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Overview
An insightful memoir about growing up between the hearing and deaf worlds.
Myron Uhlberg was born the hearing son of two deaf parents at a time when American Sign Language was not well established and deaf people were often dismissed as being unintelligent. In this moving and eye-opening memoir, he recalls the daily difficulties and hidden joys of growing up as the intermediary between his parents' silent world and the world of the hearing.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807531600 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Whitman, Albert & Company |
| Publication date: | 05/28/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Sales rank: | 208,003 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 9 - 12 Years |
About the Author
Myron Uhlberg is the award-wining and critically acclaimed author of several children's books, including Dad, Jackie, and Me; A Storm Called Katrina; and The Sound of All Things.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Dramatic Welcome
I've never liked being the center of attention. But in my family, I always have been, ever since I was born just after midnight on July 1, 1933.
Everything about that day was peculiar. For one, I came into this world during one of the biggest electrical thunderstorms in the history of Brooklyn, New York, where my parents lived. According to my father, on the night of my birth, giant fingers of lightning reached down from the sky and ignited oil tanks, which exploded, sending flames hundreds of feet into the sky and turning night into day. Then the clouds cracked open, releasing a flood of water on our neighborhood and turning Brooklyn's wide avenues into raging rivers.
In the middle of all this chaos, my father ran out of Coney Island Hospital, where my mother was about to give birth, and howled at the sky like a banshee.
People sometimes say I get dramatic. I think it might be because of the dramatic circumstances of my birth. But there was another reason I was the center of attention that night. You see, both of my parents were deaf, and no one, not even the doctors, could say if I would be born deaf too.
When I finally arrived, the first words my father spoke to me, as I lay in my mother's arms, were with his hands. As a deaf man, my father had no words to speak. Instead, he introduced me into the world with joyous signs of welcome. His hands flashed in the air, quivering with excitement: "Welcome! Welcome! Open your eyes! You are home now." And in the same way that many children start learning to speak from the moment their mother whispers "I love you" into their little ears, I began to learn my first language by watching my father's hands through half-closed eyes.
My father was right. I was home. But unlike my parents, I could also hear the murmuring voices and the thunder outside the hospital window. And while I stepped with one foot into my parents' silent world, my other tiny foot was born into another world. The world that I would one day call my own.
CHAPTER 2A New Addition
My parents' world was a four-room apartment on the third floor of a redbrick building, not far from Coney Island. And on certain summer days, when the wind was blowing just right and our kitchen window was open, I could smell the salty air of the Atlantic Ocean, sometimes even catching a hint of mustard and grilled hot dogs from Nathan's Famous hot dog stand (although this part may have been my imagination).
On one of these afternoons, when I was old enough to understand sign, my father told me about the events that led him to plead to the sky on that crazy night. It was his story. But it is also the beginning of my story.
As always, my father spoke with his hands. His hands were his voice. And his hands contained his memories.
Like me, my father was born hearing. But at an early age, he had become very ill, so ill that his parents thought he would die. Fever ravaged his body for more than a week. And when it finally let up, he was alive, but he would never hear another sound for the rest of his life.
"Not fair!" he signed to me, his hands fast, angry. I could always tell, at a glance, my father's moods — happy, angry, thoughtful, playful, serious — by paying careful attention to the way he signed. The signs sent the information, but the way he signed them told me more, like how an actor could make a character come alive, not by the words he said but by the way he said them.
My father told me that because both of his parents could hear, he could barely communicate with them. He shared only a few signs with his father: eat, be quiet, sleep. Each one was a command sign. There was no sign for love between them.
My father did share a sign for love with his mother. It was a home-sign, a sign she had created, and she used it often. My father told me that his language with his mother was poor in quantity but rich in content. She communicated less through signs than through the glow that appeared in her eyes whenever she looked at him. That look was special, for him alone.
When he was eight years old, my father was sent to live at the Fanwood School for the Deaf, a military-style school for deaf children. He thought his parents had abandoned him — that he was damaged. In his early days, he cried himself to sleep every night. But slowly he realized that he had not been abandoned. He had been rescued. For the first time in his life, he was surrounded by children just like him. He finally saw that he was not alone.
But the education he received at Fanwood was a mixed blessing. There, as at most deaf schools at the time, the children were taught by hearing teachers. So instead of teaching the students sign, the teachers tried to teach them speech.
Being deaf does not mean that a person is mute. The deaf have vocal cords and can speak. But they cannot hear the sounds of their voices, so teaching them spoken English is very difficult. Although my father and his classmates tried to cooperate with their teachers, not one of them ever learned to speak well enough to be understood by the average hearing person.
