Author’s Note:
I’ve taken liberties here somewhat with both place and time so that the rise of Martha’s Vineyard as a safe place to travel for Black Americans intersects with the peak Deaf population of the island. Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, which originated in the relatively isolated village of Chilmark, is distinct from American Sign Language and is now considered an extinct language. Oak Bluffs remains a popular vacation spot and a cultural hub for Black Americans. Many thanks to the sensitivity readers that helped me with this story. Any mistakes are my own.

 

Standing at the port, being introduced to young mister Alexander Holloway, a mulatto boy a few years older than me with wide eyes and a shy smile, I suspected two things. First, that he knew more about me than I did about him. My mother never answered me directly, about why she and I were to leave the city for the summer. She claimed it was the heat, but that had never been reason to summer away from D.C. before. I’d begun to form my own theory.

On the steamer to Martha’s Vineyard I saw the crew using their hands to communicate with each other from across the great ship rumbling beneath me and assumed it was a series of signals related to the nature of their work. Squinting in the bright summer sunlight, sweating already under my linen dress while waiting for our escorts—the Holloways, distant relatives on my father’s side so I was told—I had plenty of time to observe the locals greeting their loved ones disembarking around us, ordering ice cream from stands along the pier, making deliveries to the small shops that lined the twisting narrow streets leading away from the bay. And it was beginning to seem a lot like everyone here, Black and White, young and old, spoke with their hands, whether or not they moved their lips as well.

I tugged at the fabric at the elbow of my mother’s dress. “Is everyone here Deaf?” I asked her. The Holloway boy’s attention had waned already; his sister behind him watched my hands move but made no indication that she either could or would answer on her own. She blushed and turned away when she was caught watching. I wanted to be irritated at her blatant voyeurism, but looking at the faint pink blossoming across her cheeks and down her neck I found I could not. Instead I watched my mother lip speak, and then Ms. Holloway answered in kind. My mother then turned to me and signed “No.” Then repeated for me—my lipreading best with her and father only—“The island is mostly hearing. But in Chilmark there’s enough of the Deaf that everyone signs.” Totally oblivious to Mother though, was my second suspicion, which was fast becoming painfully obvious to me: I wouldn’t be able to understand these people either.

We rented, Mother and I, one of the Holloways’ four small vacation houses situated on a long driveway behind their own. The houses here pressed close together in rows, giving a hedge-like maze effect as they curved along the circuitous cobbled streets. And they were uniform, too, the houses. Or at the very least cohesive in structure and appearance. Each two stories with storm-worn shingles and scalloped trim that was painted in bright pastel colors that matched the railing of the deck and the color of the shutters and window boxes. I supposed to others, it was lively, charming even. To my eye, it seemed as if the residents were desperately trying to make up for something. As if their homes’ gay appearance was specifically designed to keep some darkness or depravity at bay. I told my mother this and she accused me of being dramatic. Instead she tried to distract me with gossip of who might also be vacationing here: Black cosmetics moguls, politicians, artists, and the like. Much better to be out in society here, than back home, she assured me.

