Reluctant Genius (6 page)

Each time Alec reached the post office, he searched eagerly for an envelope bearing a U.S. rather than a British stamp. In March 1871, the letter for which he longed finally arrived. The Massachusetts Board of Education had passed a $500 appropriation to finance additional teaching for deaf children. Alec was invited to arrive in Boston as soon as possible, on a short-term contract to teach with Miss Fuller.

After only eight months in Canada, Alec was Boston-bound. It nearly broke Eliza’s heart to say goodbye to her only remaining son. Would she ever see him again? She channeled her distress into her usual fever of concern about his health, and he was barely out of the house before she began firing off instructions. “Remember Boston is famed for a prevalence of East wind in the Spring. Don’t throw aside your warm clothing till the warmer weather has set in,” she wrote in an early letter. “The Americans keep their rooms too hot, and this would debilitate you.” Just in case Alec missed his mother’s message, she was even blunter in her next letter: “Our only comfort and stay now is in you.”

On a blustery April day, Alec arrived in Boston and carried his battered leather suitcase from the train station to his lodgings in a Beacon Hill boarding house. He walked past elegant churches, thriving markets, and eight-story office buildings that were far larger and older than anything Brantford had to offer. He eavesdropped shamelessly on passersby, fascinated by the New England drawl that grated painfully on his ear. With its teeming streetlife and mingled odors of saltwater, commerce, and congested tenements, Boston reminded him of Edinburgh or London. His spirits lifted with every step he took on the cobbled, crowded streets as he realized that he had escaped from the backwoods into a metropolis.

The splendid Massachusetts State House, designed by Charles Bullfinch and completed in 1798, dominated Boston and gave Alec a sense of the city’s importance.

He would soon discover that Boston’s “Brahmins,” as members of the city’s elite were always known, were, like the grandees of his hometown of Edinburgh, so convinced of their city’s intellectual superiority that they had given it a Greek flourish: they dubbed it “the Athens of America.” But there was some truth to the title. New England was the cradle of American industry, and Boston was its capital. Inventors, electricians, engineers, machinists, educators, and skilled artisans congregated there. The republic’s political heart might beat in Washington, and New York City might be the financial center, but Boston housed the technological elite of the nation.

Alec’s excitement at the Boston bustle intensified an even greater thrill: enthusiasm for the career he believed lay ahead. By using Visible Speech alongside other techniques, he was going to help hearing-impaired children and adults assimilate into the speaking world. His resolve hardened after an early encounter in Boston with a small child from New York City who was trapped in silence. The four-year-old girl was a “deaf-mute,” as children who could neither hear nor speak were labeled in the nineteenth century. It was a label with dreadful connotations: “deaf-mutes” were assumed to lack most intellectual faculties. Their families, unable to communicate with them, consigned them to residential asylums for life. The stigma attached itself to the handicapped child’s entire family: the suspicion that the condition might be genetic could ruin the marital prospects of the child’s siblings. This particular four-year-old was causing her parents endless stress because of her violent temper tantrums; her two little brothers were afraid of her. So her unhappy parents had already chosen an institution for her, and once she had been shipped off they would likely never mention her in polite company. Warm-hearted Alec was appalled at her plight. He didn’t believe she was ineducable, and he was convinced that frustration triggered her tantrums. As he wrote to his parents, “The little thing gives one a most painful idea of what an uneducated deaf mute may be.”

Yet Alec still had no formal training in deaf education, or appreciation of the fierce controversies that already raged in the United States over how best to educate the deaf. There was an endearing guilelessness about the lanky young man with a wispy beard who nervously brushed his threadbare coat before his first day of work. After combing back his unruly dark hair, he strode up the hill to Pemberton Square and the large brick building that housed the Boston School for Deaf Mutes. Alec’s first concern was to make a good impression on Sarah Fuller, the principal, who was ten years his senior. Fuller had a welcoming manner and an air of quiet authority as she dealt with her thirty charges. “I never saw
Love, Goodness,
and
Firmness
so blended in one face before,” Alec wrote home.

Alec’s gifts as an instructor were soon evident. During the first Visible Speech lesson in his Boston classroom, he drew a face on the blackboard and showed the children how to point to their own features as he pointed to the face’s features. His engaging mix of clear instruction and funny expressions delighted his audience. By the time he erased from the blackboard face all but the elements that were represented in Visible Speech symbols, the children were totally enthralled. Within half an hour, each student had learned to identify four classes of symbols. Each of them could, when invited by Alec, move their lips, tongues, and mouths to utter particular sounds. “It was a triumph to see even the youngest toddler catching the idea so quickly,” Alec reported to his parents.

The class’s progress impressed Miss Fuller, the school governors, and a reporter from the
Boston Journal.
(Alec proudly sent the clipping to his parents in Brantford.) A couple of weeks later, Alec established a class for deaf adults. He advertised private elocution lessons, and, he reported triumphantly to his parents, he had been “obliged to decline no less than
three private pupils
”—two deaf girls and a stammerer. “I find myself making headway every day. New ideas are being constantly suggested [to me] by the defects arising in the school.” He took on more and more private pupils for the afternoons, started an evening class, and worked feverishly to prepare new teaching materials. His black eyes sparkled with enthusiasm for his work, but the dark circles under them soon returned. To keep up with his responsibilities, he allowed himself less and less sleep.

