April 24, 2024 • 33 mins
Martha's Vineyard once was a place you could gossip with neighbors, shop for supplies, or play a cutthroat game of cards — all without saying a word. That's because it had a thriving Deaf community. Residents, Deaf and hearing alike, communicated with a unique version of sign language that predates ASL. But it's mostly forgotten today.
Today we dig into Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL) and the folks who are working to keep its history.
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On the Very Special Episodes podcast, we tell one incredible story each week. Follow us down a different rabbit hole every Wednesday.
Hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnett, and Jason English
Written by Joanna Sokolowski and Julia Smith
Additional Writing by Marisa Brown
Produced by Josh Fisher
Editing and Sound Design by Josh Thane
Mixing and Mastering by Baheed Frazier
Story Editors are Abbey Stone and Marisa Brown
Research and Fact-Checking by Meredith Danko, Austin Thompson, Joanna Sokolowski, and Julia Smith
Original Music by Elise McCoy
Show Logo by Lucy Quintanilla
Executive Producer is Jason English
Oral history clips with Eric Cottle, Everett Poole, Sydney Harris, and Jane Slater are excerpted from interviews conducted with Linsey Lee, Martha's Vineyard Museum Oral History Curator. Courtesy of the Martha's Vineyard Museum.
ASL interpretation for Nyle DiMarco by Grey Van Pelt.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
It used to go to the store at noon time.
They'd be sitting there playing checkers. You wouldn't hear a
sound there. Everybody was talking with the hands.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
It didn't stop at checkers. This was a place where
you could work, gossip with your neighbors, shop for supplies,
or play a cutthroat game of cards, all without saying
a word.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
When a boat was coming in, it'd go out on
the dock and everybody knew just how much fish they'd caught,
what they caught, and everything. And you wonder why I
add all information before they get a show.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
This place was called chill Mark. It's a village on
Martha's Vineyard, tucked away between Rolling Hills and the slate
Blue Atlantic Ocean. Chill Mark is still around today. It's
one of the island's six small towns. It's always been
a small town. The difference is years ago, many of
(01:20):
Chilmark's residents were deaf. These were farmers, fishermen, husbands, wives,
normal everyday folks.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
They weren't your deaf neighbors or your deaf friends. They
were just your friends who happened to be deaf, like
your other friend crossed the way happened to be tall
or to be blue eyed.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
So a sign language developed, Martha's Vineyard Sign Language. Everybody
used it, deaf people and hearing people.
Speaker 5 (01:48):
We didn't think anything of it. We just all it
was just accepted.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
But by the nineteen fifties this way of communicating in
chill Mark was gone. Few remembered sign language was once
the village lingua franca. It seemed to have disappeared without trace,
until one day, with the assist of a very helpful
great grandmother, it was rediscovered.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
What size do I remember, remember small girl, Lie, Truth,
shoe Dog? I remember quite a lot.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Welcome to very special episodes and iHeart original podcast. I'm
your host, Danash Schwartz, and this is I remember all
the signs. The evolution of language is something that has
been fascinating to me for a long time, and so
(02:48):
this deep dive in this episode it just like it
hit all my buttons. I love this type of story
so much.
Speaker 6 (02:55):
I love stories that involve people connecting with their grandparents
and then that somehow moves are understanding of the world around.
Go talk to your grandparents. You may end up in
a future episode.
Speaker 7 (03:07):
Lately call them talk to them. Oh my god, yes. Also,
what about the secret language aspect, Oh, having a secret
language with a grandparent.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Come on, now, a secret language with your grandparents. It's giving, wholesome,
it's giving sweet, it's giving Grandparents' day. Yeah, it's perfect.
Speaker 8 (03:23):
So when I was seven years old in second grade,
I was reading a book inside my desk.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
This is Joan Pool Nash. She grew up around chill
Mark in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 8 (03:35):
It was about Helen Keller and when I got to
the end of the book, they gave the fingerspelling alphabet.
So I spent the afternoon teaching myself to fingerspell. God
knows what was going on in second grade, but nothing exciting.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Joan didn't know what she was doing was a form
of sign language. She was just passing the time, and
she was excited to show off her new scale.
Speaker 8 (03:56):
After school, I walked by my great grandmother's house and
I showed her the alphabet that I taught myself.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
To Joan's surprise, her great grandmother, Emily Pool, already seemed
to know fingerspelling, and she knew more than that too.
She knew signs signs that weren't in that Helen Keller book.
Speaker 8 (04:16):
And she said, oh, I know that one handed alphabet,
and I know the two handed alphabet, and I know
all the signs. She immediately started teaching me signs and
they became a secret language between the two of us.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Joan was just a little girl, and she didn't realize
what her great grandmother was teaching her. She didn't think
it was a sign language for deaf people. After all,
she didn't see any deaf people using it. Joan figured
her great grandmother must have picked it up elsewhere.
Speaker 8 (04:47):
I thought, in the back of my brother's boy Scout book,
there's a book of Indian signs, so that must be it.
She knows this from when she ran the boy Scout troop.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
But it didn't really matter that she didn't know what
it was called. Joan was hooked on sign and as
she grew older, she expanded her knowledge. She learned American
Sign Language or ASL, and even decided to study ASL
at school.
Speaker 8 (05:13):
I went to Boston University and people were just then
starting to look at sign languages as real languages and
not just made up gestures.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
This was a pretty new approach at this time. In
the nineteen seventies. Many people didn't take sign languages very seriously.
They didn't consider that they might have their own distinct
grammars or vocabularies, and that sign languages, like all living languages,
grow and evolve. It was this last point that the
(05:48):
academics around Joan were focused on, and early on in
her studies. While in discussion with some older students, she
had a revelation.
Speaker 8 (05:57):
The thing that they were most interested in at that
point was how the sign language that people used now
clearly had been different at some time. And I was
listening to them, I realized the signs that they were
using as old signs were the signs that my great
grandmother used, and so I knew where the signs came from.
They came from Martha's vineyard.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
So those weren't boy Scout signs after all. But why
would her great grandmother know those old signs? Joan called
up Emily, who was by then in her nineties, and
asked her reply. Because all these people were deaf.
Speaker 8 (06:36):
It turned out that my great grandmother knew over three
hundred signs.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
It wasn't an answer Joan was expecting to hear, but
she knew she needed to learn more. So Joan and
other linguists went to Martha's Vineyard. They brought along their
video recording equipment and spent hours and hours with the
older chill Mark residents asking questions, what did they remember
about the deaf people who had once lived there? And
(07:03):
what about this sign language they all seemed to know.
