"Everyone here spoke sign language." – title of Nora Ellen Groce's study of the deaf community of Martha's Vineyard (1985)
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 12 OF 14 SUBJECT: What the Glass cannot hold On the island of Martha's Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts, deafness ran in a few families for two hundred years, and the whole island, hearing and deaf alike, spoke a sign language of its own. Islanders interviewed long after it was gone remembered that nobody had thought of the deaf as a separate people at all. The last deaf person who had grown up speaking it died in 1952. No seed fell. A signed language has no sound, and the law of the seed is a law of last sentences spoken aloud. The Wharf's bell did not ring. Signed languages die like any others. The Glass has no bed for them. I knew this, in the abstract, from the Bureau's file. I understood it on my hundred-and-tenth evening, when Wren Tallis took me, without telling anyone, behind the potting shed of the Quiet House. The Quiet House is Ibrahim's: a plain brick cottage at the back of the Gardens...
From the lore of The Architecture of Babel.