Beacon Broadside

Fenway at 100: Howard Bryant on the Red Sox and race

It is not a requirement that you be a Red Sox fan to work at Beacon Press, but it let's just say that it helps. There are many Fenway faithful around our offices, and we are fans who must live with the complicated, not always admirable, history of our favorite team. And, ten years ago, we published a great book that addressed the team's history of racism.

The author of Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston is Howard Bryant, a native Bostonian who has since gone on to become a senior writer at ESPN and correspondent for National Public Radio. Shut Out won Spitball Magazine's Casey Jones Award for best baseball book of 2002, and he has also written two other acclaimed books on baseball: Juicing the Game and The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron. When his book on Hank Aaron was released in 2010, we interviewed Bryant in the Beacon offices about his life as a baseball fan. We share that interview today in honor of Fenway Park's 100th birthday. 

Fenway seemed to be a pretty hostile place to non-white fans.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, the adults, the black adults in Dorchester, never went to Fenway Park. When we were kids, we never went to Fenway Park. And this was in the 1970s, when the Red Sox were really, really good. They were a great team--they went to the World Series in 1975. And yet, I'd never been to a baseball game.

And it wasn't until my family moved to Plymouth, fifty miles south of Boston, where you're in a predominantly white community, where the Red Sox were actually part of the family. Where you would go to games as part of your summer vacation. And I remember, when I got older, asking my aunts and uncles, why didn't they go to Fenway Park. And they told me--it was because it was a hostile place. And I remember one uncle, my Uncle Charles said to me one day, "Why would I go somewhere where I know I'm gonna get beaten up?" And that was quite a comment to me.

And today, under John Henry and Larry Lucchino and Tom Werner, I think they're cognizant of that. And I think today, when you go to a Red Sox game, that feeling of hostility is not there. I think that you have--you don't have great diversity because at very few sporting venues across the country are you going to have great diversity. But, at least when you walk in there as an African-American or as a woman or as any minority group, I don't think that you're going to go into a place where you don't feel comfortable. I think the Red Sox are trying very, very hard to make Boston baseball belong to everyone.

Do you want to talk about the fan bases about Red Sox vs. Yankees? How do you feel the Red Sox legacy affects the fan base? 

I'm sure it will be pretty embarrassing, and my friends probably not want to hear this, but they already know it because they lived it with me. When I was a kid, growing up in Boston and later in Plymouth on the South Shore, I was a Yankee fan. I will say it, it is true. And the reason was because, even today, as a journalist it's the same thing, I never rooted for teams as much as I rooted for players, and my favorite player was Dave Winfield. And the reason that I liked Dave Winfield was because as a young, African-American boy, I really was in need of role models. Of seeing someone confident, and Winfield was such a confident player. He looked like he never bowed his head to anybody. And he swung the bat with such confidence, he played in the field and he did so many things that you wanted to emulate.

And then, the black stars on the Red Sox always seemed so burdened. They always seemed as if they didn't feel so comfortable. They were always brooding in some ways. Oil Can Boyd had a very difficult time here. Jim Rice, naturally, had a difficult time in Boston. And Ellis Burks had a difficult time in Boston. And so, there were players that you really wanted to root for, and I rooted for all those guys, but they just never seemed happy. Winfield seemed happy, and I said, "That's my guy." So I ended up rooting for the Yankees.

I think that that is changing slightly, but not much, because the Red Sox haven't really developed African-American players since. So you don't have that evolution in terms of African-American players, but you have it with the Latino players. David Ortiz, for example, is as ebullient and fun-loving and wonderful a character as the city's ever had. Ditto for Pedro Martinez, and the same, in his own, wacky way for Manny Ramirez. So, you have that person of color who enjoys playing here, but it's been very specific to the African-American experience that the black player did not have as good, as comfortable an experience playing in Boston. So I'd like to say that that part of it is changing, but I haven't seen much evidence of it.

In Boston today, do you still see some of the racial issues that you talk about in Shut Out?

I think one of the amazing things about the city of Boston is its history, its evolution, and I think one of the things that I really enjoyed about doing that project was taking the time to look at the different issues in the city and see how they would play out over time. The book came out in 2002, and in the years since, so much has changed in Boston, both in the Red Sox and their ownership, and the fact that they've won two championships since then. And also, in the city itself. I think Boston has become much more of a money city. I'm not sure that this is all a good thing. I think on the one hand, as a native Bostonian, I liked the diversity of the city and I like the rough edges of the city even if, sometimes, those rough edges stung, they hurt. I think that today, because you have to earn so much money to make ends meet in Boston, that the city has lost a little bit of that ethnic flavor that made it so special. On the one hand, this is a good thing, because it's a much more tolerant city, it's a much more diverse city, it's got much better food. And I think that it makes for a more inclusive city. On the other hand, it can be bad because Boston is not the Boston that we knew before. Boston is not the same city that I remember growing up and that my dad remembers growing up. The neighborhoods have lost a little bit of that specialness that made the North End the North End, or South Boston... or Roxbury... but the one thing we do know is that the city is going to constantly be changing. Some of it's going to be for the better, and, on balance, I think it's a better place than it's ever been.

Is the Occupy Movement Prophetic?

The Occupy movement, which began in September in New York's Liberty Square and has since spread throughout the country, has a vibrant outpost at Dewey Square in Boston. Last week, UU World editor Chris Walton, Beacon Press Associate Publisher Tom Hallock, Beacon Broadside editor Jessie Bennett, and author Dan McKanan visited the protest on a rainy afternoon. We spoke with protestors, visited the library and donated a few Beacon Press books, and filmed this interview while we were there. 

Dan McKanan is the author of Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition. He is the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School.

Be sure to read Dan McKanan's article, "The Spiritual Heritage of the Occupy Movement," at UUWorld.org.

