Leap of Faith, the Story of a Contemporary Miracle A Conversation with Susan Schaller Are there adults living today who have not learned any language, who cannot even conceive of language? They do exist, although, according to Susan Schaller, there's almost nothing written about them. Perhaps that's because, according to the prevailing views of experts, adults who have not acquired language will never be able to do so. This was not an area to which I'd given a single thought until my unexpected meeting with a stranger one day in a Berkeley restaurant. It's a nice coincidence that the unlikely meeting took place in an unlikely setting, on the one afternoon a week that "A Taste of the Himalayas" is taken over by a group of grassroots philanthropists who serve a four-course meal for the price of $0.00. It's Karma Kitchen, where all customers are treated to a pay-it-forward dining experience. The atmosphere that inevitably seems to develop releases some of the reticence of strangers meeting strangers. People are invited to share tables with people they haven't met before. Besides the radical practice of not charging for the meal, it's another piece of the gentle iconoclasm of the place. Without fail, each week lots of stories are generated about unexpected connections, and my meeting Susan Schaller is one of them. Susan was seated directly across the table from me. I'm less anxious than I used to be about meeting strangers, but it's still an awkward process. We were both feeling our way along. Independent scholarship came up and how if you don't have a Ph.D. you're up against a lot of prejudice. Then we got into the subject of language and soon, presto! I was hearing an extraordinary story. The more I heard, the more extraordinary it sounded. Turns out Schaller had written a book about it [A Man without Words, University of California Press, 1995]. Her story was so remarkable I asked if she'd agree to an interview. A few weeks later we met at my house. As I was preparing tea, the conversation soon headed into territory I wanted to catch on tape. Wait a minute! With cups in hand we sat down and I fumbled with my old Sony Walkman and got it rolling. We'd started talking about adults without language of any kind. Where would one encounter such a person, I wondered? Susan Schaller: One goes to teachers of deaf adults. In this country it could mean someone teaching American Sign Language to foreign-born deaf people. Invariably, in any metropolitan area, there will be one or two, sometimes three, four or five people who show up in a class for ASL or reading skills or English as a second language to deaf adults, who have no language at all, no shared language. They could be foreign born or born in this country and never exposed to sign language, never exposed to a visual language and being deaf, some people are born deaf and don't know there is sound. The man I taught had no idea there was sound. Richard Whittaker: He didn't know sound existed? SS: He did not know sound existed! And he was never exposed to a visual language, and he's a visual person. When I met this man he was twenty-seven years old. Because he didn't know there was sound, because he didn't know he was deaf, he didn't know there was hearing and deafness. He studied lips and mouths. He knew something was happening. He's a very smart man. He'd be staring at lips. He'd stare at your mouth and he'd stare at this person's lips and he thought he was stupid. He thought he was stupid because he thought we had figured this mouth movement stuff out visually. Why can't I get it? He thought he was stupid. He had no idea we were making sounds. One of the things that attracted me to him more than anything else-the intelligence in his eye caught my eye-but more than that, he hadn't given up. I can't imagine going twenty-seven years thinking I was stupid and watching mouths. The most frustrating thing I can imagine. He didn't know what language was. He didn't know what sound was, but he knew something was happening and he wanted to know what that something was. RW: That's extraordinary. It really is. I wanted to ask you, how did you come to learn American Sign Language? SS: I was seventeen years old and was riding my bicycle to high school and a catering truck hit me. So my whole life is because of this accident! I had a fairly severe concussion and was put in the hospital. The part of my brain that was bruised was the part that makes semantic connections between words. I could read a sentence mechanically; I could even read out loud. I could form the words, but I wasn't getting the semantic connections. That meant I couldn't really go to school and I was excused from all of my classes. I was home with my parents and I was bored out of my mind! RW: So you were healthy except that your brain function was still affected? SS: I had just a couple of symptoms. Otherwise, I was fine. I'd talked with a friend who had graduated a semester earlier and she said, "Susan, nobody is going to know that you're not a college student! So just crash classes at the local university! It's a lot more interesting than high school." [laughs] This whole strange thing happened because I started going to classes at university. I'm a seventeen-year old kid sneaking into classes. When I saw the drama building, I thought, "Oh, that would be fun!" So I accidentally walked into something called "Visual Poetry." The drama professor was signing, and signing beautiful images! I had no idea what he was signing, but it was absolutely captivating! The professor was signing, and there was an interpreter. The interpreter was the voice for the hearing students. Half of the class was deaf and half of the class was hearing. It was a drama class. It wasn't a sign language class. At the time, I had no idea that I had walked into history. This was the first university ever to open up its doors to deaf people in a serious way. The first one in the world! I didn't know that. This was at Cal State Northridge in Southern California. I thought the professor was deaf, but he was hearing. His first language was American Sign Language. By the way, this was 1972 and there was no American Sign Language. It existed, but it was just called "sign language" or "signing." That's how recent sign language has been acknowledged as a language. RW: It had no name, but the internal structure and everything was there? SS: Yes. It existed. But deaf people didn't know they had a language. They didn't acknowledge it, except for the more academic deaf. But the average deaf person in many cases, signed underground, if you will. They signed in the privacy of their kitchens and were still embarrassed to sign in public. And deaf people were not in universities anywhere in the world until about that time. They caught the coattails of the civil rights movement. They followed African Americans and said, "Oh, yeah. Me, too!" [laughs] So the joke, which wasn't really a joke-it was more than half-serious-they used the Black Power fist. With one hand they would cover an ear and with the other hand, they would have a fist up in the air: deaf power! They were doing that all over campus! That was a greeting. These deaf people who were attracted to the visual poetry class, they couldn't stop smiling! Because this had never happened, in the history of the world! You could go to a hearing university; you could have an interpreter for the hearing people. The direct lecture would be in American Sign Language! These deaf people were just bursting with pride! And their pride couldn't be contained. The deaf people, plus what they call CODAs, children of deaf adults-people like the professor whose first language was signing and who learned to speak English later-they, not being able to contain their happiness and their pride, started a volunteer drama group just to put signing on the stage. The National Theater of the Deaf had just started less than a decade earlier. All of this was just happening overnight. It was a good lesson for me at a young age that nobody, no person, family, community or sub-culture can protest or demand equal rights until they know who they are, until they are proud of themselves. With the Deaf that meant, "Oh, we have something! We have something to offer." And they put signing on stage. So I joined this volunteer drama group and I knew three signs when I joined it [laughs]. I learned how to memorize these signs that we were performing. They were things like: [sings] "consider yourself well in," from the musical, Oliver. I had no idea what I was learning. But I was learning what they call "stage signing" which is closer to opera [laughs]. It would be like learning opera instead of learning English! RW: You're wandering around, sampling this class, that class.