From Pity to Pride: Growing Up Deaf in the Old South (review)

After Edward Pye Chamberlayne was struck and killed by a train in 1877, his mother and brother spoke of him as "a prisoner escaped, a sick man cured." By death was he "delivered from a present labor and sorrow, and from a future infinitely dark." Chamberlayne was deaf, a fate his family thought "surely the hardest ever laid on mortals." At his funeral, however, they glimpsed something about their son and brother that they had never known in all his fifty-six years: He had become a beloved and valued member of an extensive community both close-knit and far-flung. They were astounded to find the church filled with Deaf friends and acquaintances, some of them from the school that Chamberlayne had attended forty years before and others from around the country, and they were puzzled to see such heartfelt grief at the passing of someone they had thought lived "a life desolate and solitary" (2). They had known their assumptions about deafness better than they had known him.

Hannah Joyner's new book, From Pity to Pride: Growing Up Deaf in the Old South, describes prominent, well-to-do families in the antebellum South who saw their Deaf sons mostly in the stereotyped terms of tragedy and loss, which she then contrasts tellingly with the actual lives that these Deaf men themselves created. It is unfortunate that she has not given us an account of Deaf Southerners beyond white men from elite backgrounds, but the decision had largely to do with the availability of records. Given this limitation, Joyner does her best to make a virtue of necessity. Because Southern society was rigidly hierarchical and family status all important, she focuses on the question of what happened when elite-born men in this patriarchal society turned out to be Deaf. Ordinarily they would have occupied positions of respect and authority, but deafness made all the difference. Rather than becoming patriarchs of extended families, influential landowners serving in local politics, and established businessmen with seats on boards of trustees, they instead had to carve out lives and vocations outside of the usual mode of inheritance.

The themes of alienation from families and hard-won independence frame the personal stories that Joyner tells. Chamberlayne lived a life of manual labor though he came from an elite family. David Tillinghast, whose story is recounted in detail, left the family estate to attend school in New York, after graduation choosing to stay on as a teacher rather than return home. Jefferson Trist became a teacher at his alma mater, the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, and a leader in the Philadelphia Deaf community. There he helped to organize a literary society and St. Ann's Church for the Deaf, performing within the Deaf community just the kinds of patrician duties that, had he been hearing, he would have performed in the local society of his family home.

Until now, American Deaf histories have focused on the northern states, the northeast in particular. Joyner's book, however limited in terms of race, class, and gender, provides us with our first look at what it was like to grow up Deaf in the antebellum South. In the most fundamental ways, deafness meant much the same in the South that it did in the North. Deaf people formed social groups in which visual language and other cultural practices appropriate to a visual people could flourish. Within these groups, Deaf people found acceptance and learned to value their identities, becoming, in other words, not merely deaf but Deaf. Hearing people, for their part, saw deafness as tragedy, and they imagined lives passed in silence and misery. Both Northerners and Southerners in the nineteenth century, in spite of broad cultural differences, responded to deafness in much the same way. Indeed, the literature...