A Silent Culture With a Strong Voice

In the middle of the nineteenth century, deafness was so common on Martha’s Vineyard that islanders considered it a trait, like blue eyes, and virtually everyone knew sign language. A century and a half later, faculty in the Deaf Studies Program at the School of Education hope that history will repeat itself — bringing the deaf and hearing communities back on equal terms, as they once were on a small island off the Massachusetts coast.

by Midge Raymond

Janis Cole (SED'93), co-coordinator of the undergraduate Deaf Studies Program at SED, with her video library of ASL literature. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky.

As a young girl, Joan Poole Nash was fascinated when she read about Helen Keller. She began to teach herself American Sign Language (ASL), which she practiced with several deaf children at a summer camp where she was a counselor. When Poole Nash visited her great-grandmother, Emily Howland Poole, on Martha’s Vineyard, her great-grandmother told her that she too knew a few signs. “I didn’t think she meant the sign language that deaf people used,” Poole Nash (SED’80,’81) says. “I thought she meant the Indian signs the Boy Scouts used.”

Much later, when Poole Nash enrolled in SED, she realized that her great-grandmother, who was not deaf, had been using “an old, old sign language” that, while similar to ASL, was unique to the island. As it turned out, in nineteenth-century Martha’s Vineyard — where travel was rare and intermarriage common — an inbred recessive gene caused a high incidence of deafness in the island’s population. In her 1985 book Everyone Here Speaks Sign Language, Nora Ellen Groce estimates that in the nineteenth century one person in every 5,728 in the United States was born deaf, but on Martha’s Vineyard, the ratio was one in 155. In Chilmark, where Emily Howland Poole grew up, it was one in twenty-five, and in the small neighborhood of Squibnocket, one in four. Growing up, islanders used what Poole Nash calls Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, or MVSL, as frequently as spoken English.

But by the late 1970s MVSL had almost disappeared. Emily Howland Poole, then in her nineties, was among the last of the islanders to remember it (the last deaf person to use the signs had died in the 1950s). When she recognized the value of her discovery, Poole Nash, at the time a sophomore at BU, led a team of researchers to Martha’s Vineyard to record what her great-grandmother knew. “This is it,” Poole Nash says of the ten hours of videotape she collected. In all, she recorded 300 signs — the last of the once-ubiquitous language. “I wish I’d had my great-grandfather and his brother because they were very proficient signers. If we’d had them, we’d have the whole language.”

She did have her grandfather, who she had assumed was too young to have known the signs. “It turned out that his friend’s parents had a housekeeper who was deaf,” Poole Nash says, “and he used to go over there to eat lunch on school days, so he knew quite a lot.” On the black-and-white videotape, her grandfather sits facing the camera, a pipe dangling from his mouth to free his hands for forming signs: codfish, swordfish, scallop. The sign for swordfish, Poole Nash says, is “purely Martha’s Vineyard,” bearing little resemblance to the ASL sign. MVSL, she says, most likely preceded, or developed concurrently with, ASL.

	Joan Poole Nash (SED'80,'81), a teacher of the deaf and hard of hearing in Newton, Massachusetts, works with a student at the Franklin School.

Poole Nash has always been enchanted by the islanders’ stories portraying the hearing and the deaf interacting without boundaries. If there were social boundaries, they weren’t between the deaf and the hearing; when people gathered at the general store, for example, they congregated by gender. “The men would tell stories using their voices and sign language,” Poole Nash says, smiling, “but the punch line was always delivered in sign language if it was risqué.”

Most important about her research, Poole Nash says, was that it revealed a community where the deaf and the hearing were equals. Both hearing and deaf islanders were fluent signers, and no one in Chilmark considered deaf people disabled. Poole Nash recalls her great-grandmother’s response to those who referred to the deaf as handicapped. “Handicapped?” Emily Howland Poole said. “They weren’t handicapped. They were just deaf.”

“People in the deaf community were empowered by this,” says Poole Nash, who today teaches the deaf and hard of hearing, in Newton, Massachusetts. “For me, it moved from being a historical, linguistic project to being almost a deaf community affirmation. I am still very interested in my data, but the stories became much more important — a hope of deaf and hearing people getting along on equal terms rather than deaf people always struggling to try to be equal with hearing people.”

By the time Janis Cole moved to Martha’s Vineyard in the mid-1980s, MVSL had disappeared from the island. Cole (SED’93), who is deaf, lived on the Vineyard for two years, unaware of the island’s rich history in deaf culture. “There was nobody who signed at the time,” she says through an interpreter. “A long time ago, it was great, of course, but I was lonely, so I moved to Boston.”

In Boston, she worked as a caseworker at Deaf, Inc., for two years, then joined SED’s Deaf Studies Program, first as a graduate student and later as a faculty member. Now co-coordinator of the undergraduate program, Cole too feels that Poole Nash’s work is important to the deaf community. At SED, where students in the program are required to learn and communicate in ASL, she helps immerse students in both the language and the culture, emphasizing that future educators should not consider deafness a disability. “We are an ethnic group, if you will — a cultural, linguistic, minority group,” Cole says. “My famous statement is, ‘There is life after deaf.’ We have the same rights, the same everything that nondeaf people have — the only difference is that we do not hear. And not being able to hear is not important to us.”

Nor is being able to hear important on the second floor of 621 Commonwealth Avenue, the offices of the Deaf Studies Program. The halls are silent, and signs instruct the visitor that this is a signing floor and to “turn off your voice.” Because 30 percent of the classes are taught by deaf faculty, competency in ASL is required; spoken English is allowed only when no deaf people are present.

The program hasn’t always been ASL-intensive; twenty years ago, it taught oralism — deaf education through voice, residual hearing, and lipreading rather than sign language. Associate Professor Robert Hoffmeister, now the program’s director, arrived at SED in 1979, and along with Steve Nover and Ben Bahan, gave the program its bilingual-bicultural approach. Since then, about 300 students have completed the program, which now enrolls 50 to 60 students a year. Among other subjects, students study ASL literature, deaf culture and history, and ASL linguistics. The program also helps introduce students to deaf culture, which for most is a new concept. “It’s an amazing thing when you learn about the culture,” says Becca Blau-Shane (SED’99), “because it doesn’t occur to many people that it is a culture.”

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