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Joanne Greenberg In This Sign

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

IN THIS SIGN

JOANNE GREENBERG is an internationally renowned, awardwinning author of sixteen novels and four collections of short stories, most notably the novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which has sold millions of copies and was adapted into a 1977 movie and a 2004 play of the same name. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Greenberg graduated from American University, where she majored in anthropology and English. She became interested in deaf culture through her husband, Albert, who was a vocational rehabilitation counselor for the state of Colorado. Two of her short stories were published in Outcasts and Angels: The New Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature, edited by Edna Edith Sayers, and In This Sign was made into an Emmy Award–winning Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie titled Love Is Never Silent. Greenberg is proud to have had her use of American Sign Language called “clumsy yet understandable.” She lives near Lookout Mountain, Colorado, where she writes daily, tutors Latin and Hebrew, is active in the Beth Evergreen congregation, has been an adjunct professor of cultural anthropology and ﬁction writing at the Colorado School of Mines, and has volunteered as an EMT. She has two sons, one of whom, David Greenberg, has cowritten a memoir with a member of the deaf community, Johnnie Calderone.

SARA NOVIĆ is the author of the New York Times bestseller True Biz and Girl at War, which won the American Library Association’s Alex Award and was a ﬁ nalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she studied ﬁction and literary translation, and is an instructor of Deaf studies and creative writing. She lives in Philadelphia with her family.

JOANNE GREENBERG

In This Sign

Introduction by SARA

NOVIĆ

Afterword by

JOANNE GREENBERG

PENGUIN CLASSICS

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First published in the United States of America by Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1970

First published in Penguin Classics 2024 001

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Introduction by SARA NOVIĆ vii

IN THIS SIGN

Afterword by JOANNE GREENBERG

Acknowledgments

Introduction

When it comes to deaf culture, I can be protective. The American deaf community is a diverse and vibrant subculture, with our own rich history, language, and shared values. We are also small, tight-knit, and extremely marginalized by the larger hearing society around us, which can make us proprietary about our stories.

At the heart of deaf culture is American Sign Language (ASL), a language diﬀerent from English not only in its modality, but also in its vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and higherlevel linguistic concepts. In part because of this language barrier, most hearing people can’t or won’t broach the divide between our worlds in a meaningful way in their lifetimes.

As a result, deaf characters in fiction are a rarity, and when they do appear they are often poorly rendered. Typically, deaf people in literature and fi lm are pitiable, isolated, and innocent to the point of infantilization. These failures of the hearing imagination— the inability to comprehend that deaf people experience the full range of human emotions, have rich inner lives, and can be successful— are common on and off the page.

Because of all this, we can be dismissive of hearing-made art about deaf culture. Theoretically this isn’t the best strategy, but then again, we’ve rarely been wrong. Across centuries of American literature, writers again and again confuse the physiological fact of deafness with the state of our intellect or our capacity for feeling. But being a nonspeaking deaf person or one with heavily accented speech does not indicate that we are empty vessels in which to dump stereotypes, or to use as symbols. We have much to say to those who will take the time to listen.

Enter Joanne Greenberg. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1932, she is best known for her second novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Published in 1964, it is a semiautobiographical account of a young woman’s inpatient stay at a hospital while being treated for schizophrenia. Greenberg’s portrayal of mental illness is decidedly unbeautiful, a departure from other cultural forces at the time, notably Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar published one year earlier. This was an explicit motivation according to Greenberg, who said in an interview with the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA):

I wrote [I Never Promised You a Rose Garden] as a way of describing mental illness without the romanticization that it underwent in the sixties and seventies. . . . During those days, people often confused creativity with insanity. There is no creativity in madness; madness is the opposite of creativity, although people may be creative in spite of being mentally ill.

