Laurel told her daughters that they were special. This was why the Toneybee Institute wanted them. “You know how many families applied to do this?” she said in the months leading up to the move. “So many. But ours was the only one with kids who already knew how to sign. I was the only one with girls that smart.”
They knew how to sign because Laurel was special, too. She had grown up as the only black girl in the state of Maine. Or, if not technically the only one, then at least the only one in a one-hundred-mile radius. She always said it that way, too, a “one-hundred-mile radius,” so that Callie and Charlotte imagined a large bull’s-eye, its red rings hovering over the state’s borderlines. The small dark circle at the rings’ center was Laurel.
Laurel’s father, Theodore Quincy, was a former serviceman. Her mother Nancy was a seamstress. Together they bought a Christmas tree farm in Farragut, Maine, because they liked its solitude.
They never explained to Laurel what awful noises of the world had driven them to choose the muteness of assimilation. Each morning, Nancy Quincy stood at her stove and stirred a pan of oatmeal. Theodore Quincy sat behind her at the kitchen table staring out through the window, cutting down every tree he saw with his eyes.
Theodore and Nancy had not counted on it being so hard, so very, very hard, to be the only black family in a one-hundred-mile radius. But it was too late to give up, once the place was bought and Laurel was born. To admit defeat would have broken what little heart they had left. Nancy and Theodore willed themselves to believe that this life was best for Laurel. At least she wasn’t a hooligan. At least she wasn’t running the streets of Boston. She had air and trees and an overpowering sky tamping down to meet her. That had to count for something.
“None of the white people ever said anything outright mean to us,” Laurel lied to her daughters. By which she meant that she allowed herself to remember only once or twice when someone called her “nigger.” She would never say that word out loud to her girls. “It wasn’t like that,” she explained. “It was just the opposite. They were always so polite. They were so polite it nearly killed me.”
For Laurel, growing up in Farragut felt like the whole world was holding its breath around her. As she moved from her home to the road leading to school and back again, she entered a kind of airless delirium. Her favorite sound in the world was that of the soles of her own penny loafers scuffing on gravel as she walked to school. It was realer than the scrape of her mother’s tin spoon in the pan of oatmeal at the stove or the click in the back of her father’s throat as he lit imaginary fires behind his eyes and dreamed of burning pines. Whenever Laurel shuffled her loafers over the gravel, she shut her eyes and opened her mouth, tried to swallow that noise and keep it safe in the well of her neck. When the indifference of town overwhelmed her, she’d hum and hum until she brought back up the sound of her own shoes on gravel.
Once she reached town, the atmosphere was even tighter, like a lung suspended in motion. At school, the teachers spoke in loud, bright voices to try to draw her out but never named the thing that made her different.
On the playground, children screeched and ran and skipped, and Laurel sat beneath a pine tree and watched them. She rubbed a patch of sap between her fingers, and every time the stickiness pulled at the skin there, she closed her eyes in gratitude for the pain. Each stinging smack told her brain and her skin and her blood, “I am here, I exist, I am here.”
It was in this climate of reticence—never being asked more than what was polite, never being spoken to first in public, always being courteously omitted, the eschewal of ever naming things outright—that Laurel grew to hate the failures of the spoken word.
By the time she was ten years old, she had had enough. She stopped speaking. She still talked at home, but out in the streets of Farragut, she wrote everything down on a notepad with a golf pencil she nicked from the bank. She wrote notes to the grocer; to her teachers; to the few classmates who directed conversation her way. She wrote notes to the wind and the trees and the stars—her companions—and she tore up the paper as soon as she was finished writing and dropped fistfuls of it around the farm, to ensure their delivery.
For a half year, she was solved. Her teachers gladly accepted her notes, relieved to have a bona fide reason to ignore her. They palmed the sheets of paper and trained their eyes to forget her for the rest of the day. Laurel moved silently through the school’s hallways and the stream of calls and shouts and giggles ebbed and flowed around her. She felt proud, contained within herself, a smooth, perfect rock at the bottom of a river. Not a part of the current, it was sure, but not because she wasn’t good enough to be counted as water but because she was made up of a different element entirely—she was silent and strong and adamantine stone. When she was mute, Laurel was finally happy. She’d bucked the spoken word.
