The People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry (24 page)

6 S. Winata, I. Arhya, S. Moeljopawiro, J. Hinnant, Y. Liang, and T. Friedman, "Congenital Non-Syndromal Autosomal Recessive Deafness in Bengkala, an Isolated Balinese Village," Journal of Medical Genetics 32 (1995): 336-343.

7 Following Branson, Miller, and Marsaja: J. Branson, D. Miller, and G. Marsaja "Everyone Here Speaks Sign Language, Too: A Deaf Village In Bali, Indonesia," in C. Lucas, ed., Multicultural Aspects of Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1996), 39-57.

s J. Hinnant, "Music to their Eyes, Deaf Life And Performance in a Balinese Village" (paper delivered at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md., October 12, 1998); J. Hinnant, "Adaptation To Deafness in a Balinese Community," in C. Berlin and B. Keats, eds., Hearing Loss and Genetics (San Diego, Calif.: Singular Publishing Group, 2000); Branson, Miller, and Marsaja, "Everyone Here."

9 Branson, Miller, and Marsaja, "Everyone Here," quotation from p. 42.

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Having explored the contributions of southeastern New Hampshire and Martha's Vineyard to the founding of the Deaf-World in America, our investigation turned to the state of Maine for several reasons. Many Deaf families on Martha's Vineyard migrated to Maine. Intermarriage among the Vineyard families continued there, while some of the settlers gave up and returned to the Vineyard, and still others married into unrelated Deaf families. Thus, Maine had a significant hereditary Deaf population. In the 1850 census, 266 individuals in Maine were identified as "Deaf and Dumb." (There were also 57 people identified solely as "Deaf." ) Further, Maine sent a considerable number of students to the American Asylum in the nineteenth century-387-exceeded in New England only by Massachusetts and Connecticut. Thus the Maine Deaf population was substantial but of manageable size for systematic study. We refer to families with hereditarily Deaf members as "Deaf families" since, even if parents and siblings are overtly hearing, they are part of the Deaf family, for they are carriers of the Deaf trait; they pass Deaf ethnicity in its physical expression to later generations and they may pass elements of Deaf ethnic culture as well: they are likely to have developed some manual communication and to know other Deaf families, even to marry into them.'

On the Vineyard, Deaf families and hearing families were all bound to one another by marriage, language, and circumstances, especially those of island life. In Maine, however, marriage with hearing people was much less likely as relatively fewer hearing people were related to Deaf people or knew their language. Instead, on the mainland, Deaf people married other Deaf people most of the time and, when they married a hearing person, that person usually had Deaf parents or relatives. The result was that most Deaf households were enmeshed in a Deaf kinship network. Marriage with a person of one's own kind in an environment of otherness creates a heightened consciousness of shared identity and destiny in that group and ensures the transmission of language and culture to successive generations. We hypothesize that the links among Deaf families created by intermarriage were a key factor in founding the Deaf-World ethnic group. If this is correct, it conforms to Anthony Smith's description of the formation of ethnic groups:

As men and women interpret and express their collective experiences, within any grouping or population thrown together by circumstance, these interpretations and expressions are crystallized over time and handed down to the next generations who modify them according to their own experiences and interaction. Thus there arise ethnic features formed out of these experiences and interpretations, which in turn limit and condition the interactions and perceptions of succeeding generations, through the temporal and spatial configuration of the collectivity and through the shared meanings which inform and guide the activities of its members. As a result, the features of an ethnic community take on a binding exterior quality for any member or generation, independent of their perceptions and will. They possess a quality of historicity that itself becomes an integral part of subsequent ethnic interpretations and expressions.2

We suggest that the circumstance that drew Deaf people together initially was the battle for survival in a hostile environment that required shared values and ways of communicating. This bonding was reinforced and formalized in Deaf-Deaf marriages, which had the effect of increasing numbers of the Deaf, validating the Deaf experience of each by comparison with others, and offering the Deaf child a greater opportunity for instruction in language and culture by Deaf peers and Deaf adult in-laws. The "ethnic interpretations and expressions" that take on a quality of historicity, to which Smith refers, are those of Deaf culture, expressed in Deaf language, and passed down by each generation to the next.