Within two days of our arrival I had walked nearly every street of Chilmark and stepped inside every establishment I could. Though the pace of the village was slower, and the weather more temperate, I was not finding my experience here to be all that different from that in D.C. The fact was, I still depended on either my mother, or my tablet and graphite for communication. The only good thing I suppose is that at the butcher or the milliner the clerks did not look at me with poorly disguised pity. Curious, yes, that I didn’t just sign, but they didn’t show any prickling sympathy or worse, ignore me altogether. And that was a sort of relief. On my third day of wandering the village in search of either entertainment or companionship, I found myself at a hilltop park with a striking view of the water. The aroma of roasted peanuts from a nearby vendor filled the air. Children ran back and forth with colorful kites. And at the south end of the park, a post office. On the side of a postal building there was a mural which, I confess, I scarcely noticed at first. As I sat this day, nursing my own melancholy, realization cascaded over me like an approaching wave, slowly and then all at once; the image depicted in the mural was replicated in front of me almost exactly. A family was huddled close together at the dock, they held each other as if to provide comfort—not all that odd, I could easily imagine they were watching the departure of a loved one. However, in life, as in the painting, there was no departing ferry in the distance. Down at the dock the group of people stood facing an endless expanse of blue. In the painting, just beneath the waterline the sea was thick with jellyfish. And they were depicted with what I imagined to be startling realism. I could not begin to imagine what such a thing might mean. I remained in place, far longer than I intended to, watching the family at the docks, hoping for the meaning of the painting and the scene below to be made clear. Families cut through the park. Patrons ducked in and out of the post office about their errands. The sky began to purple, darkened prematurely by building storm clouds. A group of young people approached. They hung on each other’s arms, threw their pretty heads back in laughter, signed with each other animatedly. Belatedly I realized Helen, Alexander’s sister, was among their number. Our eyes caught. She begged off from the group; I could see hesitation in her companions’ body language but in the end Helen parted ways. She approached the bench where I sat without hesitation. As if she knew her company would be welcomed, no, needed. I would say that I envied the confidence with which she moved, but I was not entirely certain envy encompassed all that I felt about Helen in that moment. She took in the scene unfolding down at the docks; looked at me, to the mural and back again. Then Helen merely offered me her elbow, and I took it, and she escorted me home.

Alexander was intended to be my tutor in this insular community’s language. It wasn’t unheard of. All of us at the Lundy School came there with some sort of language, some of it used by our families alone—after an illness, like myself, or from birth. Others came from small villages like this one, where enough people were Deaf that they’d figured out one system or another. We’d all heard stories of other people like us, with less money or without the privilege of families in a position to care, never having language at all. At Lundy, we found a way to make it work, learning a standardized version of a signed language all together and sharing our own signs with each other after lessons were over. Unsurprisingly, what we learned at Lundy was different even in some ways than what the few Deaf Whites I’d met used.

Alexander was always accompanied by Helen, a year his senior, as chaperone. We were always accidentally coming into contact, him and I, his knuckles brushing against mine, or his fingertips lightly glancing against my shoulder. Once, in-between lessons he reached for my hands and held them, trailing his thumb across the strip of skin above my wrist, and I knew then that these were not chance encounters. I looked from the spot he was touching, and up to Helen, though I couldn’t have articulated why at the time. Her gaze was fixed on that spot and when she at last looked at me the intensity of her gaze caused me to flush. Her emotions danced plainly across her features. She was at once fierce and lovely. I looked away from her, quickly, terrified. Not of Helen, never that, but of myself and the emotions I could not name the exchange elicited. If Alexander ever noticed that something was amiss he did not mention it.

And then one day, Helen showed up alone.

I opened the door with surprise and a question in my gaze.

“Alexander is quickly bored,” she signed.

“I hadn’t noticed,” I responded, stepping aside so she could enter.

“Liar,” she smiled. “You shouldn’t take it personally.”

I didn’t.

We sat on the front porch. The air was heavy with a stickiness that promised rain. Helen was all focus and determination with her charts and tablet. I found I was distracted with the realization that this was our first time alone together and I could find nothing interesting to say. For her, I wanted to be clever, a delight, charming. We were close enough that our knees were touching as she alternated between words scratched out on a tablet and moving her hands in lovely arcs and stops. In this way I could not help but notice the pleasantness of her mouth, the elegance of her fingers, her perfume: delicate, floral.

I sat forward. “Why are you helping me?” I asked. The question had come to me suddenly, and I found I couldn’t bear the idea that she was here only out of a sense of duty. That I was an obligation she attended to on Alexander’s behalf.

“Let me show you something,” she said in response. I got up and smoothed down my skirts, quite wrinkled now in the humidity.

“No—” and I lost the rest of what she said. Helen saw my confusion and wrote on the tablet, ‘Not now. Meet me tonight. At ten down at the blue bridge.’

Who was I to refuse her? The sky promised rain, but Helen’s expression promised secrets, a collusion of the type I’d never been a part of before. She seemed to follow my gaze towards the horizon growing more textured by the minute, clouds with the smoothness and curvature of shells pressed towards us from beyond the shoreline. When I looked back at Helen she shrugged and smiled, “If we get wet, we get wet.”

