“Where’s the Dummy?”: Deafness, Race, and Labor in Delores Phillips’s The Darkest Child

Delores Phillips’s novel The Darkest Child (2004), which features one of the few representations of deafness in African American literature, has been largely overlooked in literary criticism. Phillips’s depiction of Martha Jean challenges a long-standing tradition of deaf characters and deaf-related imagery as negative. Yet, Martha Jean is not a marginal character, nor merely a symbol or metaphor. Rather, as I show, Martha Jean constitutes a character of complex embodiment who complicates preconceived notions of Black and deaf people as “burdens” on society. Trapped under a system of capitalism which values labor, ability, and profit, Martha Jean’s mother, Rozelle, considers her a burden, forcing her into a sort of indentured servitude in the domestic sphere—cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the babies that Rozelle continues to have. However, the article maintains that Martha Jean uses her position in the domestic sphere in order to reorder and redefine those terms. Ultimately, the suggestion is that by centering deafness and a deaf experience, Phillips exposes complex aspects of the novel which might otherwise be obscured. Through complicating issues surrounding literacy and education, and larger systems of racism, sexism, capitalism, and ableism, Phillips imagines a multiplicity of Black experiences in the Jim Crow South.

Introduction

In their assessment of the literature of Black deaf history from the 1980s to the present, scholars Glenn B. Anderson and Lindsay Dunn assert that the 1980s served as the beginning of the “black Deaf renaissance” (72). Featuring the publication of Ernest Hairston and Linwood Smith’s Black and Deaf in America: Are We That Different (1983), the 1980s placed into the public sphere a Black way of signing. The 1990s witnessed the Black Deaf renaissance evolve “outward from the black Deaf community to the mainstream of Deaf America” (73). Memoirs such as Mary Herring Wright’s Sounds like Home: Growing up Black and Deaf in the South (1999) have been instrumental in documenting Black and Deaf experiences. Finally, the 2000s to the present have experienced a rise of a “dynamic collective of black Deaf scholars and leaders” (75). Anderson and Dunn situate their historical assessment within the past thirty-five years because of such burgeoning scholarship in diverse disciplines that consider Black deaf experiences,¹ yet considering how deafness features in other creative genres of Black writing can also expand this history.

Delores Phillips’s The Darkest Child (2004) features one of the most recent representations of literal deafness in African American literature. Phillips’s only novel follows the tyrannical, violent, and “mad” (122) mother Rozelle Quinn and her ten children as they attempt to survive and escape racism, lynchings, abuse, and poverty in Jim Crow Georgia in the late 1950s. The Darkest Child is important because not only does it counter surface conceptions of Black, deaf individuals in African American literature prior to its publication, it also challenges a long-standing tradition of deaf characters and deaf-related imagery as negative. As Donna McDonald contends, “Deaf characters in fiction have historically been used as generic symbols for something else rather than as fully realized expressions of their individual selves. They rarely have been allowed to take their place in the story without having to perform a symbolic task” (465). Phillips’s novel is even more unique in that it considers this experience through the eyes of a child. Of Rozelle’s ten children, the fifth eldest, Martha Jean, is considered a “defective replica of [their] mother” who “could not hear and had not spoken one coherent sentence in her life” (9). I argue that unlike previous representations of deafness in African American literature, Martha Jean is not a marginal character, nor merely a symbol or metaphor. Her presence is not indicative of narrative prosthesis; rather, Martha Jean constitutes a character of what Tobin Siebers coins as “complex embodiment” who complicates society’s preconceived notions of Black and deaf people as burdens.

To put this novel in context, a brief survey of how deafness figures in African American literature reveals the myriad ways Black writers have considered the connections between...