The invention of miracle.., p.27
The Invention of Miracles, page 27
Alec did want the students at his school to learn to speak, but in practice, that was not his biggest goal. What he wanted was for the deaf to be able to function in society as well as hearing people. Speech, he was finally about to concede, was only a part of that.
His full articulation of that argument would come in response to several factors: this test; his students’ broad lack of general knowledge and educational achievement; and finally, the insistence of the remaining teachers that speech was the highest goal of the school. One of his student teachers, Mrs. Bingham, saw need and want everywhere in these students’ educations—but for her, and many of her peers, “nothing else is of so great importance” as speech.
She was, in many ways, a reflection of a larger force in oralism, one that wanted students to be able to culturally become hearing. Their voices should shake off all traces of a deaf accent. Their voices should be perfect.
She had embraced Alec’s message of speech as a vehicle to social uplift. But he was the expert, and now Mrs. Bingham thought Alec’s absence was to blame for the students’ speech imperfections. And she wanted to know why he wasn’t at the school.
It was the same story again: Alec wanted to be at the school, but there was the telephone, always the telephone. The petition for a government lawsuit had been taken up in Tennessee, before being swiftly shut down by President Grover Cleveland due to the amount of private interest involved by those overseeing the case; namely, Attorney General Augustus Garland was a shareholder in Pan-Electric. But the case wasn’t over—it was merely being transformed. Instead of a case driven by private litigants, it was about to become a genuine Department of Justice suit. Alec’s attentions were on his defense. And by now he felt he should be able to afford a brief absence from teaching. He had teachers, after all. Why they were languishing without him was a mystery to him.
What he wrote to Mrs. Bingham was a letter that could be repurposed just as easily, a century or more later, to argue against the very method he was trying to advance. He believed he was writing about only a few teachers, just the one school, but he underlines everything that would come to curse his system, and much of what would come to curse his name.
He wrote, “[The students] not only have mouths to be taught to speak and eyes to be taught to hear—but they have something of far higher importance—the cultivation of which has been cruelly and sadly neglected. They have minds to think, ideas to express—questions to ask. And have not we thoughts that we would give all we possess in the world to communicate to them? And we can not.”
His words are both rectifying and damning. They mean that he saw with clarity what was important, that he had come to care about the minds of these deaf students, not only their voices. But it also means that he had the evidence before him, that he could see the way his method was going wrong—even in his own school, where he had the most power to wield. As always, he believed that the problem was not in the fundamental idea of oralism, but in the small elements he could not personally control. There were so many things he’d blamed for the failures of his past: individual students, the telephone, parents, the lack of commitment of other people, lack of time, lack of health. Now he believed his school was failing because of Mrs. Bingham, or other teachers, or the legal pressures on Bell Telephone, but the truth was that the school was built on oralism’s weak foundation. Speech was not the most important thing. It was not then, and would never be, more important than the development of the mind.
At Milan, Susanna Hull had said: “I have found that with stronger faith in [speech], utter surrender of the mistaken desire for speedy knowledge, and more patient drill in the first elements of sound, failure cannot come.” But she was dead wrong. Deaf people and their allies knew this both experientially and instinctively; if the deaf weren’t taught to think, then speech would never matter. The mind had to come first. They didn’t quite have the terminology for why—they didn’t have the phrase language deprivation or an understanding of the science behind it—but there was a keen sense that under oralism the mind was under threat.
Even Mabel, a poster child of oralism, owed her success in part to her teacher’s insistence on developing the mind. For Miss True, perfection of sounds was secondary to the reception of information. Mabel always learned at her grade level. In neglecting the mind, in making it secondary to speech, oralism irreversibly harmed its deaf students. This was what it was doing in Alec’s school; it is what it would do to countless students for decades and decades to come.
Alec recognized the very core of what had become, and would continue to become, the greatest problem of oralism: the deaf children he wanted so desperately to liberate were in fact being damaged by his method. It may have been true that he was able to teach a handful of individual deaf students, in one-on-one lessons, how to speak. But such success had not proven replicable en masse, for the majority of students, by the majority of teachers.
Around this time, Gallaudet suggested that Alec, and those like him, were arguing “from the particular to the general.” Alec had witnessed and worked with several students who could do the things he asked of them, perhaps most famously his own wife. But this did not mean that all students could do the same. It didn’t even mean that his own students could always do so: George Sanders, Alec’s first student in America, who had Alec’s attentions at home—his doting care and his love—never did learn to speak particularly well. Now he was enrolled in the National Deaf-Mute College, the center of deaf intelligentsia.
* * *
At 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, November 18, 1885, Alec gave a speech announcing the closure of his school at the end of the academic year. He was distressed by the disappointing results from even his most advanced students and didn’t have the time or energy to train the teachers better or take on a greater share of the teaching. Mabel felt partially responsible, felt she should have done more to support his work. “His little school was the one great object of his life,” she wrote.