Speaker 8 (07:07):
In my grandfather's generation learned to sign, and they learned
to sign well, even if they thought they didn't. They
would be interviewing them and they'd say, oh, yeah, I
don't remember the sign for horse, but and you'd look
at them like they horse who showed it to me.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
To these older generations, sign language was second nature, part
of the experience of living in chill Mark, like fishing
for striped bass, or raking clams, or taking a dip
at Mosha Beach.
Speaker 8 (07:33):
None of the people that I videotaped had thought that
anything was unique about hearing people using sign language.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Joan had stumbled upon something, a place where hearing people
and deaf people alike communicated with one another as neighbors,
as equals. But why chill Mark. If you've never been
(08:03):
to Martha's Vineyard, you may have heard about it as
a tourist spot secluded beaches quaint towns, sandy bike trails,
fresh seafood everywhere. Its year round population is around twenty
three thousand. In the summer it grows to two hundred thousand.
The Obamas, David Letterman, Spike Lee, they all vacation there.
(08:26):
But about two hundred years ago it was pretty quiet,
pretty rural, and very remote. There weren't many visitors at all,
let alone celebrity visitors. Chill Mark, located on the southwestern
part of the island, was especially secluded.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
Chill Mark in the nineteenth century was a relatively tiny
cluster of buildings, a couple of churches, a town hall,
a general store or too over the span maybe a
quarter mile or a half a mile country road. It
wasn't the end of the world be you could see
it from there.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
This is bo Van Riper. He's the research librarian at
the Martha's Vineyard Museum. He and other historians have been
working with Joan to learn more about the islands and
specifically chill Mark's history of sign language.
Speaker 4 (09:21):
One of the great ironies of studying the chilmerk deaf
community is the thing that makes it remarkable that people
saw deafness just as another way of being human means
that the official records rarely consistently point out people's deafness
as a way of describing them. It might have been
(09:44):
that George or Bob was deaf, but that everybody was
so used to that that it wouldn't have occurred to them.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Dimension the fact, deafness can happen for a variety of reasons,
like from complications during pregnancy or a childhood infection, But
on Martha's Vineyard it was because of genetics. Some of
the early white settlers, especially the ones who ended up
near chill Mark, carried the gene for hereditary deafness. At first,
(10:13):
it was just a couple of people.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
It's worse noting that for most of the eighteenth century
the number of deaf people on the vineyard was extremely
small that you could probably have counted them at any
point on the fingers of one hand with your thumb
left over.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
But over time the deaf population grew. Bo estimate that
at its peak in the mid nineteenth century, the deaf
population on the island was no more than fifty people,
But when towns are so small, that's still a sizeable percentage.
Speaker 4 (10:50):
The figure that you often see quoted is one in
every five chill Workers was deaf at a time when
the incidence on the mainland was something like one in
several thousands.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
And on the mainland the deaf population was often treated
much much differently. During this time, deafness was commonly seen
as a quote defect and often linked with insanity. At best,
deaf people were viewed as other. At worst, they were ostracized,
(11:25):
even people who studied deafness and taught deaf students. People
like the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, thought
the ultimate goal for all deaf people should be complete
assimilation into hearing society. God forbid anyone know you're deaf.
Bell believed in a method called oralism, which values spoken
(11:48):
language over other forms, meaning the deaf should learn how
to read lips and speak aloud. Some even thought sign
language should be banned altogether. But in a way, Chill
Mark's isolation saved it from this narrow minded thinking. Oralism
didn't cross anyone's mind because it didn't make any sense.
(12:11):
So many community members were deaf brothers, husbands, daughters, neighbors
that using a sign language was the simplest way for
everyone to live and work together.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
If you were on the porch of the Childmerth General
Store and say the middle of the nineteenth century, likely
what you'd see would be people if they were hearing,
engaged in conversation with their neighbors, and they'd be simultaneously
speaking aloud to their hearing neighbors and signing the conversation
(12:44):
for their deaf neighbors.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
At church, a hearing person would automatically sign the sermon.
At a town meeting, someone would sign the agenda, so
both deaf and hearing residents knew when to signal their votes.
Neither hearing nor deaf people would be shut out of
any given conversation. All could participate.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
A far as we know. In chill March in the
nineteenth century into the twentieth century, the death were from
an economic, political, social point of view, fully integrated members
of the community. They voted in town meetings, they held
positions of respect and authority. There was no social distinction
(13:29):
between deaf and hearing. Having a deaf person look after
your children, or marry your son or your daughter, or
be your business partner, your neighbor, your heughmate in church
was a completely unremarkable thing.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
We don't know exactly when Martha's Vineyard sign language first started,
but we do know who started it, the deaf residents
in and near chill Mark, and because of that, it
was specific to life on a small island. For example,
its focus on fish.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
Being able to distinguish between multiple species of fish and
being able to have different signs for the fish that's
sitting on your dinner plate as opposed to the fish
that you're trying to catch. Is only useful if you
make your living fishing, and if most of the people
you live and work with also make their living fishing.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Swordfish, cod, scallop. They all had their own signs, signs
that don't exist in modern day standard asl or at
least look very different.
Speaker 4 (14:38):
Anybody who's ever seen a scallop swimming underwater will instantly
recognize why that's the sign for scallop, because that's what
a scalop looks like. Anybody you seed a swordfish swimming
with its sharp dorsal fin and sharp tailfin poking out
of the water, as most chill workers would have, would
instantly recognize, Oh, yes, of course that's swordfish.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
There were other unique signs too. As Joan continued her research,
she was especially delighted to find one in particular.
Speaker 8 (15:09):
So the sign for cranberry is just very important to
me because no one uses it anywhere else except here
on the mainland. There is no sign for cranberry, and
so I make it important. Everyone who I teach sign
language to I always show them the sign for cranberry.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Here Joan makes the sign, curling the fingers of her
left hand into a loose fist, her thumb on top.
With her other thumb and index finger. She flicks at
the left thumb like you might a marble.
Speaker 8 (15:39):
It's just your thumb, flicking the cranberry off the little
bush in the water and gathering them up.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Tailoring the language to the community meant that the people
who use it, the people of chill Mark, had signs
for themselves too.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
They had a sign for most everybody.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
The person that's Eric Cottle. He grew up around chill
Mark when the deaf community was still a notable presence.
Before he passed away in twenty at the age of
ninety two. Eric was interviewed by the Martha's Vineyard Museum
as part of its Oral History project.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Now the Philip. He lost his hand in the threshing
machine when he was young, so that you know that
was Benny Mail.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
As he talks, Eric makes a sign, chopping off his
right hand.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
With his left and Ernest mayo his was here.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Now he's hitting his forehead with a flat hand, almost saluting.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
They used to hang made baskets. Can he run into
somebody's clothes line, but it broke his neck and they
hit him right across there, So that was a sign
for Ernst's Male.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Sign language was so ingrained in life in chill Mark
that it wasn't limited to use only when a deaf
person was present. As Bow points out, hearing people in
chill Mark understood that in many circumstances, signing was the
preferred method of communication.
