New novel draws from the life of Crumpler’s deaf son
Jeannette Crumpler’s new novel is a gift to Disciples of Trinity. Photo by Can Türkyilmaz
Lakewood author Jeannette Crumpler’s new book, “Cumberton’s Gold”, is a novel with a charitable mission.
She wrote the book as a gift to the Lakewood nonprofit Disciples of Trinity, known to most as D.O.T., which helps terminally ill people with everyday struggles like buying groceries, paying the water bill, or throwing a birthday party for their kids. All proceeds from the book go to D.O.T., which raises money through private donations and D.O.T.’s Closet thrift store at Skillman and Live Oak, but doesn’t apply for government funding.
The book is more than just a fundraising tool, though. Crumpler also sees it as a vehicle for human understanding.
“Cumberton’s Gold” is about people living in a small town in Oklahoma between 1930 and 1970. And it addresses the struggles of people who are “different”, as Crumpler puts it.
It’s a novel, but it’s not all fiction.
Crumpler draws from the life of her son, Dean, who was born deaf and brain damaged in 1958. She also uses stories from the life of the mother of her friend, Jim Davis. Davis founded D.O.T. in 1990 in response to friends who died of terminal illness after demoralizing struggles to make ends meet in their last days.
Davis’s mother was born deaf to an East Texas farming family in the 1920s. Doctors told her parents she was mentally retarded and to put her in an institution.
She grew up an outcast in her own family, and was sent to the Texas School for the Deaf in Austin as soon as she was old enough. She stayed there through holidays and Christmas break, coming home only when her family needed her in the fields.
“I could write two books full of stories about how Mother was mistreated,” says Davis, who writes the book’s foreword.
But she went on to marry Davis’s hard-of-hearing father, whom she met at school. For years, they ran a successful upholstery and interior decorating business in East Dallas. But her own family never accepted her, and her sisters even tried to take her children away and cut her out of her parents’ will.
Doctors told Davis’s parents to always talk and never use sign language with their children because at the time, they thought signing would somehow hinder a hearing child’s learning ability. So even though Davis’s parents were fluent in American Sign Language, he didn’t start learning it until college.
Sign language was frowned upon in general because of the idea that deaf people should assimilate into the hearing world.
“The deaf had no voice in their treatment and education,” Crumpler says.
When her son was in public school in Dallas in the ’60s, teachers would make him sit on his hands to discourage signing. The school district had no teachers who could sign, even in classrooms with students who all were deaf.
Crumpler tells a story about one teacher who was proud that her students used a sign name for her. When Crumpler asked the students to show her what it was, they signed, “bitch”.
“They used to call me to translate in the schools because they didn’t have anyone who could sign,” Crumpler says.
After she found out Dean was deaf, Crumpler became an advocate for the hearing impaired. She learned sign language as quickly as possible and taught it to her husband and two sons. She reached out to parents of other deaf children. And she became a sign language interpreter for schools, hospitals and the police department.
“I was determined that he would be as independent as he could be,” Crumpler says of her son, who eventually learned to drive, held down a job, and lived on his own.
He died in 1993. And one day when she was still in mourning, Crumpler walked into D.O.T.’s Closet, where she first met Davis, and found a new way to give back to some of the most isolated members of our community.
For the cover of “Cumberton’s Gold”, she used an image of Davis’s hand, his fingers folded into their message for all those “different” people of the world, the sign for “I love you”.
“Cumberton’s Gold” is available online only at cumbertonsgoldbook.com or xlibris.com.
