In the Spring of 1951, students at the Virginia State School (VSS) in Hampton, the state's school for Black deaf and blind students, took part in the annual intramural ping pong tournament. 1 Although the school's monthly publication, The Virginia State School Bulletin, focused on Robert Jackson's exciting style of play, the girls' tournament is of more interest to scholars of disability history. After a few preliminary rounds, observed by much of the student body and faculty, the final came down to Fraitus Sessoms and Gloria Clark, with Sessoms narrowly claiming the title for her third-grade deaf class. One can imagine the crowd of students congratulating Sessoms on her victory in the distinctive Black American Sign Language prevalent at residential schools for deaf African Americans. 2 Disability scholarship is unprepared to address whether classmates would have consoled Gloria Clark in the same language, however, as she was a partially sighted student in the blind department. Historians have ignored people like Clark, blind students who attended combined residential schools like VSS. 3 The absence of these students from disability history is largely a product of scholars neglecting to delve into the archives of Black residential schools, which constitute the majority of combined deaf and blind schools. 4 Focusing on the Virginia State School, this article establishes that blind and deaf children living under the same roof developed relationships based on their common experience as Black disabled students, transcending, though not excluding, identification based on their specific impairments. 5

The social model of disability has been challenged for abstracting the lived experiences of disabled individuals. Heeding Chris Mounsey's call to consider the variability contained within broad disability categories, this article considers students primarily as people placed in either the deaf or blind department, understanding that these categories collapse "the peculiarities of each individual" defined as deaf or blind. The insights of Michael Rembis are also critical, as oral histories reveal that alumni of VSS often stressed the specifics of impairment when they described their cross-disability relationships and other experiences at school. 6 For instance, Gloria Clark was classified as partially sighted, she wore glasses to aid her in navigating the world, and the library kept large-print books specifically for students like her to read. Playing a ping pong match against Sessoms was not a spectacular feat for her if we reject abstraction and highlight the specifics of her impairment. Similarly, the idea of Deaf culture serves to foster solidarity among a group of people facing similar social barriers, but it neglects how hard of hearing, post-lingually deafened (those who become deaf after acquiring language), and the congenitally deaf experienced life in distinct ways. 7 The existing historiography discounts the potential for deaf and blind community formation because of an implicit acceptance that these populations could not communicate. 8 Carefully attending to the specific impairments of each student referenced in the archive and relying on oral history reveal that students in the blind and deaf departments shared much more than the occasional ping pong match. 9

The absence of deaf and blind residential schools from the historiography is particularly problematic because, while only one quarter of deaf residential schools in the country were combined with blind schools, nearly half of those were schools for African Americans. 10 Only ten percent of predominantly white residential schools for disabled children utilized combined schools, while nearly two-thirds of African American residential schools operated along these lines. 11 Downplaying combined institutions means that Deaf history has failed to account for the most common educational arrangement for Black deaf students. 12 This results in what Chris Bell might call white Deaf history, built on studies of primarily (and exclusively) white institutions, and producing scholarship that erases the distinct experiences of deaf African Americans. 13 Directing our attention to VSS reveals countless cross-disability experiences which suggest that the existing framework of Deaf culture must be "adjusted […] when analyzing racialized experiences" by positioning blind children as participants in the sign language community of the school. 14

