Growing Up Black and Deaf in the South
20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Mary Herring Wright
Introduction by Joseph Hill and Carolyn McCaskill
October 2019
| Table of contents Excerpt
Carolyn McCaskill interviews Mary Herring Wright for the Black ASL Project. |
$32.95 (t) paperback, ebook
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“I decided to write my story because I wanted my children to have a lasting document that chronicled my experiences growing up as a deaf person in Iron Mine, North Carolina. I also decided to write my story for my many deaf friends because my story, in many ways, is also their story.”
“Precious few works have examined the intersection between race and disability…Sounds Like Home is a welcomed illustration of the quiet resolve and considerable accomplishments of working women of all colors and communities. Their efforts grace our lives forever; their stories only infrequently enrich our books.”
Originally published in 1999, Sounds Like Home adds an important dimension to the canon of deaf literature by presenting the perspective of an African American deaf woman who attended a segregated deaf school. Mary Herring Wright documents her life from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s, offering a rich account of her home life in rural North Carolina and her education at the North Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind, which had a separate campus for African American students. This 20th anniversary edition of Wright’s story includes a new introduction by scholars Joseph Hill and Carolyn McCaskill, who note that the historical documents and photographs of segregated Black deaf schools have mostly been lost. Sounds Like Home serves “as a permanent witness to the lives of Black Deaf people.”
Mary Herring Wright (1923–2018) grew up in Iron Mine, North Carolina. She began losing her hearing at the age of eight, and was completely deaf by age ten. In 1935, her family sent her to the North Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind, where she was both a student and a teacher. She then moved to Washington, DC and became a clerk for the US Department of the Navy. She later returned to her roots in North Carolina and raised a family. Mary Herring Wright was awarded an honorary degree from Gallaudet University in 2004. She is also the author of Far From Home: Memories of World War II and Afterward.
Mary Herring Wright participated as an informant in the Black ASL Project, which researched the linguistic features that make Black ASL recognizable as a distinct variety of American Sign Language. The research was published in The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL, and her interviews can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/GallaudetUniversityPress.
Paperback
ISBN 978-1-944838-58-4
271 pages. 6 x 9. 16 photographs.
$32.95 (t)
Ebook
ISBN 978-1-944838-59-1
$32.95