Greenberg is a writer who is clearly unafraid to approach complex topics from perspectives wholly her own, uninﬂuenced by trends of the zeitgeist. I can imagine that her lived experiences with mental illness have also made her familiar with the feeling of otherness in a society that so values “normalcy.” It makes sense, then, that Greenberg’s interest was piqued by the deaf community, for whom her husband was working as a vocational rehabilitation counselor in the 1960s. In learning more about his clients and the systemic barriers they faced, Greenberg studied ASL and has since worked to establish deafaccessible mental health programs at hospitals nationwide.

Even knowing this, when I first cracked In This Sign, I was nervous about how an older book might portray deafness. Quickly, though, my worries were allayed—from its fi rst pages, it’s clear how effective Greenberg is at capturing the nuances of deaf culture.

Originally published in 1970, the novel details the lives of deaf couple Abel and Janice Ryder, from their school days

up through their eldest grandchild’s college years, a timeline that spans from the 1920s to the 1960s. Abel’s rural upbringing and attempted mainstream education result in language deprivation— an isolating syndrome that not only aﬀects one’s ability to communicate, but also eventually causes cognitive damage. Most of Abel’s childhood confusion and fear are crystallized in an upsetting sequence in which his mother shouts “oo” at him repeatedly, then sends him into town alone, where he sits in a strange room all day. He does not realize until decades later, after learning ASL and having children of his own, that she must have been saying “school.”

At the time of In This Sign’s publication, ASL had been recognized as a language for only about a decade; it was previously understood as “gestures,” or a bastardized version of English on the hands. As a result, American deaf education was only just beginning to wriggle out of the ironclad grip of the oralist ideology that had near unanimous rule since the late nineteenth century. “Pure oralists” believed that deaf people must be taught to speak and lipread, and that sign language should be eradicated. Children caught “waving hands” were punished— their hands tied to desks, slammed in drawers, and struck with rulers.

Eventually, Abel is freed from the conﬁ nes of his isolation when he is sent to a school for the deaf as a teenager and begins to learn sign language. The school itself, though, is oral, as would have been typical of the 1920s, meaning the site of most deaf students’ education was not inside the classroom at all:

Every day for two hours, candles were blown out to make the letter P and mouths moved to letters and pictures on the blackboard and the students stared at tongues and teeth and lips— dill, till, still, skill— but the words, the real words were behind the outhouse, waiting; the Language given and taken quickly at the fence; the forbidden Signs made their users rich.

Oralist programming prevented a lot of deaf children from reaching their academic potential; however, the gathering of

deaf people together in campus spaces allowed the children themselves to pull one another up out of language deprivation to a degree:

[Abel] began, very slowly, to wonder about words and thoughts themselves. Perhaps there were words for things not seen or touched. . . . The more words Abel learned, the more things had meaning; the more meaning, the more memory.

Simultaneously, Abel’s new love for language bleeds into his admiration for a fellow student, Janice. Because Janice grew up boarding at the deaf school, she has always had sign, which is the thing that draws him to her:

How busy she was, and how wise, with plans and ideas, with friends, angers and the small wars of enemies. To Abel, hand-mute in the mind- silence of his farm and Hearing school, these plans and arguments were so wide a life, that they seemed magic.

Meanwhile, Janice, who is more educated than Abel but has rarely left the conﬁ nes of the school, is enamored of the possibility of “Outside” that he represents:

Janice loved the idea of traveling; she loved all motion, all change, and Abel, who had spent his life in The World, who must have traveled easily from farm to town to city, seemed to her and the others a prince of promise.

Like many young people, Janice and Abel are in love with the idea of each other and of the gaps in their own lives the other might ﬁ ll. They quickly bond and plan to build a life together. While Abel delights in his new ability to make sense of the world around him through language, ultimately the school has left both him and Janice ill-prepared to navigate a hearing world designed to hide and, eventually, eradicate them.

