to him or not, but for some reason Mrs. Hilton lumped all of us together as culprits.
The most common outcome of fights was a bloody ear from the hard earmolds of our hearing aids. Almost everyone wore at least one hearing aid, even me. Being boxed on the ear caused the earmold to lacerate the tender outer ear. Although not for this reason, I’m sure, they now make earmolds out of a softer material.
Don came from a well-to-do family, and because they had spoiled him, he was very demanding toward everyone else. Paradoxically, he was also the center of envy because his folks often sent him boxes of toys and sweets. He was usually well-stocked and began to use the toys and sweets to reward and punish the rest of us as he liked. We all came to fear him and the power he had over us. Mrs. Hilton remained blind to all of this and didn’t take the trouble to correct the problem.
Keith was another boy in our dormitory to be dreaded. He was a frustrated soul, and being much stronger than the rest of us, he established himself as a bully over the next few years. We learned bit by bit that his mother was raising him alone. He made up stories about his father, who existed only in his imagination. He often threatened that his father would come after us if we were not nice to him or if we didn’t do what he wanted. When he beat one of us up, he threatened further terror later on if we reported it to Mrs. Hilton, a fact she never believed. When I think about it today, it reminds me of a Mafia movie where the authorities never believe the threat exists and therefore never provide the protection needed. We couldn’t report Keith or he would get someone else to strike back, and his “hit men” always lied convincingly, saying he had nothing to do with it.
Many of us developed what I’d call survival behavior. We were always on the lookout and never trusted anyone in the dormitory. It was a pretty stressful environment for boys of seven and eight to live in. The combination of conflicts made me feel so homesick that I occasionally crawled into Rusty’s bed at night to talk with him. We talked without voices by reading lips from the light of the exit signs and outside street lights. It occurs to me that all kids, from time to time, could make good use of silent speech along with gestures and body language.
If it weren’t for letters from my family, I would have fared much worse during those years. I suppose any child in a boarding school would be confronted by the same fears, alienations, and conflicts. Being able to hear may not have made it any better or worse, but my being in that school was a direct result of my being deaf. In some ways, having to go to CID brought me closer to my family and insulated me from day-to-day problems that family life creates. I did learn much and I appreciate the time I spent there. But if I were asked today whether I would rather have spent my childhood at home and perhaps learned a little less as a result, the choice would be difficult.
We weren’t completely passive in our misery in the dorm. In fact, we did manage to pull off one ingenious, if sad, caper of revenge. In the dormitory was a slow-witted boy named Ricky. For some reason, he was Mrs. Hilton’s favorite. Many of us couldn’t abide his always running to her for protection and love, which she never showed to us. Some of us decided to do something about it. We taught Ricky what we called “the dirty sign”—the flipping of the middle finger. We told him to say, “I love you! I love you!” then flip his finger. We praised and drilled him for quite a while and then encouraged him to try it on Mrs. Hilton. We all scattered to different places in the dormitory, while keeping our eyes on Ricky as he went up to Mrs. Hilton. We watched in ecstasy as he did it perfectly.
Mrs. Hilton was so shocked that she took out her favorite device, her whip, and began physically admonishing him. Physical punishment was commonplace in residential schools in those days. Poor Ricky didn’t understand the meaning of it and retreated to his bed, dumbfounded. The rest of us roared with laughter, but Mrs. Hilton took no notice of this or did not connect us with the incident—another indication of her lack of awareness. Can you imagine how obvious a group of giggling boys would have been?
The next day Ricky hugged Mrs. Hilton as usual, and, as always, we were disgusted with his behavior. So we explained to him that he must have flipped his finger too fast and startled the housemother. We repeated the drill. Amazingly, we convinced him to try again. We scattered and again watched the scene between Ricky and Mrs. Hilton. She was so shocked that she whipped him doubly hard this time. Again, the housemother proved insensitive. How could she overlook the mirth scattered throughout the room? Poor Ricky was crestfallen. He did not play with, listen to, or talk to us for several days. To this day, I feel bad about the incident and hope Ricky understands now that we were just kids being kids.
