When I was writing Feathers, I had studied sign language for many years, but there were signs that I couldn’t remember, and I would look some of them up, and then I would have to sit and try to figure out how do I write that this is the sign for death, a finger moving from the ear to the mouth.
How do I write that this is the sign for hunger, a hand pulling itself down the belly. It’s this kind of creative process mixed with the research and back to the creative, but all along the creative side of my brain is working to figure out how to put it on the page.
It’s hard because I hadn’t realized when I wrote Feathers that there weren’t a lot of books about deaf culture. There had never been a book about an African American kid who was deaf. I just didn’t know that, but I knew that I was writing realistic fiction, and I was writing about different cultures, and there are so many cultures in the world.
There is mine, the different cultures I come from. There’re the cultures that I’ve found. There’s the cultures that aren’t even acknowledged as cultures. I thought it’s amazing to have grown up and become this age and not ever have read a book about the deaf community.
I decided to make Sean deaf because Feathers is a book about the different ways people have hope in the world or search for hope in the world. I wanted Sean’s journey in there, the journey of being deaf in a hearing family, and what does that mean.
I think it’s something we don’t think about a lot. I think we think of deafness as other. We think of it as something that is not a culture but, too often, people think of it as a handicap. Deaf should be a capital D just like African-American culture.
I wanted to put on the page a kid who had his culture, who had the deaf community and his world and a supportive family that wasn’t saying be like us, but saying you’re a gift to us, and we wanna move into your world.
Also his longing, because they all had longings, and his longing was to be a part of both worlds. He never says I want to be a hearing person. He says I wanna be a deaf person who can exist in both worlds the way you as a hearing person exist in my world.
It was important for me in talking about the ways people have hope and the ways people move through the world and showing this world through this group of young people. When I first started writing it, it was actually called The Jesus Boy. And Jesus Boy was the main character.
As the story started unfolding I thought, this is not simply about him but about this whole world of kids and their strength and their weaknesses and their journeys.