Speaker 4 (17:03):
There are stories about farmers who when they were out
in the field and their wife say wanted to ask
them some message, bring us and such when you come
in for supper. They bang on a pod or a
bell to get the farmer's attention, and then rather than
hollering across the open field, they'd sign their request and
he'd sign back.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
And this was even more effective for the towns of
fishermen out on the water.
Speaker 4 (17:28):
Once people started using internal combustion and engines rather than sales.
One of the problems they ran up against was that
the engines were incredibly deafeningly loud, and so if your
engine was running, it was far easier to just sign, hey,
how's the fishing today, or are there any cod over
there by the buoy or whatever, then to try and
(17:50):
get close enough to holler over the sound of the
engine or turn off the engine and then have to
get it started again.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Jones's father, Everett Pool, was also interviewed by the Martha's
Vineyard Museum before he passed away, and he too remembered
his own father, a hearing man, signing with other men
out on the boats.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
I'd be fishing with my father. We'd pull up alongside
of another boat, and in those days we had these
damned old noisy lath benjaance you couldn't hear yourself think,
you know, and they pull up alongside it. My father
just talked to the guy with his singers, you know.
He didn't didn't bother to shout at all.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
There were other unexpected benefits to knowing how to sign,
like during cutthroat card games with neighboring towns, towns that
didn't know sign language.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
I remember all the signs. That was nyemonths, I was clubs,
that was hers, that was spades.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
That's Eric caddle again.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
So we cheat, we'd give each other signs.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Here, Eric taps his chest.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
You no, I had heart. We were bad.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Martha's Vineyard sign language was a robust and complex language.
For years. It was a specific and completely normal part
of life for its users. But the idea of a
special sign language that arises to fit the needs of
a community is not in fact unique to chill Mark.
(19:28):
Villages in Ghana, Mexico, India, Turkey, Japan, and Indonesia also
have their own sign languages used by deaf and hearing residents.
Alike like chill Mark, these communities are often quite small,
and like chill Mark was once, they are often quite isolated.
In fact, it was that change becoming less isolated that
(19:52):
ushered in the demise of Martha's Vineyard Sign language.
Speaker 4 (19:58):
By say eighteen fifty. Several things are coming together that
change the way deafness happened on the island and the
change the experience of the chill Mark death.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
That's bo Van Riper again.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
One was that as transportation technology improved, as steamboats replaced
saale ferries and steamboats became themselves more reliable. It became
easier for people to go back and forth to the mainland,
which made it more likely that chill workers would meet
and become friendly with, and potentially marry and have children
(20:36):
with people from off the island.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
And these non island people had a different gene pool,
meaning the chances that your children would be born deaf
got more and more rare. The other major factor was
a big change in access to deaf education. In eighteen seventeen,
Thomas Galladet and Lauren Clerk started what's now known as
(20:59):
the American School for the Deaf. The school, which is
located in Hartford, Connecticut, was the first of its kind
in the US. It offered deaf children around the country
a chance to live and study together. Most of the
deaf children on Martha's Vineyard ended up attending there. They
learned what would become the standard sign language in the US.
Speaker 4 (21:22):
It introduced them to American Sign language, which was being
developed in those years. It also meant that they came
home speaking not only the sign language that they were
used to in chown work, but also this new sign
language that linked them to a larger, regionwide, eventually nationwide
(21:42):
community of the death.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
So the incidence of hereditary deafness was lessening ASL was
coming into its own And let's not forget that oralism,
where the objective was assimilation into hearing society, was still
around two all of which sadly meant the eventual downfall
of Martha's Vineyard Sign language.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
By the middle of the twentieth century, it was effectively
extinct as an active language, even though it was still
being used as late as the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Its last native user, a deaf woman named Katie, died
in the nineteen fifties, and so knowing sign language, something
that used to be so commonplace in chill Mark, no
longer seemed as necessary. Growing up in the nineteen thirties, Jones'
father Everett remembered thinking exactly that I had.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
No patience with it, you know, another generation. It didn't
make sense to me why I do that.
Speaker 6 (22:45):
You know.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
But as a historian, Bo takes a different view.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
Chiel Mark and the Vineyard's reputation as a deaf utopia
remains a powerful idea because it holds out a lease,
the potential promise that things as they are are not
things as they have to be. I can't speak to
what it would feel like to be a deaf person
learning about this, but from the outside looking in, I
(23:13):
can imagine if you'd spent your whole life feeling as
if hearing society wanted to hold you at arm's length
and didn't know what to do with you. The idea
of a place where the deaf were embraced and welcomed
as humans, as individuals must be an extraordinarily powerful story.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Today, it's estimated there are around one million deaf people
in the United States and that almost four percent of
Americans have difficulty hearing. More than five hundred thousand people
use ASL to communicate as their native language, and almost
three quarters of parents with deaf children don't know sign language.
(23:57):
That's much much different than what deaf kids in chill
Mark experienced.
Speaker 9 (24:03):
They grow up in homes where there's a lack of
sign meaning that you know, there's a barrier on their
ability to connect with their parents.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Nile DeMarco is a model, actor, producer, and deaf activist.
We're talking with him through his ASL translator, so that's
the translator's voice you're.
Speaker 9 (24:22):
Hearing Oftentimes, hearing parents want their babies to be like them,
which is so natural, but oftentimes that leads to, you know,
the mistake of say, teaching oral of them and wanting
them to speak the same way when there might be
another option available.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
The other option, of course, is sign language, which was
how Nile grew up.
Speaker 9 (24:44):
Really long before my very first memories, I was learning
sign language. I had exposure to the language from the
first day that I opened my eyes, and at home
I had constant exposure to ASL. Truly, you know, sign
language is my first language, even though also English.
Speaker 7 (24:59):
Very much feels like my first language in a lot
of ways.
Speaker 9 (25:01):
They sort of run in parallel.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Nil is in fact, fourth generation death, and so he
was raised in a world where deafness is celebrated, not
misunderstood or feared. In twenty twenty two, he wrote a
memoir called deaf Utopia. He meant the title to be provocative.
Speaker 9 (25:20):
I knew that somebody hearing people would see that and say,
that can't be a perfect world, but what if it is?
It was something that I wanted to achieve with my book.