That third year we also acquired a new classroom teacher, Mrs. Lunde. Rusty and I began to look back fondly at the two wonderful years with Mrs. Olmstead, whose warmth and trust we had enjoyed without full appreciation. Mrs. Lunde taught us that sign language was a horrible practice that we would never be permitted to indulge in. The idea she conveyed was that people who signed were poorly educated, low class, and to be pitied and avoided. This was a particularly harsh interpretation of CID’s no-signing policy but by no means an uncommon one. Throughout the world of deaf education at that time, signers were looked down upon. Mrs. Lunde would not even tolerate our homemade gestures and signs. Speech was our daily communication mode.
During my first two years at CID, I had not experienced any disciplinary problems in the classroom or dormitory. Now there were big problems in paradise. Both Mrs. Lunde and Mrs. Hilton were frequently in conflict with the students. Who created all this? All I can say is that it didn’t exist the year before. One thing was certain: those two adults sure increased my homesickness. Suddenly I hated school!
Mrs. Lunde was not a natural teacher. Her impatience often overwhelmed us, as I think we overwhelmed her. Sometimes she was so impatient that she picked one of us up and shook the offender as if to loosen and detach what bothered her. All of us were terrified of her. We tried too hard to please her, making it even worse. The naturalness of communication slowly drained out of us and was replaced by awkwardness. Suddenly, whenever I was unable to figure out what she wanted from me, I would lose my ability to communicate. I’m sure other students reacted the same. Force is an ineffective teaching technique. Understanding and compassion may seem slow, but at least they don’t scare the education out of a child.
All year long, Mrs. Lunde punished us whenever we used gestures or signs. A month before school was out for the summer, she brought a pair of boxing gloves and threatened us with them: if we dared to use a gesture or a sign, we would have to wear the boxing gloves. Within a few hours a boy named Bob was wearing them. It was an awful experience for all of us. Bob was punished often, though his use of hands seemed minor to us. Once, during one of her rages, Mrs. Lunde put a paper bag over Bob’s head and made him sit for what must have been fearful eternity to a small boy.
The use of hands is natural even among hearing children. Mrs. Lunde’s overreactions served only to hamper rather than help us learn.
I didn’t often feel the brunt of Mrs. Lunde’s anger, as Bob did, but I suffered sharply from her lack of understanding. One such incident lives on in my memory. Every Monday at CID, all students had to write letters to their parents. The teachers helped us correct spelling and grammar before we rewrote our letters and mailed them home. If we were in the mood to write something personal or private to our parents, we could write letters on our own and send them without inspection, as long as we wrote our weekly letters for the teacher to review. Day pupils who didn’t live in the dormitory were expected to find a relative willing to correspond with them, so they could participate in the Monday letter ritual.
One Monday morning, I was so homesick while rewriting my letter, which had already been corrected by Mrs. Lunde, that I decided to add to the last line: “I love you very, very, very, very, very, very...” all the way to the bottom of the back page, with just enough room for me to add, “much. Paul.” When Mrs. Lunde saw the letter, she gave it back it to me with one of her terrifying facial expressions and said I had to erase all the extra “verys.” Why hadn’t she simply asked me to rewrite the letter on another paper? The erasing took a long time. I was unhappy at the thought that my parents would never see how much I cared for them. Years later, my mother reminded me of the episode and said she and my father were so touched by the letter with all the erased “verys.” So they got the message after all!
Needless to say, the bullying by other students and the threats and angry outbursts by our teacher made for a nearly impossible learning environment. I was so homesick during the Year of Terror that I began to feel insecure. At Christmas vacation, Mother gave me her special scarf, which she wore often. Understanding my loneliness, she gave me just the right thing to carry back to school. The smell of my mother’s perfume was still in the scarf. Wearing and smelling it made me feel secure. I wore the gray scarf frequently that winter. Her scent helped me through some rough times.
Looking back now, it’s obvious that Mrs. Lunde disliked teaching and that she didn’t even like kids. I’m sure she had no children of her own. I wonder whether she even had proper training in teaching children who are deaf. I often wish there were a mirror in front each of us, so that we could see what others see when we are unkind or untruthful. It might be uncomfortable, but I for one would rather know how bad I look to others so that I could correct myself.