Orchid of the Bayou: A Deaf Woman Faces Blindess, The Kitty Fischer Story

16. The Reentry of a Coed

16 'I:.e Reentry ofa Coed And allI ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by. -JOHN MASEFIELD, SEA FEVER Back at Gallaudet for two weeks, I felt like I had never been gone. I was a freshman taking the prescribed curriculum-English, biology , and for a short time, three foreign languages. I dropped Russian after the first semester, and Latin after the first year, but I kept pursuing French, feeling through it a connection to my Acadian home. "What the hell's this?" my father demanded when he received a portion of a letter written in the language I was learning. I don't know if I failed in my attempt to apply my first-year French because I'd used the formal vous instead of tu, and tutoyered when I should have vous voyed, or whether my father was just disconcerted because he had never learned to read his native tongue. In any case, when Nana wrote to me about his perplexed ire, I immediately gave up writing French to communicate with him. My favorite subject was art history, taught by Debbie Sonnenstrahl . When Debbie was finished teaching me, my lifelong understanding that a picture was a picture had been replaced by a kind of 192 'Ihe Reentry ofa Coed confusion that I think is more accurately called appreciation. Scale, purpose, color, history, culture, spirit-all captured and transformed by human art. "Another reason to visit Europe," I told Lance. My life on campus had already become comfortable, and my year in Rayne slipped over into a nodule ofmemory. Mary Langlois was happy to see me, and even our boss, Adele Krug, seemed pleased when I reclaimed my job in the library. I was relieved and happy to be there. Plumie was still there, even quieter than I remembered. I learned later that I'd been wrong in imagining that my white friends in the North had looked at the King assassination with horror and sympathy. Violence had exploded in the neighborhood around Gallaudet, and the mostly white students were enraged and undiscriminating in their anger toward the black rioters and black people in general. Plumie, finally developing a sense ofbelonging when a cohort ofblack students appeared the year that I was in Louisiana, was stung by it. She remembers notices that appeared around campus, warning about "robbery and rape ... and nigger things." An accusation of rape was raised by one of the students , and until a white construction worker was charged, the students took for granted that the perpetrator had been black. Plumie was now a year ahead of me, and we didn't talk much anymore. I didn't know until later that she had found the environment so hostile she considered quitting. Her mother wouldn't hear ofit. "You want to give up because of those white people?" she demanded of her daughter. "That's not a good enough reason." Plumie, showing the same quiet courage that had helped her heal from a crippling disease, stayed in school. My bad luck with roommates continued. My new roommate passionately pursued self-destruction. Every Friday she was drunk and throwing up, and almost always doing both these things in our room. I had little patience and less stomach for living like this. Kathy Meyer, a quiet student who had taken the previous year off to work as I had, had been granted a room to herself when her roommate decided to live off campus. Kathy grew up in St. Paul, 193 Orchid of the'Bayou Minnesota, where she was among the deaf and hard ofhearing students who were placed in resource rooms of public schools, in a venture that predated officially mandated mainstreaming. Kathy was among the brightest inside and outside the resource room, she remembered, and schoolwork was more a pleasure than a challenge. She was hard of hearing with a voice that hearing people easily understood, an attribute that offered the dubious plus of academic acceptance and the small hope of social acceptance, but no hope at all of assistance in the way ofinterpreters, note-takers, or even sign language instruction. Mter graduating from high school, Kathy spent a year in business school and then left to work as a typist in an insurance office. For fun, she joined a deaf bowling team and learned her first signs. At the same time, Bob Lauritsen, the son of deaf parents...