I wanted people to really read through it and understand
the perspective that a deaf person has when we don't
have the communication barriers. You know, Now I'm able to
function as a bilingual adult between two languages quite easily,
and I think people should know that.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
In Deaf Utopia, he tells the story about the moment
his dad found out one day old Nile and his
twin brother were both deaf. He raised his fist in excitement,
he kissed his wife. He was proud. So although Nile
was born in nineteen eighty nine, in some ways his
(26:00):
life was similar to deaf kids growing up in chill
Mark in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Speaker 9 (26:07):
You know, my entire households, everyone was accessible to me.
We could share ideas, and we talk about not only
current events but on topics. And that's a very different
story than many other deaf kids out there who are
born to hearing families. I'm a part of a ten
percent quite rare subset where my parents are deaf and
also they you sign language.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Now. I all used ASL at home, and he went
to a deaf school and a deaf university where ASL
was also predominant. So it pretty much wasn't until he
began his professional life that he was faced with a
world that didn't know how to sign, and that didn't
know much about deaf people or deaf culture either.
Speaker 9 (26:50):
It wasn't really until I got into the entertainment industry
when I started to realize, oh, okay, I'm being reminded
that I'm deaf. Every day I have to explain that
I'm daf, whether that was hearing writers, directors, or producers.
I'm in a smaller minority than is expected to very
much assimilate with society's design that was really built for
(27:12):
hearing people.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
It makes him wonder what if some of that chill
mark culture had seeped into the rest of the country.
Speaker 9 (27:20):
I wish that everyone knew some basic sign language. Oftentimes
I wonder what if every hearing school out there required
some basic asl in elementary school. I think it would
make such a massive difference in the lives of deaf people,
but more so in how hearing people perceive us and
our community and how they interact with us every day.
(27:40):
And that's huge. I mean, it really just it helps
humanize us in many ways.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
That's why the story of Martha's Vineyard sign language resonates
so much with him.
Speaker 9 (27:51):
I remember when I learned about it. I really had
wished that that tiny island was sort of like the
whole United States, because I thought it must have been
amazing to have hearing people choose to learn sign language
instead of speaking with other hearing people. That's a great
example of how you can build a culture within a
community that's really for everybody.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
It's a sentiment people on Martha's Vineyard share as well,
people like Bo and Joan and Jane Slater. Jane is
ninety two years old now, but as a child in
chill Mark, she regularly interacted with some of the last
members of the town's deaf community, like the ladies who
would stop by her grandmother's house to chat.
Speaker 5 (28:36):
I just remember the women sitting around talking and being
able to understand a little of it. You rama taught
me how to say hello, come in, sit down, She'll be.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Right with you with that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5 (28:50):
And then they would always try to get me to
talk to them, so that was fun. They'd get you
into the conversation.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
I did not know that.
Speaker 10 (28:59):
That was unusual. I mean, I don't know when I
became aware that people were interested in that, but I
do feel like I keep that I was born early
enough to still be part of the chill Mark that
included some of the chill Mark death They really were
a part of the community and there was no awareness
(29:22):
of them being different, and I think that really made
chill Mark a special place.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
I have to confess as a child, I was one
of those Midwestern child who just thought that Martha's vineyard
was an actual vineyard and I think in my mind
owned by Martha Stewart.
Speaker 8 (29:43):
Same.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
So this has been illuminating for me in many many
ways learned episode. I just learned so much this episode specifically.
Speaker 7 (29:53):
I also loved how a person's worst accident becomes their
sign language name like that to me was wild, Like
dude gets his hand lopped off by a threshold a
sudden everyone minds losing a hand, like yeah, that's Benny Mayhew.
But can you imagine that we will remember you by
your trauma.
Speaker 6 (30:07):
I like the mention of Galadet's School for the Deaf.
I have a quick Galadet School for the Deaf story.
I almost told this when we were at the Super
Bowl because it's a football story.
Speaker 5 (30:17):
Us.
Speaker 6 (30:18):
So I played on the club football team in college
at Duke, and that don't picture college football picture like idiots.
There were only like three other teams in the region
that we would play, and every year we would go
up to Washington, d C. Where Galadet had a team,
(30:38):
and they were like a legit football team, and again
we were not, and so we got crushed. I think
it was forty four to twelve and forty six to fourteen.
But the thing that happened both years which amazes me.
Every time when they wanted to hike the ball, they
would beat a big drum and they would feel the
vibrations and they would know that's how to go. And
(31:01):
by the end of the game we had all become
accustomed to this. And one time they went on the
set drum beat both years and we all dove off
sides on the first one.
Speaker 4 (31:13):
That's amazing.
Speaker 7 (31:14):
I absolutely love that story. Guys' ass is handed to
you by a drum beat. Also, I was thinking about
when I was in high school, one of my best friends,
he taught me sign language, but just the alphabet right,
And then there was a bunch of cute girls in
his history class and they also spoke sign language, so
he was able to like win over all this favor
(31:35):
with them by helping them. He was really smart. So
he would cheat in history class and they would be
sitting there doing sign luggage and the teacher had no idea.
So when I saw them doing the secret languages, I
was like, oh, I've seen that. That totally works. So yeah,
by the way, if you'd like I cast this one as.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Well, Oh yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 7 (31:50):
Oh yeah please, So if you if you guys were curious,
I did. It took me a second because I was like,
how would I cast this? Who feels right for Martha's
Vineyard other than Martha Stewart. So I went with For
Joan pool Nash, I thought Mary Steinburgeon just seemed right right.
I don't know why, it just seemed right. And then
for Bowen the historian, I thought Michael Sheen right. I
don't know why, but Michael Sheen just felt right for him, right.
(32:13):
And then for Nile DeMarco, keeping that vibe, I thought,
Barry Keegan, right, you get this cool deaf activist. He
seems like I had done integrity. And then finally for
the ninety two year old local Jane Slater, I thought,
let's give it up to a legend Carol Burnett.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Anytime Carol Burnett's coming on screen.
Speaker 7 (32:28):
I'm happy right, and you know she used to do
sign language every episode of her show, but it was
a specific little sign she gave to her. I think
I was her mother, and she would always signal with
her hand to her mother at the end of every episode.
It was like their own little sign language. So I thought, boom,
we got to honor that.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
This is perfect. Zaren, you did it again.
Speaker 7 (32:45):
Oh thank you, David.
