The People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry (21 page)

One bit of evidence that there was indeed a Deaf population in the Weald in that era comes from Samuel Pepys's famous diary that gives an account of upper-class life in London in the early 1600s. Pepys relates what happened when a messenger arrived bearing news of a fire that was threatening large parts of the capital:

There comes in that dumb boy ... who is mightily acquainted here and with Downing; and he made strange signs of the fire, and how the king was abroad, and many things they understood but I could not, which I wondering at and discoursing with Downing about it, 'Why,' says he, 'it is only a little use and you will understand him and make him understand you, with as much ease as may be.'21

Sir George Downing, the English politician for whom Downing Street is named, was an Anglo-Irish soldier and diplomat whose mother was a sister of Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop. According to one source, he grew up in the heart of the Kentish Weald at the same time as emigration to the Vineyard began but that connection has yet to be confirmed. We infer that Downing could communicate with a Deaf boy, but where did he learn how to do that? As a child in Kent or elsewhere in England; as a young man in Massachusetts, or as an adult in England?22 Another report, consistent with the idea that a sign language used in Kent reached New England in the seventeenth century, comes from the noted divine, Increase Mather, who in an essay of 1684 relates that a Deaf woman and her Deaf husband in Weymouth, Massachusetts, engaged in fluent sign communication; her guardian had lived among immigrants from the Weald in Scituate, fifteen miles away 23

LIFE AND MARRIAGE ON MARTHA'S VINEYARD

The colonizers were drawn to the Vineyard by availability of farmland, the long growing season, the surrounding sea that abounded in fishes and shellfish of vast variety and the numerous woods and ponds, where game and birds were to be found. The sandy soil was adapted to sheep raising. The Native Americans were friendly and taught the islanders how to catch whales-nearly every family on the Vineyard had a member aboard a whaler by the time of Mary Smith'sD wedding there.24 In 1700, there were 400 people on the Vineyard; the population stopped growing about 1800 at some 3000.25 Not surprisingly for this relatively isolated populace, whose ancestors were from the same parishes, most people married someone to whom they were already related and who was from their own village on the island.26 A symptom of this practice was the proliferation of the same family names: an 1850 census counted 132 Mayhews and 87 Tiltons in Tisbury and Chilmark.27 In 1807, 32 names comprised three-fourths of the island population!28

Marrying a man who was from off island, as Mary SmithD did, was thus an anomaly brought about by the opening of the American Asylum and the desire of families on the Vineyard to see their Deaf children educated. After the school opened, Groce reports, all but one of the Vineyard Deaf of school age attended.29 With so many Deaf Vineyarders enrolled, their Vineyard sign language must have had a profound influence on the developing ASL and ASL may well have affected the sign language on the Vineyard.30 Deaf Vineyarders often met their future spouses at the Asylum, many of whom were from the mainland.

The Deaf graduates of the Asylum were among the most literate people on the Vineyard in that era; less educated townspeople would bring them documents for explanation. The number of Deaf people born on the island gradually rose, peaking around the time of ThomasD marriage at 45. Groce estimates that, later in the nineteenth century, one in every 155 people on the Vineyard was born Deaf (0.7 percent), about twenty times the estimate for the nation at large (.03 percent).31 An 1830 census found twelve Deaf people in Chilmark; no doubt Mary SmithD was one of them. The town's population was 694; hence 1.7 percent of the town was Deaf, while only 0.01 percent of the population in the neighboring islands was Deaf-a ratio of more than 100 to one.32 In the 1840s, some fourteen Deaf children were born in Chilmark; by the 1870s only one Deaf child was born there, Katie WestD She was the last of the hereditarily Deaf in Chilmark, twelve generations deep, and died in 1952.33 The gradual decline in the numbers of Deaf people on the island was due to off-island marriages, in part the result of meeting mainland Deaf at the Asylum. The flourishing of Deaf ancestry had moved to the mainland, especially to Maine (see Chapter 8).

