11 Ahau
Yellow Spectral Sun
The bluest blue Jay cries
To Ruby-throated
Hummingbirds
Whose tiny sunlit
scarlet
Throats dance
In grand extravagance
Otherworldly,
truly –
Huge
Crows dip low overhead
Searching for Breakfast - screeching black
Messengers
from an Underworld unseen
Guided by the
gliding
Flying, dipping,
darting
Drumming, thrumming,
Hummingbirds –
Symbols of an
over-arching Wing
Hints of a Time
sublime –
When I too will
sing.
©Kleomichele Leeds
Geraldine Lawhorn and her dog, Blondie, 1954
Geraldine Jerrie Lawhorn (December 31, 1916 – July 3, 2016) was a figure of the American Deaf-Blind community, a performer, actress, pianist, then instructor at the Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired. At 67 years old, she became the first deaf-blind African American to earn a college degree in the United States of America.
Biography
Early life
Geraldine Jerrie Lawhorn was born on December 31, 1916 in Dayton, Ohio, to Pearl Walker and William Bert Lawhorn. Her parents were musicians, and at the time, managers of a movie theater in Dayton. She had two older brothers, Melvin and Wendell Lawhorn.
Geraldine spent her childhood between Dayton and Chicago. When she was eighteen months old, her family settled in Chicago, where they started a confectioner's trade business. After her parents' divorce in 1922, Geraldine returned in Dayton with her mother and started elementary school. However, a traumatizing experience compelled them to move back to Chicago, where she lived with her mother and her brothers. During The Great Depression of 1929, the Lawhorns went through financial hardships. Pearl Walker opened a beauty shop in their apartment to earn some money and have time to take care of her children.
Handicap and school
Geraldine was about eight years old when doctors discovered she had an eye condition. She could not see well, and faced reading difficulties. She attended many church meetings because her parents thought religion could help her. At twelve years old, Geraldine lost her sight, but she could still perceive some glimmer of light. Doctors never found the cause of her blindness. As a result, she attended the Sight-Saving Room of the Sherwood Grammar School which provided some accommodations for the visually impaired pupils. Geraldine had to learn the braille language, but still had classes with sighted students. Her integration at school was not easy: in eighth grade, her classmates booed, stigmatized, and discriminated against her.
Geraldine then attended the Braille Department of Marshall High School. She became interested in writing and public speaking. She won several prizes for her short stories. She decided to change her name from "Jerry" to "Jerrie" because she wanted it to seem French. Jerrie progressively lost her hearing capacities. Therefore, she had to learn a new mode of communication: the One-Hand Alphabet, and joined a special academic program in the Braille Room. This situation did not prevent her from improving her writing skills. She won a writing contest in Chicago after presenting her short story, Gift. She also wrote a novel entitled, The Needle Swingers' Baby.
Artistic years
Geraldine graduated with honors from high school. However, she did not have plans to further her education. She received a scholarship from the AKA sorority and decided to take a correspondence course in short-story writing offered by Columbia University. The Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired provided the braille material for the course. By the time, the Catholic Youth Organization conducted an experiment to see if dogs were able to lead blind people. Jerrie volunteered to participate and received her dog, Blondie.
At 19 years old, Jerrie completely lost her hearing. Doctors attributed this handicap to a bout of measles which she contracted at five years of age. It was an emotionally painful situation. Nonetheless, Jerrie did not stay idle; instead, she became involved in many activities. She attended the monthly meetings of the Fellowship Circle of the Blind, where she discovered drama performance and started writing plays for the fellowship programs. She performed her first full-length dramatic recital on May 2, 1940 at Poro College.
Geraldine wanted to attend college but she was refused many scholarships due to her handicaps. She decided to develop her artistic skills instead. She received a grant from the Scholarship Committee in Springfield to take private lessons in theater arts. Thus, she attended the dramatic department of the Chicago Piano College. Bessie Henderson, the head of the Drama Division of the school and an alumna from Northwestern University, taught her creative writing, diction, public speaking, and acting. Geraldine also had music lessons once a week. It was challenging since she could not hear the piano, but she could feel its vibrations.
