The People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry (19 page)

Curiously, the first deed of land to the Browns on record was for 100 acres to NahumD, who was only 17. Perhaps his father could not afford to buy land some four years after moving to Henniker, and it was NahumDs mother's family who bought the land and gave it to NahumD, endeavoring to provide for their Deaf grandchild. Or perhaps, given his debts, NahumDs father thought that deeding the land to his son was safer. Thomas Brown died when he was eighty-two-old enough to outlive two of his three wives; to attend the marriage of his son NahumD to Abiah Eastman, a hearing woman of the town; to witness the birth of their daughter, PersisD, in 1800 and their son, ThomasD, in 1804; and old enough to learn of the opening of the first school for the Deaf (in Hartford, in 1817). His grandson ThomasD enrolled there five years later.

As a young man in Henniker, NahumD did not wear shoes; in order to chop wood, he stood on warm planks in the doorway of his family cabin. The many chores he performed as the lone male child prepared him for a life of responsibility and labor. According to his son ThomasD, he worked hard from dawn to dusk and was known as a good parent and neighbor.8 He never learned to read or write. He communicated in pantomime or "natural sign." His wife served as his interpreter and helped him in such activities as buying and selling cattle. Like his father, NahumD had a long life, dying at age eighty-eight. He raised his two Deaf children, PersisD and ThomasD, saw them marry and give him five grandchildren, three of whom were Deaf. The next generation brought nine great-grandchildren, five of them Deaf. In an era when the arrival of a Deaf child was most often attributed to maternal fright, NahumD and his family must surely have been puzzled.9 NahumD saw his son ThomasD graduate from school, among the first Deaf-mutes in the nation to do so, and emerge as a preeminent Deaf leader, beginning in mid-century. Five years before NahumDs death, a group of son ThomasD's Deaf friends gathered in the Brown household to draft a constitution for the first enduring Deaf organization in America, the New England Gallaudet Association of Deaf-Mutes (NEGA). NahumDs sight had begun to fail. He suffered from severe headaches and became blind in one eye and then the other. "During his helpless and blind situation," his son ThomasD related, "he would sign for [us] to come and see what he wanted. With his arms moving slowly, he understood the movement of our hands."10 One day, he signaled for his wife to come near; with her hands upon him, the common ancestor of the Brown - Swett -Sanders clan, passed peacefully away.

In 1822, when Thomas BrownD was eighteen-a slender, powerful man with a large head, gray eyes, and a facial tic from a childhood encounter with an ox-he enrolled at the American Asylum. The town of Henniker voted annually to pay his educational expenses, until the state legislature undertook to pay for Deaf-mute pupils from New Hampshire.1' ThomasD and his elder sister, PersisD, were both considered bright-ThomasD was "shrewd, wild but not vicious"-and both could no doubt have attended the school, but PersisD was bound by a marriage contract to a hearing carpenter from Henniker, Bela Mitchell Swett, and was not free to join her brother.12 ThomasD studied under the cofounders of American Deaf education, C1ercD and Gallaudet, and under an intellectual leader of the profession, Harvey Peet, who would later direct the New York school for the Deaf.13 ThomasD, we are told, was an excellent student; at the completion of his five-year course, he agreed to stay on for two years as monitor and carpentry instructor. However, at the end of that period, twenty-five years old, he declined to become a teacher at the Ohio school for the Deaf and returned instead to Henniker to help his parents work their 123 acres.

In view of ThomasD tireless efforts in later years to organize Deaf people, to honor their leaders past and present, and to promote Deaf interests, one wonders to what extent and in what ways his years at the American Asylum developed his early consciousness of Deaf people as a distinct group. The Central Society of the Deaf in Paris, with its annual banquets celebrating Deaf language, history, and leaders, began shortly after Thomas left school, so he could not have learned about it while he was a pupil of ClercDs, though no doubt he learned of it subsequently for it was clear to American educators of the Deaf that their methods derived from the French, and transatlantic visits were made in both directions.14 Perhaps the sense of Deaf people as a distinct group was in the very air at the American Asylum in the 1820s. After all, a single language was emerging that connected Deaf people despite wide differences among them in region, family circumstances, isolation, and former methods of communication; with it, a sense of we-who-speakthis-language might naturally have emerged. Indeed, the first initiative for creating a Deaf state was organized by a group of seniors at the American Asylum just two years after ThomasD left.15 The initiative was, however, short-lived.