To examine the accuracy of this hypothesis, in Part III we focus on Deaf families and their intermarriage in the northernmost Deaf enclave-the Sandy River Valley and the surrounding region. Deaf enclaves further south are examined in Part IV. (The division between north and south, roughly at the level of Lewiston, Maine, is largely arbitrary, in part because there was extensive river travel north and south). In Parts III and IV we review some family pedigrees selected for their interconnections with other Deaf families, for the large number of Deaf people in them, or both. Pedigrees for all of these families and many more appear on the website (http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/ dv/DEA; see the Every Name Index, Appendix D). For 16 key families, pedigrees reduced to their "bare bones" for legibility are also presented in this volume; the fuller version is on the website.

In creating diffuse enduring solidarity among Deaf people, intermarriage was a very powerful institution, but it was only one of several. There were, in addition, several organizations of the Deaf that created and reinforced links among Maine Deaf individuals and families in the nineteenth century. They did this by providing the sheer joy of ethnic solidarity, as well as opportunities to use the sign language, and to accomplish good works for the Deaf-World. Among organizations that promoted the formation of the Deaf-World in Maine, the earliest and most influential was the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb at Hartford, founded in 1817, which offered its students language, culture, friends, education, a trade, and often a partner for life. Students spent from one to ten years at the residential school.

Four Deaf gatherings at the Asylum drew former students and their spouses from throughout the nation. The first of these was the 1850 meeting, described earlier, honoring Gallaudet and ClercD. The highlights of the 1854 meeting were the unveiling of the Gallaudet statue and the founding of the New England Gallaudet Association of DeafMutes. We described the organization and development of the NEGA earlier, in conjunction with the life of Thomas BrownD, its first presi- dent.3 The 1860 meeting, the fourth NEGA convention, was notable for its large attendance and Deaf cultural events. Finally, the 1866 meeting at the Asylum, on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, was also the seventh convention of the NEGA. We have cited the NEGA repeatedly as it was a significant force in uniting the Deaf in Maine and reinforcing ethnic solidarity. Its fifth convention in 1862 met in Portland, Maine, and it continued to meet biennially with rare interruption until 1976.

Another influential institution was the Governor Baxter School for the Deaf at Falmouth, now Portland, founded in 1876. The fourth such institution was the Maine Deaf-Mute Mission ("the Mission"), founded by the Congregational Church in 1877.4 Their pastor was Samuel RoweD, a Deaf missionary (on whom more later). Fifth, the meetings of the National Association of the Deaf brought Deaf people together, starting in 1880, on a national level but attendance from Maine was sparse in the nineteenth century.

The Asylum gatherings give a glimpse of the trades its graduates took up: occupation was recorded on registration. Seven returning graduates from Maine gave farmer as their occupation; there were five cabinetmakers, four factory workers, four shoemakers, three joiners, three mechanics, three equipment operators; one printer, a clerk, a teacher, a weaver, and a house worker. The Maine Deaf-Mute Mission was the institution that attracted the largest number of Maine Deaf adults. In addition to providing organized worship in sign language, the Mission afforded its members, gathered from all parts of Maine, the rare opportunity to be with others of the same ethnicity, enhancing the members' sense of Deaf identity.

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In the period after the American Revolution several of the families on Martha's Vineyard-among them, Tiltons, Smiths, and Mayhews- decided to migrate to southeastern Maine. The extensive land required for sheep raising on the Vineyard was becoming scarce with the growing population. The war had crippled the whaling industry, which was increasingly centered in the south Pacific. And Massachusetts offered to any settler in Maine 150 acres on a river at a dollar an acre or 100 acres free but away from a water course, provided he would clear sixteen of those acres within four years. More lands were given away to pay Revolutionary soldiers.' Some Vineyard soldiers who had traveled through Maine to fight the French brought back word of its wealth of natural resources. The first settlers from the Vineyard went to the Sandy River Valley in western central Maine; abundantly forested, it contained all sorts of game and streams that teemed with fishes such as trout and salmon. Other Vineyarders soon followed, starting in 1766 but especially in the years 1789 to 1794, creating the towns of, notably, New Vineyard and New Sharon but also dozens more. These pioneers remained in contact with their families on the Vineyard; people and letters traveled in both directions, encouraging more migration.2 There were twenty-seven Deaf pupils enrolled at the American Asylum between its opening and 1887 who gave one of the thirty towns in the region of the Sandy River as their residence.