The archive of VSS has many deficiencies resulting from both the failure of officials to retain records and the omission of disabled people themselves from surviving records. In 1839, Virginia opened the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind (VSDB) in the mountain community of Staunton—the country's first combined school for deaf and blind children. Blind and deaf African Americans had no school in Virginia until 1909, when Deaf VSDB graduate William C. Ritter succeeded in opening VSS in what is now the city of Hampton. 15 Ritter modeled the school on VSDB, but they were separately administered and unequally funded, resulting in deaf and blind students at VSS sharing dormitories and academic buildings because "proper separation of the groups [was] impossible." By contrast, white deaf and blind students at VSDB only shared an infirmary. 16 Unfortunately, the records from before 1940 for both VSS and VSDB were not retained or transmitted to the state archives. The bulk of the surviving records for VSS come from the tenure of Dr. William Whitehead, the school's first Black superintendent, though these records are divided between the Library of Virginia, Gallaudet University Archives, and VSDB itself. This produces archival silences about the first few decades of VSS history, though documents from Whitehead's time do offer crucial information about the school's early years. While the records generated since 1940 demonstrate how VSS modernized its educational approach, these records also largely omit the experiences of deaf and blind students, focusing instead on the efforts of non-disabled teachers and administrators. 17

The individual decisions of educators to generate and transmit documents profoundly shaped the archive of the school. The Virginia State School Bulletin includes regular contributions from student writers from 1949-1964, even featuring student editors from 1962-1964. This monthly periodical demonstrates Gracen Brilmyer's argument that the archive is a product of intersecting ideas about disability. Brilmyer's concept of "critical disability archival methodology" elucidates how student viewpoints presented in the publication could be deeply mediated by educators who sought to persuade parents and the public that the school was helping students overcome their disabilities. In part, this goal was advanced by presenting a school organized around the ideal of disability specific education. Beyond understanding these limitations, critically reading the bulletin requires rejecting rigid ideas about the capabilities of deaf and blind people, allowing the publication to reveal regular cross-disability interactions. The Bulletin is rarely explicit about cross-disability spaces, but a critical reading of the document, combined with oral history, reveals how stated divisions between the departments for deaf and blind students were rarely upheld. 18

Combining archival research and oral history brings the world of Black disabled youth to life, detailing how classrooms, sporting events, and the production of the Bulletin all facilitated cross-disability relationships. Building on a growing scholarship on Black disability, this exploration revises a historiography that presents residential schools as devoid of blind participation in the production of campus community. 19 This article first examines how deaf and blind students at VSS communicated with each other, arguing that the reification of disability categories and the neglect of Black disability archives has prevented scholars from observing blind sign language users. The article then explores the various social spaces where cross-disability community was formed before noting the limits on deaf and blind encounters at VSS. Whether in the dorm, during extracurricular activities, or in the classroom, the blind and deaf children of VSS interacted in routine ways that defy a narrow focus on exclusively Deaf community. Virginia organized residential schools for disabled African Americans in specific ways that regularized cross-disability interactions, producing a campus community defined by their categorization as disabled and Black, more so than by specific disabilities. The act of recovering the history of Virginia's residential school for deaf and blind African Americans disrupts the dominant narrative of Deaf culture by situating blind children within the process of community formation.

Communication Across Disability

Sallie Mae Pauley's time at the Virginia State School illustrates how students formed friendships across disability, but it is important to emphasize how her time at the school also resembled the common narrative of how Deaf culture is formed. Pauley, who became post-lingually deaf in foster care due to spinal meningitis at age five, began attending the school in 1960 and recalls being placed in the school's small oral program. 20 Educators at the school recognized that Pauley had learned to speak English and sought to preserve that ability through rigorous practice and total isolation from the signing student body, including separate housing. Pauley recalls that VSS did not want "students that could speak, […] to mix with the students that could only sign. So, they put me [in] the program where there was no sign language." She characterized this division of students as audist and recalled feeling that "we were kind of used. I felt like a guinea pig." 21 After three years in the oral program, she was then placed in academic classes with her signing peers, immersed in a world of sign language. Pauley was part of the cohort of Black students who integrated VSDB in 1973 and went on to attend Gallaudet College. 22 She has spent her adult life engaged with the Deaf community, serving often as an advocate, and also working with families of deaf children. Pauley's journey clearly reflects the traditional narrative of how Deaf culture is rooted in the common experiences of residential schooling. 23

