Mary’s father is liberal-minded and treats his freedman laborer, Thomas, with respect. These conflicts affect friends of Mary’s family on both sides. The settler population also disapproves of the fact that women of the tribe are free to marry former slaves, or freedmen. In parallel with the developing personal peril that Mary faces, we learn about the continuing land-ownership conflicts between the descendants of the first English settlers on Martha’s Vineyard and the native Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah.

This is a view that Andrew seems to share, even as he engages in polite conversation - through an interpreter of sign language - with the highly competent deaf people he encounters.Īndrew’s attitude soon alienates everyone, including Mary, and she is relieved when he finally prepares to leave the island, only to discover that his research is now focused on her, and will put her in real danger. Through Andrew, Mary learns the shocking fact that deaf people, whom she and her community consider perfectly normal, are treated as incompetent outcasts on the mainland. However, it soon becomes clear that Andrew is hiding a sinister agenda behind the interviews he conducts for his research. At a time before the principles of heredity were understood, this apparently random distribution of deafness is a mystery which attracts the attention of a young scientist from the mainland, Andrew Noble.Īt first Mary is excited by the idea of a real scientist visiting her enclosed community, and she fantasizes about becoming his assistant.

In the family of the engaging narrator, eleven-year-old Mary Lambert, she and her father are deaf while her mother and brother are hearing. Everyone speaks sign language, whether they are ‘hearing’ or deaf, and the reader quickly gets used to seeing the word ‘signed’ instead of ‘said’. Show Me a Sign is set in 1805 on Martha’s Vineyard, where historically an unusually high proportion of the population was deaf in one community as many as one in four people were deaf from birth.

Show me a sign by ann clare lezotte