To make things worse, sign language was forbidden. The hearing teachers thought sign was a primitive way of communicating, only for the unintelligent. It was not until many years later that American Sign Language (ASL) was recognized as the legitimate, expressive language that it is. But long before then, my father and his friends came to that conclusion themselves. Every night, in the dormitory at Fanwood, the older deaf children taught the younger ones the visual language of sign.
"When I was a boy, I had no real signs," my father told me, his hands moving, remembering. "I only had made-up home-signs. These were like shadows on a wall. They had no real meaning. In deaf school I was hungry for sign. All were new for me. Sign was the food that fed me. Food for the eye. Food for the mind. I swallowed each new sign to make it mine."
My father learned the printing trade in school. He was told this was a perfect trade for the deaf because printing can be a very noisy business. But the message he received from the hearing teachers was that the deaf were not as smart, or capable, as hearing students, so they had to be taught skills, such as printing, shoe repair, and house painting.
When he graduated, my father got his first and only job.
"I was lucky to have an apprentice job with the New York Daily News," he told me. "I knew it was because I was deaf, and so wouldn't be distracted by the noise of the printing presses, but I didn't care. I also didn't care that the deaf workers were paid less than the hearing workers, because Captain Patterson, the big boss, knew that we wouldn't, couldn't, complain. He knew that we would be happy for any job, at any wage. We were deaf. He could hear. And he was right."
Here my father paused, and his hands lay still on his lap while he remembered. "The hearing people ran the world," he signed, his hands moving in sadness.
After many years as an apprentice, my father earned his union card. This meant that his job was protected, and for him, it was proof that he was as good as any hearing man.
In the darkest days of the Great Depression, almost one of every four men in the United States did not have a job. The numbers were even worse for the deaf, since not many were employed in skilled trades. Luckily for my father, people kept buying newspapers during the Depression, probably hoping to read of good news that the hard times were ending. Because of this, my father kept his job, and he earned enough money to support a family.
"I wanted a partner forever," my father told me. His finger formed a circle like a clock, then his hand moved forward, showing the endless passage of time that was forever.
Before long, my father met my mother, Sarah. She had been born hearing too, but like so many kids in the early 1900s, before antibiotics had been discovered, she came down with scarlet fever. And when she recovered, she had lost her hearing. She had just turned one year old. Just as was the case with my father's hearing family, not one of her parents or her siblings had learned any real signs. They had barely communicated with her, using simple homemade gestures.
"We would be two deaf people in the hearing world," my father told me. "We would make our own world. A quiet world. A silent world."
After getting married, my father and mother found our apartment near Coney Island. They negotiated the price with the hearing landlord by themselves, even though their parents said that they "could not manage alone" because they were "deaf and handicapped" and would surely "be cheated."
Nine months later, at the bottom of the Great Depression, I was born. My parents had overcome many things together, but they now faced one of their greatest challenges yet: raising a hearing son.
"When Mother Sarah was struggling to bring you into this world," my father signed, his fingers fluttering, his hands spewing out a flood of words. "And the sky was split in half, like a black egg, cracked apart with blinding streaks of light, I rushed out into an underwater world, out into the downpour, screaming my questions into the heavens." Then he paused. Thinking. And he smiled. His hands came to life. "We would manage," he signed. "Together. We would build a life together."
CHAPTER 3The Tests
My parents had little help in trying to figure out how to raise me. Because there was no common way for the hearing and deaf to communicate other than writing notes, the two worlds were almost completely cut off from each other. My parents worried this meant that they would be cut off from me.
"How would we know when you cried in the dark?" my father's hands asked. "When you were hungry? Happy? Sad? When you had a pain in your stomach?"
"And how," he signed, "would we tell you we loved you?" My father's hands became still, thoughtful.
"I was afraid I would not know you if you were a hearing baby. I feared you would not know your deaf father." Then he smiled. "Mother Sarah was not worried. She said she was your mother. She would know you. There was no need for mouth speak. No need for hand speak."
The first order of business was to make sure everything was normal with my hearing. This might sound strange, but neither of my parents' families were quite sure how they had gone deaf. They knew my mother and father had been sick, but to my grandparents, the illness and the deafness were not necessarily connected. After all, their other children had gotten sick from time to time, and they had not gone deaf. They did not have "broken ears."
My father continued. "When we brought you home from the hospital, we arranged for Mother Sarah's family to come to our apartment every Saturday afternoon. 'Urgent!' I wrote. 'You must come! Every week. Saturday.'
"They listened. They came from Coney Island every weekend for your first year of life. They never missed, all of them: Mother Sarah's mother and father, and her younger sister and three younger brothers. They ate like horses, but it was worth it."
"How boring that must have been for them," I signed, pressing my finger to my nose, mimicking the monotonous turning of a grindstone wheel.
