The Deaf Mute Howls

5. I MAKE "PROGRESS"

I MAKE "PROGRESS" AFTER SEVERAL years, I reached the point where it was assumed I was able to wresde with grammar. But, consistent with my earlier childish resolution, I simply allowed words to float and swirl heedlessly around my head, making no effort to grasp them. Resolution may not be the correct term to apply to this case, for my ambition to advance myselfin other directions was never quenched. Nothing was really the matter with my brain, unless we except the referredto inexplicable atrophied centers connected with the acquirement of language. English-my mother tongue-seemed to be forever soaring miles and miles beyond reach of my comprehension. It would not or could not penetrate my head. Nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and all their ungodly relatives gyrated and squirmed like witches on a stormy Sabbath eve to bewilder and ache my poor head. I simply sat back, looking on with a blank stare as though in a torpor, my mental eyes closed tight. I was feeling too spiritually worn out to even wish to think. These lessons were infinitely more confusing to me than conjugating irregular French verbs would be to you. You would, at least, have your English grammar at hand to help you. I had no backgroundnothing to guide me. I was taught some smatterings of history, geography, arithmetic , etc., but as usual, I was too mentally atrophied to take interest in the ever-multiplying number ofhard words, their complex, intricate meanings, and their innumerable secondary colors, shades, and tones. But I made marvelous progress in understanding stories 18 THE DEAF MUTE HOWLS when rendered in signs. They were then interesting, enthralling, though I could remember but very few names of persons, places or dates. My teachers had, by now, abandoned trying to make me recite my lessons in writing. To them I was a hopeless case of laziness, obstinacy or sheer stupidity. They felt like the farmer who tries to make the horse drink against its will. Fagged out by the dull monotony of futile exercises in the classroom, I welcomed with delight the recesses and other dismissals from my lessons. I ran, played and forgot the little I had '1earned" at school. In our talks, we, the deaf-mutes, never communicate except by signs-only signs. It is to us the most natural, easiest and sweetest language. Spelt words are entirely tabooed among ourselves. Even persons and places are given distinctive signs oftheir own. The few cases where this is not practical are rare. You may be surprised to know that nearly every City, State and Country has its own sign. Matters stood thus until the entrance ofa semi-mute pupil into my class. It was then that something unusual transpired. But the influence he had over me must be treated separately and referred to later. In an earlier chapter I have outlined the difference between a deaf-mute and a semi-mute, a difference as great as that of a warbling canary and a bulldog. The deaf-mute is such as I have described my composite self The other, having become deaf when over six years old, his brain has attained a development that enables him to retain unimpaired memories of what he had heard and learned through his ears. He is much easier to teach, almost as easy as any normal child. Many ofthe semi-mutes who came to my school lost their hearing at ages as late as ten, fifteen, and some when eighteen and over. Many of them had gone through schools for the hearing, some to High School, a few to College. They were the pets of the teachers and officers. In fact, they were used as decoys to deceive and delude the indiscriminate and gullible public. 19 THE DEAF MUTE HOWLS The semi-mutes, I will repeat, number twenty percent ofall the deaf. When my school had 500 pupils, it had approximately 400 deaf-mutes and 100 semi-mutes. It was always the latter 100 who were the show pupils at public and private exhibitions. They were the only ones shown to visitors and parents of deaf children applying for admission. The officers never explained the differences between these two classes-if such explanation could be avoided. They deliberately impressed the visitors that these semi-mutes were the same as all the other pupils, and that they owed all their education wholly to the school. No wonder then that...