Alec wrote to his parents at least once a week, often enclosing items from the Boston newspapers. (“I have sent you a paper containing a Yankee poem I think Papa could manufacture into something good.”) When his first three months in Boston were up, he caught the train north to spend the summer in Brantford. There he caught up on his sleep and listened to Melville’s ambitious plans to promote Visible Speech in North America, most of which involved Alec dutifully following his father around the continent. On the rare occasion he managed to escape from his parents’ fond embrace, he walked down the cart track to the Six Nations Reserve to renew his friendship with George Johnson. The two men celebrated their reunions with some foot-stomping war-dance displays.

By September 1871, Alec was back in Boston, where his reputation as a teacher of the deaf, using Visible Speech, was spreading. He wrote an article on his techniques for the
American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb,
and read a paper at the annual convention of American deaf-school teachers in Flint, Michigan. His methods were effective, but it was his empathy and patience that made him such a superb teacher. Those early children’s parties in Charlotte Street, featuring buzzing bees and crowing cocks, had trained the inner actor. Although shy and awkward outside the classroom, Alec had the ability to captivate a crowd, whether it was composed of deaf children, interested laypeople, or skeptical scientists. When he was with a deaf child, the youngster felt enveloped and secure in Alec’s passion to help him or her communicate. The superintendent of Boston schools thought his results “more than satisfactory; they are wonderful,” and suggested that the Visible Speech system “must speedily revolutionize the teaching in all articulating deaf-mute schools.”

In April 1872, Alec moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, to teach at the Clarke Institution—the other New England school that used the oral method. However, he started to have misgivings about whether the oral method was appropriate for all deaf children, especially those born deaf. “I have been studying the subject of the education of the deaf and dumb very deeply since I have been here,” he explained in a letter home. “It makes my very heart ache to see the difficulties the little children have to contend with on account of the prejudice of their teachers. You know that here all communication is strictly with the mouth … and just fancy little children who have no idea of speech being made dependent on lip-reading for almost every idea that enters their heads. Of course their mental development is slow. It is a wonder to me that they progress at all.”

Alec had stumbled into the controversy that has now characterized the debate on deaf education for close to two centuries. He was familiar with the oral method, which taught deaf children to read lips and use a spoken language. This is where Visible Speech had some potential as a teacher’s aid. The oral method thrived in Britain and Germany; one early proponent of lip-reading was the Scotsman Thomas Braidwood. But Miss Fuller’s and Miss Rogers’s schools—the two schools at which Alec had taught since he had come to the United States—were aberrations within North America. The most popular communication technique for the deaf in the United States was a different system: sign language, which allowed deaf people to communicate with each other by silent gesture.

Sign language had been developed by the Abbé de L’Epée, a French cleric, in the eighteenth century. Not far from Boston, in Hartford, Connecticut, a pupil of the Abbé de L’Epée called the Reverend Thomas Gallaudet had founded the Hartford School for Deaf Mutes in 1817. This was a much bigger operation than either Miss Fuller’s or the Clarke school, and it was the model for nearly all the schools for deaf children in the United States and Canada.

The debate between deaf educators who were partisans of the spoken word, like Miss Fuller and Alec himself, and advocates of visible gestures such as Gallaudet was ferocious. In the nineteenth century it had a philosophical and religious dimension that was as hard for Alec Bell, no great churchman himself, to understand as it is for us today. European “oralists” appealed to the notion of speech as God’s special gift to mankind, which it was cruel to withhold from deaf children. Since the Renaissance, the human voice had been regarded as an image of the divine soul, and language as the source of civilization. Oralists argued that unless deaf children learned to speak, they could never understand God’s word or receive absolution. These arguments, however, were meaningless to supporters of sign language, who pointed out that vocal training for the deaf could be a long and arduous proc?ess—almost a cruelty in itself—whereas gestural signs (which are not based on spoken words) offered a naturalness, universality, and lucidity not available in spoken language, which is arbitrary and obscure. Those who championed sign language believed that it was a system of communication that developed naturally among the deaf and that it was as legitimate a language as French, English, or Hindi.

Alec was still trying to come to grips with this debate when he received an unexpected invitation in May 1872. Edward Gallaudet, principal of the prestigious Hartford School and son of its founder, wanted to see this talented young teacher in action. Alec agreed to give a demonstration of the oral method, using Visible Speech, in the bastion of sign language. He caught the train to Hartford, eighty miles southwest of Boston, and found his way through the state capital’s leafy streets to the Gallaudet headquarters. The size of the Hartford school took him aback: the four-story building, with its rows of neatly shuttered windows, its Corinthian pilasters, and its graceful portico, all surrounded by trim lawns, was far grander than any institution he had taught in. But he refused to be overawed by the wealth of this establishment. His first initiative was to introduce the Hartford students to an unfamiliar sensation—the use of their vocal chords.

A correspondent for
Silent World,
a magazine for the deaf, described the exercises that this energetic new teacher took students through each morning. Alec stood at the front of the Hartford classroom like a conductor, his arms outstretched and his face aglow with enthusiasm for what he was doing. The students stood up, stretched their arms to “open their lungs,” then, “in a low tone and all together, they say what may sound like i…i…i…i…i…i, as long as Mr. Bell wishes. He moves his hand, with thumb and forefinger close together, slowly from left to right, for this, and spreads out his fingers quickly when he wants them to stop. Then he begins again but with his thumb and forefinger wide apart, and such a roar comes up as makes the floor tremble, the windows rattle, and the hall resound again. With these simple motions … he has the whole two hundred and fifty voices, from deep bass to shrill treble, under sufficient control to make them roar in concert or die away softly.… In the warmth of a summer’s day, these extraordinary sounds floated out of open windows into the Hartford streets, startling horses and bringing passersby to an astonished stop. The students reveled in both their unheard chorus and their young teacher’s encouragement.