The People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry (17 page)

50 J. Fishman, "Ethnicity as Being, Doing and Knowing," in Hutchinson and Smith, Ethnicity, 63-69. Fenton, Ethnicity: Racism. On racism and audism see: H-D. Bauman, "Audism: Exploring the Metaphysics of Oppression," Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 9 (2004): 239-246.

51 Davis, "Postdeafness"; Fishman, Rise and Fall; Glazer and Moynihan, Ethnicity; Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity; Verkuyten, Social Psychology.

52 Smith, Ethnic Origins.

53 "In 2000, 18 percent of the total population aged 5 and over, or 47.0 million people, reported they spoke a language other than English at home. These figures were up from 14 percent (31.8 million) in 1990 and 11 percent (23.1 million) in 1980. The number of people who spoke a language other than English at home grew by 38 percent in the 1980s and by 47 percent in the 1990s." www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-29.pdf (accessed 7/22/2010).

54 Waters, Ethnic Options.

55 Verkuyten, Social Psychology.

56 Cornell and Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race.

57 Ibid.; Fishman, Language and Ethnicity; Fishman, Rise and Fall; quotation from p. 516; L. Vail, "Ethnicity in southern African History."

58 Smith, Ethnic Revival; Verkuyten, Social Psychology.

59 Fishman, Rise and Fall.

60 Smith, Ethnic Revival; Verkuyten, Social Psychology. The Arab European League in the Netherlands stated: "We want to remain who we are, participate in the broader society, while keeping our own cultural identity"; quotation from p. 131.

61 Edwards, Language, Society.

62 Bahan, "Comment on Turner"; Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan, Journey.

63 T. Humphries, "Deaf Culture and Cultures," in K. M. Christensen and G. L. Delgado, Multicultural Issues in Deafness (White Plain, N. Y.: Longman, 1993), 3-15.

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Three Deaf enclaves that flourished in the nineteenth century stand out in an analysis of how the Deaf-World was founded in New England: Henniker, New Hampshire, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, and southern Maine.' Deaf ancestry in America has roots in the English settlers of the seventeenth century. What the settlers found and created together is the backdrop for a consideration of the individual Deaf families.

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Early in the 1600s, the postmaster in the village of Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, William Brewster, illegally convened a little Separatist church in his home. The Separatists, or Puritans as they came to be called derisively, were Calvinist. They were opposed to all ritual not plainly required by the word of God, and they believed that God predestined some souls for salvation, others for damnation. But these Calvinists sought to carry the Protestant Reformation further than the Church of England was willing to carry it; they opposed the cross in baptism, the ring in marriage, kneeling at communion, and ecclesiastical vestments. Queen Elizabeth and her archbishop saw in this movement a grave threat to the Church of England and were determined to stamp it out; numerous clerics were suspended for being tainted by it. The Scrooby congregation attempted to flee by ship to the Netherlands but was betrayed by the ship's captain; their leader was jailed for heresy. At his release, the congregation regrouped in Amsterdam but then, finding no work and fearful of becoming involved in an ongoing dispute among other Separatist congregations there, they settled in Leiden, in the Netherlands, where other Englishmen joined them and the congregation grew to more than two hundred.

The congregation then passed over a decade in exile, engaged in manual labor, while many of its children were drawn into the military or merchant marine, imperilling the future of the community. Yearning for their native English language and culture, the congregation debated its future and prayed, prayed and debated, and decided to send an initial group, led by Brewster, to America. They applied for funding to a London stock company. Boarding the ship Speedwell, they sailed to Northampton on the English coast where they met up with other Separatists, who had come from London on the Mayflower, and the two ships set out for the New World. However, the Speedwell proved unseaworthy. After putting into port to exchange passengers with the Mayflower, it headed back to London with those too old, too ill, or with too many children to brave the voyage and the harsh conditions reputed to await them in America. Many families were separated but about one hundred set sail, a third of them Separatists, the rest sent by investors. The pioneers dropped anchor in Plymouth Harbor on December 16, 1620, where they created a "church without a bishop and a state without a king."2

These early settlers, called Pilgrims, built log hovels, and survived the first freezing winter by stealing grain from Native American stores. Although there were farmers among these pioneers, they had no knowledge of New World agriculture and had neither plow nor ox. It has been truly said of them that they lacked everything but virtue. By the following autumn, half the original colonists were dead, killed by cold, sickness, and famine. The survivors begged food from a fishing settlement on the Maine coast. Friendly Native Americans showed them how to plant native crops and to fertilize the ground with fish. The first harvest was sufficient for a thanksgiving feast. Elder William Brewster and his fellow Pilgrims had established the first colony that would ratify the Constitution of the United States.

