Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard by Nora Ellen Groce (review)

Summer 1986 Review Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard by Nora Ellen Groce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1985. x + 169 pp. $17.50. How would a bilingual community -- in which "every resident... learns to talk with fingers as early as with his tongue..." actually function on a daily basis? (p. 75) In her slim volume, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard (EHSSL), Nora Ellen Groce offers a glimpse into such a community. She presents a friendly, concise, and informative look at Martha's Vineyard between the 1600s and the 1900s. During these years, the Vineyard contained a sizeable deaf community, because of a recessive gene for deafness in many early settlers and a high incidence of intermarriage within a small gene pool. "In the nineteenth century, and presumably earlier, one American in every 5,728 was born deaf, but on the Vineyard the figure was one in every 155." (p. 3 and note 4)1 As a consequence the Island came to have a population fluent in Sign and English. It was a true meeting of two worlds usually separated by a communication barrier. Flourishing for three centuries, this situation dissipated with the establishment of residential schools for the deaf on the mainland and a change in marriage patterns. EHSSL is given both charm and strength through its @ 1986 by Linstok Press, Inc. See inside front cover. ISSN 0302-1475 SLS 51 Review : 184 emphasis on oral history. Indeed, within two years of the start of Groce's research more than half of her informants had died. Without her work much of the knowledge of everyday interactions within the bilingual Vineyard community would be lost. Stories such as the following rarely find their way into town records: We would sit around and wait for the mail to come in and just talk. And the deaf would be there, everyone would be there. And they were part of the crowd, and they were accepted. They were fishermen and farmers and everything else. And they wanted to find out the news just as much as the rest of us. And often times people would tell stories and make signs at the same time so everyone could follow him together. Of course, sometimes, if there were more deaf than hearing there, everyone would speak sign language -just to be polite, you know. (p. 60) There was this one (deaf) lady, and oh, she was a mean one! I was going to trade a horse with her husband one time, and I went into the house to talk to him. She didn't want that horse traded, and boy, did she scream at me (in sign language)! The whole neighborhood still remembers that fight she had with her sister-in-law down here on the road. Her sister-in-law could hear fine, but she could sure hold her own fighting in the sign language too, I'll tell ya.... (p. 92) Oh, (you'd see the deaf) all over town. Now Eben Brewer he loved to play cards. He was a farmer more or less, but he loved to play cards and checkers and games. Very good at games... very good card player. Of course, they had signs for when they were playing cards, for when we were playing cards, for different suits.... Yes, that's what we used to do, because'I played cards with them over in the, well, it was the Chilmark store. (p. 91) The many stories in EHSSL speak of how sign SLS 51 Summer 1986 Review : 185 language was learned, incorporated into church services, and even used among hearing friends when it was more convenient than speaking. Along with these tales Groce has assembled extensive notes, maps, flow charts, and statistics based on data collected in America and England. She makes us privy to the many problems involved with work relying on oral and written records. The book is not merely a compilation of octogenarians' reminiscences on the "good old days;" rather it is a well-researched and fully documented study of a world in which hearing and deaf lived side by side in a truly...