"We didn't care," he signed vigorously. "I had a plan!
"They always came when you were sleeping. I made sure of that. Before making themselves comfortable, I asked them to stand at the back of your crib. Then they pounded on pots and pans I gave them. You heard a big noise and snapped awake, and you began to wail. It was a wonderful sight to see you cry so strongly at the heavy sound."
"Wonderful?" I asked. "Wonderful for who?" No wonder I had trouble sleeping some nights, I thought.
My father continued, ignoring my complaint.
"On Sundays, my mother, father, brother, and two sisters came down from the Bronx. They did not trust Mother Sarah's family. They brought their own pots and pans." Here, my father's hands formed a small curved pot, then they traced a larger pot that could hold a dozen potatoes. Then, seamlessly, his hand grasped an imaginary handle of an enormous frying pan, moving it back and forth over an equally imaginary, but very hot, flame.
"Each one held a pot or a pan on their lap during the two-hour, three-subway-ride trip from way up in the Bronx, to Kings Highway in Brooklyn. They practiced banging on the pots and pans while the subway cars went careening through the tunnels. The train's wheels made such a screeching sound that people on the car barely noticed them. When they got off the subway, my sisters and brother marched to our apartment, still banging the pots and pans. They looked like some ragtag army in a Revolutionary War painting." My father's signs were so expressive, so lifelike, that I could see each one in my mind's eye. First was my heavyset uncle, plodding up the street with a determined look on his face, banging away on a pot big enough to cook a large chicken. Then, trailing behind were my stern aunts, smacking their frying pans with soup ladles.
"As soon as they arrived at our apartment," my father continued, "they hid behind the head of your bed and pounded away while they stomped their feet like a marching band. I felt the noise through the soles of my feet. They had a nice rhythm. The result was the same: you awoke immediately. Jumped, actually."
"How about our neighbors?" I asked. "All that banging and stomping. Didn't they mind?"
"What do you expect?" my father answered. "We had to know if your hearing stayed with you. The neighbors threatened to call the landlord. Have us evicted. Mother Sarah sweet-talked them out of it. The notes flew fast and furious between her and the neighbors till they settled down. Anyway, they thought you were a cute baby. They were not completely convinced that you could hear. They wondered if the deaf can have a hearing baby. We were the only deaf people they knew. They had no idea of our deaf ways."
I watched as his hands added, striking each other sharply, "It was hard for Mother Sarah and me to figure out how to take care of you. But we did. We learned how to tell when you cried at night. You slept in your crib next to our bed when we brought you home from the hospital. We kept a small light on all night. Mother Sarah wore a ribbon attached to her wrist and to your little foot. When you moved, she would immediately awake to see the reason why. She still has that ribbon somewhere. Sign was your first language. The first sign you learned was I love you.
"That is a good sign. The best sign."
CHAPTER 4A Fox in Brooklyn
As I grew, the ribbon around my arm disappeared, and I slowly began to learn to tell my parents what I needed through sign. And along with my signing ability, my own memories began to form. One of the first signs I can remember learning was for the question What?
This is an essential word in sign. It's so important there are actually two signs for it. Both are dramatic, and they are often used together for added forcefulness. Nearly every exchange between my parents and me in my early years began with them asking me this question.
My answer would tell them many things: My needs. My feelings. My emotions. My state of mind. The sign left no room for doubt. The right finger would pass over each finger of the left hand, from index to pinkie, listing, while asking, "Which one?"
With this information, my parents would be able to figure out what to do next. But it always started with my response to that question, which concluded with the second, more insistent sign: What? WHAT? This time both hands were thrown out, palms up, moving back and forth. They demanded, Come on, what do you want? Meanwhile, the face formed a puzzled look like a crinkled walnut, and the shoulders rose in anticipation, along with the eyebrows, wrinkling the forehead.
My earliest memory of this sign takes place when I was still too young to have a room of my own. I awoke to a sound coming from my parents' closet. Frightened, I got out of my crib and walked in my footed pajamas to wake my father.
He jerked upright as I shook his shoulder. "What?" he asked, his hands wiggling back and forth, demanding an answer. His face was twisted with puzzlement, and his shoulders were hunched up, waiting.
"WHAT?" His follow-up sign demanded that I respond. Since he was deaf and I could hear, he could not allow any misunderstanding between us. The answer had to be exact, the danger clear, the need for action immediate.
But on this night, at midnight, the what was my fear — what was the sound that woke me up?
I pointed to my ear and banged my fists together, the sign for I heard a noise. To make sure my father knew that it was a scary noise, I beat my fists hard against each other. My father stilled my hands and got out of bed.
"Show me," he signed.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Sound of Silence"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Myron Uhlberg.
Excerpted by permission of Albert Whitman & Company.
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