Commentary: "Sounds Like Home: Growing Up Black and Deaf in the South" by Mary Herring Wright
"The nineteenth-century institution was a means of education as well as a separately organized place of education. It was conceived as a way to remove the afflicted-- the deaf, the blind, the insane, and the criminal-- 'from the streets' where they were wont to wander without constraint, and place them in more regimented environments."
— Inside Deaf Culture, Carol Padden, Tom Humphries. 2005.
Photo by me.
Mary Herring Wright (1924-2018) was a Black and Deaf writer and teacher who participated in the Black ASL Project, which researched the linguistic features that make Black ASL recognizable as a distinct variety of American Sign Language. Having attended the North Carolina School for the Colored Deaf and Blind (NCSCDB), Mary was deeply familiar with ‘Raleigh Sign Language’— a distinct North Carolina variety of Black American Sign Language primarily used by Black Deaf signers who has attended segregated schools for the deaf, making her position in the project invaluable. Her memoir, Sounds Like Home, mainly focuses on her school days at NCSCDB.
Mary writes about the NCSCDB in mixed language. On the one hand, her perspective on the school includes positive, warm memories— reminiscing about her friends, teachers, and all the mischief she and the other Black, Deaf girls would get into. Such chapters were followed by brief but idyllic summers at home on the farm with her family. However, peppered throughout are moments of political critique that are surprisingly blunt compared to Mary’s rosy interpretation of her growing up. Her “introduction into politics” came at school because of the nature of the school as an institution. It is this perspective that drew me to Mary Herring Wright’s memoir and, as such, I’d like to share a bit of what I learned from Mary.
Let’s start with an almost-protest.
Blind and Deaf Black students were kept separate at school, but Mary made a point to go to the Blind girls’ dorm and form relationships. There, she’d teach the Blind girls how to fingerspell, by forming the shape on her own hand and then allowing the Blind girls to feel the shape until they could form it themselves. They worked together to communicate. And it was because of this relationship that Mary was let in on their plan to protest the school.
"They said they were fed up with being treated like prisoners and wanted a new school system. They told of injustices by teachers and for me to tell the deaf girls and boys what they said, so we could all protest."
For some, the idea of students protesting their school may sound strange. “They should just be grateful they get an education at all,” you may think. “Kids love to complain; it probably wasn’t that bad,” may also pop to mind. If either of these sentiments occurred to you, then it’s time you learned about institutions and how they really work.
Carol Padden and Tom Humphries are two Deaf scholars and writers. (Click here to read my post about their work Deaf in America.) As evidenced by their quote at the top of this piece, they examine the role of Deaf schools as institutions, in alignment with the philosophy, values, and oppressive tactics utilized by other institutions (like prisons, asylums, nursing homes, etc.).
Padden and Humphries explain the origin of Deaf schools,
"The schools were first built in the early nineteenth century as a response to the problem of what to do about deaf children living among hearing people."
Inherent in this statement is the nascent need to categorize people and segregate them. At the time, due to urbanization, industrialization, and growing populations, people sought after ways to make space, primarily by institutionalizing “… 'ex-slaves', unemployed immigrants, vagrants, criminals, juvenile delinquents, poverty-stricken derelicts, and a raft of uneducated children…” (Padden), essentially those deemed lesser than. Said separation was under the guise of “care”, offering rehabilitation and education to those who needed such services but couldn’t access them without the state’s support. However, when one looks at the treatment given to those in institutions, it is clear that the reality fell far short of these humanistic goals.
Padden and Humphries write,
"Memories of schools for the deaf in the 1940s and 1950s are almost universally about irrational punishments, moving about in groups, standing in lines, fighting to get a second helping of dessert, waking in the morning to flashing lights and banging on metal beds, sharing showers and sinks. One Deaf man described his residential life with other boys as a 'Lord of the Flies' existence, where there were hierarchies of status among the boys, and punishments exerted from within the group of Deaf boys, as well as by their caretakers."
Mary describes her experience at NCSCDB in the 1930s similarly, often comparing her experience to jail,
"Outside we were lined up like soldiers and told to stand still until the breakfast bell rang…we marched in a single file across the grounds to another building… I was assigned to a seat but told to stand until time to sit down… Another march to chapel for devotion... then a march upstairs to the classrooms... At the noon bell, we marched downstairs for dinner-- another mess of something and a tin cup of water."
After her first year at school, Mary describes the experience of going home,
"GOING HOME! After nine months of jail life."
This regimented and drab schedule was only part of the story.
The imbalance of power endemic to institutions revealed itself to Mary through interactions with teachers and administrators. Upon arriving at school, Mary informed the teachers that she had completed fourth grade back at home, however, no one listened. She had to run the argument to a higher-up, take an exam, and present samples of her writing to prove that she was in the fifth grade. On another occasion, the school nurse told Mary that she had to have her tonsils removed, as the school was bringing in a doctor to perform the surgery on Deaf students (at the time, removing tonsils was seen as an avenue to address deafness). However, Mary’s tonsils had been removed the year before. When she told the nurse this, Mary was not believed. Mary feared she would have to go through the painful surgery again and for no reason, because they would inevitably discover that her tonsils were not there. Mary’s mother had to write to the school and the doctor who removed Mary’s tonsils had to be consulted.
These are but two examples of many where Mary, and other Deaf students like her, are rendered powerless and silent by the institution. Rather than listening to Mary, then perhaps following-up with her mother or doctor to confirm, the school bulldozed over Mary’s voice entirely, forcing her to take additional time, energy, and resources to prove herself. As Padden and Humphries so powerfully put it,
"Deaf people knew from long experience that hearing people were unresponsive to Deaf people's expression of their 'needs, wants, and desires,'..."
