face my own truth. Never had I felt such power, yet such pain; in order to love myself, I had to lose the one I loved.
When summer came, I wrote Matt a letter; here’s the gist of it:
Matt, I will always love you. But as I’ve grown up and entered the world, on my own, my choices for myself have changed. I am now part of the Deaf community and need a partner to share it all with me. I no longer want to stare at conversations I don’t understand because people don’t sign. I don’t want to spend holidays at a dinner table all alone in my own world because I am not following the conversations. I no longer want to feel this terrible pull between my love for you and a world that you are not part of. Nor do I want to force you to accept a world that is not yours.
I hope that my community makes its own headlines someday, and that Deaf rights are pushed to the forefront, as we demand more awareness. Perhaps you’ll read about us in the newspaper or a magazine—and even meet another deaf person. Then you might understand why it was all so important to me, and even be glad that you were not there. Brandi
HAVING A DEAF boyfriend helped me to adjust to NTID. To have a deaf man to walk with hand-in-hand, share meals, and have fun allowed me to begin accepting myself not only as a deaf person but also as a deaf woman in this new environment. Eric and I started dating in the midst of my self-awareness crescendo. He was 5’11”, with a large build, had blonde hair and cute dimples, and was sharp as a tack. He was very involved in his fraternity, Delta Sigma Phi, so we went to frat parties all the time and hung out at the fraternity house. Although born deaf, he grew up orally, going to the Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, one of the most prominent oral programs in the country. He first learned how to sign at NTID; until then, he used his voice and lip-read. His father was the president of the Clarke School for the Deaf (now, Clarke Schools for Hearing and Speech) in Northampton, Massachusetts—the famous “oral” school that adhered to the philosophy that deaf students learn best when they can speak; they don’t use sign language there at all. We were two sponges soaking up our newfound environment and embracing our newly discovered culture and identities in unison (along with everyone around us).
It was during that time that I entered and won the Miss NTID Pageant, which took place every year at the school. At the time it was a very popular event and sounded fun. What better way to explore being a deaf woman, I figured, and also have a blast. When I first arrived at NTID, I became friendly with the reigning queen, a woman named Angie, and she encouraged me to enter the pageant. I remember being so surprised that someone three years my senior would be so friendly and kind to me. She was absolutely beautiful and had the greatest smile. Angie’s background was similar to mine—hearing family, oral, mainstreamed; she even grew up in the town right next to mine in the suburbs of Chicago. I felt that she had accomplished so much with her life, and she became my role model. The following spring when I became Miss NTID, she crowned me.
Pressing on with things Deaf, I signed up for the Miss Deaf Illinois state pageant that summer, the next step in the pageant circuit, which just happened to take place in my hometown of Naperville. I won that as well, and the following summer, in 1987, I became Miss Deaf Illinois. Honestly, it was great fun winning both pageants, but it was exploring myself as a deaf woman and person that was fueling me. I also have to admit that part of me still wanted to prove to my family and friends that I was capable and successful as a deaf person.
Enveloped in my new and fabulous life, I took courses on Deaf History and Culture. Somewhere along the way, I made a profound revelation: my own personal struggles over the years reflected the struggles of all deaf people—the same struggles that they had been dealing with for centuries. The world truly was contained in a single grain of sand. I could not get over what I had learned. Like most minorities, deaf people have suffered due to the ignorance, intolerance, and prejudice of others, yet there was a sad, sick, twist to our story.
Prior to 1750, the lives of people who were born deaf or became deaf prelingually were unthinkable. For thousands of years, given no exposure to any language, and therefore unable to learn, the congenitally deaf had been considered dumb or stupid. Regarded by primitive law as “incompetent,” they were barred from inheriting property, marrying, receiving an education, and engaging in challenging work—all things we consider basic human rights today. The law and society treated them as idiots. They often lived alone and penniless, and were forced to do menial jobs. (I understood even more deeply why, as an oral deaf person, I thought I was too smart for the deaf program; although deaf myself, I, too, had been influenced by this horrific fallacy.)
Unable to speak and called “dumb” or “mute,” deaf people couldn’t communicate with their families, and except in large cities, they were cut off even from other deaf people. Having just a few simple signs and gestures, they were illiterate, considered uneducable, and lacked knowledge of the world.
Without symbols to represent and combine ideas, they couldn’t acquire language. But the horrendous mistake—perpetuated since 355 BC when Aristotle proclaimed the deaf incapable of reason—was the idea that the symbols had to represent speech. The misperceptions about deaf people are ancient; the belittlement of mutes was part of the Mosaic Code, and St. Paul’s pronouncement in his letter to the Romans that “faith comes by hearing,” was misinterpreted for centuries to mean that the deaf were incapable of faith—and Rome wouldn’t condone anyone inheriting property, if he could not give confession.
The seeds of change can be seen in the writings of Plato and in the sixteenth century when philosophers such as Jerome Cardan began questioning whether another form of language—one that involved the body—might be used to teach the deaf to communicate. Yet it wasn’t until the middle of the eighteenth century, a more enlightened time generally speaking, that the future for deaf people finally became brighter. It all began when a benevolent man, the Abbé de l’Épée, became involved with the poor deaf who roamed the streets of Paris and their native sign language. Not wanting their souls to be robbed of the Catechism, de l’Épée actually heard and then taught them.
To everyone’s surprise, by associating signs with pictures and words and using an interpreter, de l’Épée taught the deaf to read and write, and they were able to acquire an education. His school, founded in 1755, was the first school for the deaf to achieve public support. In 1791, the school became known as the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes in Paris, headed by a brilliant grammarian, the Abbé Sicard. By the time of de l’Épée’s death, Sicard had established twenty-one schools for the deaf in France and Europe. Deaf schools with deaf teachers blossomed, allowing the deaf to rise from darkness and disdain to positions of eminence and responsibility—deaf philosophers, deaf writers, deaf intellectuals, deaf engineers.
This amazing change reached the United States in 1816 when Laurent Clerc (a student of one of Sicard’s students), a brilliant and educated deaf man, showed American teachers the capacity for deaf people to learn when given the opportunity. With Thomas Gallaudet, Clerc set up the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817, and its spectacular success led to the opening of even more schools. All of the teachers of the deaf in the United States (nearly all of whom were fluent signers and many of whom were deaf) went to Hartford. Eventually, the French sign system brought over by Clerc morphed with the natal sign languages here—the deaf generate sign language wherever there are communities of deaf people—and American Sign Language (ASL) was born.
In 1864, Congress passed a law authorizing the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in Washington, DC—now Gallaudet University—to become the first institution of higher learning specifically for the deaf. Its first principal was Edward Gallaudet, the son of Thomas Gallaudet,