One of the scattered enclaves of Deaf people that were gathered and to some extent amalgamated by the schooling of their number at the American Asylum was the Deaf population of Martha's Vineyard; more pupils came from there than from any other single locale.16 While at school, ThomasD met Mary SmithD, whose family came from the Vineyard, where Deaf people-especially in some remote communities "up island," such as Tisbury and Chilmark-were quite common. Three years after his return to his father's farm in Henniker, ThomasD made the journey to the coast, where he took a boat for the Vineyard, six miles off the Massachusetts shore, and then traveled a day on horseback to arrive at the village of Chilmark, where he and MaryD were married (April 1, 1832) in the presence of her many Deaf and hearing relatives and friends. (More about Mary SmithD and other Deaf people on the Vineyard in the next chapter.)

ThomasD and MaryD settled on his parents' farm; his father was sixty, his mother sixty-six and strong hands were sorely needed. More than that, Thomas brought to the task many natural gifts. He was a good horseman. He drove his own oxen and won prizes at the county fairs in Concord, New Hampshire, for drawing a load with a large boulder, over a ton, the allotted distance. He won awards for plowing, and for his colts, and MaryD drew a premium of $2 for a nice lot of cheese she had prepared.17 He raised cattle and poultry, grew fruit, wheat, and hay. Thomas divided the large farm into lots of pasturage, tillage, orchard, woodland, etc., and each lot had a name. Those that have come down to us were figures in Deaf education such as Gallaudet, ClercD, and Peet.18 He kept his accounts carefully. He was frugal, practical, methodical.19 Sometimes it was very hard: there were years of early and severe frosts that killed the crops; there were seasons extremely dry, when small fruit withered and fell from the trees and clouds of grasshoppers settled on the fields, devouring everything.20

Deaf people, like their hearing contemporaries, found it beneficial and at times imperative to work together as an extended family. Deaf bonding, based on shared language and way of life, made frontier life bearable, even rewarding. In addition to ThomasD s father, NahumD, and sister, PersisD, there were PersisD's and Bela's two Deaf sons, Thomas B. SwettD (called NahumD in honor of his grandfather), born the year Thomas BrownD went off to school, and William B. SwettD, two years older (See Fig. 2, BrownD Pedigree). In 1837, Thomas B. SwettD went to the American Asylum and Mary BrownD lost her hearing daughter, Charlotte, to illness, only a year old. Then, two years later, William SwettD went off to school and MaryD gave birth to a Deaf son, Thomas Lewis BrownD. On return from Hartford, the Swett boys took Deaf wives. WilliamD married Margaret HarringtonD, from Ireland, whose Deaf brother had also married into a large Deaf family. WilliamD had a colorful career as an explorer, showman, mechanic, writer, and artist, before settling down. They had three hearing children two of whom died quite young, and two Deaf daughters who married Deaf men. WilliamD s brother, Thomas SwettD, and his wife Ruth StearnsD of Bradford, Maine, had three Deaf children and one hearing. ThomasD was a farmer and mechanic, RuthD a factory worker.

As many ethnic groups did, Deaf people tended both to marry within their ethnic group and to hire workers from their group. The Swetts lodged a Deaf carpenter who owned the blind and sash company where WilliamD B. worked. Sometimes Deaf workmen would live on the Brown farm-for example, Joel Lovejoy, one of the Deaf Lovejoys from Concord, New Hampshire, (see Chapter 8) and Josiah SmithD, with Deaf relatives in Hillsboro, New Hampshire. There was also a Deaf couple nearby, named the GovesD, who were close friends. (Abigail Clark GoveD was from two towns away, New Boston, where there was the Deaf Smith clan, good friends of the BrownsD.) So it was quite a little Deaf society that worked and celebrated together and prayed together at the interpreted services in the Congregational Church.21 However, the Deaf society centered in Henniker extended into nearby towns. Thomas BrownD socialized with Thomas HeadD and his family in Hooksett and with NEGA member George KentD and others in Amherst (both two towns away from Henniker); Mrs. HeadD was from a large Deaf family in nearby Francestown, one town away from Henniker.22 In his notebooks devoted to genealogical studies of the Deaf, Alexander Graham Bell lists all the Deaf persons in New Hampshire according to the Seventh Census, conducted in 1850.23 Including only towns that are contiguous to Henniker, or at one remove, we find an additional thirteen Deaf residents, for a total of twenty-seven including Henniker itself.

A different gauge of the size of the Deaf-World in and around Henniker may be had from the 1887 publication of cumulative enrollments at the American Asylum since its opening in 1817. There were six children enrolling from Henniker and an additional thirty-eight from townships contiguous or at one remove, for a total of forty-four. Both the census and enrollment measures are in one respect underestimates of the Henniker Deaf enclave, since participants could certainly live more than two towns away and, indeed, with the coming of the railroads, they could live a considerable distance away. On the other hand, presumably not all Deaf people within easy reach of Henniker chose to participate in its social life.

