I happened to read your article about the Chilmark deaf community and found my father Thomas Hart Benton’s portrait of Josie West as one of the illustrations — yet with no authorship as to who painted the portrait, which I think is important. The Wests were painted often by my father. And the deaf community of Chilmark, dating back to the 1920s, had a great deal to do with why the Benton family moved to the Island.

This was due primarily to my mother, who at the time was a student studying art at the New School for Social research in New York City. She was supporting herself by designing hats for the Ladies Home Journal. Originally she had emigrated from Italy when she was twelve and had an English tutor, a Scots-woman with a very thick Scottish accent. My mother felt she came to speak English with an accent and was embarrassed by it. She was looking for a remote place to spend the summers where she would not have to talk.

She discovered that there was an Island with a community of deaf people who only signed. And she thought she had found paradise. She rented a tiny shack on the moors of Chilmark overlooking Menemsha Pond, learned to sign, and spent blissful summers becoming a part of the silent community as well as the non-deaf.

My father was her teacher at the New School, and she brought him to her paradise. He rented Ella Brug’s barn, which still stands in Chilmark, and he brought Tom Craven to share the rent. Without the deaf community in Chilmark, the Benton family would never have been there. Tom and Rita Benton were subsequently married, and my brother Tipi and I followed, and now my own children.

I hope you find this of interest, and thank you for using my father’s portrait.

Jessie Benton
Baja, Mexico, and Chilmark