Mary SmithD s marriage to Thomas BrownD was anomalous in a second sense: Not only did she marry a man from off-island but also she married a Deaf man, whereas most Deaf people like her on the Vineyard married hearing people, while those on the mainland predominantly married Deaf people. On the Vineyard nearly two-thirds of marriages were "mixed" (they were even more common before the opening of the American Asylum.)34 On the mainland, only about onefifth of Deaf marriages were to hearing people. The high rate of mixed marriages on the Vineyard was probably a reflection of, and contributor to, a broader feature of life on the island-the blending of Deaf and hearing lives. Like Mary SmithD (and her maternal grandmother, Jerusha TiltonD), most children born Deaf on the Vineyard had both parents hearing, as well as many hearing siblings, the more so as birth rates were high on the island.35

Another reflection of, and contributor to, this blending of hearing and Deaf lives was the widespread use of a sign language among both Deaf and hearing people (no doubt with varying degrees of fluency). A reporter who visited Chilmark in 1895 recounted that "every resident of Chilmark learns to talk with his fingers as early as with his tongue." This may be an overstatement as by one account "Some of the deaf would carry little notebooks around with them, and when they wanted to communicate they would write their messages down on paper."36 The reporter goes on to report that distant neighbors communicated by sign language using spy glasses; sign language also served for boat to boat communication and for "whispering" in church. Folks were so bilingual, he claimed, that they passed from English to sign almost unconsciously.37 The sign language on the Vineyard may have come from England to America with the colonizers: When Martha's Vineyard signs, elicited from elderly hearing residents in 1977, were recorded and presented to a British Sign Language speaker, he identified 40 percent of the signs as cognates. (The British two-handed alphabet was also in use on the Vineyard, unlike the one-handed manual alphabet on the mainland.)38 Two and a half centuries had passed from the arrival of the first Deaf person on the Vineyard to the test with the British Sign Language speaker, so there had been ample time for Martha's Vineyard sign language to diverge from its origins, and to converge toward ASL, which Asylum students presumably brought back with them to the Vineyard if they settled there. An ASL informant, tested about the same time, found 22 percent overlap of ASL signs with Vineyard signs.

Linguists Ben BahanD and Joan Poole-Nash make the case that Deaf people on the Vineyard were thoroughly assimilated and, as with Deaf people in the Mayan community studied by linguist Robert E. Johnson,39 they valued their village more than they valued the company of other Deaf people: "Being Deaf itself is irrelevant," Johnson wrote, "as Deaf people have access to everyone in the village"40 In accord with this "village-first" value in assimilative societies, the Mayan villagers, according to Johnson, tended to identify first with their family, then with the village, and then with Mayan society. When Johnson gave a party for all the Deaf people in the village and their families, he learned that it was the first event in the village that singled out Deaf people. Similarly, Groce relates that on the Vineyard "All these [Deaf] people were included in all aspects of daily life from their earliest childhood.... One of the most striking aspects of this research is the fact that rather than being remembered as a group, every one of the Deaf islanders who is remembered is remembered as a unique individual."41 From this perspective, the Deaf on Martha's Vineyard were not a distinctive ethnic group; instead, they conformed to the dominant ethnicity, they were almost totally assimilated - to a society that valued them and used their language.42

The next chapter contrasts the very different Deaf enclaves in Henniker and on the Vineyard. It hypothesizes that the differences between these communities in language barriers and marriage practices are due to differences in genetic transmission of the Deaf trait; those differences give rise, in turn, to differences in ethnic consciousness.

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The story of Thomas BrownD and the emergence of the first American organizations of and for Deaf people that he led can be seen as the story of emerging Deaf ethnic consciousness, which surfaced clearly in the mid-nineteenth century. Consider this evidence: The formation of the numerous societies of Deaf people over which BrownD presided; the explicit goals of the first enduring Deaf organization, the NEGA, which he founded ("We, Deaf-mutes, desirous of forming a society in order to promote the intellectual, social, moral, temporal and spiritual welfare of our mute community. . ." [italics added]); the ritual-like rehearsal at meetings of the great events in Deaf history; the raising of monuments to important figures-all these testify that BrownD and his associates saw the Deaf as a distinct group with a language and way of life that should be fostered. "That these conventions [of the Deaf] tend to keep alive the feelings of brotherhood and friendship among the mutes at large cannot be disputed," wrote William ChamberlainD, an eminent Deaf journalist.' Consequently, ChamberlainD supported the gatherings of "the children of silence." In the silent press, BrownD was referred to as the "patriarch of the silent tribe"2 and his eulogist stated that BrownD was always ready to do his share "for any plan which promised to promote the welfare of his class."3 Class, our mute community, children of silence, silent tribe-these are all forms, we submit, of ethnic self-ascription.