Chris Walton: Your book highlights the religious dimensions of the long history of radical movements in America, and it came out just as Occupy Wall Street was going up in New York. Where would you place the Occupy movement in the American radical tradition? 

Dan McKanan: When I think of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Boston, I think all the way back to the 1820s when working people gathered at First Universalist Church in Philadelphia. Wealthy people were consolidating economic activity, and they saw this is a betrayal of the American vision of equality and freedom, and they organized what they called the Working Man's Party. People had a common identity as workers and needed to exercise political power in proportion to that. So this same theme of the ninety-nine and the one is something that's deeply rooted in our history and we have many predecessors to draw inspiration from as we do the work today.

Chris Walton: What's different about Occupy? Is there a way in which it's unlike previous progressive movements?

Dan McKanan: The kind of blending on the ethos of the 1930s, when many people were out of work, many people were struggling and organized around that, with the ethos of the 1960s, when college students especially were benefiting from the great economic growth of the previous couple of decades, and were saying, "How can we make sure that that economic prosperity is shared widely?" Now we're seeing a period where all those economic gains of the post-war period are being lost, but we still have that legacy of student activism, so we have chance for really exciting alliances between student activists and persons experiencing homelessness or persons experiencing unemployment... really the whole spectrum.

Chris Walton: I want to ask about the two words in your title. The first one is "prophetic." What do you mean by "prophetic" and how is something like Occupy a "prophetic" movement?

Dan McKanan: When I think of the word "prophesy," I think a lot about the ways people are transformed by their encounters with the divine. And I want to suggest that something like that happens here and happened in the Montgomery bus boycott, happened among abolitionists--white and black people standing together to end slavery. When people encounter one another deeply, when they find the power that they have in fighting against oppression, there's something spiritually transformative about that, something like religious conversion, and I want to celebrate that.

Chris Walton: The other word in your title is "encounters." It clearly has religious dimensions in your book, the way that you use it. In your last chapter, you talk about how the anti-globalization movement, which would seem to be a pretty direct forerunner of this, was more focused on resistance than on encounter. What do you mean when you talk about encounter as a religious term in a political movement?

Dan McKanan: There are three kinds of encounters that have occurred in different social justice movements in U.S. history that are really important.

The first is the kind of encounter--I call it the encounter of identity--when people who've been oppressed, who've been marginalized, come together, share their stories, and claim some sort of new identity. When persons who had been enslaved in this country began calling themselves "African" and prizing that identity. When working people said, "We are working men, we're working people and we're proud of that." That's the kind of encounter of identity.

The second kind of encounter happens when persons of relative privilege see the power that's being generated amongst communities of the oppressed and say, "We want to have a piece of that," and they identify with one particular individual who embodies that. So a lot of people had their lives transformed by the individuality of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X during the 1960s.

And then there are also the kinds of encounters that happen when people immerse themselves in communities in struggle: Catholic Worker houses, settlement houses, people going on pilgrimage to base communities in Latin America, all these are more collective sorts of encounter.

One of the things that happened I think among radical movements in the past thirty years is that we saw an upsurge in a conservative movement in this country, of a sort that was almost unprecedented, and radicals put more and more emphasis on resisting or defeating the Right. So you saw a resurgent religious right, and people said the best we can do is to hold them at bay. There was this motif of resistance and maybe something of a loss of utopian thinking, a loss of really imagining what the alternative would look like. And the way I think we get to that positive vision is through encounter. And so what's really exciting for me about the occupy movement is there's space. People are not just coming to one-off demonstration, they're spending deep time together, developing practices of participatory democracy, sharing the wisdom of tradition and the wisdom of right now in a way that I think will help us to imagine what a world beyond the hyper-capitalist reality we have now could be.

Mary Oliver reads "The Summer Day"

In honor of the first day of summer (and a glorious first day it is here at the top of Beacon Hill), here is some inspiration from Mary Oliver. She reads her poem, "The Summer Day," the audio of which is available on At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver reads Mary Oliver. The poem first appeared in House of Light, and was reprinted in her National Book Award-winning New and Selected Poems: Volume One. 

Echoing the words of the poet, we ask "[W]hat is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?"

Mary Oliver reads "The Summer Day"

Video: Nancy Gertner On Being an "Unrepentant Advocate" and How She Became a Judge

Beacon Press director Helene Atwan talked with Judge Nancy Gertner about her new book, In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate. Watch to hear about her life as a defense lawyer, what it meant to her to defend women, and the different paths Gertner and Justice Sotomayor took to becoming judges.

Mary Oliver Reading Three of Her Poems at Emory University

At the end of January, Mary Oliver gave a reading at Emory University. For those among us who had the great joy of seeing her, and for the rest of us who were unable to be there, here is a video of her reading three poems at that event: "Tom Dance's Gift of a White Bark Pinecone," "Wild Geese," and "Peonies."

In honor of National Poetry Month, Beacon Press will give away five signed copies of Mary Oliver's Swan: Poems and Prose Poems. 

For details and to read a poem from the book, visit MaryOliver.Beacon.org. You can enter once a day between now and Friday, April 15, at noon EST.

Mary Oliver: Many Miles

In honor of National Poetry Month, we share this essay by Mary Oliver, which was included in the CD Many Miles: Mary Oliver reads Mary Oliver. 

Beacon Press is giving away five signed copies of Mary Oliver's Swan: Poems and Prose Poems. 

For details and to read a poem from the book, visit MaryOliver.Beacon.org. You can enter once a day between now and Friday, April 15, at noon EST.