It was Nancy who ruined it for her, who found a semester’s worth of discarded notes in the bottom of a battered schoolbag, who marched Laurel to class and said to the teacher, her voice shaking to stay calm, “Why didn’t you ask her to speak?” and the teacher, perplexed, “Because we thought this was better,” and Nancy again, her voice nearly hoarse with the effort to stay cordial, to not show her anger, “Please treat her like everyone else. Teach her like everyone else. She needs to speak like everybody else. Please ask her to speak.”
Nancy hustled Laurel out of the classroom and into the cab of their pickup truck. Before she even put the key in the ignition, Nancy reached for Laurel’s golf pencil and silently, efficiently, broke it down into splinters. She gathered all the pieces in her fist, rolled down her window and tossed them on to the curb.
“We’ve got enough problems out here,” she told Laurel as she brushed the lead dust off her palms. “You don’t want to make being peculiar one of them.”
Being the only black family for a one-hundred-mile radius had one benefit. Laurel and her parents were famous. For nearly a decade running, the Quincys’ tree farm was the only entry for the entire state of Maine in The Colored Motorist’s Guide to America. They were, officially, the northernmost Negroes in the United States. Day-trippers from Boston, defiant honeymooners, bored servicemen on leave from the Navy Yard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—they all came to the Quincy tree farm to gawk and take pictures. The Colored Motorist’s Guide told them where they could and could not sleep, in what towns the citizens would shoot them if they stayed there after dark, and here, in a book that listed what was possible and what was not, was the impossible printed plain on a page: Negroes in Maine.
The summer Laurel was eleven, the Hallelujah School for the Colored Deaf found the tree farm. They came at the end of the season, in a white rusting school bus, with their name printed on the side in bright blue paint. The bus pulled up alongside the farmhouse’s front gate and idled as about a dozen boys and girls pressed their faces to the windows and stared at Laurel where she played. She ignored them.
She was bored of tourists. They were black, but they spoke to her parents with a condescension Laurel felt in her bones, though she didn’t have a word for it yet. “It’s a living, I guess,” they said, while drinking her parents’ lemonade. And the kids who came with them, who hung over the sides of doors chewing gum and staring at the jagged ends of Laurel’s hot-comb pressed hair, spoke too quickly, in a high pitch and with a force Laurel found bewildering. It was giddiness that made them talk like that, something Laurel had never heard before and so could not understand. Here was an even harder truth to live with: she couldn’t trust any words, even when the people speaking them looked like her.
So Laurel pretended not to hear the bus’s engine.
The bus door folded open and a woman came down the stairs. She took the liberty of opening the Quincys’ front gate herself, and she walked up to where Laurel sat in the grass drawing in her notebook. She was probably only about nineteen or twenty, but she seemed like an adult to Laurel. The woman wore a flowered skirt pressed into sharp pleats, but when she held out her hand Laurel could see faint stains on the armpits of her blouse.
The woman said: “You’re the Quincys? You live here?”
Nancy came from the house and into the yard and shook the woman’s hand. The woman said that her name was Mary Ann Grannum and she was a teacher at a colored school for the deaf in South Carolina. They paid for their classes by touring the country every summer in an acting troupe. Nancy asked, “How do the students give their lines?” and Mary Ann smiled. “We’re special.”
They came from a place that had been forgotten by time, a school founded to teach signing to the colored deaf, started right after the Civil War by well-meaning Yankees and quickly taken over by the colored citizens themselves. Over the years, when other deaf schools banished sign language, declared it backward and a threat to the wholesome spoken word, subscribed to the theory that sign language would encourage the deaf to marry only each other and create a perpetuating race of non-hearers, and swaddled the hands of their most defiant students in thick cotton mittens, the students at the Hallelujah School paid no heed to any of that and kept signing. They became a rarity: black children who could speak with their hands.
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.