If it weren’t for the fullness of the moon I might not have made it at all. The darkness on the island was absolute. When night came it came quickly, eating at the twilight like a starving beast. The storm had dissipated by then, leaving behind an evening heady with petrichor and ground sodden and flooded in parts. By the light of the nearly full moon I tip-toed and wide stepped around dirty puddles and made my way to the blue bridge not far from Inkwell Beach. Though the island was less concerned with miscegenation and mixing in general, most Blacks ended up congregating on this couple-hundred-yard strip of sand and stones between two jetties.

When I arrived, I was rewarded with the sight of Helen, luminous in the moonlight. She shone, skin nearly iridescent and I wondered briefly, if my skin, though darker, might hold the moonlight too. She stood waiting for me. Beckoning me closer. And then when I was close enough her hands started flying nearly too fast for me to understand. Helen grabbed my hand and pressed letters into my palm. She laced our fingers together then led me closer to the railing, pointing into the dark water. At first I saw nothing. Nothing but the reflections of the stars eager to shine after being blotted out by the early evening storm. And then I leaned closer. In the water there was no reflection of Orion, Polaris; there was no Cassiopeia trapped in a watery counterpart. The speckles in the water were moving of their own accord, a strange sort of motion that required one blip backwards for every two blips forward. Jellyfish. I’d seen them before, washed up on Maryland beaches, like bubbles that refused to pop. But these were different. They were starlight embodied. The longer I looked the more I realized they did not just glow gold and green, they cycled through an array of colors, some flashing from turquoise to lavender while others made the transition from the orange of lost embers back to the flashing of Spanish gold. I can’t say how long I stood there entranced by their motion and transformation. The feel of Helen’s thumb running across my knuckles brought me back to the present. She turned to face me. Pressed my hand to her heart. And I thought to myself, this, this I know the meaning of.

Our days were spent in this way. Student and tutor, sometimes at the house but more often than not we spent our time perched on boulders that comprised the jetties at Inkwell, picking at the barnacles and sea snails that stuck themselves there. If my mother was disappointed I wasn’t spending more time with Alexander she did not show it. I thought perhaps she was just grateful I’d found a friend. Helen told me more of the island—which beach to comb for shark teeth, and how slow it was come fall when all the tourists went home, but that was okay because that was when the big jellyfish returned, on some sort of great migration. The size and number of these jellies I was assured was beyond my comprehension. Her phrasing reminded me of the scene I’d witnessed at the docks, which until then had been quite forgotten. Presumably the events were related, but not in any way that Helen would elaborate on. You just have to see it, she’d say, making me promise to return.

In turn, I told Helen about the city and the automobiles and debutante balls. And if her skin shone more iridescent, both in the moonlight and by day, it was nothing that concerned me because this too, I imagined, was love made manifest. To my eyes, we only shone for each other.

We met most nights, sometimes we walked together to the blue bridge to gaze at the jellyfish that congregated there. Helen’s gaze always both intent and distant, as if something about the strange glowing creatures pulled her further away from herself. Other nights we sat on the beach, letting the low tide lick at our feet. Simply leaning into each other, content to inhale the sweetness of each other’s skin.

One such night as I waited for her at the back porch, I was taken completely by surprise when not Helen, but Alexander came tumbling down the back stairs, so busy glancing over his shoulder that he nearly crashed into me. When he realized who he had blundered into, for a moment, he had the propriety to look embarrassed. In another timeline perhaps, it would have been me Alexander was sneaking out to meet. I held him no ill-will though. We stood there stunned in the yellow flickering light filtering out through the kitchen window, neither about to ask what the other was doing because it was better off for both of us if we just didn’t say. And besides. We knew.

Before turning away, Alexander looked at me, his face having morphed from startled to pitying, and said, “It can’t last, you know.” And for a moment I wanted to shove him. Make him take the words back. The anger was a volatile thing in me, oil flashing in a pan. How dare he declare this, before we’ve even decided for ourselves? What right has he to shape with words, the bleak thought I’d carefully avoided all these weeks? As he walked by me, he placed his hand on my shoulder, but then nothing else came. He disappeared in the night, leaving me alone, slightly chilled by the wind, waiting for Helen.

