Read Online I Can Hear You Whisper by Lydia Denworth - Free Book Online Page A

that didn’t have language in it. It was based on his understanding of people as social beings, facial cues, and gestures.”
    Just how critical social and visual cues, gestures, and facial features were to Alex was painfully apparent at that first speech language evaluation back in January, when they were taken away. I compared what happened there to a moment a few weeks earlier, at Christmas. Jake had received a marble run as a gift from my aunt Nancy. After putting it together with the grown-ups, six-year-old Jake showed a delighted Alex how it worked. He held out a marble for his little brother and pointed to the spot where Alex should place the marble to start the run. Jake was talking and gesturing all the time.
    â€œHere, Alex, you try. It goes right here. Wait, wait . . . There it goes!”
    Alex took the offered marble, put it in the right spot, and clapped with delight as it ran through the track we had constructed.
    The problem was that there was only so far you could go with the kinds of cues Alex had been using. Life was not all marble runs and helpful brothers. If Alex couldn’t eventually parse out the parts of the language that were swirling around him, he would have a hard time ever making use of those parts himself.

5
“S OME M EANS OF I NSTRUCTING ”
    T here is a story that goes like this: On a dark night in Paris in the 1760s, a priest was making his rounds in a wretchedly poor neighborhood. Well into his fifties, white-haired and portly, and wearing the long black cassock of a religious man, theAbbé Charles-Michel de l’Epée traveled along a narrow cobblestone street, through a bleak courtyard, and up a steep, worn stair until he found himself in a dimly lit meager room where two teenage sisters clad in dark wool dresses sat sewing on stools by the hearth. “Their lips are still, their eyes averted, their faces haggard” is how one storyteller described them.
    â€œIs your mother at home?” Epée is said to have asked, regarding the girls with his usual penetrating gaze.
    The young women did not respond or even look up from their work.
    Perplexed, the priest sat down nearby to await the mother. Perhaps they have been taught not to speak to men, he thought to himself.
    Eventually, the girls’ widowed and weary mother returned.
    â€œMy daughters are deaf,” she explained.
    Ah! thought Epée. The extent of their plight became clear. In the eighteenth century, to be deaf was to be virtually alone. If you could not hear, you could not speak. If you could not speak, it was assumed you could not learn. The girls did not attend school; they had few friends and no community. Communication with their hearing mother was sparse, limited to gestures. Their futures were bleak; neither real work nor marriage was likely. As one historian put it, deaf children would probably remain a heavy burden to their parents and “endure an idle and uniform existence.”
    All that was bad enough, but what distressed their mother most was that without religious instruction her daughters would never be able to take communion. For a time, a kindly neighborhood priest had tried to help by visiting occasionally and showing the girls carvings of the saints, but he had recently died. Now she feared for the souls of her daughters.
    As he contemplated the two girls, the abbé knew what he must do. “Believing these two children would live and die in ignorance of their religion if I did not attempt some means of instructing them,” he later wrote, “I told . . . the mother she might send them daily to my house.”
    Resolved to teach the deaf and “to reach heaven by trying at least to lead others there,” Epée had then to consider how to teach the girls. For familiar items, he could show them pictures together with the printed words in French (
pain
for a loaf of bread), but what about abstract words like “God” and