The idea behind the pure oralist movement— emphasis on

pure —wasn’t so much eﬀective pedagogy as xenophobia. Its rise at the turn of the twentieth century coincided with the burgeoning popularity of nativist and eugenics groups, which were concerned with how to forcibly assimilate the large number of immigrants arriving on America’s shores, as well as the language and culture of deaf people, who seemed to them just as alien as foreigners. Deaf and disabled people who found themselves in federal custody were often subject to compulsory sterilization. As for the broader civilian populations of immigrants and deaf people alike, another solution was posited: Just speak English.

Around this time, Scottish immigrant Alexander Graham Bell used his budding fame as an inventor to become an inﬂuential spokesperson for both nativism and eugenics. In one 1913 letter to a friend, he wrote, “I believe that, in an English speaking [sic] country like the United States, the English language, and the English language alone, should be used as the means of communication and instruction.”

Having come from a family of speech teachers, Bell was quickly considered an authority on oral education. Perhaps his most infamous statements on the subject came from an 1883 address to the National Academy of Sciences titled “Memoir Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race”:

Those who believe as I do, that the production of a defective race of human beings would be a great calamity to the world, will examine carefully the causes that will lead to the intermarriage of the deaf with the object of applying a remedy.

Bell never outright advocated for the sterilization of deaf people. Instead, his “remedy” was a cultural one: the eradication of sign language. Without sign, deaf people wouldn’t be able to congregate with ease and would thus be forced to assimilate. The thinking was that fewer deaf couples would mean fewer deaf babies, although the recessive nature of most genetic deafness meant this was mostly false. The very real result was a dark age for deaf children: Deaf teachers, who could not

teach speech, were squeezed out of teaching roles, leaving deaf children language- deprived and uneducated.

Greenberg’s novel is nuanced in its portrayal of deaf people compared to the general understanding at the time, appearing as it did after nearly a century of pure oralism’s rule. Impressively, Greenberg is also leagues ahead of her contemporaries; deaf characters of note immediately before and after the publication of In This Sign are almost laughably one- dimensional in comparison to Abel and Janice, with even talented writers seeming either incurious about dismantling deaf-related clichés or bolstered by the rhetoric of saviorism to speak over the deaf in problematic ways. Carson McCullers’s John Singer, in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, is saintly, a receptacle for hearing people’s secrets and feelings, and once he is full to the brim, he is disposed of; Singer’s deaf friend, Spiros, is also dead by novel’s end. Eight years after In This Sign , Stephen King’s The Stand, with its “deaf-mute drifter,” Nick Andros, presents a cornucopia of problems, from the writer’s questionable comprehension of the physiological components of deafness and speech, to Andros’s sacriﬁcial death for the lives of his hearing companions, to his reappearance in dreams, where he can always speak and hear. (In whose dreams, exactly?)

By contrast, Janice and Abel ﬁ nd agency in using the stereotypes others believe about them to get what they want. Of their ﬁ nding ways to be together on campus, Greenberg writes:

Most of all, they used their deafness. They were all and completely mute; they understood nothing, they agreed to everything. They nodded and smiled and said yes to everyone. . . . [T]hey promised to reform and then went where they wished.

Later in the novel, Abel uses his landlord’s assumptions of his diminished intellectual capacity to procure another week’s stay in their apartment as they look for a new place to live. In their silence, the couple ﬁ nds power.

Greenberg, too, seems to make use of this— there is power in the novel’s quietness. Part character study and part family

saga, In This Sign is wholly steeped in the everyday, holding up a magnifier to Abel and Janice’s relationships with each other, with their children and grandchildren, with their employers, with their fellow parishioners at the deaf church, and with their in-laws. That’s not to say there isn’t tension in the novel. Over the course of it, I was often as gripped by these somewhat commonplace interactions— the friction between Janice and her coworkers due to her superior performance on the factory floor, or Janice and Abel’s fi rst meeting with their son-in-law to-be— as I am while reading a thriller.

I spent a while trying to reverse- engineer this craft trick: How did Greenberg make the minutiae of our daily lives feel so monumental? Eventually I realized that through astute and wholly authentic observations, she had simply cultivated an intense empathy for Abel and Janice, which is to say it wasn’t a trick at all.

