Sounds Like Home

Mary Herring Wright began to lose her hearing when she was eight and a half years old, and was completely deaf by the age of ten. At that time, she began to travel back and forth from her home in Iron Mine, NC, to Raleigh, where she attended a residential school for black deaf and blind children from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s. Her account adds an important dimension to current literature in that it is a story by and about an African American deaf child. It is unique and historically significant because it provides valuable descriptive information about the faculty and staff of her school from the perspective of a student as well as a student teacher. This engrossing narrative contains details about the curriculum, which included a week-long Black History celebration where students learned about important Black figures such as Madame Walker, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and George Washington Carver. Also, the story occurs during the time of two major events in American history, the Depression and World War II.