Signs
After learning my new cousin was a Teacher’s Assistant at the Georgia School for the Deaf, I eagerly asked her to teach me some signs. My teenage self was intrigued by this new language and I wanted to know more. Language and lexicon have fascinated me since I was a child reading the big dictionary and World Book Encyclopedia my grandmother kept at her house in Jackson, Mississippi. Public libraries were my second home in Chicago, but Black folk like me weren’t allowed in the Jackson public library and I was desperate for something to read when we visited Jackson. I’d already learned the Greek alphabet and used it to write my diary in a language my parents didn’t understand. But this sign language was a new language to explore. When we returned to Chicago from our visit to Georgia, I dug out the alphabet card I was given by a deaf man sometime in the past year or so. And I practiced the letters again but now I knew there was more than the alphabet to signing. Not knowing where to go