The quietness of In This Sign is, I think, one of the novel’s greatest successes, because it forces readers to reckon with the intricacies of deaf people as people, not only in big, trajectorychanging events, but mostly in the little moments. The hardships that Abel and Janice do experience aren’t because they’re deaf, but because they’re human and must contend with the full range of what it means to grow up and raise a family against the backdrop of a rapidly changing society.

At times, these hardships are certainly made more difficult by the inaccessibility of the hearing world: a misunderstanding between Abel and a car salesman at the opening of the novel results in wage garnishing that further burdens the family fi nancially in an economically tumultuous time. The pain of losing a child is made harsher and more humiliating in the struggle to communicate while coffi n shopping. Because of this, some readers have criticized the portrayal of Abel as “ignorant” and Janice as quick to anger for casting deaf people in a negative light. And while it’s true— especially at the time of its fi rst publication, when there were few portrayals of deaf characters— that some might mistake these characters’ struggles and failures as inherent to deafness itself, I don’t think that’s the book that Greenberg wrote.

Deafness isn’t a monolith; it would be unfair to ask any writer or character to fully embody a deaf perspective. And what’s more, Greenberg’s care in foregrounding Abel’s language deprivation and the failures of oral education makes it clear that his and Janice’s confusion over and mistrust of the hearing world are not character ﬂ aws but the result of a deeply ﬂ awed system designed to crush them. Today’s readers, encountering Abel and Janice amid a more robust backdrop of deaf literature, including works by deaf writers, will be even better positioned to appreciate the complexity, the humanity, and the ugliness in In This Sign’s pages.

Through the eyes of their hearing daughter, Margaret, we also see moments when Abel and Janice’s limitations are selfimposed: Abel buys himself a hearing aid (which he wears and dislikes) as a gift for Margaret, thinking she’d ﬁ nd him more presentable, when the electronic gift that Margaret is really pining for is a radio. Janice feels self- conscious in both the hearing and deaf worlds, worried about being seen signing at the factory, and afraid for the family to attend the deaf church without the “right” clothing. These failures are important because they’re speciﬁc to the characters’ own personalities and ideologies rather than indicative of deafness. In a literary world of so many Tiny Tims, I appreciate that Abel and Janice are sometimes unlikeable. Greenberg respects her characters enough to craft fully realized human beings, warts and all.

It’s undeniable that Janice’s and Abel’s lives are not exactly beautiful, marked often by strain and struggle. But if all the hardships and slights they endure at the hands of hearing people are upsetting, I’d implore readers to see these injustices as a call to action— to advocate tirelessly for an education system that, instead of providing deaf children with the veneer of inclusive education, gives them the robust linguistic and academic skills they’ll need for a safe and successful future. A call to action to stand in solidarity with the deaf community, whose self-determination remains under attack. Today, pure oralism, now rebranded as “Listening Spoken Language approach” (LSL), still exists as a powerful force in deaf education, perpetuating isolation and cognitive damage through lan-

guage deprivation that doesn’t look much diﬀerent from what Abel might have experienced nearly a hundred years earlier. In this way, it’s unfortunate that Greenberg’s novel has stood the test of time.

Ultimately, though, if Greenberg has pulled back the curtain on the suﬀering of disabled people in an oppressive society, she has also given us the answer for how to overcome it. In the ﬁ nal pages of the novel, we see Abel, Janice, and their grown daughter chatting; together they laugh, and it’s clear that this novel isn’t only one of deaf hardship, but also one of bravery and great joy. Margaret’s son, Marshall, has left home to join the civil rights movement, and the three discuss what he might be hoping to achieve.

“He wants us to end poverty and despair,” Margaret says. Abel, whose once halting sign is now described as “elegant,” says proudly, “we did that.” When Margaret explains that Marshall is thinking of change on a larger scale, Abel and Janice suggest the solution must be something “like Sign”— sweeping and propulsive, passed down and across generations with both care and urgency: the thing that changed their lives, and made its users rich.