This is an incomplete view, however, of the social world at schools like VSS where chronic underfunding guaranteed constant interaction across disability. Though Pauley attended classes with other deaf students after turning nine, her move from the separate housing for students in the oral program to the dormitories meant entering an environment where she was constantly encountering blind peers. Like many students first moving into a residential school, Pauley remembers having difficulty making friends with her peers. Unlike the dominant Deaf culture narrative based on predominantly white institutions, however, Pauley recalls having many friendships with blind children. 25 In fact, she reported that "I had maybe more friends in the blind students than in the deaf students. The deaf students would bully me […] but the blind students were sweet and caring." She explained her closeness with blind students by appealing to the specifics of her audiological condition, saying that "I think it's because I was born hearing, my brain kind of runs hearing sometimes. I understand the hearing world and hearing language." 26 Friendship between blind and deaf students goes entirely unmentioned in the archive of VSS, as are the methods of communication used between these children. 27

Deaf history has long examined the rise of oralism, or the approach to deaf education focused on the retention and acquisition of spoken English and lip-reading, though this practice has been explored much less at schools for deaf African Americans. The Virginia State School practiced the combined method of deaf education, first attempting to help students retain their spoken language skills while remaining open to the use of sign language. 28 While not denying the very real abuses of children at residential schools due to oralism, it is clear that for some students, the skills developed in these courses aided their communication with blind peers. 29 Phyllis Bubanji believes that being hard of hearing meant she possessed enough residual hearing to excel more easily in acquiring spoken English and lip-reading skills. Like Pauley, Bubanji recalls regularly socializing with blind peers, though she seems to have formed more friendships with her deaf classmates, like Andrew Bates who became her first husband. Pauley also reported that she relied on spoken English and speech reading with blind friends who did not know sign language. She stressed that, as a post-lingually deafened person, she retained her spoken English skills and, in fact, often had an easier time becoming friends with blind people because of her retention of this language. Although both these individuals have led lives deeply tied to the Deaf community and preferred to be interviewed in sign language, they also both emphasized that their speech and speech reading skills allowed them to form friendships with blind peers.

English was not the only language that deaf and blind students conversed in, however. Both Pauley and Bubanji reported that they also relied on sign language to communicate with students in the blind department. Rather than using Protactile ASL, a way of signing directly into someone's hands often used with deafblind individuals, they simply used sign language as they might with their deaf classmates, perhaps making minor adjustments to accommodate different friends. Phyllis Bubanji, a hard of hearing alumna of VSS, highlighted that "some [blind students] had vision that allowed them to […] sign," and Pauley recalls communicating with blind peers through both sign language and spoken English as the specific impairments of the individuals involved dictated. 30

While VSS did offer sign language courses in the summer for area parents, there is no evidence that students themselves received formal instruction. 31 While Pauley recalls teaching blind students sign language, it is likely that many blind students learned the language the same way teachers and new deaf students did: through immersion in a sign language community. 32 As members of residential schools, most students spent the entire school year living in dormitories with their peers, returning home only for Christmas and summer for much of the school's history. Blind children were therefore part of the language environment at VSS, learning sign language through exposure and teaching younger students the language when they arrived at the school. Though Hannah Joyner has argued that deaf and blind students at combined schools "did not intrinsically belong together since they generally could not communicate with each other," it is clear that cross-disability communication was not only possible at VSS, but routinely occurred in both spoken and signed language. 33 Many teachers of the deaf never learned more than a few rudimentary signs, suggesting that blind children were more invested in communicating with their deaf peers than were their teachers. 34