All our lives, at least seasonally, the redbird sings, and the oriole and the wren, and in April the ponds are reliably loud with the singing of frogs, and on long winter afternoons the snow-heavy wind whistles in the pines. But our own voices, the particular voices of those who are dear or important to us-- or both-- vanish utterly at the end of the season of life. And how thoroughly also are the sounds of a certain place gone when we visit it no more, though visual joys, sometimes with great clarity, may remain in the mind.

In Rajastan, in India, a man, a woman, and a child were singing outside a restaurant; I can still see them in their vibrant gypsy clothes, the man holding a stringed instrument somewhat like a guitar, but smaller and shaped differently, rather like a gourd. But I cannot hear anymore their loud brisk, joyful singing, a strange and powerful performance. How can this be, that the eyes can keep so many pictures, and the ears have no such reliable and comforting memory? It was perhaps the most exciting music I had ever heard; I think I might have followed it anywhere; but we drove on to the next town, and now in my ears there is nothing.

Of course, the ears are not always quite so empty as I describe them in this story. One can remember voices and almost hear them again a little, especially the intonation of a familiar voice at some pitch of emotion, angry, or frightened, or tender. But for me, at least, it's a few syllables thrust into the air, and they are hard to hold onto.

Many years ago a friend and I used to go to the Old Met in New York, two or three nights a week sometimes. We would stand in the lobby and wait, and sure enough some svelte couple would come dashing out at the end of Act One, to a dinner or a party perhaps, and we-- poor but audacious-- would ask them to give us their ticket stubs. We were never refused, and invariably they were good seats: first floor, down front. Tebaldi, Tucker, Warren, De los Angeles! And then Tebaldi and the others sang at the Met no more, sang no more anywhere.

Well, the truth is that I wish I could live those years again, and enter into the presence of those live performances that meant so much to me. But I do not need to suffer the absence of their voices: technology, while it has invented some horrendous things, can claim much good magic also. So I can hear Tebaldi again. I can hear Dylan Thomas telling in his wondrous voice about a long-ago Christmas day. I can hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaiming that he had seen the promised land. What if that voice had vanished irretrievably-- I think we would feel by that much less the long struggle up the mountain. As in history, as in art, so in life. Oh, what if one had no kept record of the voice of someone loved and now gone? What an extra dish of sorrow that would be.

For there is something heard in the actual voice that cannot be accrued from the printed page, though we read with care and excitement, even with a real falling-into-it passion. There is simply no "connect" as there is between listener and speaker. That, at its best, is almost touch. Nuances unfelt on the page hang in the air. So. Though I am an old-fashioned sort of person, who knows only the kind of blackberries that grow on bushes (for which my friends berate me), I can't deny my own joy and appreciation at the salvation of voices otherwise vanished into the unknowable darkness.

Therefore, this second CD. I join the world. And ponder this fantasy sometimes-- that one day technology will find a place in the dark air and bring back to us the voices of Keats, Shelley, Whitman, Emerson, Li Po, Rumi, Homer-- anyone anyone wants to hear. Who knows. . .

Listen to Mary Oliver read "Many Miles."

How the Peace Corps Promotes Democracy

The Peace Corps Mission Statement says that its goals are:

1. Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
2. Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
3. Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

In the process of meeting these goals, Peace Corps volunteers have helped to bring the spirit of democracy to many nations where the ideals we treasure were once very foreign. In this video, Stanley Meisler, author of When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years, talks about how Peace Corps volunteers in Ethiopia contributed to the overthrow of an emperor. 

A Year of Celebrations for the Peace Corps

Stanley Meisler is the author of When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years. Meisler was a foreign and diplomatic correspondent for the Los Angeles Times for three decades. He was also deputy director of the Peace Corps’s Office of Evaluation and Research in the mid-1960s. Meisler, who lives in Washington, D.C., has written for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Atlantic, the Nation, and Smithsonian, and periodically posts news commentaries on his Web site.

March 1st marked the 50th birthday of the Peace Corps, but the anniversary celebrations are continuing for another six months, culminating in September when thousands of former Volunteers descend on Washington to lobby Congress, exchange memories, discuss the future, and party.

In a sense, the half year of celebration parallels the gestation of the Peace Corps 50 years ago. President John F. Kennedy signed the executive order creating the Peace Corps on March 1, 1961. But the Peace Corps was no more than an idea and a hope then. The President gave his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, the enormous and complex assignment of molding a new agency out of an exciting but cloudy idea.

A madcap six months followed. Shriver hired a staff (preferring those who broke the bureaucratic mold like mountain climbers and sea captains), and the team sifted thousands of applications, selected potential Volunteers, rushed them to universities for high-speed training, and dispatched them overseas. The crucial job of persuading foreign presidents and prime ministers and royalty to invite the Volunteers, of cajoling Congress to approve and fund the new agency, and of sustaining the American public’s enthusiasm fell on the charming, irrepressible, idealistic Shriver.

On August 30, the first contingent of Volunteers landed in Ghana in West Africa.  On September 21, Congress passed the Peace Corps Act by overwhelming votes. President Kennedy signed it into law the next day.

There are now more than 200,000 former Peace Corps Volunteers (who prefer to call themselves “returned Volunteers”), and many belong to associations based on where they now live like Boston Area Returned Peace Corps Volunteers or where they once served like Friends of Cameroon. These associations are sponsoring celebrations throughout the 50th anniversary year. Some like the early Ghana and Philippines Volunteers have published books about their experiences during the first year of the Peace Corps.

Universities, especially those with large numbers of Peace Corps alumni, have already staged symposiums, exhibitions and ceremonies in honor of the 50th anniversary. These include the University of Michigan, UCLA and the University of Wisconsin. Others joining them in the months ahead include Portland State University, Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, Bowdoin and Boston College.

In mid-summer, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which celebrates different ethnic cultures for a couple of weeks every year, will honor the Peace Corps this year by featuring crafts, foods, music and drama from groups helped by the Volunteers overseas.