SARA NOVI Ć

TO ALBERT

“The right hand, palm inward, covers the left hand, which rests on the heart.”

In This Sign

They sat on the bench and waited. Now and then people walked past them on the mysterious errands of the Law and, as they passed, looked at them sitting there and then looked again with small, quickly hidden smiles. They had been sitting on the bench for almost an hour and slowly Abel had begun to understand why the looks were strange. They were sitting very straight, he and Janice, because they were frightened; it made them sti in their clothes. The strange looks were because their clothes were not correct for the season. He had felt so free and wise in these same clothes before. They had been beautiful when they were new; he remembered walking proudly out of the store in them, into the carefully portioned light of September, knowing that the last of his great money had gone for them. It was January now, and Janice beside him was still Summer, all summer green and gold and wearing a hat full of ﬂowers.

Maybe it wasn’t the right thing for her to wear the thin gauze dress or a hat piled with ﬂowers, but it was her good outﬁt; it made him remember the summer days and her running down the street toward him, running for joy, the wonderful automobile and the food, all the food, and the tent show they went to in August, and how, in The Summer, what they had and what they hoped for made a shine in their eyes and faces and gave to each of their ways and gestures a special grace.

All of his summers before were nothing but a haze of dust and the smell of dust, tiredness and sweat. That was the farm. Town Summer was di erent. He thought he had never looked at a tree when the leaves were full, or walked in the night’s

little wind, or seen the green-moving sun- dapple on someone’s face, or felt it on his own. Janice’s yellow hair was warm and it smelled of herself and of the sun. He gave her a green jewel ring to keep the sunlight in and he got himself a marvelous watch, fat with numbers, a chain and a fob and a fob charm in the shape of a lion’s head with red jewel eyes. The Summer . . .

Janice moved a little. The door of the courtroom had swung open and she was leaning forward to catch a look at the inside. They saw some benches, rows of them, but the door swung closed again and that was all.

A man in a heavy coat came around the corner and toward them. Abel began to raise his hand just a little for Janice, to tell her that this was his boss, Mr. Webendorf. There was another man with him, a thin man, very clean and dressed tightly, a stranger, but before Abel could get up and give his greetings, Mr. Webendorf nodded and went away into the courtroom and the stranger was left standing in front of them.

“Comstock,” he spelled out with his ﬁ ngers, and into their astonishment. “I’m here to interpret for you.”

“You deaf?” Abel asked, stuttering because his hands followed his mind.

“Parents,” Comstock said. “I work for the Court sometimes. Come on, they’re ready for us now.” His Sign was quick, educated, a little ugly with impatience. Abel and Janice turned to each other, surprised.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Comstock said. He swung through the door, and they winced and followed.

A man took them all the way to the front of the courtroom near the Judge, and between the Judge and themselves, Mr. Comstock stood. Everyone swore to tell the truth and then the thing began.

It was, the Judge said, a Hearing. Weren’t all of them Hearing? — latitude—what was latitude? —would be given the respondent in his replies in consideration of his inﬁ rmity. The beautiful, unmeaning words that the Judge was saying broke hard through Comstock’s ﬁ ngers. Into the dark wood-andstone room, an old, shaking sunlight was slowly venturing. Chair by chair it crept the way down the aisle and by the time

Mr. Dengel, the automobile dealer, was ﬁnished with what he said, the light had slid down and gone to sleep between the front row of chairs and the tables where people talked to the Judge. Abel was happy to watch the light. It was the only thing in the room which was not strange to him.

Mr. Dengel was the man who had sold him the car. This trouble must be about the car, then.