Perhaps the most obvious site for the acquisition of sign language by any student was the school's weekly "chapel program." Students gathered in the school's chapel, often for mundane presentations on topics such as fire safety and common spelling errors. Typically, a particular class would be responsible for the content of a given program and would perform a skit in support of the learning objectives of teachers. Chapel programs were presented in both spoken English and sign language, but this was often augmented by a student-performed skit, all of which aided the development of student skills in both languages. At one chapel program dedicated to kindness to animals, blind students recited a story called "The Friendly Cow" while deaf student Delois Hawkins signed the story. This format allowed some students to access both the sign language and English versions of the story simultaneously. The meaning of the story was then further emphasized by the dramatic performance of the children, creating an excellent environment for language acquisition. 35 Chapel programs also served as venues for the presentation of small research projects, as on one occasion such as in 1955 when blind and deaf high school students taught their younger schoolmates about important Black figures like Ralph Bunche, Adam Clayton Powell, and Duke Ellington for Negro History Week. Beyond the program being a space where sign language and spoken English could be observed simultaneously, the process of organizing this program together indicates that deaf and blind students were well versed in cooperating with each other. The siloed historiography of Deaf culture excludes blind participation in the propagation of sign language, rendering these experiences at VSS invisible.

Socializing Across Disability

Exploring the Virginia State School Bulletin and the archive of the school exposes the myriad ways that Black deaf and blind students interacted, but archival silences prior to 1940 render it easier to understand these relationships at mid-century than during the first few decades of VSS. Dr. Whitehead took over operation of the school in 1940, becoming the school's first African American, and also first hearing superintendent. The ascent of the school's first Black superintendent occurred during a statewide campaign by Black Virginians to secure better schools. 36 Whitehead ushered in a series of reforms aimed at improving the education of his students, focusing on expanding the academic offerings of the school while also increasing extracurricular activities which provided regular space for cross-disability encounters. The limited archival evidence available for the period before Whitehead's arrival suggests these sorts of enrichment activities were not common then, but dormitories and academic buildings were shared by both deaf and blind students for the entirety of the school's history. While some of the terrain of cross-disability encounters was developed under Dr. Whitehead's tenure, the basic infrastructure of the school placed deaf and blind children in common space since the school's founding.

Residential schooling meant that blind and deaf students lived on the same campus for most of the year. At VSS dormitories were organized by gender only, placing blind and deaf students in regular interaction as they went about their daily routines. 37 At its founding, the school consisted of a single three-story building, with boys' and girls' dormitories on the second floor and deaf and blind classrooms on the first floor. While the school expanded beyond a single building, it never adopted the VSDB's practice of separate buildings for blind and deaf students, building new cross-disability dormitories and academic buildings. 38 Indeed, Laura Myers, a second-generation student in the VSS deaf department, had a blind roommate when she attended the school in the 80s and 90s. 39 Aside from being spaces where students could sleep, these buildings were also home to group leisure activities. In 1953 a television was installed in the boys' recreation room and became a frequent site of congregation, though the girls had to wait two years before gaining similar privileges. While deaf and blind students might enjoy the television in different ways, one wonders if some blind students weren't called on to interpret dialogue for deaf students or, conversely, whether deaf students who possessed some oral abilities didn't offer clarifications of scenes. 40 Children making independent decisions about television programing could also create routine opportunities for students to bicker over which show to watch, another mundane interaction which called on children to communicate across disability categories. Though cross-disability encounters were routine, dormitory supervisors also hosted parties and events that were specific to deaf or blind students in these buildings. 41 VSS educators believed that deaf and blind students had distinct needs that were best served by dividing students by disability, but the organization of the dorm ensured that division of students by disability was impossible except for specific events.

One common site of cross-disability socialization was in the Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops on campus. Boy Scout Troop 63 started small in 1949 with most scouts being from the deaf department. However, by 1953 the troop had doubled in size and two of its older members, Melvin Joyner and Lucius Redmond, were dubbed "scout patrol leaders" of the blind and deaf scouts respectively. Although the appointment of these scout patrol leaders indicates some division within the troop, it nevertheless remained one troop with common activities enjoyed simultaneously by both blind and deaf children. Girl Scouts at VSS also functioned as a unit, placing deaf and blind girls in the same troop, and sending them on joint scouting trips with other troops, such as in in 1956 when they traveled to nearby Fort Eustis for an annual celebration. Sallie Mae Pauley has vague memories of being in a deaf and blind troop while at the Hampton school, but she remembers more clearly her time in the scouts after transferring to VSDB in 1973 where she was the only Black girl in her deaf troop, which was entirely separate from the blind troop. At VSS, the only divisions within the Girl Scout Troop were based on age and the attainment of badges. 42