Speaker 6 (32:48):
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
This show is hosted by Danish Wartz, Saren Burnette, and
me Jason English. Our producer is Josh Fisher. Day's episode
was written by Joanna Sokolowski and Julia Smith, Additional writing
by Marisa Brown, editing and sound design by Josh Thame,
(33:10):
mixing and mastering by Beheed Fraser. Our story editors are
Abby Stone and Marisa Brown. Oral history clips with Eric Coddle,
Everett Poole, Sidney Harris, and Jane Slater are excerpted from
interviews conducted with Lindsey Lee, Martha's Vineyard Museum oral history curator,
(33:32):
courtesy of the Martha's Vineyard Museum. Couldn't have done it
with value. Original music by Elise McCoy. Research and fact
checking by Meredith Danko, Austin Thompson, Joanna Solkeolowski, and Julius Smith.
Joe logo by Lucy Quintinia. I'm your Executive producer Very
Special Episodes is the production of iHeart Podcasts.
Originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
It used to go to the store at noon time.
They'd be sitting there playing checkers. You wouldn't hear a
sound there. Everybody was talking with the hands.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
It didn't stop at checkers. This was a place where
you could work, gossip with your neighbors, shop for supplies,
or play a cutthroat game of cards, all without saying
a word.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
When a boat was coming in, it'd go out on
the dock and everybody knew just how much fish they'd caught,
what they caught, and everything. And you wonder why I
add all information before they get a show.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
This place was called chill Mark. It's a village on
Martha's Vineyard, tucked away between Rolling Hills and the slate
Blue Atlantic Ocean. Chill Mark is still around today. It's
one of the island's six small towns. It's always been
a small town. The difference is years ago, many of
(01:20):
Chilmark's residents were deaf. These were farmers, fishermen, husbands, wives,
normal everyday folks.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
They weren't your deaf neighbors or your deaf friends. They
were just your friends who happened to be deaf, like
your other friend crossed the way happened to be tall
or to be blue eyed.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
So a sign language developed, Martha's Vineyard Sign Language. Everybody
used it, deaf people and hearing people.
Speaker 5 (01:48):
We didn't think anything of it. We just all it
was just accepted.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
But by the nineteen fifties this way of communicating in
chill Mark was gone. Few remembered sign language was once
the village lingua franca. It seemed to have disappeared without trace,
until one day, with the assist of a very helpful
great grandmother, it was rediscovered.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
What size do I remember, remember small girl, Lie, Truth,
shoe Dog? I remember quite a lot.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Welcome to very special episodes and iHeart original podcast. I'm
your host, Danash Schwartz, and this is I remember all
the signs. The evolution of language is something that has
been fascinating to me for a long time, and so
(02:48):
this deep dive in this episode it just like it
hit all my buttons. I love this type of story
so much.
Speaker 6 (02:55):
I love stories that involve people connecting with their grandparents
and then that somehow moves are understanding of the world around.
Go talk to your grandparents. You may end up in
a future episode.
Speaker 7 (03:07):
Lately call them talk to them. Oh my god, yes. Also,
what about the secret language aspect, Oh, having a secret
language with a grandparent.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Come on, now, a secret language with your grandparents. It's giving, wholesome,
it's giving sweet, it's giving Grandparents' day. Yeah, it's perfect.
Speaker 8 (03:23):
So when I was seven years old in second grade,
I was reading a book inside my desk.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
This is Joan Pool Nash. She grew up around chill
Mark in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 8 (03:35):
It was about Helen Keller and when I got to
the end of the book, they gave the fingerspelling alphabet.
So I spent the afternoon teaching myself to fingerspell. God
knows what was going on in second grade, but nothing exciting.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Joan didn't know what she was doing was a form
of sign language. She was just passing the time, and
she was excited to show off her new scale.
Speaker 8 (03:56):
After school, I walked by my great grandmother's house and
I showed her the alphabet that I taught myself.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
To Joan's surprise, her great grandmother, Emily Pool, already seemed
to know fingerspelling, and she knew more than that too.
She knew signs signs that weren't in that Helen Keller book.
Speaker 8 (04:16):
And she said, oh, I know that one handed alphabet,
and I know the two handed alphabet, and I know
all the signs. She immediately started teaching me signs and
they became a secret language between the two of us.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Joan was just a little girl, and she didn't realize
what her great grandmother was teaching her. She didn't think
it was a sign language for deaf people. After all,
she didn't see any deaf people using it. Joan figured
her great grandmother must have picked it up elsewhere.
Speaker 8 (04:47):
I thought, in the back of my brother's boy Scout book,
there's a book of Indian signs, so that must be it.
She knows this from when she ran the boy Scout troop.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
But it didn't really matter that she didn't know what
it was called. Joan was hooked on sign and as
she grew older, she expanded her knowledge. She learned American
Sign Language or ASL, and even decided to study ASL
at school.
Speaker 8 (05:13):
I went to Boston University and people were just then
starting to look at sign languages as real languages and
not just made up gestures.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
This was a pretty new approach at this time. In
the nineteen seventies. Many people didn't take sign languages very seriously.
They didn't consider that they might have their own distinct
grammars or vocabularies, and that sign languages, like all living languages,
grow and evolve. It was this last point that the
(05:48):
academics around Joan were focused on, and early on in
her studies. While in discussion with some older students, she
had a revelation.
Speaker 8 (05:57):
The thing that they were most interested in at that
point was how the sign language that people used now
clearly had been different at some time. And I was
listening to them, I realized the signs that they were
using as old signs were the signs that my great
grandmother used, and so I knew where the signs came from.
They came from Martha's vineyard.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
So those weren't boy Scout signs after all. But why
would her great grandmother know those old signs? Joan called
up Emily, who was by then in her nineties, and
asked her reply. Because all these people were deaf.
Speaker 8 (06:36):
It turned out that my great grandmother knew over three
hundred signs.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
It wasn't an answer Joan was expecting to hear, but
she knew she needed to learn more. So Joan and
other linguists went to Martha's Vineyard. They brought along their
video recording equipment and spent hours and hours with the
older chill Mark residents asking questions, what did they remember
about the deaf people who had once lived there? And
(07:03):
what about this sign language they all seemed to know.
Speaker 8 (07:07):
In my grandfather's generation learned to sign, and they learned
to sign well, even if they thought they didn't. They
would be interviewing them and they'd say, oh, yeah, I
don't remember the sign for horse, but and you'd look
at them like they horse who showed it to me.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
To these older generations, sign language was second nature, part
of the experience of living in chill Mark, like fishing
for striped bass, or raking clams, or taking a dip
at Mosha Beach.
Speaker 8 (07:33):
None of the people that I videotaped had thought that
anything was unique about hearing people using sign language.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Joan had stumbled upon something, a place where hearing people
and deaf people alike communicated with one another as neighbors,
as equals. But why chill Mark. If you've never been
(08:03):
to Martha's Vineyard, you may have heard about it as
a tourist spot secluded beaches quaint towns, sandy bike trails,
fresh seafood everywhere. Its year round population is around twenty
three thousand. In the summer it grows to two hundred thousand.