In 1942, Geraldine was admitted to the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, where she studied for four years. She performed monologues at the United Service Organizations programs. She also volunteered in the Red Cross sewing division and received a medal for her dedication. The Blind Service Association selected Jerrie to audition for Reuben's Amateur Hour on one of the Chicago's leading stations. She did not win the prize but became popular. She appeared on television programs like "Someone You Should Know", The Phil Donahue Show, and Ripley's Believe It or Not.
Personal life and artistic break
At her 25th birthday party, Geraldine met Hap, a friend of her brother's. When she married Hap, she stopped her artistic activities to take care of her household despite the opposition of her mother. In 1944, Geraldine and Hap divorced, after six months of physical separation. She revealed that a lack of communication destroyed their marriage. She never married again.
New York City and the One-woman show years (1946–1966)
In 1946, Geraldine and her mother left Chicago for New York City. They settled in Queens, at the home of Frank Wilson, a Broadway actor playing in Watch on the Rhine. He was known for helping young talents find success. Blondie was supposed to join them, but Geraldine learned by telegram that her dog succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage. Jerrie was depressed for a long time after the loss. Frank Wilson gave Geraldine opportunities to perform on stage. Her first performance in New York City was at his church and her second at Carnegie Recital Hall. She met the actors Ezio Pinza, Mary Martin and Juanita Hall after attending a performance of South Pacific. Geraldine and her mother were supposed to spend only a summer in the city, but her increasing notoriety compelled them to stay two years with Wilson.
Jerrie did not have a manager. She and Pearl Walker were in charge of her career. The income from the shows allowed her to have private lessons in theater. She also took speech lessons to control her pitch. Pearl Walker and Frank Wilson collected the audience's comments in backstage to help Geraldine improve herself. New York street artists, her surroundings, and her everyday life inspired her shows. Geraldine's One Woman Show was entitled : Projected Hearts. Jerrie rented evenings at Carnegie Recital Hall and dedicated her shows to Frank Wilson. She was part of the Celestial Choral Ensemble of the Blind, which presented two concerts at the New York World's Fair in 1964. She was the emcee during these concerts. Her favorite activities included shopping and attending Broadway shows with her mother. At Christmas time, both women would visit the Rockefeller Center and the Radio City Music Hall.
In 1948, after Wilson got married, Geraldine and her mother left his house. Because they did not want to leave the city, they went through the perilous apartment search process. They applied to the office of Housing authority, and found an apartment in Long Island City. For the moving-in, Geraldine and her mother received help from their former neighbors, who offered them furniture, including a piano. Both women received monthly allowance from their family in Chicago. Jerrie was involved in many civic activities. She joined a program for handicapped adults, in which she learned swimming, bowling, ceramics, aerobics, and social dancing – like rumba, mambo, tango, and paso doble. She took piano lessons offered by the association and learned to read Braille music notation. These new skills opened to her the doors of the New York College of Music where she studied piano techniques.
By this time, only three deaf-blind people had received a college degree including Helen Keller and Richard Kinney, president of the International Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Besides her artistic career and courses, Jerrie wanted to earn a college degree. However, her advisor recommended that she use her scholarship to improve her theater skills. Therefore, she enrolled at the Brown Adams Professional Actors Studio, off Broadway. Geraldine appeared on daytime television shows and won several awards, like the Award of the Best One-Woman show by trade magazine Show Business. Ebony Magazine wrote an article about her life in an eight-page spread. Jerrie was also columnist for Braille magazines and wrote short stories for Skylark.
In 1966, Geraldine was invited to the 100th birthday anniversary of Anne Sullivan, instructor of Helen Keller. The Perkins School for the Blind and the Industrial Home for the Blind sponsored the Centennial Commemoration at the Washington National Cathedral. This night, eight deaf-blind adults, including Geraldine Lawhorn and Richard Kinney, received the Anne Sullivan Gold Medal. During the event, Kinney invited Geraldine to become an instructor at the Hadley School for a new correspondence course. She did not give an answer after receiving the school invitation letter. She felt perplexed and confused. On the one hand, she did not want to abandon her career, and felt part of the New York City community. On the other hand, she worried about her mother who needed to retire near her family. She finally accepted the teaching proposal.