She showed soon enough, easing out the back door and carefully closing it behind her, likely having learned the hard way how not to get caught by your hearing parents. Her face was practically glowing, the thrill of sneaking out together had not dulled for either of us. Only, her brother’s words were still playing in my mind and likely across my face. “What’s wrong?” Helen asked, eyebrows drawn in worry. She pushed a stray hair back behind my ear and I turned my head to press a kiss against her palm. We did not venture far that night, not to the pier, the jetty, not to the bridge to watch the jellyfish dance and swim. We simply laid side-by-side in the yard. Watching the Perseids descend across the heavens, fingers interlaced and heads close enough to touch. Occasionally turning to each other and leaving our own trails of magic and starlight across each other’s brows, lips, collarbones. Helen tasted a little like salt water and what I imagine star-stuff would linger like on the tongue.

Helen did not come to see me the next day.

Or the one following.

When I finally called on her, her mother told me she was unwell, and that was expected to be that. The whole village felt morose on those days. Common sense would assert that I was projecting my own depression on those around me. But no, in retrospect I saw it. People crowded in clusters, draped in mourning colors and kneeling at the water. Holding each other and not saying much of anything else in particular. Precipitation hung in the air like a funerary shroud. On the third day, it was Alexander that opened the door and he looked conflicted. Glancing back and forth between myself and up the stairs behind him.

“Please?” I asked. He relented, face softening and stepping aside, letting the front door open wider.

He gestured up the stairs: First door on the left.

I took the stairs slowly, trying not to rush in my eagerness to see her. The door to Helen’s room was already cracked, and I pushed it open further with my foot.

In all this time, I’d never been into Helen’s room. It was small. Crowded but neat. Each of the shelves were lined with books, smooth-faced porcelain dolls, and stuffed bears. A pink circular rug lay in the center of the room. A four-poster bed was pushed into the corner beneath the window and Helen sat up in it, staring out at the street below. I realized, if she’d been in this position any amount of time she must have seen me coming.

I crossed the room to sit at the foot of her bed. I was confident she felt my weight there, but still she did not turn to look at me. I scooted closer to Helen, had my hand out to touch her, and stopped just short of placing my hand on her shoulder. She refused to look at me still, instead her eyes darting back and forth following the path of the gulls outside. Eventually I laid one finger against her face, following the blue-green striation I saw there from the apple of her cheek down towards her jaw, where it disappeared beneath the collar of her night gown. It was as if her skin had been made thin, translucent nearly, exposing the network of veins beneath that I should not be seeing. She turned towards me then, eyes shut, so that my hand cradled her face. And when she opened her eyes I startled—her irises for the most part remained the same golden brown, but an aqua color ringed those and spread out in sun-like streaks.

She started to speak, to explain. Her hands moved fast, her words lost to me as I became aware of the shadows she left across the blankets. Each finger stretched twice as long as it should have, perhaps not unnatural on its own in the late evening sunlight, but in addition to this, each tip of her finger split and absolutely curled and writhed as if each part was trying to get away from each other. Eventually she saw I was not paying attention to her, instead watching the monstrous shadow-show playing out on the blankets. She looked where I was looking and froze.

“I don’t understand” was all I could say.

Helen’s hands stilled, she folded them in her lap, closed in on herself. Considering maybe how to try again.

I traced with my eyes the bold and faint lines, like maps of waterways.

She reached for me, and I flinched. And she saw it. I closed my hand over hers anyway, trying to show her. Or atone. But the effort was too little too late.

“You should leave,” Helen said, shaking me off. She turned back towards her window, drawing her blankets back around her.

I reached out to tap her shoulder but decided against it. I clearly no longer had her attention. Helen was determinedly staring out the window. I can’t say how long I stayed there, waiting, hoping she would acknowledge me again. She did not. And the golden light began to fade. When it became clear I would get nothing else from her I rose and left.

Helen came to me in the rain.

In the grey haze of dawn, Helen came to me. Had I not been on the covered porch already, watching the sun stubbornly not rise amidst the morning rain storm, I do not know what she would have done. Marched into the house? Taken me by the shoulders and shaken me awake? As it were, insomnia had me in its grip and I had been awake for hours anyway, watching the steady percussion of raindrops against the growing puddles in the yard. When I first saw Helen walking along the drive between the two houses, I nearly did not believe what I was seeing. I thought her to be one of the haints my Memaw would warn us about only, haints could not abide the water and would have no business here anyway. Besides, even from that distance I could tell her coloring was all wrong, her gait changed.