The Obamas, David Letterman, Spike Lee, they all vacation there.
(08:26):
But about two hundred years ago it was pretty quiet,
pretty rural, and very remote. There weren't many visitors at all,
let alone celebrity visitors. Chill Mark, located on the southwestern
part of the island, was especially secluded.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
Chill Mark in the nineteenth century was a relatively tiny
cluster of buildings, a couple of churches, a town hall,
a general store or too over the span maybe a
quarter mile or a half a mile country road. It
wasn't the end of the world be you could see
it from there.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
This is bo Van Riper. He's the research librarian at
the Martha's Vineyard Museum. He and other historians have been
working with Joan to learn more about the islands and
specifically chill Mark's history of sign language.
Speaker 4 (09:21):
One of the great ironies of studying the chilmerk deaf
community is the thing that makes it remarkable that people
saw deafness just as another way of being human means
that the official records rarely consistently point out people's deafness
as a way of describing them. It might have been
(09:44):
that George or Bob was deaf, but that everybody was
so used to that that it wouldn't have occurred to them.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Dimension the fact, deafness can happen for a variety of reasons,
like from complications during pregnancy or a childhood infection, But
on Martha's Vineyard it was because of genetics. Some of
the early white settlers, especially the ones who ended up
near chill Mark, carried the gene for hereditary deafness. At first,
(10:13):
it was just a couple of people.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
It's worse noting that for most of the eighteenth century
the number of deaf people on the vineyard was extremely
small that you could probably have counted them at any
point on the fingers of one hand with your thumb
left over.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
But over time the deaf population grew. Bo estimate that
at its peak in the mid nineteenth century, the deaf
population on the island was no more than fifty people,
But when towns are so small, that's still a sizeable percentage.
Speaker 4 (10:50):
The figure that you often see quoted is one in
every five chill Workers was deaf at a time when
the incidence on the mainland was something like one in
several thousands.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
And on the mainland the deaf population was often treated
much much differently. During this time, deafness was commonly seen
as a quote defect and often linked with insanity. At best,
deaf people were viewed as other. At worst, they were ostracized,
(11:25):
even people who studied deafness and taught deaf students. People
like the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, thought
the ultimate goal for all deaf people should be complete
assimilation into hearing society. God forbid anyone know you're deaf.
Bell believed in a method called oralism, which values spoken
(11:48):
language over other forms, meaning the deaf should learn how
to read lips and speak aloud. Some even thought sign
language should be banned altogether. But in a way, Chill
Mark's isolation saved it from this narrow minded thinking. Oralism
didn't cross anyone's mind because it didn't make any sense.
(12:11):
So many community members were deaf brothers, husbands, daughters, neighbors
that using a sign language was the simplest way for
everyone to live and work together.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
If you were on the porch of the Childmerth General
Store and say the middle of the nineteenth century, likely
what you'd see would be people if they were hearing,
engaged in conversation with their neighbors, and they'd be simultaneously
speaking aloud to their hearing neighbors and signing the conversation
(12:44):
for their deaf neighbors.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
At church, a hearing person would automatically sign the sermon.
At a town meeting, someone would sign the agenda, so
both deaf and hearing residents knew when to signal their votes.
Neither hearing nor deaf people would be shut out of
any given conversation. All could participate.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
A far as we know. In chill March in the
nineteenth century into the twentieth century, the death were from
an economic, political, social point of view, fully integrated members
of the community. They voted in town meetings, they held
positions of respect and authority. There was no social distinction
(13:29):
between deaf and hearing. Having a deaf person look after
your children, or marry your son or your daughter, or
be your business partner, your neighbor, your heughmate in church
was a completely unremarkable thing.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
We don't know exactly when Martha's Vineyard sign language first started,
but we do know who started it, the deaf residents
in and near chill Mark, and because of that, it
was specific to life on a small island. For example,
its focus on fish.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
Being able to distinguish between multiple species of fish and
being able to have different signs for the fish that's
sitting on your dinner plate as opposed to the fish
that you're trying to catch. Is only useful if you
make your living fishing, and if most of the people
you live and work with also make their living fishing.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Swordfish, cod, scallop. They all had their own signs, signs
that don't exist in modern day standard asl or at
least look very different.
Speaker 4 (14:38):
Anybody who's ever seen a scallop swimming underwater will instantly
recognize why that's the sign for scallop, because that's what
a scalop looks like. Anybody you seed a swordfish swimming
with its sharp dorsal fin and sharp tailfin poking out
of the water, as most chill workers would have, would
instantly recognize, Oh, yes, of course that's swordfish.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
There were other unique signs too. As Joan continued her research,
she was especially delighted to find one in particular.
Speaker 8 (15:09):
So the sign for cranberry is just very important to
me because no one uses it anywhere else except here
on the mainland. There is no sign for cranberry, and
so I make it important. Everyone who I teach sign
language to I always show them the sign for cranberry.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Here Joan makes the sign, curling the fingers of her
left hand into a loose fist, her thumb on top.
With her other thumb and index finger. She flicks at
the left thumb like you might a marble.
Speaker 8 (15:39):
It's just your thumb, flicking the cranberry off the little
bush in the water and gathering them up.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Tailoring the language to the community meant that the people
who use it, the people of chill Mark, had signs
for themselves too.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
They had a sign for most everybody.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
The person that's Eric Cottle. He grew up around chill
Mark when the deaf community was still a notable presence.
Before he passed away in twenty at the age of
ninety two. Eric was interviewed by the Martha's Vineyard Museum
as part of its Oral History project.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Now the Philip. He lost his hand in the threshing
machine when he was young, so that you know that
was Benny Mail.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
As he talks, Eric makes a sign, chopping off his
right hand.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
With his left and Ernest mayo his was here.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Now he's hitting his forehead with a flat hand, almost saluting.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
They used to hang made baskets. Can he run into
somebody's clothes line, but it broke his neck and they
hit him right across there, So that was a sign
for Ernst's Male.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Sign language was so ingrained in life in chill Mark
that it wasn't limited to use only when a deaf
person was present. As Bow points out, hearing people in
chill Mark understood that in many circumstances, signing was the
preferred method of communication.
Speaker 4 (17:03):
There are stories about farmers who when they were out
in the field and their wife say wanted to ask
them some message, bring us and such when you come
in for supper. They bang on a pod or a
bell to get the farmer's attention, and then rather than
hollering across the open field, they'd sign their request and
he'd sign back.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
And this was even more effective for the towns of
fishermen out on the water.