The National Peace Corps Association, the main organization of former Volunteers, usually sponsors a national celebration in September every five years. There was one exception: The 40th anniversary events had to be postponed for a year because of the shock over the terrorism of 9/11 in 2001.

The association has scheduled a varied program in Washington September 21-25 including a day of lobbying on Capitol Hill, a symposium on the future of the Peace Corps, the laying of a wreath at the grave of President Kennedy in Arlington Cemetery, and a formal Gala with television news commentator Chris Matthews (a former Volunteer in Swaziland) as emcee.

Aside from the official activities sponsored by the National Peace Corps Association, there are a host of other events including separate reunions of Volunteers from many of the Peace Corps countries, a luncheon at the Library of Congress honoring Peace Corps authors, and pre-game ceremonies at the baseball park of the Washington Nationals.

It is a full anniversary year.    

View all of the videos included in this post and more in our When the World Calls YouTube Playlist.

The First Fifty Years of the Peace Corps

Stanley Meisler, author of When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years, discusses the Peace Corps, its history, and its diminished presence today. Watch here or on YouTube.

Courtney E. Martin: Reinventing Feminism

TED posted Courtney E. Martin's engaging talk about her generation's brand of feminism. Martin is the author of Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists.

Mean Little deaf Queer: My New Love Affair With Sound

This week, we've been sharing stories by Terry Galloway, author of Mean Little deaf Queer: A Memoir. Today, she shares her thoughts about experiencing sound since her cochlear implant surgery.

We're giving away five signed copies of Mean Little deaf Queer. To enter, leave a comment on any of this week's posts about Terry Galloway, like any post about the book on our Facebook page, or share a link on Twitter. We'll choose winners at random at the end of the week from entries across our social media empire.

Three months ago I heard my mother's voice for the first time since I was nine. When I first heard her voice I said, "Mom! You have a Texas accent!" All those years of reading her lips and I had never really known that. We both laughed ourselves sick.

When she was six months pregnant with me, she'd been given an antibiotic that saved both our lives, but left me with a chemical imbalance that insidiously ate away at my hearing.

As I wrote in my memoir, "By the time I was nine the voices of everyone I loved had all but disappeared." 

That was my life for 51 years. Then, last May, I was given a cochlear implant. I'd resisted it like crazy. I was used to my hearing aids and couldn't believe the operation (which is, after all, a brain surgery) could offer anything better than I already had. I'd worked hard to understand as much as I could and to be myself in the world. But one day, after attending a meeting with my Vocational Rehab counselor and me, my lover and sweetheart Donna Marie said to me, “Why should you have to work so hard?"

Watch Terry Galloway on YouTube discussing why she decided to get cochlear implant surgery

So there was that. And the fact that my counselor had almost exactly the same type of hearing loss I did (profound) and she had two implants. Her audiologist, who is my audiologist, told me that to watch her after she had had the implant was like seeing someone put points on their IQ. 

So I had the operation. They implanted receivers in my brain, tucked a magnet under my scalp. It took me a month to heal. And then they brought out the gem-- the cochlear computer itself. When I first began thinking of the cochlear I had imagined the machine to be the size of half my head-- a huge, robotic, unabsorbed twin.

The real deal looked sweet in its little box. It slipped easily behind my ear. And the coil that ran from the computer to the magnet inside my head was no bigger than the thumb of an alderman.

When they first turned it on, I was in a soundproof room alone with Katherine Gray the audiologist, an intern, Donna, and Diane Wilkins, who was taping it for a documentary about the process we're doing called Rewired. 

They turned it on and that soundproof room turned on in my head like a space shuttle-- filled with sounds that everyone else in the room had long learned to ignore. It tore my head off.

That's why Katherine had insisted on holding my hand. The rush of sound is like the rush of blood and makes you sick with the excess.

I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to adapt. And then Katherine let go of my hand and took out a small child's bell and rang it. 

And that tiny little bell sounded in my brain so sweetly, so clearly, my whole soul turned to it. 

That was the beginning of my new love affair with sound. The world is exactly what I thought it would be -- a miraculous, buzzing confusion. And my brain is already beginning to categorize the different meanings of different sounds. So, yes, there are birds -- which I kind of believed in because I had seen the fluttering through the skies but never really believed that they made the cacophony that everyone claimed. But then I heard them clanking and clattering. And they were all one until again my brain became to sort through them and tell me, well, this is one kind of bird and it makes a sweet trill; and this other yaks like a gossip. And this one over there -- and, god, I actually could locate it by its singing-- and the song sounded (or so I imagined) first like yearning and then changed. Of course in my state of mind I defined that change of tone as happiness.

Photo of Terry Galloway enjoying piano taken for the documentary Rewired.

Mean Little deaf Queer: Little-d Deaf (excerpt)

This week, we've been sharing stories by Terry Galloway, author of Mean Little deaf Queer: A Memoir. Today, we're posting an excerpt from that book, in which she explains the difference between Big-D and Little-d deaf.

We're giving away five signed copies of Mean Little deaf Queer. To enter, leave a comment on today's post, like any post about the book on our Facebook page, or share a link on Twitter. We'll choose winners at random at the end of the week from entries across our social media empire.

I recently read that hearing is the last of the senses to go. I’ve taken this to mean I’m going to be buried alive, because, deaf as I am, I won’t know I’m not already dead. This alarming new bit of information moved me to take up the nonhearing exercises I used to indulge in when I was younger. I put my hearing aids aside, stretch out on the bed, and get myself ready for what’s in store. The mattress trembles with every passing car and so do I. When a train rumbles and chugs along the tracks three blocks to the north, my body rumbles and chugs right along with it. Thunder shakes the walls of the little house where I live and the shocks of it make the headboard and my own heart thwack. Lying there awake too long breeds in me a deep unease, a fear that I ought to be feeling something I’m not. My longtime love, Donna Marie, calling for help in the back room; our cat, Tweety, yowling piteously to be let in. Those are the times when going deaf the way I have, in fits and starts, seems most akin to dying. I’m losing, will lose, have lost. And each step of the way, my body seems to have been trying to tell me something new, something it seems I ought to have known all along.

