Baseball, Bene Gesserit, and the Maidens of the Spear - Reactor

Recently, while roaming mindlessly across the internet, I came across a little social media post about the deaf baseball player William “Dummy” Hoy, and how he was responsible for the hand signals that are used by players, coaches, and umpires to communicate in baseball. I’ll admit that I know very little about baseball—sports aren’t really my thing—but I was intrigued by the social history, and the disability history, that the claim suggested. A little searching later, and I came across an article from the Society of American Baseball Research, which explored the history of hand signals in baseball and the contributions made by deaf players (both professional and non-professional) to their evolution and use in the sport.

Turns out, it isn’t correct to say that Hoy pioneered the use of hand signals or even that he was responsible for making them a standard part of the game. However, it does seem that Hoy and his fellow deaf players had an indelible impact on how baseball evolved hand signals for communication between teammates and coaches, umpires and players, and even between the umpires and the crowd.

You might be wondering what all this has to do with The Wheel of Time. Or perhaps, like me, any mention of hand signals starts you thinking about the “handtalk” of the Far Dareis Mai and why we really only see women using that sort of thing in the story.

The hand signals used by certain Aes Sedai and by the Black Ajah for covert communication certainly owe something to the inspiration Robert Jordan took from Frank Herbert’s Dune. The Bene Gesserit, like the Aes Sedai, are a powerful but morally dubious institution of women who use hand signals and other covert means of communication in their attempts to manipulate those around them. It is a language of spying, of political machinations, and of the mystical science the Bene Gesserit employed in their genetic breeding programs. The Aes Sedai version is not quite as sinister as that, but their manipulation and control over the world is enacted by the White Tower in a very similar way, and whenever they use hand signals or interact with their networks of spies, the reader is always very conscious of the fact that the secret signals and manipulation (usually of men) goes hand in hand.

However, the Maiden’s handtalk is different. It is a full language that the Maidens use to have conversations among themselves. While one can assume it might occasionally come in useful when communicating silently during a hunt or a wartime situation (the other societies also have hand signals for this use), it is much more than a battlefield utility. It is an everyday language, used in everyday conversations and for everyday reasons.

This makes the handtalk a very special thing in the world of The Wheel of Time, one that, in my mind, is incredibly underused. We have no examples of deaf people in this world, very few examples of any kind of disability, in point of fact, which makes the world less rich than it could be. This observation isn’t a particular dig at Jordan; the lack of diversity and representation in popular books and media is a conversation that is ongoing, societally speaking, and not what this essay is about. What I will say about Jordan, however, is that the best of his writing is so good that the flaws become more obvious by comparison. The existence of the Maiden’s handtalk, a full and complete signing language, points out the lack of deaf people in this world in a bright and glaring way that any reader, accustomed to only seeing disability portrayed when it is part of the plot, might otherwise overlook.

Kind of like how the existence of lesbians points out that Jordan completely avoided ever mentioning the existence of male homosexuality.

Kind of like how the binary understanding of sex/gender within the story wouldn’t really matter if Jordan hadn’t built a magical system around a basic and boring assumption that can’t support the beauty and complexity of everything else he did with the One Power throughout the series.

But I digress.

When the handtalk was first described, I remember thinking how excellent a narrative choice it would be to say that there was once a deaf Maiden for whom the handtalk was invented, so that she could truly be a participant in the lives of her spear-sisters, and they in hers. It made sense to me that the Far Dareis Mai might have an easier time integrating someone disabled, someone different, since their identity is also that of outsiders. They are considered equals among the other warrior societies when it comes to their abilities as fighters, but not in other ways; their access to the identity is limited because of their gender, and they have special rules and requirements (no marriage, no motherhood) in order to maintain that identity that men do not have to worry about. If anyone would understand the desire of an outsider to access a world not traditionally available to them, and that the challenges and restrictions of that access do not make the identity lesser, or shameful, it would be the Maidens of the Spear.

But the story of William “Dummy” Hoy—both the simple social media “myth” that he was single-handedly responsible for the creation and implementation of baseball hand signals and the more complex and interesting truth that a variety of deaf players combined with other practical needs of the sport led to the signals we know today—reminded me of my own biases around disability representation in story. Even as a disabled person myself, I made the mistake of conceptualizing a single deaf character who influenced this society in a way that was overly simplistic and tokenizing. The truth of the deaf community’s influence on baseball and the interplay between them and their teammates, coaches, and the needs of the game is more interesting by far than the idea of one “special” deaf person revolutionizing something. 

Disabled people should exist in fiction because they exist in life—not as a device to explain an interesting quirk about the world.

The focus of the narrative around Maiden handtalk is primarily on the fact that the Maidens can use their sign language, which no one outside their society knows how to understand, to make jokes and gossip about those around them, and particularly members of the other warrior societies, all of whom are men. They very often talk to each other about Rand, including when he is in the room with them. There is no other reason for the Maidens to have a more developed sign language than other communities, other than the fact that it lets them have secret conversations. Because women are sneaky, and they talk about you to manipulate you (or make fun of you).

Of course, there is another group that has a fully developed sign language, and that is the Seanchan nobility. It primarily appears to be used by high-ranking members of the blood to communicate to their so’jhin Voices, but we also see Tuon and Selucia having entire conversations about a variety of subjects, keeping track of what is going on during their captivity and discussing it in great deal, without anyone knowing.

What Tuon and Selucia are doing is spying, but their activities also can’t escape being read from the “gossipy women” angle, especially since so much of their conversation is about Mat. Though the same signs may very well be used by male Seanchan, we have never seen it. Narratively, the use of sign language is presented as the purview of women, used to deceive and dissemble and control men.

And as I consider all this, I can’t help but think of all the ways that humans in general tend to distrust those who speak in a language they can’t understand. We worry they are talking about us, probably because many people in our society have a constant fear of being judged, especially by those who belong to a different group than us, be it to a different culture, or a different belief system… or a different gender.

As in our world, there is deep distrust between the sexes in the lands of The Wheel of Time. In some ways, this is part of the story, as the taint on saidin has resulted in a fracture between men and women, and has taken away the true power of humanity by removing the ability of male and female channelers to work together. But a lot of it is also presented as a simple fact of the world, apparently a biological, or at least a social, truth that has nothing to do with the fallout of the conflict between Lews Therin and Latra Posae during the War of Power. I think it’s sort of a shame that sign language exists in this world as a part of that disparity, when it could be so much more.

There are many reasons for the evolution and use of hand signals in baseball. It is not only deaf players who needed signs to understand the umpire’s calls, but also fans seated far away in the stadium seats. The ability for a coach to signal a player’s next move to them without the other team hearing the plan still exists even if there are no deaf or hard of hearing players on the team. And yes, deaf players needed a way to communicate with their teammates that wasn’t through spoken words.

It’s the complexity of the story that makes it beautiful.

Happy New Year to all my Reading The Wheel of Time friends! Your regularly scheduled column resumes next week.