Speaker 4 (17:28):
Once people started using internal combustion and engines rather than sales.
One of the problems they ran up against was that
the engines were incredibly deafeningly loud, and so if your
engine was running, it was far easier to just sign, hey,
how's the fishing today, or are there any cod over
there by the buoy or whatever, then to try and
(17:50):
get close enough to holler over the sound of the
engine or turn off the engine and then have to
get it started again.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Jones's father, Everett Pool, was also interviewed by the Martha's
Vineyard Museum before he passed away, and he too remembered
his own father, a hearing man, signing with other men
out on the boats.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
I'd be fishing with my father. We'd pull up alongside
of another boat, and in those days we had these
damned old noisy lath benjaance you couldn't hear yourself think,
you know, and they pull up alongside it. My father
just talked to the guy with his singers, you know.
He didn't didn't bother to shout at all.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
There were other unexpected benefits to knowing how to sign,
like during cutthroat card games with neighboring towns, towns that
didn't know sign language.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
I remember all the signs. That was nyemonths, I was clubs,
that was hers, that was spades.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
That's Eric caddle again.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
So we cheat, we'd give each other signs.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Here, Eric taps his chest.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
You no, I had heart. We were bad.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Martha's Vineyard sign language was a robust and complex language.
For years. It was a specific and completely normal part
of life for its users. But the idea of a
special sign language that arises to fit the needs of
a community is not in fact unique to chill Mark.
(19:28):
Villages in Ghana, Mexico, India, Turkey, Japan, and Indonesia also
have their own sign languages used by deaf and hearing residents.
Alike like chill Mark, these communities are often quite small,
and like chill Mark was once, they are often quite isolated.
In fact, it was that change becoming less isolated that
(19:52):
ushered in the demise of Martha's Vineyard Sign language.
Speaker 4 (19:58):
By say eighteen fifty. Several things are coming together that
change the way deafness happened on the island and the
change the experience of the chill Mark death.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
That's bo Van Riper again.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
One was that as transportation technology improved, as steamboats replaced
saale ferries and steamboats became themselves more reliable. It became
easier for people to go back and forth to the mainland,
which made it more likely that chill workers would meet
and become friendly with, and potentially marry and have children
(20:36):
with people from off the island.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
And these non island people had a different gene pool,
meaning the chances that your children would be born deaf
got more and more rare. The other major factor was
a big change in access to deaf education. In eighteen seventeen,
Thomas Galladet and Lauren Clerk started what's now known as
(20:59):
the American School for the Deaf. The school, which is
located in Hartford, Connecticut, was the first of its kind
in the US. It offered deaf children around the country
a chance to live and study together. Most of the
deaf children on Martha's Vineyard ended up attending there. They
learned what would become the standard sign language in the US.
Speaker 4 (21:22):
It introduced them to American Sign language, which was being
developed in those years. It also meant that they came
home speaking not only the sign language that they were
used to in chown work, but also this new sign
language that linked them to a larger, regionwide, eventually nationwide
(21:42):
community of the death.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
So the incidence of hereditary deafness was lessening ASL was
coming into its own And let's not forget that oralism,
where the objective was assimilation into hearing society, was still
around two all of which sadly meant the eventual downfall
of Martha's Vineyard Sign language.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
By the middle of the twentieth century, it was effectively
extinct as an active language, even though it was still
being used as late as the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Its last native user, a deaf woman named Katie, died
in the nineteen fifties, and so knowing sign language, something
that used to be so commonplace in chill Mark, no
longer seemed as necessary. Growing up in the nineteen thirties, Jones'
father Everett remembered thinking exactly that I had.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
No patience with it, you know, another generation. It didn't
make sense to me why I do that.
Speaker 6 (22:45):
You know.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
But as a historian, Bo takes a different view.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
Chiel Mark and the Vineyard's reputation as a deaf utopia
remains a powerful idea because it holds out a lease,
the potential promise that things as they are are not
things as they have to be. I can't speak to
what it would feel like to be a deaf person
learning about this, but from the outside looking in, I
(23:13):
can imagine if you'd spent your whole life feeling as
if hearing society wanted to hold you at arm's length
and didn't know what to do with you. The idea
of a place where the deaf were embraced and welcomed
as humans, as individuals must be an extraordinarily powerful story.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Today, it's estimated there are around one million deaf people
in the United States and that almost four percent of
Americans have difficulty hearing. More than five hundred thousand people
use ASL to communicate as their native language, and almost
three quarters of parents with deaf children don't know sign language.
(23:57):
That's much much different than what deaf kids in chill
Mark experienced.
Speaker 9 (24:03):
They grow up in homes where there's a lack of
sign meaning that you know, there's a barrier on their
ability to connect with their parents.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Nile DeMarco is a model, actor, producer, and deaf activist.
We're talking with him through his ASL translator, so that's
the translator's voice you're.
Speaker 9 (24:22):
Hearing Oftentimes, hearing parents want their babies to be like them,
which is so natural, but oftentimes that leads to, you know,
the mistake of say, teaching oral of them and wanting
them to speak the same way when there might be
another option available.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
The other option, of course, is sign language, which was
how Nile grew up.
Speaker 9 (24:44):
Really long before my very first memories, I was learning
sign language. I had exposure to the language from the
first day that I opened my eyes, and at home
I had constant exposure to ASL. Truly, you know, sign
language is my first language, even though also English.
Speaker 7 (24:59):
Very much feels like my first language in a lot
of ways.
Speaker 9 (25:01):
They sort of run in parallel.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Nil is in fact, fourth generation death, and so he
was raised in a world where deafness is celebrated, not
misunderstood or feared. In twenty twenty two, he wrote a
memoir called deaf Utopia. He meant the title to be provocative.
Speaker 9 (25:20):
I knew that somebody hearing people would see that and say,
that can't be a perfect world, but what if it is?
It was something that I wanted to achieve with my book.
I wanted people to really read through it and understand
the perspective that a deaf person has when we don't
have the communication barriers. You know, Now I'm able to
function as a bilingual adult between two languages quite easily,
and I think people should know that.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
In Deaf Utopia, he tells the story about the moment
his dad found out one day old Nile and his
twin brother were both deaf. He raised his fist in excitement,
he kissed his wife. He was proud. So although Nile
was born in nineteen eighty nine, in some ways his
(26:00):
life was similar to deaf kids growing up in chill
Mark in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Speaker 9 (26:07):
You know, my entire households, everyone was accessible to me.