Such treatment was only exacerbated by racism.
Padden and Humphries explain,
"From the middle of the nineteenth century until desegregation began in 1955, every school for the deaf in the southern states made 'separate' arrangements based on race."
This arrangement, however, proved expensive, meaning that the Black students typically lived in worse conditions than their white counterparts, while also taking on manual labor that their white peers weren’t subjected to. For instance, at Mary’s school, she was assigned to laundry tasks, kitchen-duty, as well as waitressing for her own teachers. Such labor was labeled vocational training.
Mary witnessed the difference of treatment she and her other Black, Deaf peers experienced compared to white, Blind students, while on a field trip,
"Once, we went to a program in town at the school for the White blind children. Afterwards, we were given a tour of their campus and the differences between their school and ours were unbelievable. Instead of long rooms with rows of beds, all with white spreads and only shades at the windows, they lived in family-type houses with only a few bedrooms to each building and two or three to a room. Each house had a nice homey living room, a dining room with white tablecloths, and china, silverware, and glassware instead of the bare tabletops and metal plates and cups we were accustomed to. The bedrooms had pretty colored spreads and ruffled curtains. The auditorium was beautiful with a sloping floor, comfortable individual seats, and a stage with rich red velvet curtains and floodlights, plus a heated swimming pool and gym in another wing. Ours was a level floor with hard wooden benches and no stage or curtains."
This, Mary said, "... left us depressed and angry. That's why Flossie and Hill and a very few more were willing to help the blind girls with their protest."
Here, we have arrived back at the students’ organizing action. Mary doesn’t say what ever came of the blind girls’ protest idea, but she does highlight that an investigation took place after she left the NCSCDB, which resulted in some of the staff getting fired. During her time, Mary did take some of the students’ complaints to a trusted teacher.
"I also told her how we felt like prisoners, always watched and shut up, never allowed any freedom. She listened, and things changed; not a whole lot, but they did change. She started borrowing Mr. Mask's car and taking us... for rides into town... We were given permission to walk to the country store out on the highway in front of the school and buy snacks if we'd ask first."
In this sense, Mary was quite lucky. Other similar institutions were not so flexible. For other students, there may not have been a trusted teacher to turn to at all.
The small changes that Mary points to above speak to the rigidity of institutions. While, yes, those changes made it slightly less regimented and granted the students some pleasures, they did nothing to address the way that the staff disregarded what the students said, the low-paying or unpaid labor expected of them, and the overarching imbalance of power.
Yet, at the same time, there was joy. Throughout her memoir, Mary shares a number of stories where she felt immense pleasure and happiness. Witnessing Black girl joy in Mary’s own words added another dimension to my understanding of the complex dynamic between the student and the school.
Deaf students’ experiences in schools for the Deaf vacillate between a much-needed sense of community with others like themselves and a sense of powerlessness— a complicated relationship, which breeds a sort of double life.
Mary loved her school community and shared in her memoir that,
"It seemed I belonged to two different worlds-- the deaf and hearing. When I was in school, I was with others like myself and I knew what was being discussed and could just speak up and say what I thought. I fit in and was looked up to by my peers. I took pride in things I was capable of doing and I had fun with the other kids.”
For back in the hearing world at home, loneliness was quick to set in. Or, worse, anger and hurt at the harmful ways hearing people treated her. While her immediate family learned how to fingerspell so that they could better communicate while Mary was home, others in town weren’t so open.
"A few would catch my eye in a crowd and wiggle their fingers and giggle at each other. Some boys I didn't know even made obscene gestures. That hurt. I'd tell Mama and lay my head on her lap and cry and say I wasn't going out among hearing people anymore."
At the end of each summer, leaving home was an emotional experience for Mary, not just the first time she left for school but each and every time thereafter. And, at the end of the school year, she looked forward to going home, sometimes desperately. Yet, when the time came, Mary felt a similar homesickness for school and her friends.
"... somehow I felt a little sad [leaving school for summer], for I had made friends and I'd miss them."
After graduating, Mary was offered a teaching job at the NCSCDB and accepted. She enjoyed teaching and held an intimate relationship with her students, some of whom were her younger classmates. Padden and Humphries speak to the social role schools can play for Deaf students after graduation,
"… the schools also generated a stability that outlasted a student's school years. Many graduates remained close to the school, living in the same neighborhood."
For Mary, the stability offered after completing her primary education was important. It gave her some time to decide what she wanted to do next. She battled between the urge to stay there— a place she knew well— and the exciting desire to go out into the world and do something new. After a year of teaching, Mary chose the latter and the final page of her memoir includes a black and white photograph of her on top of a big motorcycle with a friend— ready to embark upon her own adventure.
What about schools for the Deaf today? Well, some things have changed.
Padden and Humphries write,
"The common experience of deaf students prior to the 1950s, when they endured long separations from home and family, has vanished. In the twenty-first century, the body of the deaf child now no longer belongs entirely to the school-- instead, responsibility for the child is shared by families, school districts, doctors, and other professionals, each competing for the child."
However, Deaf students still face struggles with self-determination. The schools remain institutions and are therefore plagued by similar problems that Mary faced, though different in our own age. By reading authors like Mary Herring Wright, we gain crucial knowledge to bring real care to educational spaces and to participate in liberatory movements led by disabled people.