The scout troops frequently hiked the grounds of the extensive property of the school, but they also gave demonstrations of the skills they learned during chapel program. One such program involved three blind and four deaf students demonstrating their skills in knot tying. The 1953 Boy Scout Week was punctuated by nightly presentations on different topics, with Lucius Redmond leading the deaf scouts in a first aid demonstration one night and Melvin Joyner leading blind scouts in a demonstration of "recreational periods" on another night. The week concluded with a taped speech by superintendent Whitehead which P.E. instructor William Brown Sr. interpreted in sign language. Like many aspects of VSS, scouting divided students along disability lines at times, but it also brought students together for routine shared social experiences where friendships could be developed. 44

Sporting events provided a less structured space for cross-disability interaction akin to dormitory living. In 1950, students organized an exhibition football game with rival cheering squads for the two teams. This game, much like the annual ping pong matches of the 1950s, provided entertainment for the entire campus community. In 1952, deaf and blind boys, many of whom played in the 1950 game, traveled regularly to the Hampton Institute to learn how college athletes approached the game. Importantly, the same article that mentions these cross-disability games also reports on the differing ways blind and deaf boys performed calisthenics and stunts. William Brown, the head of the P.E. department for at least a decade, approached his job with an awareness of the differences between his students, offering them adapted exercises, unspecified in the Bulletin, based on their specific impairments. Simultaneously, he remained open to the reality that students in both departments could compete as equals in many sports, as demonstrated by the ping pong final between Fraitus Sessoms and Gloria Clark. 46 VSS educators like Brown accepted the leading ideas about educating disabled children at the time that emphasized distinct approaches for distinct impairments, but limited resources ensured that cross-disability sporting flourished, nonetheless.

VSS organized the school's first basketball team in 1962, with the newly dubbed Eagles composed entirely of boys from the deaf department. Most of their competitors were regional Junior Varsity teams from African American high schools, but they also played peer institutions from the region, such as the North Carolina School for the Blind and Deaf in Raleigh, the state's African American residential school, as well as the Gallaudet-run Kendall School in Washington, D.C. which began to racially integrate in 1954. 47 While the basketball team was composed entirely of deaf boys, after its first year it was supported by a cheer squad composed of deaf and partially sighted girls. The squad, known as the Eaglerettes, performed at all home games and many of their away games. 48 Like football and ping pong, these basketball matches served as entertainment for the entire campus community.

The Eagles and Eaglerettes traveled to Washington, D.C. in 1962 for the team's match against the Kendall School, played on the Gallaudet College campus. After VSS star player General Scott missed a last second shot, the Eagles and the Eaglerettes stayed in the Gallaudet gym to watch two more games together as a group. Taking advantage of the trip to D.C., both groups also toured the National Mall before heading home. Trips to Gallaudet, the world's only liberal arts university for deaf students, were about more than basketball. These routine visits encouraged students to follow in the footsteps of Andrew Foster, the first African American graduate of the college, who completed his degree in 1954. Notably, Geraldine Morris and Esther Bittle, the two partially sighted Eaglerettes, made the trip with their squad to the center of American Deaf culture.

