Deaf American Poetry: An Anthology

Alice Cornelia Jennings (b. 1851)

71  Alice Cornelia Jennings (b. 1851) In “A Prayer in Signs,” Alice Cornelia Jennings answers any doubts, advanced by some hearing philosophers and religious leaders before and during her time, as to whether Deaf people could pray. What is more, she contends that they do so “with force more potent than the spoken word.” She would have had reason to make this declaration because the Lord’s Prayer was the first thing ritualized in American Sign Language. Translated in a highly stylized manner, the different versions recited in Deaf school chapels and churches outdid one another in gravity and eloquence. This exercise may have been the precursor of ASL poetry. The signed rendering of the Lord’s Prayer often was used in exhibitions promoting education of the Deaf to the public because it almost never failed to impress hearing people who had no knowledge of the language. However, the fact that audiences were well familiar with the words of the prayer probably helped people think they understood more of the signs than they actually did. While Jennings is confident that it is the signers who really know how to “lift up hands in prayer,” she maintains that Deaf people are just as subject to the human condition as hearing people, saying “O hearing brother, we are like you still.” Alice Cornelia Jennings was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. She became deaf when she was eight years old. Her sister and father, a clergyman, educated her until she became one of the first pupils at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston, Massachusetts . Denied admission to Gallaudet College, which had not yet begun enrolling women, Jennings turned to the Society to Encourage Studies at Home and Chautauqua University, studying and teaching for fifteen years. Her career as a published writer Alice Cornelia Jennings 72 began in 1871 and included at least two collections of poems, Heart Echoes and My Queen. The date of her death is uncertain, but it is known that she was living at the Riverbank Home for the Aged Deaf in 1901. ...