In the next two years, additional settlers came without provisions, sent by the colony's London investors. The enlarged community counted thirty-two cabins and 180 settlers. Some labored to exhaustion to convert the communal meadows and marshes into cornfields but others were unwilling to do so, and the harvests proved insufficient, leading to a time of starvation. When the colony dropped communal farming and assigned to each family its own parcel of land, the harvest improved greatly and trading soon commenced with Native American tribes. Fur proved the best way the Pilgrims found to pay their debts contracted for the voyage; the Mayflower had been rented. Livestock was distributed, so each family had its own supply of dairy and meat. Nevertheless, life remained very hard. These were constant concerns: securing enough firewood to withstand the bitter winters and to prepare food; transporting enough water; planting, tending, and harvesting fields, maintaining gardens and orchards; mowing meadowland and storing hay; caring for livestock.

Meanwhile, it had become clear to the Puritans, who had remained in England seeking to reform the church from within, that the crown was determined to move the church back toward Catholicism. Many more Puritans decided to immigrate to New England. In 1628, a group of Puritan businessmen formed a venture for profit named the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay. Initial voyages that year and the next created a small colony on Cape Ann and later at Salem, Massachusetts. Beginning in 1630, nearly one thousand colonists came to the New World, establishing a settlement on Massachusetts Bay in what is now Boston. The Great Migration had begun. Some two hundred settlers died the first year and as many again returned to England. As living conditions improved, new colonists came, mainly English Puritansmore than 20,000 over the next decade. New settlements soon fanned out from Boston-Newtown (later Cambridge), Lexington, Concord, Watertown, Charlestown, Dorchester, and others. After 1640 there was little immigration until after the Revolution, with the result that for a long time the ancestors of most New Englanders were English Puritans. This homogeneity of the small population of settlers made it more likely that marriages would be among people with similar genetic backgrounds, favoring the birth of Deaf children, as we explain later.

The result of the Great Migration was a new society, forged not as European societies had been through long evolution around fortress towns and markets, but forged-without peasants and without landlords-by shared beliefs and a theocratic government. The Massachusetts Bay Colony organized immigrants into towns of two to four square miles and some thirty to fifty families, generally from the same region, exception made for essential tradesmen, such as blacksmiths, who might hail from a different region. A surveyor would designate a main street with lots laid out on both sides. This arrangement facilitated contacts among neighbors, attendance at the meetinghouse (as the Puritan churches were called), mutual protection, and supervision by authority. For example, Andover, Massachusetts, ancestral seat of the great Lovejoy Deaf clan (on whom, more later), was founded in this way in 1646. Everybody farmed, including the minister and the artisans. Everybody paid taxes to support the established church. All members of the church signed a covenant: one had to avow and defend the faith, live a godly life and, since all mankind was born in sin, experience spiritual rebirth (and prove it to the minister and the congregation). The inherent hardships of frontier life became ethical values: the Puritans favored plain style in life and plain speech in sermons; their homes were plainly furnished, their meetinghouses unadorned.

The Plymouth Colony founded by the Pilgrims merged with its larger and more successful neighbor, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1691. Together they built the society and government that ultimately gave rise to the New England states. Puritanism became a "tribal cult"cult because of shared religion, tribal because some two-thirds of all church members from 1630 to 1800 were either original founders or their descendants.3 The transmission of property and of family names linked one generation with the next. If a child died, the same first name was normally given to the next infant of the same sex. Moreover, some two-thirds of first sons and daughters were given their parents' names. (These practices make tracing New England ancestries particularly challenging.) Thus, the Puritans, by virtue of their language, culture, religion, ancestry and bonding to one another, comprised an ethnic group, one that would do battle with Native-American ethnicities.

