The Hallelujah School for the Colored Deaf’s all-sign-language productions were famous in their home state, Mary Ann explained, and that summer was their first tour of the North. It ended in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where there were still black faces in the audience. They were certain they wouldn’t see anyone any farther. But then they read the entry in their Colored Motorist’s Guide and so they’d decided to see the impossible before they headed back south.
Nancy led Mary Ann and her students around the farm, Laurel following from a few feet back, trying not to seem too interested. There were ten performers in the troupe, most younger than her, seven or eight years old, but there were a couple adolescents: a girl and a boy, both magnificent versions of fourteen who walked with such assurance, that Laurel, sulking behind them, was ashamed of her own steps.
Laurel had thought the deaf would be soundless, but these people weren’t. Some made a careening sound as they walked. Mary Ann, the teacher, breathed in soft, heavy sighs through her mouth. Laurel liked the sound. The visitors had a queer scent, too, like a damp swath of canvas that had dried in grass.
The tour ended in the kitchen, in the mudroom where Mary Ann told her students, in spoken words, to stand in a line, and Nancy poured glasses of milk for each of them. The two teenagers, the boy and the girl, were the last to enter the kitchen, and as soon as they came through the door they got excited. They raised their hands eagerly, opened their eyes wide, and the boy made a high gasp. At the sound, Mary Ann turned, made a quick scan of the room, and gestured at the two of them. They lowered their hands, chastened.
Nancy frowned. “Is there something wrong?”
Mary Ann said, “It’s nothing.”
Nancy stopped pouring the milk.
“It’s your washing machine.”
“What about it?” The machine was an old hand-crank one, a heavy drum in the corner by the door, a wringer bolted to the top and a line of rust creeping up around its belly.
“We haven’t washed our clothes since we left South Carolina,” Mary Ann explained. The Laundromats along the way wouldn’t let them. Or rather, they could put their clothes in the washer, but they were watched the whole time and more than once accused of breaking a machine. They had an iron in the back of the van for keeping their costumes neat, and so they used this, pressing their sweaty shirts and blouses into straight lines. That’s why they smelled like burnt cloth.
Nancy said, “You’re welcome to use it,” but Mary Ann shook her head.
“We don’t accept charity.”
“Please, it wouldn’t be that.”
But Mary Ann was adamant. She kept saying, “We are not a charity. We don’t take handouts.” From her voice, it was impossible to tell the emotion. Only her frown told Laurel that she was angry.
Finally, Nancy asked her, “What if you give us something for it? What if you stay here for the night, eat dinner, wash the clothes, and you put on your show for us. My husband would like to meet you, I’m sure.”
So Mary Ann and her students rigged up a sheet between the two pine trees in the front yard. Laurel and her parents sat before it on their wooden kitchen chairs. Mary Ann placed a storm lantern behind the sheet, right at the center. Five of the Hallelujah players came out in front of the sheet, and five stayed behind it. They all held up their arms and then the play began. It was the story of Hagar, though Laurel didn’t know it. The Quincys were not religious.
The teenaged girl, the very pretty one, played Hagar, and Mary Ann and the teenaged boy played Sarah and Abraham. Mary Ann curled her back into a crone’s hunch. The boy wore a fake white beard. Another boy, younger, stood to the right and narrated the action with spoken words.
Young, beautiful Hagar, wrapped in white cloth, knelt on the ground.
Abraham, in a blue-and-white bathrobe, stood beside her. He reached into the folds of his coat and pulled out a baby doll, its porcelain skin splashed with brown paint. He said, “Ishmael,” and behind him, his shadow spelled the name: the smallest finger held up straight, then a fist, then motions so fast that Laurel could not follow them, though she tried very hard.
Hagar took the doll from Abraham and held it in her arms and rocked it. She kissed the porcelain crown of its head while behind the sheet all five shadows held their arms up as high as they could. They touched their pointer fingers to their thumbs, spread the remaining fingers wide, circled their hands slowly over their heads. The narrator, standing in front of the sheet declared, “They had made a family.”
