Essay Questions

What was unusual about the Martha’s Vineyard settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony?

One of the things which makes this novel stand out is the introduction of non-fictional background information scattered irregularly throughout the text. The fictional narrative is enhanced by these additions which provide background information for better understanding deaf culture. One of these non-fictional additions to the narratives tells the story about how a deaf colonist named Jonathan Lambert and his moved to the island that would become Martha’s Vineyard in 1694. Due to the inherently more restricted mobility of living on an island combined with the lack of genetic diversity among the settlers, the incidence of deafness within those colonists there was starkly higher than the rest of the entire European population in North America. While only about one in 6,000 people were deaf off the island, among the population living on the island, essentially one out of every 150 was deaf. The point of introducing this information into the narrative is the logical outcome: that segment of the colony developed their own language to communicate with deaf residents, a language today known as Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language.

What is the direct relationship between February Waters’ first name and deafness?

The first fictional character introduced in the book is February at a turning point in childhood when without warning she suddenly got up from her desk in class at school, walked over to sharpen her pencil, and promptly proceeds to stab herself in the ear with the nearly sharpened point. It is an extreme act partially brought about by the latest in an endless series of mindless bullies using her name to form rhymes intended to humiliate her. In this particular case, a thug sitting behind her dives deep into his clearly bottomless supply of creativity to form a partial poem: “February’s very hairy, and she eats the yellow snow.” February learned long before she had even turned nine about all the multiple words which rhyme with the last part of her name—bury, scary, and ancillary are just a few to come to mind—that can be used as fodder for teasing. She also managed to engage the higher critical thinking skills to reach the conclusion that only a deaf husband and wife couple sharing a passionate love for the quietude of winter would ever consider the possibility that February would be a good name for their offspring.

When communicating using the visual syntactical arrangements of sign language, what is the basic rule of sentence construction?

In addition to interrupting the flow the fictional narrative to introduce background information, it is also interrupted at times—most in the first half the book—to introduce a basic overview of grammar of signing. Syntax is a term which refers to the way that words are arranged in a sentence in order to convey the full and intended meaning. The same arrangement which is easily understood verbally may need to be slightly repositioned in order to facilitate a visual picture of the same idea. The example used by the author in the book is very simple: “The cup is on the table.” When signing, the preferred syntactical logic is to start with the table and lead to the cup’s placement. The easiest way for those completely unfamiliar with sign language to think about how this concept works is probably to consider it as if one were playing a drawing game like Pictionary. Logic mandates the progression is from the object which dominates and then work one’s way down to the details. For instance, if more information were added to the verbal description such as “The flowers is in the cup on the table” the most logical signing syntax would be the reverse: table-cup-flower, just as it would be in a drawing game.