Mr. Dengel talked for a long time, saying everything about the car, about the color and the kind and the di erent papers that had to be signed because of it. But when he told about the money—what the car cost— Abel had to jump up and tell what was true, because the car did not cost what Mr. Dengel said. That was a lie. Then the Judge was angry and Comstock’s hands shot out that anger against Abel and told him that if he did not sit down and wait until he was called, he would be ﬁ ned for contempt of court. What was ﬁ ned? What was contempt? Abel saw then that it was very important to keep them all from anger. He sat down. Mr. Dengel said some more and the Judge asked things and then told Abel that he, too, must tell about the car. He began, trying to see everything clearly in his mind: Town and the shining machine and The Summer.

They came in late spring, he and Janice, from his father’s farm. There was a job for him and for Janice. They had a room on Perrer Street and money for their start— the savings his father gave him in a deep, old-fashioned snap-purse. On his way home from the printing shop each night he walked past the place where they sold the automobiles. He always stood for a while, staring. On nice nights the big doors were open and a light was on so people could stop and see the beautiful machines, glowing and smooth. Sometimes the man came out and took someone by the arm and smiled to him to come and sit behind the wheel and notice this thing or that, try the horn, try the lights. Once, Abel was that person. The man motioned to him and he went and sat in the car while the man spoke to him aside, privately, like someone of special fame. He didn’t need to hear the words to feel the honor, so he smiled and nodded to show how glad he was because of it. Then the man began to

write numbers on a paper. He showed them and Abel nodded under the light. All that time the man was saying and saying things, his mouth moving without rest; smiling, too, because he was telling Abel that for the small savings in the snap-purse, for only the small money which his father gave him— it was true, it was to be his own, his and Janice’s, that wonderful car. Then Abel nodded yes, and yes again and signed the papers and the man came all the way around the car and opened the door and shook his hand.

Abel also remembered very clearly, the light trembling in the leaves of those summer evenings. The air was warm and the late light was warm, and more rich, golden light lay all along the streets. In such a light, he came to the room and told Janice about the automobile. She was so excited they left without eating dinner and went back to see it. The streets and stores were dark by then; there was little to see, but they were glad they had gone anyway. They walked home slowly, in silence, because of the dark. The stars here were not spread out on one wide night as it was back on the farm; they were comfortably measured and held between the buildings of the city. Everything they saw, thought and knew had splendor for them; happiness, richness and strength. They looked at everything in a clearer light. How could there be bad in such joy, in any of it?

Tell about the car. The car was blue; very, very smooth to touch. It made the days perfect. Abel tried to describe the silvered fittings gleaming on it and the steadily made fi ne outlines, red painted around the wheels. A new car; Pierce-Arrow 1919. The Judge was restless in his chair; Comstock told Abel to hurry, so he tried to ask how it was anyone’s fault if the joy of the car was short. He was used to handling horses and the need to see far ahead and rule every move of the machine was strange to him. On his fi rst drive he ran the car into a fence; on the second he scared some horses and they kicked at the back of it, and in fear he steered too much, so that the machine tipped over on its side. Also, he did wrong, many times, to use up all the gas, and Janice became too frightened to go in it. She began to nag at him to sell it. For a moment he stopped

speaking, his hands caught over a Sign. He was remembering the anger he had felt at Janice then. For a week he did not speak to her, not even giving a greeting night or morning. She was afraid to ride with him. She kept asking him to sell the auto. She cried and told him she was afraid. After many ﬁghts and crying and days without speaking, and after two more accidents, he agreed to sell the machine.

He put a sign on the car and sold it to a man who was passing. They wrote out di erent prices until they agreed. At ﬁ rst Abel was proud because he sold the car for more money than he paid. Then, for a week after, he was sad the way people feel when someone dies. He and Janice walked on Sunday. . . .

“Hurry!” Comstock said. “The Judge does not want to know your feelings.”

“I will tell everything. How can he know if I do not tell everything?”

