To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.
Anthony Robbins
My start at Central Institute for the Deaf coincided with Jonathan’s enrollment at Arkansas School for the Deaf, where signing was the primary mode of communication. My parents asked Jonathan not to use signs with me so that I would conform with CID’s policies. He respected their request. We continued to talk with each other using lipreading, speech, gestures, and body language. When I was very young, I didn’t comprehend that there was such a thing as formal sign language and that Jonathan used it with his deaf friends.
Years later, my parents told me how shocked they were to learn there was a Jonathan unknown to them. They knew him as a quiet, even timid boy. Then one day, when they had to pick him up at school, they found Jonathan sitting with his deaf friends and signing a hundred miles per hour. He was vivacious and lively. He had never been like that at home. They knew immediately that they had done the right thing by letting him go to a signing school. For Jonathan, sign language became the door to social interaction. For my family it became the living symbol of a basic fact about deafness: although Jonathan and I were deaf, we were not without language. We simply learned different ways to express ourselves, ways that suited our different personalities.
Far too often, in a family with more than one deaf child, the deaf members stay together and apart from the rest of the family in a kind of communication bondage. But for Jonathan and me, who used different modes of communication, this was not true. I spent about the same amount of time with him as with the other members of my family. Still, we did share a great sensitivity to others’ nonverbal expression, and in some ways, he worked with me in deepening this sensitivity.
In my early years, I became extremely sensitive to Jonathan. He maintained strong eye contact with me. People don’t realize that their eye movements, most of which are outside their conscious control, communicate messages of excitement, arousal, pleasure, grief, sorrow, and so on. The shades of meaning conveyed by the eyes can be extremely subtle.
At the age of five or six, I found myself understanding Jonathan’s feelings by looking at his eyes. When Jonathan disapproved of my behavior, he reprimanded me with his eyes without his knowing it, and I felt punished or scolded. Although the eyes of everyone in my family were an important source of information, I found Jonathan’s more powerful, more penetrating, and more expressive. From time to time I felt more vulnerable to him than others. He taught me, more than anyone, how profoundly informative visual stimuli can be.
Once, when I was about twelve, Jonathan took me to the airport to meet our parents on an incoming flight. While waiting for the plane, we sat across from a row of telephone booths, all occupied. “Look,” Jonathan said, “what can you tell about those men?” We scanned the line of men talking on the phones and speculated on which were enjoying their conversations and which were not, which were talking with people they liked or loved, which were conversing with strangers or business associates, which were nervous about what they were saying, and which were talking naturally. We also guessed at which were lying and which were telling the truth. We were fascinated by what we saw. I felt almost as though we were eavesdropping on their conversations.
Often, Jonathan and I were left out of a conversation with hearing strangers while our parents were busy talking with them. At those times, Jonathan would comment on the discussion. He would say things like, “This person’s body is saying ‘Okay’ but his gestures are saying ‘No’” or “His gestures are saying ‘You did well’ but his eyes are saying ‘You weren’t good enough.’” Jonathan made me more aware of people whose messages were mixed. I began paying more attention to my parents’ interactions with hearing people. For me, trying to tell whether a person was sincere was like a guessing game. It kept me intrigued. After the “game” I would ask my mother to fill me in on details of the conversation to learn whether my initial suspicions were well-founded.
The longer Jonathan was at Arkansas School for the Deaf, the more I sensed his disdain for and distrust of hearing people outside of the family. Little by little, I understood that he felt hearing people were not worth the effort it took to communicate with them. Compared to his deaf friends at school, they struck him as cold and boring. His friends had many bad experiences with hearing people, and Jonathan himself experienced some of the discrimination they described to him. Since he agreed with his friends, he began adopting their attitudes. He became ever more deeply entrenched in the signing world—and loved it.
One day at home I found an alphabet card that contained pictures of hand shapes for the letters of the alphabet. I was about eight or nine. I went to Jonathan and fingerspelled a few words to him. He was furious and chased me, trying to get the card. It was like a game until he caught me and took the card away. He may have been worried about my parents’ reaction, for he was always faithful to their request that he use no sign language with me. But he also may have just been selectively proud and protective of his own private world of signing.