Putting down roots in the Valley was a daunting challenge, in travel and in settlement. First there was the seagoing voyage from the Vineyard to the mouth of the Kennebec River, some two hundred miles. From there, people, food, cows, sheep, hay, firewood all traveled by river.3 Some settlers traveled in the spring when they could haul sleds on the snow. If the season is right, the crust can be very hard and thick so large animals will not break through. The president of the NEGA and educator of the Deaf, George WingD, recounted in a letter: "I just returned from an eighteen mile drive; it's awful cold... . The cause of my thus exceeding a Sabbath's day journey was the arrival of my cousin... . I had taken him in a sleigh and put him through over the road as near [illegible] as the snow would permit."4

In warmer weather, boats carried early settlers. In 1791 about a dozen families from the Vineyard debarked at Hallowell, put all their belongings on oxcart, and went by foot to the Sandy River town of New Vineyard, a trudge of some forty miles as the crow flies. So poor were the roads that a horseman with a light load could make no more than ten miles a day.5 On arrival, the settler had to cut and burn clearings, build a log cabin, and plant a crop, while braving extreme weather, wild animals, and frequent illness. Cabins built in the Sandy River Valley had roofs of hemlock or spruce bark, held with long poles. The cracks were filled with moss on the inside and plastered with clay on the outside. Chimneys were made of stones laid in a clay mortar. It wasn't like the home the settlers had left on the Vineyard, but it would have to do.6

Six Deaf families illustrate the migration from the Vineyard to the Sandy River Valley.

THE SMITH-PARKHURST CLAN

We saw earlier, examining Mary SmithD s paternal lineage, that her great-grandfather was Elijah Smith (1716-1802), scion of English Smiths and Parkhursts. This Elijah, a master mariner, had two sons, both farmers, Elijah and Harlock, who decided to break from island life on the Vineyard and seek their fortunes in the wilderness Maine territory, in the Sandy River Valley (see Fig. 6, Smith-Parkhurst pedigree).? Of the two brothers, Elijah Smith was the first to go. His wife Hannah Mayhew had died; he married her second cousin, Matilda Mayhew, and in 1791 they moved first to Farmington, Maine, later to New Sharon, nine miles away, both on the banks of the Sandy River. Many families lived in the Sandy River Plantation (Farmington) before going on to their homesteads in New Vineyard, New Sharon, or Industry. Elijah and Hannah's oldest son, Benjamin, had been living in Chilmark with his wife Ruhama Mayhew and three small children when he, too, decided to move to New Sharon; its first settler had arrived only eight years earlier. Benjamin and Ruhama were founders of the Congregational Church there. They had thirteen children in all, two of them Deaf-HannahD and ElijahD Smith. HannahD attended the American Asylum but left after a year to marry her cousin, Benjamin MayhewD, who was too old to have attended the Asylum. This couple had two Deaf children, BenjaminD and JaredD Mayhew, both of whom attended the American Asylum. Benjamin MayhewD settled on the Vineyard, where he was known as "one-arm Ben" because he lost a hand in a mowing machine accident as a boy; his name-sign was a flat palm "slicing" on the other wrist. (Note that lacking a hand was a more salient characteristic than being Deaf.) BenjaminD was a fisherman but kept a cow and a horse. He was a skilled marksman and rower (he made a harness for his stump). He married a hearing cousin, Harriet West, who had numerous Deaf nephews and nieces, and they had three hearing children.8

JaredD Mayhew, BenjaminD's brother, went to the American Asylum when he was eleven and his brother twelve. In the admission process, JaredD laid claim to Deaf parents, a Deaf brother, five Deaf uncles, and five Deaf aunts. On entering the school in, respectively, 1864 and 1858, both boys gave Chilmark as their residence, suggesting that their parents or grandparents had moved back to the Vineyard. In maturity, Jared MayhewD owned several hundred acres of land on the Vineyard, a herd of dairy cattle, and a large flock of sheep. His wife was hearing as was their daughter Ethyl and her husband. JaredD and his wife were pillars of the Methodist church, where his wife interpreted the sermons.9