Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson (review)

While all individuals have a story, not all individuals’ stories offer great insights about American history. This account of Junius Wilson’s life (1908–2001) provides a devastating critique of North Carolina social norms and policies (especially attitudes to the deaf and to African Americans), court operations, state institutionalization and treatment of the insane, and access to justice. Mr. Wilson was “incarcerated in an insane asylum merely because he was deaf, black, and poor, and bureaucratic inertia and staff paternalism helped keep him there for [more than] sixty-five years” (129). Not only was he imprisoned physically but also he was isolated culturally since he was denied access to other members of his language community, the deaf African American signers who shared his regional dialect of American Sign Language. In addition, Mr. Wilson suffered the physical indignity of castration in 1932, approved by the state government decree, “An Act to Provide for the Sterilization of the Mentally Defective and Feeble-Minded Inmates of Charitable and Penal Institutions of the State of North Carolina” (47). This law was enacted in 1929 and deemed unconstitutional within four years, but in that time period, Junius Wilson and forty-eight other individuals were “sterilized.”

This horrifying narrative is compassionately presented by the two authors, who were unable to interview Junius Wilson because of his death in 2001. Unfortunately, he had few means of documenting his own life, and his history exists mainly in the form of a few photographs and the words and memories of others.

Interviewing at least twenty-four named individuals and fifteen anonymous speakers, some of them multiple times between September 2001 and March 2006, Burch was able to obtain reminiscences of Wilson’s life. She accessed other details from court, hospital, and other public accounts, and from Wilson’s papers, including his medical and legal records, which a family member provided to the authors. By these means, Burch and Joyner recreate the history of a man whose story was misunderstood, suppressed, and inaccurately recorded for decades. Wilson’s individual narrative is connected to the larger historical events of his times, and his story provides insights into the terrible personal costs of inappropriate public policies.

The book consists of eleven well-written chapters, concluding with extensive notes and bibliographic resources. The chapters present his life, organized in blocks of time, and placed in historical context, focusing on ethnic relations in North Carolina, and the history of disability, especially Deaf Culture in this nation. The authors are to be congratulated for their outstanding contribution to African American Deaf Cultural history.

This account begins with the birth of Junius Wilson and his youthful years, presenting his family and community dynamics, and his incredible luck in attending the “residential North Carolina School for the Colored Blind and Deaf in Raleigh” (18), at age eight, where he learned to sign. Sadly, he was expelled from the school after eight years, when he got lost during a community outing and did not return to the institution for several hours. This unfortunate event had long-lasting negative outcomes since his poor reading and writing abilities isolated him further from the nonsigning world, which included his family. In the second chapter, the authors detail the communication difficulties with his extended family, including the charge that he attempted to rape a relative. Later interviews with family members suggest that this event was likely a misunderstanding of his attempts at deaf communication, which includes touching and gestures. Family members probably also were concerned about his ability to live safely in the Jim Crow South since whites almost certainly would have misinterpreted his behavior (normal in Deaf Culture) as insolence, which could be fatal. Incarceration provided some degree of safety to Junius Wilson, although his family could never have anticipated police, court, and doctors’ failure to document his hearing disability, resulting in his long-term placement in the Goldsboro State Hospital for the Colored Insane, beginning in 1925...