In 1961, the year after I was diagnosed, my body reached a tipping point and I began to lose my hearing in big old chunks. It was a loss as erratic and unsettling as a Ukrainian train schedule. I’d lose a decibel or two of sound, then my hearing would stabilize. A day, a week, a month later, whole conversations would fade into gibber- ish. Familiar noises like the purr of the refrigerator would simply vanish and I’d have to adjust all over again. One late afternoon I fell into a doze on the couch listening to my parents’ muttered lazy Sunday conversation, then woke a handful of minutes later to what seemed like nothing. For two days even my own voice was an echo in my head.

I loved the crispness of my own speech, a trait both Trudy and I picked up from our German maids. When we first moved from Germany to Texas my precise enunciation marked me as somehow superior to those who drawled or squeezed words through their noses. After my deafness took hold, my speech began changing, every vowel out of my mouth taking on a soft slur that people took for south- ern. I didn’t love the South then, the way I love it now. And that change to my voice embarrassed me, but not as much as it did to see the new incongruities of my voice reflected in people’s faces, the wince when I was talking too loudly, the grimace when I wasn’t talking loudly enough, or the skeptical twist of brow when I’d swear I didn’t mean my tone to be angry, that I had no idea I sounded sardonic when I’d meant to sound sincere. I could feel all the lilt and color draining from my voice, feel it becoming a monoto- nous drone. I’d forget to give the end of a sentence a vocal twist to make it mean this one thing, or drop the sound in the middle to make it mean another. I found it hard to remember how words I knew sounded, harder still to learn new words I couldn’t quite hear. My two sisters loved playing teacher, and made exaggerated facial displays, showing me how my lips should move to form the new syllables. But even with my new hearing aids it was hard to piece the muted gabble of sounds together into any kind of sense.

Hearing aids or no, I was constantly being taken unawares, and that made me jumpy, almost paranoid. I didn’t realize someone was running around the corner until the body was upon me, didn’t answer the voice calling from the bathroom until they’d got up off the toilet to scream, didn’t know anyone was pounding at a locked door unless I accidentally opened it and they came tumbling through. I was a private child, made even more private by the con- fusion and intensity of my sexual desires, and everyone seemed to be sneaking up on me. I needed a big hunk of uninterrupted solitude to play out my needs to their natu- ral conclusions, and it divided my focus having to keep one eye on my closed bedroom door and the other on my Barbie and Midge dolls having sex.

At the same time, I was discovering, to my repeated embarrassment, the Freudian element in lip reading. One memorable afternoon as I was inching forward in the lunch line, I looked up at the lips of the fourth-grade sex bomb who had just cut in front of me, and was wonderfully taken aback when she deigned to address me: “Hey kid, you’ve just made my day!” My heart started thumping like a happy Disney bunny until her flat inflection, her narrowed eyes, and the pinchy look around her nose clued me in to what she’d really just said, which was, “Hey pig, get out of my way.” Who knew deafness could be so ironic?

All my mother and father knew of deafness was what they’d seen in a film called Johnny Belinda, about the rape of a tragically clueless deaf and mute girl doomed, like me, always to be taken by unwelcome surprise. All they knew about the deaf was that they signed. My parents didn’t know what to think of Sign. They knew it to be a real lan- guage, but it was an alien one, something neither one of them—even my father, with his spy’s proficiency in Ger- man and Russian—could ever imagine learning. When the Texas school system offered them the choice of leav- ing me in public school or enrolling me in a school for the deaf, they had no idea how to choose, and left it up to me. I’d seen only one person sign before, and the symbols her hands carved out of air seemed akin to the soundless lan- guage of the TV Apaches I so admired. I was already using my hands anyway—to gesture, touch, and feel. Sound was quickly seeping away from me, leaving me in a void I was anxious to fill. I would have welcomed that new way to understand. But for my mother’s sake I wanted to appear whole again. I already knew how to do that—act cool and pretend all was well. Over pancakes one Sunday morning, my parents asked me if I wanted to transfer to a special school where they’d teach me to sign. I didn’t even bother to think about it, just downed my cocoa and rolled my eyes as if they’d told the biggest joke in the world. “Sign? Hah. Not for me, thank you. And pass the syrup, please.”

At public school in Fort Hood, I sat up front and did the best I could to learn, and each afternoon served out a two- hour sentence in the gulag known as special ed. Special ed was usually held in a one-room annex that looked like a trailer on stilts. There was a steep ramp with handrails running from the ground to the door. The room was dark and close and stuffy, just big enough to hold the handful of us special kids. There was usually someone in a wheel- chair, someone blind, someone dull and thuggish, and at one point a sister and brother who seemed old to be in elementary school—they both had a shadow of a beard and a look about their eyes that reminded me of dogs turned mean after being poked at, beaten, and teased. I realize now they were probably mildly retarded, because when- ever they talked, which was seldom, their faces would con- tort in rubbery exaggeration, as if they had to fight their own muscles to get the words out right. We did nothing productive those two hours we were together. Zero. Zilch. We sat, fidgeted, or stretched out and whiled away the hours. Since I was able-bodied I helped empty the pee bags and sometimes I’d read aloud while the volunteer assis- tant, whose Texas twang thrummed like an overtightened string, would correct my pronunciation, teaching me to say “fir” instead of “for” and “enny” instead of “any.”

