Clara Jean Mosley Hall, Gayle Williamson. Paris in America: A Deaf Nanticoke Shoemaker and His Daughter. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2018. xxii + 212 pp. $32.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-944838-35-5.
Reviewed by Caroline Lieffers (The King's University)
Published on H-Disability (June, 2021)
Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison (University of Glasgow)
“As the only child of Deaf parents,” writes Clara Jean Mosley Hall, “I never had the privilege of shyness” (p. 195). Hall’s memoir, Paris in America: A Deaf Nanticoke Shoemaker and His Daughter, written with Gayle Williamson, showcases the author’s warmth as well as her forthright and philosophical approach to life’s challenges and joys.
The book’s title, Paris in America, refers to Hall’s father, James Paris Mosley, who lost his hearing after a bout of scarlet fever during his early childhood in Dover, Delaware. Mosley, who was of Nanticoke heritage, attended the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf (PSD) starting in 1923. Though the school used an oralist approach, Hall recounts how her father learned American Sign Language in the dorms after classes. After his graduation, Hall’s father became a shoemaker, and in 1949 he married a graduate of the Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf. Hall is clear about the nature of her parents’ union: “my mother’s marriage to Dad was the result of parents, his and hers, and others who thought the dramatic commonality of their deafness would be enough to sustain a lifelong commitment” (p. 45). Hall was born in 1953, and after her mother left the relationship in 1957, Hall was raised primarily by her father, with support from other family and community members. With an honest and unaffected style, the book details Hall’s upbringing and adolescence, as well as how she went on to graduate from Delaware State College, start a family, and ultimately earn her PhD and become a professor in the American Sign Language and Deaf Interpretive Services Program at Ohio’s Cuyahoga Community College.
Several major themes run through Paris in America that may be of special interest to history scholars. Hall inhabited many cultural worlds, and her story takes place against the backdrop of the civil rights movement; perhaps unsurprisingly, race and identity play a central role in the book. One of her opening anecdotes is a moving reflection of a 2010 visit to what had previously been Dover’s Capitol Theater. In her youth, Hall, who is Black and Indigenous, was required to sit in the balcony, but she was now able to take a seat on the main floor. She writes that “the magnitude of the moment hit me harder than I thought it might,” troubling the previously quiet resilience that “admitted to no emotional reaction to Jim Crow laws or segregation” (pp. xx, xxi). With the careful and thought-provoking approach that characterizes the rest of her book, Hall notes simply that both she and Dover had changed, and she invites the reader to do the important work of weighing the significance of segregation’s personal and collective wounds.
Hall’s insight into the life of Dover’s Native American community is also crucial. She describes her father’s family, for example, as “Native Americans who had assimilated into the Black culture out of necessity. Their lives ran parallel to the Black community without truly intersecting” (p. 27). Discrimination was inescapable. The PSD, for example, would not accept Black students, and Hall explains that the school assumed that her father was of African American descent and refused to admit him. He was permitted to attend only after her grandmother “fiercely talk[ed] her way into PSD on my father’s behalf” (p. 34). Indigenous approaches to Deafness and disability, moreover, are a brief but important part of Hall’s reflections. She notes that her father’s hearing loss “did not seem to be a source of shame, and [his family] didn’t seem to offer him any pity for what a lot of people consider a disability.… In Native cultures, children with a difference are considered gifts from God. It was the lot they’d been dealt and deal with it they would and did” (p. 29). Yet cultural isolation remained a challenge for Hall’s father, who in adulthood struggled with separation from other Native Americans, from the hearing world, and from the larger Deaf community.
Hall’s details about life as a child of Deaf adults also provide valuable firsthand documentation of an era before widespread professional interpreting services. Hall was tasked as a young child with interpreting medical appointments, business transactions, political speeches, family arguments, and even her father’s divorce and custody trial. Her fear that “if I interpreted something incorrectly or didn’t understand how to interpret something, they would take me away from the only parent I knew” testifies at a deeply personal level to the impact of structural inequalities on Deaf families (p. 79).
Paris in America is a sincere and highly readable account of lives fully lived. In unflinching and engaging prose, Hall shares struggles and joys, layered with kindly insights. The importance of supporting one another and believing in others’ abilities runs through the work: just as her grandmother learned of PSD and believed that her son was worthy of an education there, Hall credits much of her own success to her future husband’s early faith in her ability to go to college and build an expansive life for herself. Family, friends, music, and the author’s irrepressible spirit suffuse the book, and she closes by reiterating the importance of gratitude, persistence, and enthusiasm. Her father’s presence in her life shaped many of these values, and Hall began the J. Paris Mosley Scholarship with the Cleveland Foundation with the hope that his life might continue to serve as an inspiration. The importance of uplifting one another is central to Hall’s philosophy, and she honors these beliefs, as well as her father’s legacy, with this moving memoir.
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Citation:
Caroline Lieffers. Review of Hall, Clara Jean Mosley; Williamson, Gayle, Paris in America: A Deaf Nanticoke Shoemaker and His Daughter.
H-Disability, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55953
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