Unbowed Against the Tide

'I Had Found My People'

Jane Kelleher, the eldest of five children, was born in Worcester, Mass., in 1956, a time when services for the deaf were minimal and the widespread use of sign language lay in the future.

Like her mother, Kathleen, and a younger brother, Joseph, Fernandes suffered from nerve deafness, said her father, Richard Kelleher, 76, a retired district judge who lives on Cape Cod. Doctors told him that the condition was hereditary and that there was no cure.

Richard Kelleher did not know any deaf people other than his wife, "an expert lip reader" who had learned to get by in the hearing world. "When you talk about mainstreaming, Jane was mainstreamed because I didn't know anything else," he said.

Like her mother, the young girl was trained by a dedicated speech and hearing teacher with the Worcester public school system, Katherine Madigan, who also gave her private lessons. Fernandes learned to speak so clearly that years later, she could often hide her deafness from acquaintances.

Sometimes, her father said, it broke his heart to see his daughter, so smart and motivated, struggle to keep up with other children. When her brothers played ice hockey, she took ice skating lessons. She triumphed with figure eights and other precision moves, but she was lost when it came to skating with music, Kelleher said.

At Trinity College, she joined the fencing team; that suited her better, her father said. She majored in comparative literature and spent a summer in France. But it would be her graduate school years, at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, that would transform Fernandes and her relationship with the world.

At first when she got to Iowa, Fernandes took her usual approach, not calling attention to her deafness. Many of her classmates and professors did not realize she was deaf. Fernandes was in Alan F. Nagel's seminar on John Milton her first semester, and he thought she was "simply a quiet graduate student -- I always had respect for students who did what was required and didn't jump in and speak a lot."

It turned out to be a pivotal year.

It was serendipity, Fernandes recalled, that led her to tag along with a roommate who visited a community deaf club for a class assignment. Once a popular concept across the country, the clubs had dwindled until they existed only in the Midwest. When she walked into the Cedar Rapids Deaf Club, she got the surprise of her life.

"There I saw about 300 deaf people, all signing," Fernandes said. "It was a life-changing event. A complete bombshell, in a silent room. For the first time, I knew that there were a lot of other people in the world just like me. I learned that I was not alone. I had found my people."

Inspired, she set about learning American Sign Language, applying the techniques she had used to learn French and Italian. "I soaked up ASL like a sponge, literally growing from a glass half-empty to a glass half-full," she said.

At the same time, her interests in the deaf community and deaf rights were ignited. Soon, she was urging the university to employ interpreters. In 1983, she entered the Miss Deaf Iowa contest and won, giving speeches about the need for the deaf and hearing communities to come together. The next year, she was third runner-up in the Miss Deaf America pageant.