I was a clever little schemer and a voracious reader, so I managed to keep up in my regular classes at school, getting hard-won B’s and A’s even though the teachers had a bad habit of turning their backs as they were speaking to write on the blackboard. I’d read their lips as they said, “We call the theory that there is only one . . .” then they’d turn their backs and the rest would be lost in puffs of chalk. It didn’t occur to me to ask my teachers to change their behavior, to look at me when they were talking, to slow down so I could read their lips. I was a child and thought I had no agency. But I knew I was flying by the seat of my pants, that every answer I gave was guesswork, that I couldn’t really spell or diagram a sentence; and at age ten, then eleven, then twelve, I was still using my fingers to add and subtract. It wasn’t until years later that I found out I’d been one of the lucky ones.

As a child I didn’t pay much heed to other deaf chil- dren, because I didn’t know any. The deaf as a people don’t regard themselves as disabled but simply a culture entire, like the Amish. And, like the Amish, they keep to themselves. There is a definite hierarchy in that deaf cul- ture. If you are deaf of deaf—a deaf person born to deaf parents—and your language is Sign and the company you keep is primarily deaf, you are Deaf with a capital D. If you are hearing-born to deaf and you sign and live and play primarily within the deaf community, your blood is still pure. It dilutes a bit with every variation from those first golden means, but lowest on the deaf totem pole are the waverers like me who came to deafness gradually or late and were “mainstreamed” to be part of the hearing world. As a general rule we suck at Sign. My own Sign is on par with my Spanish, which can get me to the bathroom, but after that, nada. We are known as the little-d deaf.

Growing up, I knew none of this. I was twenty-five before I went to my first deaf gathering, and I was taken aback to encounter hostility and suspicion there. When I introduced myself as Deaf, overenunciating and gesturing broadly with my hands, one of the women signed to me furiously, her eyes getting harder by the second as she re- alized how little I understood. I wasn’t Deaf but deaf, and when she signed the lower-case d I could almost smell its rotten tang. I’d gone there thinking I’d be embraced like a prodigal daughter and instead found myself under fire for, so I thought—the same curse that had befallen me at the Lions Camp for Crippled Children—not being disabled enough. Hostility makes me hostile in return. It was all I could do not to stick out my tongue and grimace and pos- ture like a Maori warrior. I walked out of there thinking they were a closed, provincial bunch and I was better off outside their preachy little circle. I remained smug in my lowercase superiority until a few years later when I devel- oped a crush on a deaf woman who was a consultant for the PBS television series for disabled children I was cowriting. She spoke as well as signed and it was she who told me these stories.

Once upon a time in certain institutions for the deaf, Sign was out of fashion and something called total communication was in. Total communication simply meant that deaf children would be taught any and all ways to communicate, and that meant lip reading as well as Sign. In some places the message got skewed and in those places the fashion of the day became for deaf children, all deaf children, to learn to lip-read and speak. Sign was frowned upon if not strictly forbidden. As an expert lip-reader I can tell you, lip-reading is a true talent and hard as hell to learn. Most people never can.

The children who couldn’t learn to lip-read tried to please their teachers by moving their lips while mimicking what they thought were the right sounds. But the sounds they made were random, based on raw physicality, the feel of air moving through the throat and head. Hearing par- ents didn’t like their children vocalizing this way, because it was too close, they complained to the teachers, to the grunting of animals. If the sounds the children were mak- ing weren’t the “perfect” ones, their teachers would tape the children’s mouths as punishment. The children were trying their hardest to please, to communicate, so they’d gesture as they tried to form the shapes of the words in their minds, shapes for which they had no sounds. That struck their teachers and their parents again as looking too animal, too vulgar, too much like Sign, so to teach them better, the teachers would tie the children’s hands to their chairs. “Read the lips,” they were told over and over again, but those children couldn’t do more than guess what they were being asked to read. It was next to impossible for them to find the essence of elusive sounds in the swift mo- tion of the mouth. Many of them grew up without language—a whole generation who couldn’t speak, couldn’t sign, and could barely read or write.

She had other stories to tell me too, of unbearable disregard. A child was born to hearing parents, both doctors, full of high expectation for their children, but this infant girl wasn’t thriving like her two brothers. She seemed indifferent to language, slow to respond to the simplest commands. They were ambitious, busy people who had no time to waste on a child who was, for whatever reason, less than perfect. They diagnosed her themselves as being mentally retarded and had her committed as a toddler to a state institution. Years later a new attendant who was fond of the child noticed her collecting gum from under the tables and chairs. As he watched her fashion intricate and fantastical figures from the raw material, it began to dawn on him that a mistake had been made. He stood behind her and clapped his hands. She didn’t respond. That was all it took to find out she was simply deaf.

Years later I met that girl. By then she had become an artist, living on her own. She wore two hearing aids like mine and also had pulled off a miracle—she not only signed, she lip-read. She vocalized too. But when we talked, I remember thinking how interesting it was that her facial expressions were identical to those of the brother and sister I knew from special ed. I never shared my observation with her. I didn’t want her to be disturbed about something she couldn’t change. Besides, she probably already knew the oddities of her own speech, the same way I know that when I talk—despite all my pains—the words out of my mouth are cottony, blurry around the edges, as if they’re in danger of being swallowed back down my throat. Exactly the way a little-d deaf like me would speak.

Video: Terry Galloway on why she decided to get cochlear implants

Photo by Alan Pogue.

Mean Little deaf Queer: What Changes When You Can Hear Again?

This week, we're giving away five signed copies of Mean Little deaf Queer, Terry Galloway's memoir that Kirkus called "frank" and "bitingly humorous." To enter, leave a comment on today's post, or share this post on Facebook or Twitter. We'll choose winners at random at the end of the week from entries across our social media empire.

