Child of Deaf Parents Has Love Story She Wants All to Hear

Charlotte Abrams’ says her earliest memory is of the time when she was 5 years old, sick with scarlet fever, lying in a bed in the children’s isolation ward of a hospital. Soundproof glass separated the children from their parents and no communication was possible--except for Charlotte.

“I remember seeing my mother with eyes so filled with tears they seemed to be gushing. I was quarantined, but I was the only child whose parents could communicate with her because they used sign language.

“It was a powerful moment for me because my parents were deaf and yet I was comforted by them while the other children were distraught,” she said recently from her home in Venice.

Sixty years later, Abrams is writing a book, not about being the hearing child of deaf parents, but a love story about two people who happened to be deaf.

“After they died I wanted to hang on to them, so I started writing their story,” she says. “And it was during that process that I realized that they were meant to be together; they were a wonderful couple.”

Abrams’ father, Dummy Jordan, was known as a boxer. Dummy Jordan fought people with names like Silent Martin. He was a big man with massive fists and he was deaf from birth. Before he met Charlotte’s mother, he was a hobo traveling the boxcars, hanging out with hoods, running numbers in his native Chicago and selling bootleg liquor during Prohibition.

Jordan had a successful career as a fighter. Abrams can recall how, as a small child, she came to understand his impact on others.

“I remember walking down the street with papa. He was an angry, imposing man and yet strangers would come up to him and shake his hand and yell at him thinking he could hear them better. He didn’t like that, so he would take a pad and pencil out of his pocket and write words. Looking up at all the commotion, I tugged at his hand and asked, using finger spelling, why all these people were talking to him. He signed, ‘I was a big man once. I was a fighter.’ Then he made a fist and brushed it against my cheek.”

Many children of deaf parents work with the deaf when they grow up. Abrams chose to work in the business world, selling real estate and managing an office, but she says she occasionally feels a twinge of regret.

“I had this feeling that I wanted to be an average person. But part of being the hearing child of deaf parents is that you possess the ability to communicate with the international language. You’re always connected to deaf people. Once in a village in Russia, I went right over to a group using sign language and started up a conversation.”

Abrams started the book in 1987 more as a letter to her daughter than as a book, and it wasn’t until she enrolled in a creative writing class two years later at Santa Monica’s Emeritus College that she felt the commitment to write a book.

“I needed feedback. What I was writing was boring. I found myself not being honest and I needed to dig deeper. I still have to dig deeper. With my husband’s help I learned how to use the computer, and then I opened myself up to the criticism and work of the other students,” she said.

The book is close to completion. What she has written is not the tragedy of a hearing child with deaf parents but a love story--hers and theirs.

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