Next, Sarah came forward. She crossed one crooked leg over the other and ominously circled Hagar and her baby. The narrator said: “Hagar fled from Sarah’s face,” and Hagar stood up, as if to run. Behind the sheet, the shadows stopped moving their hands. They twisted their legs up into trunks, their arms into branches, hung their heads, the better to be Hagar’s wilderness.
Alone, in front of the white curtain, Hagar held her baby in her arms and first ran right, then ran left. She ran forward and stared out into the night, over Laurel’s head. She beheld the black sky above her for one long, terrible moment and then she shut her eyes and dropped to her knees and called out, “Lord.” Behind her, one of the trees unfurled into the shadow of a girl. The shadow threw out her arm, threw her thumb and forefinger into an L and in one long pull brought the letter from her heart to her hip.
A small boy in a white shirt and white pants came from behind the sheet and went to Hagar where she knelt with her eyes closed. He was meant to be an angel. He took Hagar by the elbow and raised her up. He held up the baby and called, “I will make multitudes of him.” The boy’s voice was deep, as if he were already a man. He shouted: “God opened her eyes”—and Hagar obeyed. Then the boy said: “And she saw a well of water.”
But by then, Laurel was hardly paying attention to the actors in front of the sheet. Instead, she watched the shadows behind it. Their hands made the words—made Hagar and her banishment, Hagar and the terrible wilderness—real. When the angel got to the last word of his speech, water, his shadow on the other side of the sheet stood against the bright white expanse and tapped three fingers to its chin.
Mary Ann and her charges wouldn’t stay in the house. They slept in their bus. All night long Laurel watched from her bedroom window, afraid that it would drive away and take its secret with it in the night. The next morning, she was up early. She followed Mary Ann around as she and her students took down the sheet from the pine tree’s branches.
She forced herself to speak. “How did you learn to move your hands like that?” she asked. And Mary Ann said, “It’s sign language.”
A package came in the mail a month after they left. The emblem of the Hallelujah Colored School for the Deaf was printed on the envelope and it was addressed only to Laurel. Inside, a book. It was very old: a dictionary that had been printed in the previous century and had been held by many hands since.
All the Maine winters and springs and summers that followed, Laurel sat with a hand mirror in her lap and signed her ABCs to her reflection, until her fingers learned the rhythms. Her favorite sign was the letter p. It reminded her of sitting in the school yard under the pine tree, rubbing sap between two fingers, the stickiness of resin summoning her back into this world.
She was no longer adrift in Farragut, Maine. She had discovered a universe where silence wasn’t cold and stony but warm and golden, where there was no need for speech. Signing was full. Signing made words important. It was beyond condescension or awkwardness or fear or loneliness. It wasn’t avoidance or dismissal. It was, as far as Laurel was concerned, the perfect language.
It was lucky for Laurel that by the time she graduated from high school, sign language was beginning its revival. She finally had others to sign to. She enrolled in a teachers’ college to become a sign language interpreter.
College was the first time she tried to sign to another black person, her roommate, Dorothy Marshall. Dorothy watched Laurel’s hands for a bit and then she laughed at Laurel for a long time before telling her
she signed like a white girl. Laurel’s eyes watered at the insult, but she decided, in the end, to be practical about it. No matter, she told herself, no matter. It was not as if she didn’t understand division. Borders existed everywhere. It was silly to expect there would never be any. Growing up, Laurel decided, was learning to grudgingly respect the borders and even come to call them beautiful.
In honor of her lost Hallelujah Players, Laurel resolved to use black sign language whenever she could. “It was the seventies,” she explained. But in truth, it wasn’t as flippant as that. She fell in love with the black dialect’s beauty: she loved the theatricality, the delicacy, the force of it. She came to believe that it was her charge to show this beauty to the rest of the world. When she left school, she made a pact with herself to always sign black. But when she applied for jobs at deaf schools, her potential employers shifted uncomfortably in their seats when they saw her sign and politely suggested she apply for assistant positions, not lead teachers.