To give you an idea of Terry's warmth and humor, we made some videos with her prior to her cochlear implant surgery a few months ago. In yesterday's installment, she spoke at length about her deafness and why she decided to get the surgery. In today's video, she discusses how she thought the surgery will make her different and how she'll stay the same.

Terry Galloway on how cochlear implants may or may not change her

Transcript: Terry Galloway, author of Mean Little deaf Queer, talks about her upcoming cochlear implant surgery.

So they turn it on, and then they start to teach your brain how to hear again. And in my case, because I had sound, and I lost my hearing gradually, my brain’s going to remember.

So once upon a time I might have heard birds signing. Once upon a time I heard the insects doing whatever the insects do, I don’t know what they do, I’m hoping it’s a symphony! Once upon a time… and so my brain remembers.

But that part of it hasn’t been stimulated… in years. And all of a sudden it’s going to be going hmmmmmmmm.

Just like with the little digitals. When I first got these, it was like, “Oh my god what is that ungodly sound?” And it was a train. And I hadn’t even realized that there was a bridge with a train--the years that I’d been living in the neighborhood--- that there was a bridge with a train, that the train went over every single day. I didn’t even realize it until that moment.

But then at night, you take it off. Or when you get sick of it and you can’t take it any more, you take it off. And you’re deaf again. And there is a kind of bliss in the silence. It’s so profound. And you genuinely can be lost in… it’s not just self-contemplation, but it’s the contemplation of silence.

And so I don’t have to miss that. I’m going to keep that.

What do you think will remain unchanged about you after the surgery?

I don’t know. One would assume, and I assume, that I have a core of behavior that has been untouched by both the loss and will be untouched by the restoration of hearing. I would assume that, but, God, I don’t know. What if all of a sudden, I get my hearing back and I turn into a complete and utter shit? And I have been in my life a complete and utter shit, so it’s very easy to contemplate. I remember, as a kid, a real strain of selfishness. And a real strain of… something mean. And I kind of hope I’ve had that wrung out of me. I kind of hope that-- and I’m not talking about self-pity that does it—but I kind of hope that because of all of this, and because of the way I’ve had to go at my own ambitions aslant, that I became, or have become, kind. I hope I’ve become kinder.

Mean Little deaf Queer: Terry Galloway's Cochlear Implant Surgery

Terry Galloway is the author of Mean Little deaf Queer: A Memoir. In 1959, the year Galloway turned nine, the voices of everyone she loved began to disappear. No one yet knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system, eventually causing her to go deaf. As a self-proclaimed "child freak," she acted out her fury with her boxy hearing aids and Coke-bottle glasses by faking her own drowning at a camp for crippled children. Ever since that first real-life performance, Galloway has used theater, whether onstage or off, to defy and transcend her reality. With disarming candor, she writes about her mental breakdowns, her queer identity, and living in a silent, quirky world populated by unforgettable characters. What could have been a bitter litany of complaint is instead an unexpectedly hilarious and affecting take on life.

A few months ago, Galloway underwent cochlear implant surgery to restore her hearing. Prior to the surgery, we spoke to her about her hopes and fears about cochlear implants. We'll be giving away copies of the book on Facebook and Twitter this week. Fan and Follow, and we'll choose the winner at random at the end of the week from all entries.

Waiting for Superman, the Education Debate, and America's Future

The critically-acclaimed documentary Waiting for Superman opens nationwide today, and one of the key educators featured in the film is Geoffrey Canada. Canada is President and CEO of Harlem Children's Zone, an organization described by President Barack Obama as "an all-encompassing, all-hands-on-deck anti-poverty effort that is literally saving a generation of children in a neighborhood where they were never supposed to have a chance."

Beacon Press was proud to publish Canada's two books, Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence (now available in a new edition) and Reaching Up for Manhood: Transforming the Lives of Boys in America, as well as a new graphic book adaptation of Fist Stick Knife Gun. The graphic version, which was adapted by comic artist Jamar Nicholas, was recently praised by Publisher's Weekly as "exactly the sort of broadly appealing and gripping nonfiction graphic novel that librarians need to be adding to their shelves."

We are equally proud to see Canada given prominent voice in the debate about how to improve educational opportunities for all children in America. Click on the links below to find out more about Geoffrey Canada, the Harlem Children's Zone, and Waiting for Superman.

Geoffrey Canada Members Project video, where he speaks about Mike, his childhood protector and a major figure in Fist Stick Knife Gun.

Time Magazine feature article on Waiting for Superman

New York Times review of Waiting for Superman

Oprah Winfrey's Waiting for Superman resource page

Geoffrey Canada on The Today Show

As Waiting for Superman highlights the challenges faced by our educational system, Beacon offers several titles that provide perspectives on how to address them.

The Hardest Questions Aren't on the Test: Lessons from an Innovative Urban School
by Linda Nathan

The Boston Arts Academy comprises an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse student body, yet 94 percent of its graduates are accepted to college. This remarkable success rate, writes Principal Linda Nathan, is in large part due to asking the right questions and being open to seeking solutions collaboratively with faculty, parents, and the students themselves.

 

Quality Education as a Constitutional Right: Creating a Grassroots Movement to Transform Public Schools

Editors: Theresa Perry, Robert P. Moses, Ernesto Cortés Jr., Lisa Delpit, Joan T. Wynne

Legendary civil rights leader and education activist Robert Moses invited one hundred prominent African American and Latino intellectuals and activists to meet to discuss a proposal for a campaign to guarantee a quality education for all children as a constitutional right-a movement that would "transform current approaches to educational inequity, all of which have failed miserably to yield results for our children." The response was overwhelming, and people literally started organizing on the spot.

 

In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization
by Deborah Meier

We are in an era of radical distrust of public education. Increasingly, we turn to standardized tests and standardized curricula-now adopted by all fifty states-as our national surrogates for trust.