When they walked, he went on, they began to look at the prices of all the beautiful things in the stores and the food in restaurants and they began to see that the car money could give them all these things. That was how they had the idea to have and buy the jewels and clothes. Abel smiled. The pride they had in this richness made them sleep well every night and wake up hungry; and be glad and work all day with quickness. At night they went to restaurants and ate every kind of strange and remarkable food that never was on the farm or in the cold school where they met. On Sunday afternoon the stores were open and Janice began to look carefully at how Town women dressed. He bought her the hat, the one she was wearing. He bought her the ring with the wonderful jewel in it, and his watch, and the chain and fob charm, this lion’s head with a jewel eye. When the tent show and fair came in August, they went. They bought a toy monkey on a string, spinning tops, pinwheels, pine-needle pillows and cedar pillows and Chinese burning sticks to smell good and many di erent kinds of paper ﬂowers. The Summer. He smiled again.

“And what then?” the Judge asked.

“Summer ended then.”

One evening after work, Abel and Janice counted all their money. The warm days were gone and the money-joyfulness shriveled. The nights were getting cool for summer clothes. They tried to be cheerful, but soon it was cold at night and the mill girls walked from work in hard-dark, shivering. Then they saw that they could not eat away from the room until payday. All the starting money was gone; all the car money was gone.

Still they weren’t angry. Abel didn’t tell the Judge about the store windows. The Judge would laugh if he knew that they always used those windows for mirrors, and that in those windows it was still summer. When Abel passed them, he saw a well- dressed man walking, a man raised in a city, not a boy from a stone farm; a man of ways, of things, not a boy of fear; and beside him, smiling and sure, a gold, glowing woman, his wife. They walked together past the windows and people nodded to them and smiled sometimes, not knowing what they really were, taking them for city people surely, successful, rich, una icted.

The winter came, Abel said, and all the money was gone. They had to use all the money they made. That was Abel’s six dollars a week and Janice’s fourteen. She worked in a mill, sewing caps and jackets, and the hours were seven to seven. When she came home, she was angry because of no more dinners out and after the rent and food there was nothing left for extra coal for hot water. They were afraid to buy a gas ring and she couldn’t cook, so they had to eat in the room, cold dinners, and be afraid of the landlady.

The Judge was speaking. Comstock said there were questions. “When you bought the car, did you read what was given you to sign?”

“It was about the car. I signed it because it was about the car.”

“Why didn’t you answer the letters that were sent to you?”

“They were about the car, too, but I sold the car— the car was gone, then. How can it help to read about it?”

“Weren’t you aware that you had made only partial payment?”

“What?”

“Didn’t you know you made only part of the payment— that you had more to pay?”

“No.”

Abel’s eyes went from the Judge to Comstock and back again, watching how his own words were taken up, judged and laid aside in the Law. Now the Judge was not speaking, but Comstock’s hands were breaking words. “I bet you tried to hide that you were deaf. I’ll bet you never told him you were deaf!” Abel looked again at the Judge, but his mouth was not moving.

Abel was afraid. This Comstock knew what no Hearing knew and how to ask it. This Comstock was trying to hurt him with secrets, things that could only be known by a child of their own people.

“Did you tell him you are deaf?”

“The Judge wasn’t asking that. I didn’t see his mouth move.”

“Did you?”

“No.” Abel’s ‘no’ was almost invisible, quick, hesitating, a barely formed triangle of the hand, and then, “I did not tell him . . . he called me ‘sir.’ ”

Comstock’s mouth was moving for the Judge. Abel watched, and because he knew what would be said, he was able to read a little from the side: “. . . man . . . say . . . he was deaf . . . people . . ashamed . . .”

“But why?” Abel could read the words on the Judge’s lips because they were few. He looked away. Then sun had awakened from the ﬂoor and had gone touching weakly up on the legs of some of the chairs. A little bit reached Janice and climbed on her dress as she sat watching in the third row. She looked like a stranger. The sun went away, tired. Comstock was ﬁ nished. The Judge looked out at Janice for a moment and Abel saw that she wanted to smile, but was too frightened. Then the Judge began to speak again and Comstock asked: “Did you try to read Mr. Dengel’s lips?”