As we recounted earlier, BrownD had the idea, at mid-nineteenth century, to assemble in Hartford a large gathering of Deaf people to pay tribute to Gallaudet and C1ercD. When he asked for contributions, "the flame of love ran like a prairie fire through the hearts of the whole Deaf-mute band, scattered though they were through various parts of the country" and $600 was soon raised (that's about $17,000 today, according to the Consumer Price Index).24 Four hundred Deaf people witnessed the presentation of the symbolic pitchers. A few years later, Deaf representatives from each of the New England states gathered in Henniker to write a constitution for the New England Gallaudet Association, as we have told; some were lodged in the BrownD home, others at the SwettsD, still others at the GovesD. Thomas BrownD was chosen president of the new organization, which convened at the same time as the Gallaudet monument unveiling, in Hartford. The second biennial meeting of the NEGA took place in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1856.25 There were forty-four members from Massachusetts (including four Mayhews and three Tiltons from Chilmark, Martha's Vineyard; see Chapter 6); thirty-four from New Hampshire (mostly from towns close to Henniker); eleven from Maine, and fifty-eight from other states. It was at this meeting that the eminent Deaf minister and teacher, Job TurnerD, dubbed Thomas BrownD "the mute Cincinnatus of Americans," since he was so ready to drop his plough and come to the aid of his fellow mutes. The honorific, Mute Cincinnatus, stuck.26 The third biennial NEGA meeting was held in Worcester Massachusetts, and the fourth in 1860 at the American Asylum, as mentioned earlier.27 BrownD gave the presidential oration.

Just at the time when his network of Deaf friends and associates was the strongest yet, Thomas BrownD, age fifty-six, suffered a series of personal losses. The year before, he had lost his father, NahumD, age eighty-seven, who gradually became blind and helpless. Then, two years later, his wife MaryD died, sixty-one years old, after an excruciating, year-long illness. Some months later, death took his mother, Abiah, age eighty-five. Then Bela SwettD, and Bela's hearing grandchildren, William B. SwettD s children, died. Deeply depressed at the loss of his children, WilliamD left to pursue the life of an adventurer and guide in the White Mountains. ThomasD son, Thomas Lewis BrownD, age twenty, graduated from the American Asylum and accepted a position as teacher in the Deaf and Dumb Asylum at Flint, Michigan. It was not uncommon in that era for a widower to remarry; ThomasD married Sophia Curtis, a hearing member of one of the large Deaf families in southern Maine. (We'll come back to the Curtises in Chapter 10.)

Thomas continued his life as a farmer-and Deaf leader. In 1866, the NEGA met in Hartford to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the American Asylum. Some 500 people saw BrownD give the presidential address, in which he announced that, after twelve years of service, he would resign in favor of his vice-president, George WingD of Bangor, Maine.28 Two years later, the Deaf-Mutes' Friend (successor to the National Deaf-Mute Gazette) published a letter from Thomas BrownD proposing a national convention of Deaf-mutes. According to an eminent Deaf teacher and journalist who endorsed the suggestion in the following issue, BrownD had first made this proposal "to the convention in Syracuse in 1865"-no doubt the meeting of the Empire State Association of Deaf-Mutes.29 A year later, ThomasD sister, PersisD, died, as did Laurent C1ercD.30

ThomasD, sixty-five years old, won awards at the state fair and cattle show. His son, Thomas LewisD, came home from Michigan to host a large birthday party for his father. Just as the Gazette reassured its readers that BrownD's new wife knew sign language, so the Friend explained to its readers that one of the storytellers at the birthday party "although a hearing man, is a very good sign-maker."31 In 1874, BrownD took on the presidency of the Clerc Monument Association,.32 and four years later he founded the Granite State Deaf-Mute Mission and was elected president.33 William B. SwettD followed in his uncle's footsteps in promoting Deaf welfare: he published (with William ChamberlainD) the Deaf-Mutes' Friend; he was a director of the Deaf-Mute Library Association; he was business manager of the Boston Deaf-Mute Mission34; and he founded a school of industrial arts for Deaf adults, which shortly added an educational program for Deaf children; it continues today as the Beverly School for the Deaf (formerly the New England Industrial School for Deaf Mutes).35 Thomas BrownD was a trustee of the school in its early years.36 In 1880, the first national convention of the Deaf in America was convened just as BrownD had proposed-except for the venue: it was held in Cincinnati, not Hartford; at that meeting was founded the preeminent national organization of the Deaf to this day, the National Association of the Deaf. BrownD, then seventy-six years old, could not attend. He did, however, attend the meeting in New York in 1884, and then traveled to the Vineyard with his son Thomas LewisD, to visit the friends of his late wife.37