Although much of this trip was filmed "for showing on some future date," the film has not surfaced, so extrapolating how these students may have experienced the center of American Deaf culture requires examining other details about their time at VSS. 50

Morris and Bittle spent much of their childhood surrounded by deaf children, who constituted the majority of the VSS student body, making it entirely possible that the only remarkable portion of their trip was the fact that the college was majority white. Morris was a member of student council alongside the 1951 ping pong tournament champion, Fraitus Sessoms. Nothing in the Bulletin suggests that student council was of particular importance to the student body, but their routine meetings never indicate the use of sign language interpreters despite always having students from both departments. While students did elect representatives from the boys' and girls' dormitories, the council had no formal system for ensuring parity of blind and deaf members though they tended to be evenly represented. 51 Morris and Bittle were even enrolled in a vocational class, previously reserved for deaf students only, in the same year they traveled to Gallaudet. These two Eaglerettes chose to be in these cross-disability spaces, indicating a high level of comfort among their deaf peers. 52 There is no evidence in the archive regarding how Morris and Bittle communicated with the members of their cheer squad, but oral histories from alumni of the school strongly suggest that they spoke and signed with deaf friends on a regular basis.

In addition to connecting VSS students with deaf peers at the Kendall School as well as blind and deaf peers in North Carolina, the Eagles and Eaglerettes also brought the school into closer relationship with the students at the Petersburg Training School, the only institution in the South exclusively for Black feeble-minded children. 53 In 1963, the Eagles played against the school's team in Petersburg, also bringing along with them The Blazers, a school band which played an hour of "hot music" according to Ralph Shelman, author of the bulletin article as well as member of the band. In 1965, the Eagles hosted the Petersburg Training School's basketball team for their homecoming weekend. After the match, the visitors joined VSS students for the homecoming reception, performances by the drill teams of both schools, as well as a joint dance. Notably, the drill team from VSS was also "composed of deaf and partially sighted boys." 54 The archive has nothing say about the interactions among these students, except that the Eagles tended to win these matches. Despite prior connections among faculty, no record exists of how the students themselves approached these cross-disability interactions other than the Bulletin reporting that "everyone enjoyed themselves." 55 VSS students, already comfortable with cross-disability relationships, may have approached these visitors at their homecoming as social peers, but it would be naïve to assume that notions about the feeble-minded common in the broader society had not filtered into the consciousness of VSS students.

The editorial board of the Bulletin itself was also a cross-disability space after 1962, when it became a fully student-run affair. 56 Though producing this monthly periodical involved only a small portion of the campus community, it remains noteworthy because it challenges Deaf history by placing blind children alongside deaf in the process of producing a residential school publication. While students from both departments contributed to the production of the Bulletin, the majority of those involved were actually from the blind department. 57 Students did not simply attend an occasional meeting with students from other departments; they actively wrote stories for the publication together. Ralph Shelman and Dorothy Adkins, of the blind and deaf departments respectively, worked together as reporters to produce an article about the students of the month, one boy and one girl. 58 Teresa Gee, of the blind department, constructed a playful piece for the Bulletin in which she interviewed students from both departments about whether they'd like to live on another planet. 59 While Deaf history has emphasized the important role of residential school publications like this in developing Deaf culture through fostering ties between alumni and the school, at VSS in 1962 only two of the six students who ran the publication were from the deaf department. Historians are not wrong to insist on the importance of residential school publications in connecting and fostering the development of Deaf culture, but the cross-disability production of the Bulletin further illustrates how previous studies of Deaf culture obscure blind contributions to community formation by neglecting the archives of Black residential schools, silencing the experiences of Black deaf students at schools like VSS where cross-disability encounters prevailed over disability-specific spaces. 60

Cross-Disability Classrooms

Whether in their dorms, on student council, or at sporting events, students at VSS routinely interacted, communicating in spoken English and Black ASL, but there was one area of student life where disability lines were more rigidly enforced. For the most part, students at VSS took classes organized around their disability, the practice favored by special educators at the time. After 1940, teachers at VSS were expected to have, or to be in the process of attaining, a specified number of credit hours in masters-level special education training, which they acquired mostly at the nearby Hampton Institute. These classes were often taught in the summer, with classes on deaf education frequently offered by faculty from Gallaudet College. This training was meant to ensure that VSS teachers had specialized skills tailored to the specific disabled students they were instructing. 61 For the most part, classes at VSS supported divisions between deaf and blind students, but there were some cracks in this arrangement as well. 62

