Strangely enough, the idea for Singing Hands started with a traffic jam. Ever since my three daughters were little, the girls and I have devoted two weeks in the summer to visiting their grandparents. This trip always includes a six-hour drive from my parents’ home in Virginia to my husband’s parents’ beach house in Delaware. And year after year, the sisterly fighting in the back seat reaches its peak right about the time we hit the massive backlog of cars waiting to pass through the tollgates and cross the long bridge over the Chesapeake Bay.
Often my mother would accompany us on this journey, and to keep World War III from breaking out in the back of the van, she began to entertain my daughters with stories about her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama. The stories were especially fascinating because my mother, Bobby, grew up in a rambling old house that included two deaf parents, two eccentric roomers —Felicia and Maude—who lived upstairs, and her own two sisters and brother, who were always ready for adventure. My mother has a remarkable memory for detail and on each of those long, hot car trips, my children would beg Bobby for more funny stories about her old adventures playing tricks on the 
roomers upstairs or hiding out in “the Cussing Woods” or serving as chief of the Golden Trail Amazon Club.
As the driver, I sat quietly and soaked in those tales one summer after another, gradually realizing that I was listening to perfect material for a novel.
Once serious research for the book began, I had the fun of combing through old family photo albums, scrapbooks, and stacks of letters I had never seen before. One of my favorite treasures to be uncovered was this rather sassy letter from 1947 that my mother wrote to her beloved Aunt Beezie when she was just ten. As I searched to find just the right voice for Gussie Davis, the twelve-year-old narrator of Singing Hands, I returned to this letter again and again for inspiration.
Obviously, my mother had an irreverent, mischievous streak which must have been awkward to manage at times, especially considering the fact that her father was a minister! This is the relationship I wanted to explore and take a few drastic steps further with the characters of Gussie and Reverend Davis in Singing Hands.
So the next step was to find out more about my grandfather’s life and career as the Reverend Robert Fletcher. . . . “Pop” died in 1986, but my memories of him are still vivid. He was an affectionate man who loved to fish, tell funny stories, and eat his fill of good Southern cooking. To me, it was always an interesting bonus that he also happened to be deaf and could teach me sign language and had light bulbs in his house that would blink on and off when the doorbell or TTY (teletype) machine rang. Until I dug deeper into my research, I never realized that Pop had been a leading pioneer in the deaf community from the 1930s to the early 1970s, traveling the South and helping deaf people overcome hurdles of isolation and discrimination.
His contributions became even clearer to me once I made a trip to Birmingham to visit Saint John’s Church for the Deaf, where he served as minister for more than forty years. There I was able to interview several of Pop’s old friends and former church members who had attended state-sponsored schools for the deaf during the years when educators had very different views about the best methods for teaching children who couldn’t hear. Along with their fond memories of school, they also described the painful challenges—the scolding and punishments they received for signing in class instead of using their speaking voices, the embarrassment they felt whenever they were forced to sing for hearing audiences, and the hardship of being separated from their families at such a young age.
When I visited the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind in Talladega, I found some of my best resources for imagining what life must have been like for deaf students in the 1940s. There I was allowed to hunt through boxes of old photographs as well as back issues of a school publication called The Alabama Messenger for valuable bits and pieces of information about everything from the dormitories and the dining hall to the segregated campus for the so-called “Deaf and Blind, Colored.”
In real life, my mother never had the chance to accompany her father on his visits to the Alabama School for the Deaf. But in my novel, I could take Gussie places where even the mischievous Bobby never dared to venture. For me, this is the magic of writing historical fiction. As I strolled around the beautiful historic grounds of the school and examined old photos of the deaf students performing in the annual May Day Pageant, I began to “see” Gussie scampering along the hallways or joining those dancers around the May Pole, adding her own special flair to the routine.
