Deaf Hearing Boy: A Memoir

Introduction

Out of this silence yet I picked a welcome, And in the modesty of fearful duty I read as much as from the rattling tongue Of saucy and audacious eloquence. —A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.100–103 This story follows my years with my Deaf parents from my birth in 1938 until my departure for college in 1956, with a final chapter by way of bringing to a close my long association with them over their eighty-plus years of life. I hope it will help my daughters understand what my early life was like as they come to know better the unusual relationship that existed between me and my parents, my parents and their grandparents, and me and my grandparents. I hope, too, that, in some small way, my experiences will assist students of the Deaf community so they can understand more clearly the tensions that exist between Deaf parents and their Hearing children and so they in turn will be better able to recognize the special needs of these children and their parents. My story includes revelations, confessions, and resurrections of events long dead, and some of them will prove embarrassing and 1 Introduction 2 Introduction hurtful to my parents and my family. I know that friends and relatives will be dismayed by how I portray some of the actions and attitudes of my grandparents, who were considered “good Christian people” and pillars of the community. I can only say I have tried to present a truthful account, one that honors my subjects but does not shirk its duty to be honest to myself. For any proverbial closeted skeletons that may be rattled here, I am regretful, but my intention, like that of the famous French essayist, Michel de Montaigne, has been to write an honest book. The uniqueness of my experience with my parents is twofold. First, it stems from my family’s nomadic journey from the farm to the city in late 1942 and then back to the farm again at the close of 1949. It also concerns the deprivations we suffered when we had to leave the city, where my parents had depended on a large and flourishing Deaf community for social contact and support. The change was hard for my father to make, but it was devastating to my mother, who thrived on the gregarious life the city provided her as a Deaf person. Second, the uniqueness of this experience has to do with the tension between my parents and me and between them and my grandparents as well as with the chasm that separated their Deaf world from the Hearing world of Grandma Amy and Grandpa Lloyd Newton. For much of my childhood and adolescence, we shared a house, a farm, and a livelihood with my grandparents. This family construct constitutes Paul Preston’s H-D-H schema (Hearing-Deaf-Hearing, referring to the difference in three generations: Hearing grandparents, Deaf parents, and Hearing children) as he describes it in his book, Mother Father Deaf.1 In this construct, the Hearing grandparents and Hearing grandchildren inevitably are drawn into a complex relationship 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. Introduction 3 that both tries to privilege the prerogatives of the Deaf parents and inevitably in various ways undermines them, as it did in my childhood. Because I was so accustomed to witnessing my parents being treated by other Hearing people as somehow mentally deficient, that is, “deaf and dumb” (and the “dumb” did not necessarily signify being mute), I really didn’t see anything out of the ordinary in the way my grandparents treated them until I was about fifteen and old enough to understand how my parents would never in my grandparents’ eyes be quite normal. Although Lloyd Newton was really my stepgrandfather, I refer to him as Grandpa Lloyd because he was the only paternal grandfather I ever knew; my grandfather Miller died more than ten years before I was born. The portraits I paint here of my paternal grandparents show only a part of my life with them as they dealt with my parents, who could be difficult. My grandparents could be distant, patronizing, and distrustful. My grandmother’s behavior was quite different from what was usually the practice among Deaf people, who displayed affection openly, exuberantly, and frequently, but we were caught between two cultures—one Hearing-midwestern and the other Deaf. Ohio farm families...