It was a new low for Alec, a moment when he could have examined the failure of his school, could have come to see it as a failure of his method. He could have asked questions, could have wondered. But he didn’t. Instead, he found something new, someone new, who would give him reason to hope. She was a young girl, deaf and blind, and already her parents were going through the same desperate motions that so often drove families to Alec’s doorstep.
In this moment, Alec knew nothing of her, nor of the hope they would bring to each other. For now he could do nothing but give himself over to the disappointment of shuttering his beloved school. After his closing speech, he returned home and lay on the couch with “a splitting headache and a heartache harder to bear.” He told Mabel that his whole life had been shipwrecked, that Mabel was all he had left.
Chapter 16
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more…
—Lord Byron, from “There Is a Pleasure in the Pathless Woods,” a favorite poem of Alexander Graham Bell’s
Three years earlier, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in a two-room cottage covered in vines and honeysuckle, Helen Keller was expected to die. It was January 1882, only months after the death of President Garfield, and she was nineteen months old. Her family gathered around her bed and watched and waited. She’d been diagnosed with “brain fever”—either scarlet fever or meningitis. No one had much hope.
But then her health turned. After several days, she seemed stronger, more alert, though it only made her more aware of the things that were different. Her eyes were hot and dry; she turned them toward the wall and away from the light. What light she allowed herself to see grew dimmer and dimmer until one day she woke and all was dark. She awoke, she believed, into the night. She waited for the sun. She waited for light, and wondered why it took so long to come.
By the time her parents understood what had happened, Helen could no longer see, and she could no longer hear.
* * *
After announcing the closure of his school in late November 1885, Alec left his home in Washington, DC. He left his school, his pet monkeys, his lab, his wife and children. He wanted to leave everything behind. He went to Martha’s Vineyard to return to his genealogical studies, investigating any deaf family in New England with two or more deaf children. He knew that the success he sought lay at the other side of hard, focused work.
He traveled simply as A. G. Bell, hoping to be incognito. His letters to Mabel stank of cigars, which she gently chastised him for. The island moved through the modest rhythms of a hard winter, quieted from the summer tourist hum. Alec stayed in “dull and cheerless” Cottage City, with miles of cottages abandoned for the season, “and the stillness of a Scotch Sabbath resting over all.” In nearby Vineyard Haven, Alec went on hours-long walks, which he took in hopes of strengthening his health before his upcoming doctor’s appointment.
He spent the rest of his time copying down genealogy records. Many in New England’s deaf community had connections to Vineyard families; in the nineteenth century, approximately one in every 5,728 people were born deaf in America, but on Martha’s Vineyard, the ratio was one in every 155. In the town of Chilmark, one in four residents was deaf. The island, which had the highest concentration of deafness in New England, was a gold mine for information on genetically deaf births, though the record books themselves were slowly disappearing. The books that remained were only the few that survived a fire, and their condition was bleak—faded, the corners rubbed out by thumbs of old clerks turning pages. “No wonder the leaves are ragged and dirty,” wrote Alec. “No wonder the records are fading away.”
As he was copying these record books, though, Alec was ignoring another phenomenon: in several towns on Martha’s Vineyard, deafness wasn’t a calamity but an afterthought, an easily accommodated piece of human diversity. The deaf married, had careers, went to church, had wide circles of friends, had families, and none of this was confined to a separate community; they were fully integrated into the hearing world. Or, more accurately, the deaf had integrated hearing people into their world. On the island, the hearing people signed. It was a utopia of sorts for deafness, the kind of utopia that Alec sought—deaf people and hearing people lived peacefully side by side. Whether someone was deaf or not was an afterthought in the memories of islanders. A deaf person was first renowned as “a great fisherman,” remembered to be deaf only after some prodding into memory. One hearing woman, who was born into the community only shortly after Alec’s visit, remembered that “those people weren’t handicapped. They were just deaf.”
But while Alec believed in hearing-deaf integration, his vision did not include the idea of hearing people learning sign language. He observed this phenomenon, but he didn’t dwell on it. It didn’t seem like a solution worth exploring.
Instead, he did what the telephone had taught him to do: push everything aside, work tirelessly and singularly, focus on the larger picture, the utopia he believed he could usher into being. He let the hum of his failure die down to a nearly inaudible din; he let himself forget.
Even as Alec was on the island to observe, record, and study genetic deafness, he was already set in his ideas about how to achieve deaf equality. He held fast to his promotion of oralism, even as he had begun to see the ways in which the broader education of these children was being sacrificed to teach them spoken English. He was back in touch with Sarah Fuller, and together they were working toward replicating his style of school in Boston, all while keeping their eyes open for students who could represent the success of the method. He forced himself to believe that the failure of oralism under his watch was only an isolated incident, a strange misstep in an experimental school. He pushed past it.