“Yes. I cannot read him. He chews a cigar while he talks.”

“But three letters were sent. Didn’t you think the letters might be important?”

“I tried to read them, but I didn’t understand. Only that they were about the car. I sold the car.”

The Judge shook his head and said something and Comstock ﬂ ipped the words out to Abel in disgust, “Go and sit down.”

Abel began to sit, then stopped and said, “Why are you angry?” Comstock’s eyes got wider. “You. Why are you angry? You don’t know us. The Judge is not angry.”

Comstock’s hands ﬂew with his words; “You damned fool. You’ll be out begging in the street before winter is over, with a sign on your shirt!” His Sign was almost too quick to understand. “Hearing will pity you because they’re stupid and they pity all Deaf, so you’ll beg and all the Deaf will be pitied. Why did you come here and make trouble? People who work hard and never owed a cent will be called Deaﬁe and be laughed at and taken advantage because of you. You’re nothing but a damn beggar—”

The Judge moved his mouth and Comstock turned with a smooth gesture to say he was only explaining something. Then Mr. Webendorf was called.

Mr. Webendorf told about Abel. It was strange to hear Comstock’s hands saying things about Abel’s own life. Yes, he was hired from Apprentice Training at the deaf and dumb school. Yes, he worked well in the big shop, and was a good and responsible second-year apprentice. It was true that most apprentices were only boys, but since the man was deaf . . .

Then the Judge asked about wages and Mr. Webendorf told about that.

“He gets union scale for second year: six dollars a week to start and last month it was raised to seven.” The Judge looked surprised and Mr. Webendorf went on, “In three years he’ll be making fourteen dollars and when he’s ﬁ nished his six years, he’ll get good money— twenty- eight dollars.” Then he stopped and shook his head and said, “I didn’t know about the car.” Abel felt the same kind of shame as once before when his father had beaten him, but he couldn’t look away from the words. “I didn’t know anything about the clothes, or—well— the wife, either. The boy came in the same every day, in old

clothes. I knew where he stayed— it was a room; I didn’t know he had a wife with him. If he’d come to me, I would have told him how bad it was . . . all his savings . . .”

The Judge moved in his dignity and began to speak. In a strange way, Comstock’s hands made his words of a di erent speaking than Webendorf’s. The Judge-words came heavy, loud and full; they swung in strong curves; they waited longer on the air. They were so beautiful that Abel leaned back in awe, watching them. They were so rich that he didn’t understand any of them. As deeply aware as the Court had been made of the plight of the respondent, the Judge-words said, the Law was clear. The car had been sold and the respondent, having concealed his inﬁ rmity from the complainant, was guilty of what amounted to fraud. (So beautiful, those words! Abel watched them as they moved in their long rhythms. They reminded him of other long-rhythm things: pitching hay, scything.) Yet, this inﬁ rmity was also a mitigating circumstance, and although the garnishment of the maximum of ten percent of the respondent’s wages was mandatory, the Court was inclined to favor a more lenient approach to the fraud charge than would ordinarily be entertained.

Comstock ﬁ nished; Abel sat staring at him patiently, waiting for meaning.

“I am going to order payment,” the Judge continued, “over the ten percent garnishment, which will cover the fi ne of one hundred dollars and the additional court costs. The payment will be two dollars a week for the next five months, increasing to three dollars as the apprenticeship wages are raised, and so on by wage- steps until the apprenticeship is fi nished, and thereafter five dollars a week until the debt is satisfied. The Court hopes that the interest rate will be no more than six per cent.” The Judge looked at the dealer. “Although there is no law against usurious practice, the Court hopes that in this case you will modify your present custom.”

Abel’s hands moved restlessly for the interpreter. “I do not understand the words. What did he say? Did I win or lose?”

Comstock made a gesture of disgust and turned to the Judge again.