We could share ideas, and we talk about not only
current events but on topics. And that's a very different
story than many other deaf kids out there who are
born to hearing families. I'm a part of a ten
percent quite rare subset where my parents are deaf and
also they you sign language.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Now. I all used ASL at home, and he went
to a deaf school and a deaf university where ASL
was also predominant. So it pretty much wasn't until he
began his professional life that he was faced with a
world that didn't know how to sign, and that didn't
know much about deaf people or deaf culture either.
Speaker 9 (26:50):
It wasn't really until I got into the entertainment industry
when I started to realize, oh, okay, I'm being reminded
that I'm deaf. Every day I have to explain that
I'm daf, whether that was hearing writers, directors, or producers.
I'm in a smaller minority than is expected to very
much assimilate with society's design that was really built for
(27:12):
hearing people.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
It makes him wonder what if some of that chill
mark culture had seeped into the rest of the country.
Speaker 9 (27:20):
I wish that everyone knew some basic sign language. Oftentimes
I wonder what if every hearing school out there required
some basic asl in elementary school. I think it would
make such a massive difference in the lives of deaf people,
but more so in how hearing people perceive us and
our community and how they interact with us every day.
(27:40):
And that's huge. I mean, it really just it helps
humanize us in many ways.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
That's why the story of Martha's Vineyard sign language resonates
so much with him.
Speaker 9 (27:51):
I remember when I learned about it. I really had
wished that that tiny island was sort of like the
whole United States, because I thought it must have been
amazing to have hearing people choose to learn sign language
instead of speaking with other hearing people. That's a great
example of how you can build a culture within a
community that's really for everybody.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
It's a sentiment people on Martha's Vineyard share as well,
people like Bo and Joan and Jane Slater. Jane is
ninety two years old now, but as a child in
chill Mark, she regularly interacted with some of the last
members of the town's deaf community, like the ladies who
would stop by her grandmother's house to chat.
Speaker 5 (28:36):
I just remember the women sitting around talking and being
able to understand a little of it. You rama taught
me how to say hello, come in, sit down, She'll be.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Right with you with that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5 (28:50):
And then they would always try to get me to
talk to them, so that was fun. They'd get you
into the conversation.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
I did not know that.
Speaker 10 (28:59):
That was unusual. I mean, I don't know when I
became aware that people were interested in that, but I
do feel like I keep that I was born early
enough to still be part of the chill Mark that
included some of the chill Mark death They really were
a part of the community and there was no awareness
(29:22):
of them being different, and I think that really made
chill Mark a special place.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
I have to confess as a child, I was one
of those Midwestern child who just thought that Martha's vineyard
was an actual vineyard and I think in my mind
owned by Martha Stewart.
Speaker 8 (29:43):
Same.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
So this has been illuminating for me in many many
ways learned episode. I just learned so much this episode specifically.
Speaker 7 (29:53):
I also loved how a person's worst accident becomes their
sign language name like that to me was wild, Like
dude gets his hand lopped off by a threshold a
sudden everyone minds losing a hand, like yeah, that's Benny Mayhew.
But can you imagine that we will remember you by
your trauma.
Speaker 6 (30:07):
I like the mention of Galadet's School for the Deaf.
I have a quick Galadet School for the Deaf story.
I almost told this when we were at the Super
Bowl because it's a football story.
Speaker 5 (30:17):
Us.
Speaker 6 (30:18):
So I played on the club football team in college
at Duke, and that don't picture college football picture like idiots.
There were only like three other teams in the region
that we would play, and every year we would go
up to Washington, d C. Where Galadet had a team,
(30:38):
and they were like a legit football team, and again
we were not, and so we got crushed. I think
it was forty four to twelve and forty six to fourteen.
But the thing that happened both years which amazes me.
Every time when they wanted to hike the ball, they
would beat a big drum and they would feel the
vibrations and they would know that's how to go. And
(31:01):
by the end of the game we had all become
accustomed to this. And one time they went on the
set drum beat both years and we all dove off
sides on the first one.
Speaker 4 (31:13):
That's amazing.
Speaker 7 (31:14):
I absolutely love that story. Guys' ass is handed to
you by a drum beat. Also, I was thinking about
when I was in high school, one of my best friends,
he taught me sign language, but just the alphabet right,
And then there was a bunch of cute girls in
his history class and they also spoke sign language, so
he was able to like win over all this favor
(31:35):
with them by helping them. He was really smart. So
he would cheat in history class and they would be
sitting there doing sign luggage and the teacher had no idea.
So when I saw them doing the secret languages, I
was like, oh, I've seen that. That totally works. So yeah,
by the way, if you'd like I cast this one as.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Well, Oh yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 7 (31:50):
Oh yeah please, So if you if you guys were curious,
I did. It took me a second because I was like,
how would I cast this? Who feels right for Martha's
Vineyard other than Martha Stewart. So I went with For
Joan pool Nash, I thought Mary Steinburgeon just seemed right right.
I don't know why, it just seemed right. And then
for Bowen the historian, I thought Michael Sheen right. I
don't know why, but Michael Sheen just felt right for him, right.
(32:13):
And then for Nile DeMarco, keeping that vibe, I thought,
Barry Keegan, right, you get this cool deaf activist. He
seems like I had done integrity. And then finally for
the ninety two year old local Jane Slater, I thought,
let's give it up to a legend Carol Burnett.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Anytime Carol Burnett's coming on screen.
Speaker 7 (32:28):
I'm happy right, and you know she used to do
sign language every episode of her show, but it was
a specific little sign she gave to her. I think
I was her mother, and she would always signal with
her hand to her mother at the end of every episode.
It was like their own little sign language. So I thought, boom,
we got to honor that.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
This is perfect. Zaren, you did it again.
Speaker 7 (32:45):
Oh thank you, David.
Speaker 6 (32:48):
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
This show is hosted by Danish Wartz, Saren Burnette, and
me Jason English. Our producer is Josh Fisher. Day's episode
was written by Joanna Sokolowski and Julia Smith, Additional writing
by Marisa Brown, editing and sound design by Josh Thame,
(33:10):
mixing and mastering by Beheed Fraser. Our story editors are
Abby Stone and Marisa Brown. Oral history clips with Eric Coddle,
Everett Poole, Sidney Harris, and Jane Slater are excerpted from
interviews conducted with Lindsey Lee, Martha's Vineyard Museum oral history curator,
(33:32):
courtesy of the Martha's Vineyard Museum. Couldn't have done it
with value. Original music by Elise McCoy. Research and fact
checking by Meredith Danko, Austin Thompson, Joanna Solkeolowski, and Julius Smith.
Joe logo by Lucy Quintinia. I'm your Executive producer Very
Special Episodes is the production of iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Zaron Burnett
Dana Schwartz
Jason English
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