One summer Jonathan had nothing to do, so my parents encouraged him to work at a lakeside vacation camp. He worked hard all summer doing odd jobs and earning his own money. When we visited him he proudly showed us the camp and all his different tasks. Jonathan was learning that he was capable of being independent.
After that experience, my parents encouraged Jonathan to go to a religious camp for deaf people, sponsored by the Church of Christ. He was eighteen. At the camp there were many deaf people from all over the Midwest and from other Church of Christ congregations. One camper was Dorothy Louise Wright, a shy girl from Texas. Dorothy and Jonathan fell in love immediately. Everyone at the camp called them “the love birds.”
When Jonathan returned from camp my family was stunned when he suddenly became interested in letter writing. Writing had never been one of his favorite activities. But he wrote to Dorothy almost every day. He was a different person, obviously transformed by his new feelings.
When Dorothy visited, I loved to watch the two of them talk in sign language. Dorothy was terribly shy, and though she had enough residual hearing to play the piano, she almost never used her voice. That came from her school training. My family was happy for Jonathan but sad that none of us could communicate with Dorothy. We didn’t know any sign language and Dorothy had no speech. When Dorothy signed, she didn’t form words on her lips. It was impossible to lipread her, and she didn’t even want to talk.
Just as the world around us was adapting to important and dramatic change, so too was my own family. When Jonathan graduated from Arkansas School for the Deaf in 1959, he wanted to go to the Southern School of Graphic Arts in Nashville to learn the printing trade. He planned to become a printer and work for a newspaper company. Clearly, it was his intention to marry Dorothy, but he felt he had to get a job first. Here, however, he came up against my father.
My father felt that Jonathan had the intelligence to go to college, so he talked him into applying to Gallaudet, the liberal arts college for the deaf in Washington, DC. To attend Gallaudet, a student had to first pass entrance examinations. Jonathan did well on these exams, but he hesitated about going to Gallaudet. My father came from a family where everyone went to college. To him it was unthinkable for anyone in his family not to receive a college degree. But Jonathan was not interested in college at all. Breaking a family tradition was the least of his concerns. Still, my father put pressure on the deaf school to encourage Jonathan to go to Gallaudet. He himself talked long and hard to Jonathan about it. Finally, Jonathan agreed to give Gallaudet a try.
After one semester, Jonathan was bored with his studies and didn’t want to return. He kept thinking about printing at the Southern School of Graphic Arts, and about Dorothy. My father was disappointed but satisfied that Jonathan had at least tried Gallaudet College for one semester and had earned Bs in his courses. My father felt better knowing Jonathan could have finished college if he had wanted to.
Now that Jonathan was free, the wedding was on! My mother—who had prayed that Jonathan would marry a deaf woman rather than wind up in a difficult “mixed” marriage—was sure Dorothy was the right girl for him. The only problem was the left-out feeling that stemmed from the language barrier. The marriage ceremony highlighted this issue in a sad way, for it was conducted in sign language by a deaf minister. My father, as a minister, was disappointed that he was not allowed to perform the ceremony or play an important role in it. I think we all felt the wedding confirmed Jonathan and Dorothy’s membership in that “other world,” far away from us. I wish we had thought of including a sign language interpreter.
Now Jonathan and Dorothy together lived in the deaf world. The only way to get there seemed to be through the knowledge of sign language. I didn’t feel a part of their world at all, though I was as deaf as Jonathan. My instinct was to include everyone, hearing and deaf—anything else felt unacceptable. I decided at the wedding that I would never separate myself or my future wife from my family in that way.
It wasn’t until years later that I realized there was another side to the coin: when hearing people with deaf signing family members do not learn sign language, they do just as much to isolate themselves from those close to them. When my family realized that Jonathan was not cut out to be an oralist and supported his choice of Arkansas School for the Deaf, they should have learned sign language so they could better communicate with him.