The first immigrants found marshland for the most part from the Connecticut coast north as far as Saco, Maine. There were also meadows bordering the great rivers that various Native-American tribes had cleared; these allowed the Pilgrims at Plymouth and the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay to survive their first years in the New World by cultivating wheat and roots. Increasingly, the pioneers grew livestock feed in the salt and fresh marshes. For home consumption, every farmer tried to keep a few cows. By the late 1600s, most farmers also had a family horse, an ox or a pair of oxen, a pig or two, and in some areas sheep and goats. They harvested a few tons of English cultivated hay to feed them. The early farmer sowed his seed by hand, plowed and harrowed with primitive tools, harvested with a sickle, threshed his grain with a flail. Agricultural historians have estimated what a farm family of five required in acreage in those times: six to eight acres of cultivated land including a kitchen garden and an orchard (barley for the customary English beer grew poorly, but apples for cider grew well); fifteen acres of pasture for grazing and as many again for mowing to yield winter hay; thus, some forty acres of improved land, plus woodland to yield wood for the fire. Many farmers had less, and about half were unable to sustain themselves. Destitute, they went to work for other farmers and were paid with livestock; or they fished and trapped; or moved north to Maine or west to hill country, where land was cheaper or even, in later years, free (some had been confiscated from British loyalists).

The settler's first priority, on arriving at the land he had acquired, was shelter. One-room log cabins were the quickest solution. Low ceilings, few windows, and large hearths helped to keep houses warm despite the bitter cold. The successor to the log cabin in the Maine countryside, from the mid-1700s until a century later, was one or one-and-a-half stories and one or two rooms deep, with all living spaces arranged around a central chimney. The average colonial house had a simple bed, a large wooden table with benches, some stools, and a chest and chamber pots. There were knives and wooden spoons but no forks; there were dishes, earthenware bowls, and cups. All the activities of the house took place in one large room, the "hall" on the first floor. Food was basic and unvaried-fried pork and corn meal. Beans, potatoes, apples, eggs, butter and cheese; fish and game. Water, coffee, cider, beer.4

Families worked from sunrise to sunset. It was expected and it was necessary for survival. Supporting a family of, say, nine members with just a hoe, a scythe, an axe, and a spinning wheel was daunting and yielded only the essentials: shelter, food, fuel, and clothing. Farming obeyed the dictates of the seasons: spring, planting; summer, cultivating; fall, harvesting. Winter: flail grain, shell corn, cure tobacco; repair fences, tools, and harnesses; cut wood and pull stumps; cut ice; increase home manufacturing. Farmers and their sons might take jobs in town in winter. Much of the home manufacturing was done by women and their daughters. This included fabricating all the family clothing in linen, wool, or blend. Shoes were prohibitively expensive and many families were unshod, even in winter. Child labor was needed to survive in this unmechanized rural society. For example, it took twenty procedures and sixteen months to turn flax into linen .5 Girls participated in most stages of that process and also learned sewing, quilting, cooking, candle-making, and dairying; boys tended the livestock, cut wood, mended fences, cleared ground. Girls often joined other families to do household work and often stayed on there until married. Nearly all women married while they were still quite young, and they had many children-seven births per family on the average.6

We said that nearly everyone was engaged in farming in the early years of the new republic. Each farmer was highly dependent on his neighbors, and this no doubt reinforced the importance for Deaf people of finding one another and of forming small enclaves. When bringing in the harvest or corn husking, as many as a dozen neighbors might participate. Neighbors might lend the farmer a man and a horse or a set of tools. They would often help with digging a cellar, moving boulders, felling trees, logging, threshing grain, house raising and barn raising, dressing flax. The neighbor would ordinarily be paid back in labor and produce. Those who did not have the means to own a farm (this was true of many Deaf people) worked as hired hands. Like the Deaf hands employed at the BrownD homestead in Henniker, New Hampshire (about whom more later), workers were treated as family dependents. In addition there were public works where neighbors were expected to labor together in order to protect against fire and disease, to create water supply and waste-disposal, and to build harbors.