Grab the Lapels

Sweet Bells Jangled: Laura Redden Searing (Yaeger Jones & Vallier, eds.)

Welcome to National Deaf History Month! It runs through April, and during this time, I’ll be sharing posts about books by or in collaboration with Deaf, deaf and hard of hearing people.

Whew, that’s three terms: Hard of hearing, deaf, and Deaf! I’ll be using all three throughout April. Click this link to see what each word means according to Dr. Bill Vicars, Deaf professor of ASL and juggernaut of the internet. It’s worth it to educate yourself!

My goal is to introduce you to different lived experiences. We like to think that minority groups are all the same, but keep in mind that just as they say in the autism community, “If you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person,” and that applies to D/deaf people, too.

I’ll also add in some perspective from what I’ve learned in an Interpreter Training Program about Deaf culture where appropriate.

Last week, I shared a newer book called Learning To Be Deaf Without Losing Your Hearing by Kim Harrell and S. Lea. This week, we’re going back in time to the Civil War of the United States. Sweet Bells Jangled is edited by Judy Yaeger Jones and Jane E. Vallier. Our two editors collected and organized poems by Laura Redden Searing, a Deaf poet and journalist. Before the poetry, the editors constructed Redden Searing’s life from various sources, so we have a better picture of who this Deaf woman was and how she navigated a patriarchal society.

Judy Yaeger Jones started research on a women’s history project for one thing, but was drawn to a footnote in a source about a town established in 1872 called Glyndon in Minnesota, named after a living poet. Not just any poet but a Deaf woman — Laura Redden Searing. Born in 1839, Redden Searing was the victim of a fever that left her deaf when she was thirteen, meaning she knew spoken and written English before she was deafened.

Eventually, she could no longer continue “regular” public school and agreed to go to the Missouri School for the Deaf, where she learned sign language. She didn’t want to go because at the time the school was called the Missouri Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, and she claimed, “If I am sent there, I shall, indeed, become Dumb.” However, Redden Searing gave it a chance and enjoyed it, writing for the school newspaper and creating poems for graduation and in celebration of prominent figures. She begged her parents to learn the ASL alphabet to communicate with her.

Many skilled students who graduate from Deaf schools are offered jobs to stay on and teach and be dorm supervisor, but Redden Searing did not accept. She was hired at a newspaper and became well known as a journalist who went out in the field — in this case the battlefield of the Civil War — to get the story. She interviewed so many Civil War soldiers that her existence and work cannot be denied; many soldiers went on to write memoirs and mentioned Redden Searing by name.

Around this time, Redden Searing adopted the pen name Howard Glyndon, not because she was a woman or deaf and wanted to hide that, but because no one published their thoughts openly in the papers at this time. It was the de rigueur of the day. Howard Glyndon was the name associated with her poems, too, hence when one man loved her work so much, he named a Minnesota town after her, as mentioned above. When Redden Searing was attacked by a rival newspaper that outed her a a deaf woman, she published a retort proudly declaring her identity and shaming them for such foul tactics instead of running off in shame.

Eventually she married at 37 and had one daughter when she was 41, an age that’s somewhat surprising to us today for the onset of motherhood, but surely a shocker in the 1800s. Redden Searing held out on marriage for so long, turning down proposals, because she did not want to surrender her independence. I’s unfortunate, then, that the man she did marry was no good. In fact, she secreted away her child, fleeing from her husband before finally getting divorced. Later, she was remarried, divorced, and then married again. The writer’s feeling on domesticity was made clear in one stanza of a poem:

Leave school, get married, (just as well be buried!)
Have a fine house, and get one’s life crushed out
In caring for it.