Legendary school founder and reformer Deborah Meier believes fiercely that schools have to win our faith by showing they can do their job. But she argues just as fiercely that standardized testing is precisely the wrong way to that end. The tests themselves, she argues, cannot give the results they claim. And in the meantime, they undermine the kind of education we actually want.

In this multilayered exploration of trust and schools, Meier critiques the ideology of testing and puts forward a different vision, forged in the success stories of small public schools she and her colleagues have created in Boston and New York. These nationally acclaimed schools are built, famously, around trusting teachers-and students and parents-to use their own judgment.

Meier traces the enormous educational value of trust; the crucial and complicated trust between parents and teachers; how teachers need to become better judges of each others' work; how race and class complicate trust at all levels; and how we can begin to 'scale up' from the kinds of successes she has created.

 

These and many more titles can be found on the Beacon Press website. 

Courtney E. Martin on How to Make the World a Better Place

Courtney E. Martin is a senior correspondent for the American Prospect and an editor of Feministing.com. A 2002 recipient of the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics, she is the author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, coauthor of The Naked Truth, and coeditor of Click. Her work frequently appears in the Christian Science Monitor, Alternet, and Publishers Weekly, among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn. The following is from a post on Alternet adapted from her new book, Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists.

Save the world.

Where were you the first time you heard those three little words?

It’s a phrase that has slipped off the tongues of hippie parents and well-intentioned teachers with a sort of cruel ease for the last three decades. In Evangelical churches and Jewish summer camps, on 3-2-1 Contact and Dora the Explorer, even on MTV, we (America’s youth) have been charged with the vaguest and most ethically dangerous of responsibilities: save the world. But what does it really mean? What has it ever really meant -- when uttered by moms and ministers, by zany aunts and debate coaches -- to save the whole wildly complex, horrifically hypocritical, overwhelmingly beautiful world?

Social scientists and the media seems to have made an ugly habit in the last few years of labeling my generation as entitled, self absorbed, and apathetic. Psychologist Jean M. Twenge argues that, largely because of the boom in self-esteem education in the '80s and '90s, young people today “speak the language of the self as their native tongue,” in her book Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled -- and More Miserable Than Ever Before. Tom Friedman dubbed us Generation Q for quiet in the pages of The New York Times, writing, “Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good.” And morning shows can’t resist a segment on how entitled Gen Y is in the workplace and what their bosses can do to tame their positively gargantuan egos.

I think they’ve got it wrong. They’re missing a class analysis. And they’ve mistaken symptoms for the disease. We are not, on the whole, entitled, self absorbed, and apathetic. We’re overwhelmed, empathic, and paralyzed. The privileged among us, are told over and over that it is our charge to “save the world,” but once in it, we realize that it’s not so simple. The less privileged are gifted their own empty rhetoric -- American Dream ideology that charges them with, perhaps not necessarily saving the whole damn world, but at the very least saving their families, their countries, their honor. We are the most educated, most wanted, most diverse generation in American history, and we are also the most conscious of complexity. Read the rest at Alternet.

The Daddy Shift: Random Memories of the Today Show

Jeremy Adam Smith is the author of The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family and the co-editor of Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology. This post originally appeared on his blog, Daddy Dialectic.

So, apparently, on Tuesday I was a guest on The Today Show:

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1. When I walked up to the studio, the guest entrance was besieged by awe-struck teenage girls. Were they waiting for me? Er, no, they were there for a supernaturally handsome dude I later learned was Peter Facinelli, one of the stars of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse:

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Peter and I were ushered into the studio together; he gave me the once-over to make sure I wasn't somebody famous, and then ignored me. That's OK, because I didn't recognize him either, and I would rather gouge out my own eyes than watch The Twilight Saga.

Video: Mark Winne on Progress in Closing the Food Gap

In Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, food activist and journalist Mark Winne poses questions too often overlooked in our current conversations around food: What about those people who are not financially able to make conscientious choices about where and how to get food? And in a time of rising rates of both diabetes and obesity, what can we do to make healthier foods available for everyone? In this video, he looks at encouraging signs that we are making progress toward closing some of the biggest gaps in our food system.

Link Roundup: No Reading Required

Sit back and watch or listen to some recent media appearances by Beacon authors:

J. Malcolm Garcia talks with BookTV about his experiences in Afghanistan, which came to be his book, The Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul.

Carole Joffe (Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us) discusses how access to abortion is affected by the health care legislation.

Listen to Sonia Sanchez read two haiku from Morning Haiku at the Philly Inquirer website.

On the Diane Rehm show, Beth Whitehouse talks about the Trebing family and their quest for a donor sibling to help heal their daughter.

The trailer for Raw Faith, a new documentary about Rev. Marilyn Sewell, her ministry, and how she comes to terms with love in her own life.

Video: Bruce Rich on Universal Health Care in Ancient India

In To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India, author Bruce Rich contemplates the rule of the Indian emperor Ashoka over 2,200 years ago, whose philosophy of tolerance, conservation, nonviolence, species protection, and human rights still have much to teach us today. One of the many programs established by Ashoka was a system of universal health care for people and animals which, once established, served the Indian empire for close to a millennium. Rich discusses Ashoka's health care system in this video. 

Bruce Rich is a Washington DC based attorney who has served as senior counsel on international finance and development issues for major environmental organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Rich has published extensively in environmental and policy journals, as well as in newspapers and magazines such as The Financial Times, The Nation and The Ecologist. He is the author of Mortgaging the Earth, a widely acclaimed critique of the World Bank and reflection on the philosophical and historical evolution of the project of economic development in the West. He has been awarded the United Nations Environment Program 'Global 500 Award,' the highest environmental prize of the United Nations, in 1988, and also won the World Hunger Media Award in that year for the best periodical piece on development issues.