She should have started signing white again, at least get a shot at the better jobs, but Laurel was stubborn. She truly believed that she could win people over to see her side of things. They only had to see black sign language, she was certain, to understand that it was special. She took the assistant positions, and when her daughters were born, she taught them to sign with the accent. But because she wouldn’t sign standard, she was never promoted. She spent nearly fifteen years as a teacher’s assistant.
So when Laurel first read the job announcement pinned to the bulletin board in her teachers’ lounge at the deaf school where she worked, she took down the piece of curling fax paper and stuffed it in her purse so that none of her co-workers could apply. In the weeks that followed, she skipped work and drove for hours to the Toneybee Institute and schemed and charmed her way through the interviews.
Laurel never doubted that she loved Charlie. She loved him before she even met him. But it wasn’t love that made her insist upon the innocence and beauty of Charlie and the experiment. It was her complete and utter exhaustion at being underestimated.
When she got to the Toneybee, for the first time in a long time, with the scientists and the lab assistants at least, Laurel signed white. But at night, when they were gone and it was just her, just her and Charlie, she signed with the drawl.
Charlotte
That first night, Charlie gripped the front of my mother’s nightgown and made those terrible noises and she clutched him back even tighter. She waved her one free arm at us. “Charles, girls, not now, go.”
My father scrambled off the bed. He took Callie and me by our shoulders and hustled us out of the room. When we were safely over the threshold he halted, then turned and gently shut the door behind us, careful not to slam.
We huddled together in the hallway, none of us wanting to move. From the other side of the door, my mother’s voice was pleading now. That was the scariest part. My mother did not beg for anything from anybody, but here was her voice now, warbling, “Please, love, please, love, please.”
Suddenly Charlie stopped. There was no noise at all, not even a groan of defeat.
After a moment, my father began walking us to our rooms.
Callie took his hand. “There’s nothing wrong with Charlie, right? Like, he’s not sick or something?”
“Probably not.”
“Will he do this every night?”
My father said he didn’t know.
When I was alone in my bedroom, I couldn’t lie down. I opened the window, stuck my hands out into the deep night air, and wagged them at the dead countryside. If I squinted, I could see the woods through the dark.
I listened for any sound. I would have preferred the sounds of Dorchester—a creaking floor, the dirty sigh of a city bus’s exhaust pipe, the scattered footfall of a neighbor stumbling home, an ambulance’s siren, the heavy husk of Callie breathing—I’d rather have any of that than this nothingness.
I leaned farther out the window and looked up. All summer long, as we got ready for the move, my father told me about the constellations I would see when we lived in the countryside.
“I see stars in Boston all the time,” I countered.
“Nah,” he said. “You’re just seeing satellites.”
Now, I wanted to see the shapes in the stars: the bear, the scorpion, the crab, and the lion. But when I looked above me, all the stars were tangled. They didn’t make any forms or symbols—they were meaningless and mute. But the earth and the trees and the water below me were not. All in a rush, the night broke and I heard waves from some water, somewhere, burping up against a shore. I heard the rancid woods creaking. And then suddenly, the rise of a bass cry, some animal caught up in its own dreams.
I slammed my window shut, not caring anymore about the heat. I turned on the overhead light and then I lay in bed, absolutely still, until I heard a click click click, and the room sputtered into darkness. I sat up in bed with a start, even more terrified, and the lights sprang back on. The Toneybee had our bedroom lights on a motion sensor, a way to save money. I lay back down, tried to calm my breathing but the lights went out before I quieted. I held my hands up above my head and frantically signed nonsense into the air until the light clicked back on. I did this over and over again, waited for the timer to run out, then furiously called the lights back. My arms tired. I had exhausted myself. I could fall asleep to the snapping sound of the Toneybee Institute’s economy.
NOBODY WANTED CHARLIE. Not at first. He came into this world unasked for, a problem to be solved.