Within four days he’d copied 206 pages of records. He was supposed to leave Massachusetts and travel to New York by December 7, but these records, he felt, were too important to abandon. Besides, there were more records in Edgartown and deaf families he wanted to visit. “I had to decide—either to go and leave my work half done or stay and finish it.” He decided to stay.
He worked compulsively. For months he had been tracking the family trees of any deaf person close to him, and now he fleshed out the trees of deaf families whose names he’d been seeing for years. He copied and copied, collected data, and preserved it for future analysis. When he wasn’t copying records, he spent two to three hours a day walking in the deep oak woods that surrounded the towns. They smelled of ocean air and crisp decay, and there was something mournful about the leaves fallen from the trees, something sad that he was drawn to, and yet something alive, too, in the bracing winter air. Alec took up quiet residence in the “Sailors’ Free Reading Room” to copy the Mayhew family tree, which the Unitarian minister, Mr. Stevens, let him borrow. As Alec copied the records, he listened as the sailors told Mr. Stevens of the countries they traveled from, the cargo they were carrying; Mr. Stevens would help them find something to read—free copies of Harper’s Monthly, Scribner’s Magazine, assorted novels, and what Alec determined were “not a few religious tracts.”
From outside the Sailors’ Free Reading Room, Alec could hear the breaking of huge waves against the shore, though the water everywhere was calm as far as he could see. Mr. Stevens told him it was the waves of a storm, huge billows, not against this shore but the south shore of the island, caused by yesterday’s storm. Astonished and enchanted, Alec stood there, on a graying old porch cluttered with whalebones and the figureheads of old whaling ships and listened to the breaking of yesterday’s waves more than nine miles away.
He thought of Mabel, a memory from a decade before, when he first knew her: walnut furniture, warm summer air, and Mabel, seated at her mother’s feet, Mabel’s arm on her mother’s knee, her head on her mother’s lap. At the time of this memory, he had just learned that Mabel would be leaving for the summer, for Nantucket, not far from where he was now. He remembered her pale arms and her mother playing with her long hair. And he remembered, too, how he hoped it would be if she could love him, how he would protect her from her deafness. “My great strong love would shield you,” he later wrote to her, “and compass you round so that you should never know or realize the affliction that had clouded your life.”
Looking back, it would seem that everything he’d tried to do since then had gone awry. He still believed that oralism wasn’t respected enough, and the combinists still held significant sway. Combinism may not have had power in the wider hearing world, but it was still the dominant voice in the field. Besides, oralists didn’t want combinists in the field at all—they were fighting for total dominance. And Alec believed that this dominance ought to have come years before now. Instead, his school was dissolved. His memoir was hated. He still wanted to eliminate discrimination against the deaf, but his mind increasingly went toward eliminating deafness itself. He wanted to do something big. He wanted, maybe more than anything, a legacy in the world of deafness, a single contribution that wouldn’t fall apart.
* * *
In Alabama, Helen had found ways to communicate certain words—words like yes and no, water and bread—but she knew that she was missing out on something more. Other people moved their mouths for reasons she couldn’t understand. She tried both: moving her lips and gesticulating as she had always done. Nothing worked. Her attempts at communication ended, increasingly, with kicking and screaming.
This would become part of the fundamental story of Helen: her childhood temper, her anger, what was so often described as her animalistic or monstrous nature. No one would question this, wonder what it would be like to have no way to control or make sense of the world. It wasn’t the state of being languageless. It was animal. It was monster.
In the summer of 1886, when Helen was about six years old, she and her family made the journey to see a Baltimore doctor, whom they hoped might be able to do something for her eyes. On the train, Helen made friends: one lady gave her a box of shells, and Mr. Keller poked holes in them so Helen could string them together. The conductor let her hang on to his coattails while he went down the aisle punching tickets, and then gave Helen a punch to play with on her own. She sat in the corner of her seat for hours, punching holes in cardboard as the train made its way to Baltimore.
* * *
Not long after Alec returned from Martha’s Vineyard, Secretary of the Interior L. Q. L. Lamar called for a genuine government suit against the Bell Telephone Company—one that would be controlled by the Department of Justice. This would cut the Pan-Electric and National Improved Telephone companies out of the suit altogether, thus eliminating their ability to settle, making for a purer inquiry into the validity of the Bell patents and determining once and for all the charges of patent infringement and fraud that were coming up against the company.
In addition to the government case, Pan-Electric had also elected to move forward with their suit on patent infringement, likely with the hopes of reaching a settlement. And another inventor, a poor Italian immigrant, Antonio Meucci, claimed that Alec had stolen his idea—he had filed a caveat for a telephone back in 1871. Storrow wrote to Alec not to worry about Meucci, whom he called “the silliest and weakest imposter who has ever turned up against the patent.”
Meanwhile, several older court cases had now consolidated and made their way to the Supreme Court, which would hand down a definitive ruling on the company’s rights to the invention. Arguments would be held in January and February of 1887. If they lost, the Bell Telephone Company stood to lose their patent, and with it, their monopoly.