Vocational classes were of great importance at VSS. These classes often occupied two hours of a student's day for five days each week from 1940 onward, and seem to have taken up even more time prior to Dr. Whitehead's arrival. While vocational course offerings were typically intended for students of either the deaf or the blind department, many students received vocational training alongside peers from the other department. William C. Ritter, the founder of the school, ensured that it adopted VSDB's tradition of vocational training which typically prepared deaf boys for agricultural work and deaf and blind girls to be housewives. 63 Unfortunately for his students, while other vocational programs began to include a more diverse training program in the 20^th century, Ritter persisted with a vocational program which conformed to the racial confines of the Southern economy, preparing Black students largely for jobs in agricultural and domestic work. 64 While blind students could receive training in traditional vocations of the blind, like mattress and broom making, in 1923 half the boys in the deaf department worked on the school's farm, and two-thirds of girls in the deaf department took vocational course in laundering. Ritter reported in 1910 that "outside of school hours, farming operations have been claiming our entire time and attention," revealing how critical the potatoes and cabbage produced on the farm were to the maintenance of the school. The laundry work of the girls, coupled with the farm labor of the boys, was instrumental in maintaining the school on a limited state budget, but unlike asylums that exclusively utilized unpaid patient labor, VSS began paying for the labor of older students as early as 1913. 65 Like all residential schools for deaf and/or blind children, the vocational training at VSS under Ritter assumed most students would become low-wage workers. Unlike other schools, however, Ritter seemed to assume that the only appropriate jobs for his students were in agricultural or domestic work, excluding trades like upholstery which were mainstays at contemporaneous residential schools.

In 1940, Dr. Whitehead reformed the school's vocational offerings by introducing classes already offered at VSDB, like piano tuning for blind students and upholstery and barbering for deaf students. 66 Coming from his former job at St. Paul's Normal and Industrial School in rural Southside Virginia, Whitehead rooted VSS in the Black tradition of racial uplift through vocational education, while also extending the academic offerings of the school. During his tenure, the academic program was extended through the high school level, resulting in graduates going on to attain college degrees for the first time in the school's history. 67 Also introduced under Dr. Whitehead's supervision was the offering of cross-disability vocational training, noted explicitly by Elaine West Johnson, a VSS teacher whose master's thesis explores the history of the school. She notes that "the blind and the deaf are taught many of the trades together," specifically listing both chair caning and typewriting as courses offered to both departments. Though a chart she created references only these two courses as offered to both blind and deaf students, her work also makes it clear that blind students were barred only from taking "painting, woodwork, photography, beauty culture, and barbering," while deaf students were excluded solely from the piano tuning and instrumental music courses. 68 Shortly after Whitehead's retirement, in 1962, the vocational class on cooking was opened up to four students from the blind department, among them the Eaglerettes Esther Bittle and Geraldine Morris. 69 This suggests that students could enroll in vocational courses if they were deemed capable of learning the corresponding trade, rendering vocational courses occasional cross-disability spaces. It is perhaps unsurprising that vocational opportunities at VSS expanded under the school's first Black superintendent, but it is noteworthy that students were allowed to pursue trades once limited to students with specific disabilities. 70