In stark contrast, the accounts available to us of the lives led by Deaf and hearing people in Tisbury and Chilmark during the same era are marked by an apparent absence of events and structures that would set Deaf people apart from hearing people. These accounts do not reveal any leader, any organization, any distinctive gathering place, any banquet or other ceremony, any monuments-indeed anything at all that suggests that Deaf people on the Vineyard had ethnic consciousness. Now that we have made this bald claim, something contrary may well come to light but it seems unlikely that the difference in degree will be eliminated by future discoveries.

The pedigrees that we have presented (Figs. 2 through 7) have led us to the hypothesis that a difference in the incidence and distribution of Deaf people in the two locations, Henniker and the Vineyard, is responsible for the difference in the emergence of ethnic consciousness. Other possible explanations of that difference come to mind, foremost among them, perhaps, differences between the two locations in language and marriage practices. We believe that those differences, like ethnic consciousness itself, are heavily influenced by genetic patterning.

The hereditary difference between hearing and Deaf people can be traced to any of numerous genes, most often acting singly. As a result, the occurrence of Deaf and hearing people in the family tends to follow the laws of heredity first spelled out by Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel in the mid-nineteenth century (but not widely recognized until the early twentieth century). Mendel identified two main patterns of genetic transmission, called dominant and recessive.

The Brown-Swett-Sanders clan of Henniker exemplifies the dominant pattern of inheritance. To the best of our knowledge, the Deaf trait was not expressed in any of Nahum BrownD's ascendants among the twenty-three we ascertained but NahumD and some of his descendants in every generation expressed that trait, indicating that the genetic difference in this family began with NahumD (see Fig. 2, Brown pedigree). If the pattern of genetic transmission was dominant in NahumD s family, then on average half of his offspring would inherit that genetic difference and be born Deaf, while the other half would be born hearing. The proportion of offspring that can be expected to have a particular trait is called the "segregation ratio." Of NahumD's eighteen descendants, twelve were Deaf and six hearing: this is statistically within range of the expected half-way split. All Deaf members of the family had a Deaf close relative and all Deaf members who married had at least one Deaf child. Thus the Deaf trait was expressed in each generation: Each Deaf person receives a Deaf heritage and may pass it on. Marriage between relatives (that is, spouses with the same gene) is not necessary for such generational depth.

The Tilton, Mayhew, Skiffe, Smith, and Lambert families of Martha's Vineyard (Figs. 3 through 7), exemplify, on the other hand, the recessive pattern of inheritance. In this pattern, many people in the family may possess the critical gene but the trait will not be expressed-it remains hidden or latent. This is because with a recessive trait two copies of the gene, one from each parent, are needed to produce a Deaf child. Parents who carry but do not express the gene are called simply "carriers." According to recessive transmission, hearing parents who are carriers will have, on the average, a segregation ratio of threefourths hearing children. Deaf adults who marry hearing people who are not carriers will have only hearing children. Hence, with recessive transmission, there are lots of hearing people in families with Deaf members. Contrast that with dominant transmission where at least one parent is Deaf, and fully half of all their children are Deaf in every generation.

As our lineages for families with recessive transmission demonstrate, the hearing parents of a recessively Deaf person very frequently have an ancestor in common (see Parts III and IV). The odds of unrelated parents having exactly the same recessive gene (so that their child will receive the pair and be Deaf) are much greater if those parents are related to one another, as we explained. Intermarriage among relatives is most likely in a community that is isolated-on an island, say. This was indeed the picture on Martha's Vineyard.