Lights Out, Books Out: An Unexpected Education

In the last issue of Holy Cross Magazine (Summer 2023), it was fascinating and exciting to read the article about “comic books,” as they were called while I was a kid growing up at Clarke School for the Deaf, a residential school for deaf children in Northampton, Massachusetts.

During my years at Clarke, my classmates and I lived in dormitories. While in the Lower School division, we discovered flashlights and used them after the lights went out, so we could lipread one another. (Sign language was forbidden because the emphasis was learning our verbal Mother Tongue.)

After we moved into the Middle School division, we discovered playing cards and comic books. After the lights went out, we would take out our hidden flashlights, playing cards and reading comic books. If we were caught, they would be taken away, but they were always given back to us in June when we returned home for the summer to be with our families.

During these years, it was always an ongoing struggle to learn speech, lipreading and language, and especially “language for communicating with hearing people.” Even though we had the Fitzgerald Key (a crutch for learning “straight language”) and the teachers’ homemade sentence cards on charts, it was not an exciting way to learn to “talk with language.”

Through our middle school years, after lights out we — at least on the boys side of the dormitory — would take out our flashlights, read comic books and “naturally” pick up some of hearing people’s way of verbal communicating with one another. It was so much easier for us to learn spoken language during these nights at a time when closed captions were not available. The words in the speech balloons with the drawings were much easier to look at than using the dictionary. 

After reading the article, I got on my knees to thank God for the “sinful” hidden invasion of comic books flooding the dormitory for the middle school boys. They helped me and my dormitory mates learn some of the words hearing people used with one another.

Rev. Joseph Bruce, S.J., ’73 is curator of the Deaf Catholic Archives housed at Holy Cross. The archives are a collection of materials received from pastoral workers and religious assigned to Deaf ministry, as well as a variety of institutions across the globe, including parishes and regional Deaf Catholic organizations. The collection provides insight into the history of Deaf culture, as well as an understanding of how Deaf Catholics practice their faith (culturally) in new ways, when traditional methods are insufficient.