He was the result of an unplanned pregnancy in the lab. His mother was a loud, nosy, gap-toothed teenaged chimp named Denise. She was supposed to be on the Pill. All the girl chimps at the lab were—it was standard policy. But Charlie’s will to exist was stronger than progestogen, and so Denise managed, somehow, to conceive him despite the grubby patch of hormones stuck to her hairy side. None of the researchers even suspected Denise was pregnant. They noticed she was irritable sometimes, and that her middle was swollen, but they chalked that up to a rough adolescence. Charlie’s father was a mystery: there were two or three older chimps sniffing around Denise for a bit, pushing at her shoulders and backing her into corners before the researchers could shoo them away. Dr. Paulsen and her assistants never got close to figuring out who exactly was the culprit. Charlie was a fatherless child.
No one at the Toneybee noticed Denise was pregnant until the day Charlie was born. It was on a summer morning, and some of the chimps were allowed into the yard for outdoor observation. Denise usually spent her time outside good-naturedly bullying her friends, but this particular day, she abruptly left off swatting at a younger girl chimp, turned on her heel, and staggered over to a shaded corner in the pen—the farthest one from the observation deck. Once, twice, she rocked back and forth on her heels, and then clumsily squatted down into the dirt. She sat like that, low on her haunches, for the rest of the afternoon, only moving to stay in the shade, following it, inch by inch, as it drifted across the yard. Dr. Paulsen and her team watched her all day, tracking her inertia. She bared her teeth and screamed at anyone or anything that came near. Even the other chimps left her alone. Confused and brave Denise was determined to give birth alone.
Late in the day, just past dusk, as abruptly as she sat down, Denise reached between her legs and pulled up something damp and dark and strange and tucked over. She rested the thing beside her in the dust. She stayed close to it for a little while, occasionally prodding it with one knobby finger. But when it was dark, when all the other chimps had been coaxed back inside and she was all alone in the yard, Denise put her palms on the ground and pushed herself up. She staggered back, then forth. She was still very weak, the hair on her thighs and ankles matted down with dried wet and blood and dirt. She swayed once more. Then she grunted, turned her head, and strode away, leaving Charlie down in the dirt, never once glancing back.
It wasn’t Denise’s fault that she left Charlie behind. She wasn’t callous by nature. It was onl
y that she had been hand-reared. She was raised by humans, so never knew her mother’s touch. She didn’t know what to do with a baby.
AFTER THAT FIRST night of crying, my mother told Callie and me this story in a hushed and hurried tone, as if she was betraying some trust with Charlie. When she finished, she stood up, her face chastened and sad, and left us to go back to him. As soon as she was gone, I turned to Callie and pressed the fat tip of my tongue against the inside of my cheek until a round little bulb popped out there.
What’s that? Callie signed.
“Knocked up,” I told her. “It means dumb kids get pregnant.” Another dirty sign learned at summer camp and put to good use. We began to laugh but when my mother came back in the room, Charlie on her hip, neither one of us could bring ourselves to tease him to his face. He seemed too fragile for that. There was something about the set of his shoulders, if he didn’t know you were watching he would kind of slump them forward, already wary of the world, preparing himself for defeat.
It was true what my mother said about him. He was beautiful. Large, deep-set eyes, well-formed teeth, perfectly circular nostrils. But his chin was weak and recessive, and his eyes, as well formed as they were, as soft and full as his lashes grew, his eyes never lit on anything for long. He was too nervous to look anything in the eye.
Our first afternoon with Charlie, we sat with him in front of a standing mirror. My mother propped it up longways against one of Charlie’s bare walls. She and Callie and Charlie rolled a red ball back and forth among the three of them until my mother rolled the ball away from Charlie, toward the reflection. He followed. She picked up the ball and tapped it against the glass. She put her own finger to the mirror, then touched the center of her chest and signed Mother. Then she handed the ball to Callie, who tapped it on the floor in front of her, then to her own reflection, and signed Callie. Callie rolled the ball to Charlie again. My mother touched Charlie’s chest very gently with the rubber ball, then touched it to his reflection in the mirror. The first few times they did this, she signed his name, too, Charlie. On the final round, though, and I don’t know why she did, she didn’t sign Charlie. She signed chimp instead.
We Love You, Charlie Freeman Page 6