The editors of Sweet Bells Jangled include photos of Laura Redden Searing, her contemporaries, and some buildings, like the Missouri School for the Deaf in the 1800s. The photos are not stuffed in the middle on glossy paper, but right on the page where you can reference them easily in context. Her contemporaries were famous poets at the time, some of whom have been forgotten (maybe they will be resurrected like Zora Neale Hurston?), but Laura Redden Searing was known to and appreciated by many famous folks: Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain. She was a popular, likeable woman who always had fashionable friends. At one point, she met Alexander Graham Bell, notorious for the telephone, but a controversial figure in Deaf history because he tried to ban sign language. Instead, AGB advocated for learning to speak and lipread. Redden Searing was interested in AGB’s theory, and she did regain some of her speech, but only some, and never learned to lipread (it’s almost impossible — try it with your friends).

The rest of Sweet Bells Jangled are poems grouped into categories like “Idyls of Battle” and “Dedicatory Poems.” She tends to use ABCB as a rhyme scheme, which suits me just fine. Nothing like a good beat to propel a poem. Given how we Americans have been debating treason since January 6th, 2021, I’ll share a bit from a poem called “The Legend of Our Victories” written in 1861-1862:

What, ho! ye valiant wrestlers!
Ye soldiers of the Right!
Full armed by Truth and Justice
To battle lawless Might.
Ho! I have glorious tidings!
Come, list the tale I tell,
How the cause of UNION triumphed,
And the crest of Treason fell.

Other poems lament the blood soaked grass of Civil War battlefields and the families left behind in despair. Laura Redden Searing died in 1923 having written over 600 poems, a biography of the men in congress in 1892, several poetry collections, and hundreds of newspaper articles.

25 comments

  1. What a stunning woman! It’s a crying shame women in history have to be resurrected when they should have been famous all along.

    “get married, (just as well be buried!)” There’s a few Australian women authors who would have agreed with that!

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  2. So cool! I have never heard of her before. So many exclamation points in the poem excerpt! 😉 Of course I had to look Glyndon. It’s a tiny town just west of Fargo North Dakota.

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    • Yes, he did a lot of terrible things. There is evidence he stole the patent for the telephone and claimed it as his own, he tried to ban sign language and was in a years’ long fight with the leader of teaching ASL to children, and he was a eugenicist.

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  4. She sounds amazing! It strikes me that there are several parts of her story that would be unique for a woman of her time, let alone when you put them all together in one person’s life!

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  5. I adore your goal of showing people’s different lived experiences. ❤ It's important and benefits everyone. 🙂
    This was such a great review. She sounds like quite the badass! The married/buried part of her poem made me chuckle. 😛

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  6. Wow this is a very cool woman in history. I loved her poem about domesticity LOL

    also, having a kid at 41! Very impressive at anytime, but especially back then, she was probably socially scorned for doing it

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  7. Love stories like this Melanie. So many fascinating people – particularly women – to learn about. Love your comment about the rhyme scheme, and enjoying a beat to a poem. Like others here I also love her perspective on marriage. Fascinating that she left it so late and got it so wrong. Makes you wonder about her reasoning.
    ”The photos are not stuffed in the middle on glossy paper”. This too. I don’t see this happening so much now and wonder whether it’s due to better printing technology.
    I’m not sure I’d call AGB an a-hole, as one of the commenters did? Theories come and go about communication don’t they? Sounded to me like it was one of those situations. Or, was he out of step and trying to promote something to benefit himself?

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    • I believe people had strong feelings about him promoting speech for people who can’t hear and him making a profit on the telephone (and there is evidence her may have stolen the design for the phone). He felt deaf people shouldn’t be allowed to learn sign language, but he appeals to people who lost their hearing a little older and miss it (think teens). Also, he was a eugenicists.

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  10. Redden Searing sounds like an incredible person! Definitely worth a mention in the history books, especially as she spent her career recording and creating based on real national events!
    Minnesota’s more or less my neck of the woods so I had to look up Glyndon- not sure I’ve been *in* the town, but I spent a weekend in Moorhead MN just a few miles down the road. Cool! Do you know if she lived/visited in the town or why that particular place was named after her? (No pressure if you don’t recall or if it’s a complicated backstory, I should see if Google knows…)

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    • Glyndon was named after Searing because that was her pen name, and at the time the town was founded, a man had looooooved the war poems of “Glyndon.” It’s funny because the founder of the town thought the poems were by a patriotic male poet.

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