The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.
Nishan Panwar
The death of my brother David and the closeness it brought with Dunbar matured me greatly. By the fall of 1960, when I entered my seventh year at Central Institute for the Deaf, I had started to become a serious person. When David died, I started thinking more about life. His death hit me hard but also helped me make positive decisions. I couldn’t play forever. I started to follow Dunbar’s lead and pay better attention to my studies.
I was heading into the final stretch at CID. At the end of the Advanced Section in four years’ time, I would leave the familiarity of the deaf school to test my English skills in a public school in my hometown. I was going to be “mainstreamed.” At age fifteen, I would finish my schooling alongside hearing peers.
When I got back to CID, I felt like I was leading a double life. The teachers loved me, but the housemothers saw me as a troublemaker. I had gained confidence and was better able to express my opinions and oppose the status quo. My sharp tongue expressed a new independence of mind. My newfound personality seemed to both attract and repel my new housemother, Miss Cora Lacy. As a result, we spent much time arguing, discussing, and explaining, all important interchanges in which I sharpened my English skills—often at my housemother’s expense. I was more fluent with the English language, thus more articulate in getting my points across.
Romance was at the root of some of those conflicts. I had fallen in love with Nancy, one of the older girls. She was a pretty brunette with an expressive face. Unfortunately, she did not have too much affection for me. One day Nancy hurt my feelings and then wrote a note to apologize. She handed me the note in the dining room.
Miss Lacy saw the transaction and followed me back to the dormitory. She asked to see the note, but I laughed and said it was none of her business. The remark infuriated her. She warned that she would send for Mr. Maltse, the dormitory supervisor, and have him take the note from me. I said that would be fine with me, so she stormed off to call him.
I didn’t know what to do next. My friend Erik suggested I tear the note into tiny pieces and give her the pieces in a box. I followed his suggestion and wrote Miss Lacy a note that said, “Here are the pieces in this box. If you really want to read the note, you’ll have to put the pieces together first!”
Miss Lacy was furious when I presented her with the box. Mr. Maltse soon showed up in my room, carrying the box. He told me I had to work on the pieces until the note was glued back together again. I protested that the note was personal and its contents were nobody else’s business. Mr. Maltse grabbed me and said I was to do as he said. He handed me Scotch tape and said, “You work on it for as long as it takes to get it back together.”
What was I going to do? To the dubious rescue came Dave, another of the boys in my dorm, who said, “No problem!” He brushed the pieces of my note off the table and into his hand, opened the window, and threw them into the wind. We then witnessed a beautiful scene, as my incriminating evidence fell like snowflakes to the ground. An hour later, Miss Lacy came up to my room to check on my progress. I sat at the table with a Cheshire cat grin. She looked around for the note, and I told her that it was gone for good. She became furious and left.
Soon, to my amazement, Mr. Maltse reappeared and demanded to know what had happened to the pieces. I was getting deeper and deeper into trouble through the “help” of my friends, but I warmed to the challenge. I told him a bird had flown in the window, taken the note, and scattered it. He didn’t like that answer one bit. He began shaking me and demanding to know who the “bird” was. I decided to remain loyal to my friend. Mr. Maltse kept shaking me, and I kept saying, “A bird threw it out!”
“Who?”
“A bird.”
“Who?”
“A bird.”
It went on like this for quite a while until Mr. Maltse suddenly got a relieved look on his face, turned, and left. He returned with Robert, another dorm friend, in tow. He began interrogating Robert, asking why he’d thrown the pieces of note out the window. I of course protested that I hadn’t said anything about Robert. Mr. Maltse slapped me and called me a liar.
I was shocked. How had this thing gotten so far out of control? I defended myself and Robert: “I am not a liar. I did not say, ‘Robert.’ I said, ‘A bird.’”
Mr. Maltse was adamant. “No, you told me Robert! Now you’re lying.” He continued to slap me around. Mr. Maltse had mistaken “a bird” for “Robert.” Somehow, despite all my speech practice, in a crucial situation I had been misunderstood even by a person used to interpreting the speech of people who are deaf. This was infuriating and frightening. Would my oral skills fail me like this when I left CID for the hearing world? It was a disturbing question I had to ponder during the subsequent three Saturdays I spent writing “I will obey Miss Lacy. I will obey Miss Lacy,” thousands and thousands of times.
A contradictory mix of self-doubt and self-assurance was common among us boys as we emerged from childhood. We began to take seriously our sense of right and wrong, as well as our right to privacy. Robert began to suspect that Miss Lacy was reading our mail. He was upset and felt she had no business doing this, so he called a council of war. We parleyed about the problem. Many of us expressed concern. We knew there was a federal law against reading other people’s mail.
Robert suggested we take drastic measures and wrote a letter. “Dear Miss Lacy: You are wrong to read this letter. You have no business reading other people’s mail. If you had not read this letter you wouldn’t know that we all think you are fat, old, and nasty . . . Sincerely yours, Robert.”
Robert folded the letter, put it in an envelope, and addressed it to himself. He didn’t seal it but folded it inside tightly so that someone would have to work to open it. He put the letter in the top drawer of his dresser where he usually kept mail. We couldn’t wait until the next day.
When we got back from school that next afternoon, we all walked into the dormitory together. One by one we passed by Miss Lacy’s room and took a quick look inside. It was obvious from her facial expression and the way she sat clutching the arms of her chair that she was furious. We ran to Robert’s room and looked in the top drawer. The letter was gone! We had her. She had opened Robert’s letter! We jumped for joy.
Miss Lacy knew she’d been outsmarted. She couldn’t report the incident because it would prove she had been reading our letters. She did get her revenge by being harsher with us for a time, but she never mentioned the episode. We reveled in every minute of her discomfort. We had triumphed over injustice.