Deaf Field Trip
When the children at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf first learned about Paul Revere in their 6th grade class – his famous ride, the advancing British troops, the Longfellow poem (“One, if by land, two, if by sea”) they were unimpressed. Their teacher did her best to give the story a Deaf twist, explaining that this all happened a long time before Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone. Distance communication back then, she emphasized, was all visual, like it is for you! It was letters delivered by stagecoach, semaphore on ships, lanterns in windows. That sort of thing. Still, they were unimpressed.
And now on their field trip to the Paul Revere House in Boston’s North End, crowded together inside the 350-year-old wooden homestead, the docent pointing out the original hearth, wainscot, beams and ceiling joists – while the sign language interpreter breaks into a sweat as he tries to keep up with the docent’s narration – the kids are still unimpressed.
Then out of nowhere, a chamber pot changes everything: One of the kids notices it under the four-poster, raises his hand and asks through the interpreter, What is that? “It’s a chamber pot,” says the docent. “For pooping and peeing.” And because of the lag time, as soon as the interpreter has finished signing poops and pees (the docent eyeing him surreptitiously), titters, gasps, giggles and groans go up. Then up go the hands, the follow-up questions buzzing around the master bedroom of Paul and Sarah Revere, the students more interested now than they ever were for any part of the patriot’s story, or the country’s.
“Didn’t they have bathrooms?” asks a girl in the front row. “What about toilet paper?” signs the boy who’d been texting on his phone. “What about privacy?” “What about the smell?” “Where did they empty it?” The class is all ears now, and the docent is hitting her stride because this is interesting stuff, this is important historical stuff.
“Bathrooms were invented much later,” she says, “in the 19th century. Here it was either the chamber pot or a long cold walk to the outhouse in the middle of the night. They emptied them in the street – everyone did. They didn’t know about hygiene or germ theory. How many of you wash your hands after you go to the bathroom?”
The children are watching the sign language interpreter who is still signing, then, like a flock of birds at the report of a rifle, all the hands go skyward at once in answer to the question. And some of the birds begin to tunnel and dart and flicker from sleeve to sleeve as the children begin to tease each other about not washing their hands.
The docent continues, “The smell must have been hideous since everyone emptied their chamber pots in the street. People got sick. They died young. Paul Revere had sixteen children, but only nine survived.” And now the Deaf kids are rapt, engaged, impressed! And all because poops and pees are basic. The stuff of life, the stuff of history.
When the tour is over, the kids are signing excitedly amongst themselves as they make their way through the gift shop, which doesn’t carry any chamber pots – one of the boys asked – out to the narrow cobblestone street where their yellow school bus is waiting
On the ride back to the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, they pass by the Massachusetts State House, where on the front lawn there is an idealized bronze statue of Horace Mann (1796-1859) wearing, anachronistically, a toga. Horace Mann, who was 22 years old when Paul Revere died in 1818. Horace Mann, who was an educational crusader who believed that Deaf children should not be allowed to sign, that they should be forced to learn to speak and lipread. Horace Mann, whose eponymous school for the Deaf opened in 1869 in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and whose oral philosophy concerning the education of the Deaf persisted for nearly two hundred years. But as the bus trundles past Horace Mann wearing his toga on the front lawn of the State House, not one of the Deaf kids flips him the bird. Because they’re all too busy signing excitedly about what they just learned at the Paul Revere House, the hands flying, looping, darting, going a mile a minute, the whips and throws of their signs as beautiful and noiseless as their laughter is loud.
Paul Hostovsky makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. His poems and essays appear widely online and in print. His newest books of poetry are Pitching for the Apostates (Kelsay, 2023) and Perfect Disappearances (Kelsay, 2025). He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, the Muriel Craft Bailey Award, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac. paulhostovsky.com
You can see more of Paul's work in 10.4 and 10.4 and 1.1