“Come with me.” Her face was a plea, so much like that first time she asked me down to the bridge with her. “We don’t have much time.” She held out her hand; her palm pulsed with a subtle lavender glow along the lines the fortune tellers use to make myths, build legends. I hesitated, not out of fear but confusion. In the end, I trusted Helen with my everything. I pressed my warm hand against her cool one.

If we get wet, we get wet.

At first, I thought we were actually going to the bridge again, though I couldn’t imagine what could be so urgent there that Helen needed me to see it now. We moved at a brisk pace, but hardly a run. Even so, after a while Helen began to lag, her face screwed up in concentration, her lips pulled back from her teeth in determination. Pain?

I tugged at her arm so she had to face me. “Helen, What—”

“No time,” and she urged me forward, but instead of turning right towards the bridge we turned left towards the beach. Waves were thrashing against the shoreline, the sand speckled and dark. I helped her over the storm wall and she pulled me down towards the water. The salt spray whipped harshly against my face. Belatedly, I realized we were not the only ones on that beach. There were others—all standing with their faces turned up towards the rain. Some held their arms outstretched towards the ocean, towards the heaven, skin softly luminous in no natural way.

“I held on as long as I could. But it’s too much.”

The striations at her jawline glow green, then blue, then green again.

“Watch for me?” she asked. Her eyes were watery, the golden discs of her irises all but lost to the blue. I couldn’t answer her, I didn’t know how to or what she meant. Instead I pressed her hand to my heart, traced her lips with my thumb. Slowly Helen turned away from me, our fingertips, the last places to touch. She walked into the water, the waves rose, like the hands of leviathans to scoop Helen up and then she was gone.

I don’t remember much of the after. I don’t care to. My mother, the way she tells it, I staggered into the home shortly after dawn screaming a pain, a sorrow, I could only feel; a sound she could never forget.

Alexander and his parents went down to the beach after I told them my story. They did not seem to feel any of the shock, or outrage or urgency I did. It took three days, but finally they were able to find something of Helen. A nightdress, I was told. But I caught a glimpse of what Alexander and his father brought back from the beach; and while it was slung over one of Mr. Holloway’s arms it was no fabric; it was Helen, and it wasn’t.

There was no funeral. I had no chance to say goodbye. Only an invitation to return the following fall. And I did.

I met Alexander at the same dock I had sixteen months before. Not much changed about him other than he was engaged to be married. He sent my bags away to the house I’d be staying in, the same one from the year before, and together we walked down to the beach. The sun was a blazing disc lowering to kiss the horizon. Families stood clustered together in a scene I recognized but no better understood.

“Don’t look at the top of the water,” Alexander said. “Direct your gaze downwards. At an angle.”

The sun burnished the surface of the water gold. I did as Alexander instructed and after a while I began to see it. Something anyway. Long trails of pulsing white light ran this way and that; most visible when the waves swelled. Jellyfish. So very much larger than the colorful pulsing Helen had shown me once over a bridge under the stars. The mural I’d seen couldn’t begin to do them justice. And there wasn’t just one, there were many, swaying and dancing, as if they knew they were being watched. Being admired.

“They come back?” I asked Alexander.

“Every year. It’s not a migration, though. Not really.”

That’s not what I meant and I’m certain he knew that. I started to protest his answer but he went on, “Yes. She’ll come back. To shore even.” He said, hands moving slowly, like cutting through water. “Eventually, they all do.”

I sat there in the damp sand until the sun disappeared beneath the waterline completely. Until Alexander himself returned home. I imagined I might be here, in this same spot, whenever the sea decided to return my golden-eyed girl. Would she have hair strung through with kelp and coral? Would her eyes and fingertips still pulse with light? And if I kissed her, what then? Would she still taste of salt water and summer dreams? There was, of course, only one way for me to know.

(Editors’ Note: K.S. Walker is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2024 K.S. Walker