Academic classes were the space on the VSS campus where students were most rigidly divided by their categories of disability. This was the practice of the day, and the school seems to have adhered to it for the most part, with reports in the Bulletin divided into categories like "Third Grade Deaf" and "Upper Blind Grades." Beyond this, Sallie Mae Pauley's initial experience in an oral only program points to an intention to keep students divided by the specifics of their impairment. Indeed, while the classes themselves were largely disability-specific, with specially trained teachers who made careers in blind or deaf education, academic classes nonetheless took place in common buildings which allowed for routine cross-disability encounters in hallways and bathrooms. Further, academic classes could occasionally involve cross-disability encounters. In 1957, Esther Bittle, a high school student in the blind department, was reported to be helping out deaf second grade students during a P.E. class. 71 Indeed, reports on the P.E. program suggest that classes were organized around gender and grade level, with students practicing exercises and sports both in disability-specific and in cross-disability groups. 72 Sallie Mae Pauley recalls being placed in a math class with blind peers during her time at VSS. Her recollection does not suggest that most academic classes involved cross-disability instruction, merely that it occasionally occurred. Pauley boasted that "they put me in with that class because I was so good at math," though her inclusion in this class may have also been an informal way of encouraging her speech-reading skills. 73 Regardless of the reasoning, her experience suggests that many spaces which appeared to be disability-specific could involve occasional cross-disability interactions.

Conclusion

Unequal school funding rendered "proper separation of the groups […] impossible" at VSS, leading blind and deaf students to develop meaningful relationships across disability while living at the school. 74 This raises important questions about identity among Black deaf and blind people, but these individuals left few archival traces beyond the school, allowing oral history to offer only tentative answers. The women I interviewed identified themselves as Deaf and they dated and married men and women who were Deaf or otherwise organically connected to the Deaf community. While Sallie Mae Pauley did recommend a blind alumnus to be interviewed, the contact information she provided was not up to date. This contrasts with her ability to provide current information for Deaf alumni, suggesting that she is in closer contact with former students of the deaf department than the of blind department. Shared dormitories, academic buildings, and clubs at VSS supported the formation of cross-disability relationships, but life outside the school fostered relationships with deaf people and sign language users. Under the state's school desegregation plan, Pauley transferred in 1973 to VSDB, where the deaf and blind departments were thoroughly separate; then she went on to Gallaudet where there were few if any blind students. After graduating from VSS, Phyllis Bubanji secured a job with the Internal Revenue Service, which employed a number of Deaf workers. After these women left VSS, society tended to place them in spaces with other deaf people; without structured contact with blind individuals they gravitated toward other sign language users. 75 Scholars of Deaf culture sometimes regard the impairment of deafness as naturally leading to association among "true peers," but the story of VSS demonstrates how blind and deaf people became peers when placed together, even if these relationships weakened without the walls of the school to encourage them. 76

Moments like the ping pong game between Fraitus Sessoms and Gloria Clark jump off the pages of the Virginia State School Bulletin, but a careful reading of the publication reveals that encounters between students in the deaf and blind departments were so routine as to render this match unremarkable, at least to the students and teachers at the school. Students communicated in spoken English and sign language across disability categories, forming relationships which enabled them to produce the school periodical, run student council, and form romantic relationships. 77 A close reading of the records of the Virginia State School combined with oral history reveals how this institution—and perhaps others—created bonds between students that were not dependent upon a common audiological condition, so much as on a common social position: Black and disabled. 78 These young people's isolation together at VSS helped forge bonds that are unsurprising given their prolonged contact, even though these relationships have been overlooked by scholars.

Understanding the variability of impairment and searching it out in the archives makes clear that the social world of VSS students transcended the traditional narrative of residential deaf schools, which has too long been defined by the experiences at predominantly white institutions. Historians of Deaf America have missed much of what sets the experience of Black deaf people apart from that of their white peers, namely that most Black deaf students lived among blind children, many of whom used sign language. The cultural model of deafness, as developed by scholars examining majority-white institutions, cannot easily be transposed onto schools like VSS where blind students were also deeply involved in the community of sign language users. Examining the archives of Black residential deaf schools necessarily brings blind people into the process of constructing Deaf culture, challenging white Deaf history, which has erased the contributions of blind African Americans to the proliferation of sign language. Recovering the history of residential schools for Black deaf and blind children complicates this narrative by questioning the historiographic tradition of separating the stories of deaf and blind people.