Return to Chicago
In 1967, Pearl Walker and her daughter went back to Chicago, as the Hadley School confirmed Geraldine's employment. She did not immediately start her position. Indeed, she participated in a training program, offered by the Anne Sullivan Macy Program, known today as the Helen Keller National Center for the Deaf-Blind Youths and Adults, in Jamaica, NY. Afterwards, she started teaching two correspondence courses : the "Independent Living for Those Without Sight or Hearing" and "Verse Writing and Poetry". The poetry courses were free, and twenty-four students signed up.
Geraldine occasionally attended the staff meetings and conferences in Winnetka. Geraldine and Richard Kinney became good friends, and he was a source of inspiration. Geraldine's one stage appearances did not stop after she became instructor. She still gave presentations to service clubs, conventions, and seminars. She was the keynote speaker at the Second International Conference of the Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired at Chicago's McCormick Center Hotel.
Less than two years after they settled in Chicago, Pearl Walker had a stroke and was hospitalized for thirty days. The attack left her paralyzed on the left side. She had to undergo months of rehab, which consisted of therapeutic exercises with a nurse's aid five times a week. Geraldine's family were supportive during this phase. Geraldine used the Vibralert and the Tactile Speech to communicate with her mother. She and her sister-in-law, Helen Lawhorn, organized Pearl's 81th birthday party. However, in 1972, Pearl suffered another stroke, and passed away on October 11, 1972. After the death of her mother, Geraldine started using new equipment to be more independent: the Code-Com telephone attachment for the deaf-blind, a Signal Master that activated electric appliances when the telephone rang, and an Optacon given by the Hadley School to read inkprint material.
Pearl Walker, mother of Geraldine Lawhorn before 1954
Furthermore, Geraldine remained very active. She attended the convention of the American Association of the Deaf-Blind at the University of Washington, along with 175 other deaf-blind people. She was present at the 80th-birthday ceremony of Helen Keller organized by the Industrial Home for the Blind in Brooklyn. She went to Helen Keller's one hundredth birthday on June 27, 1980, at The Helen Keller Centennial Congress in Boston, MA. Geraldine also worked with elderly people and deaf-blind families, and was very supportive.
College degree
Obtaining a college degree was a great challenge for Geraldine, and she was determined to make it. Through a friend, she learned about the University Without Walls program that many colleges offered. She applied to this program and got accepted at Northeastern Illinois University.
On March 23, 1983, Geraldine presented her narrative abstract before a committee, and passed her examinations. She earned her bachelor degree in Rehabilitation of Deaf-Blind Adults from Northeastern Illinois University. The commencement ceremony took place on June 12, 1983, and three television channels videoed it. Thus, at the age of 67, Geraldine became the first deaf-blind African-American person to graduate from college. She became the sixth deaf-blind person in the United States to earn that achievement.
Three days later, the new graduate flew with a friend to New York City, where David Hartman interviewed her on the nationwide television show "Good Morning America". On June 17, 1983, Geraldine received a letter from President Reagan congratulating her on her degree. After that, Zig Ziglar quoted Geraldine as an model of perseverance in his book Steps to the Top, published in 1985. Geraldine continued to be active in the Deaf-Blind community. She encouraged deaf-blind people to never give up and "keep trying". In 1991, Miss Lawhorn wrote her autobiography entitled On Different Roads. She supported people who had the same goals but took different roads.
Late years
In the 2000's, Geraldine traveled throughout the United States to educate people about teaching deaf-blind people. She lived alone in her South Side apartment, using equipment such as Braille cooking utensils. She wished she could drive and be more active in the deaf-blind cause. Nevertheless, she stayed grateful for the opportunity she had in life and said: "I enjoy what I get and I don't worry about the rest".
Sanjay Leela Bhansali cited Geraldine autobiography's On Different Roads as a source of inspiration for his film Black, released in 2005. The same year, Geraldine received the Ninth Annual Mercedes Mentor Award in Chicago.
In 2011, Jerrie Lawhorn retired from the Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired after 40 years of teaching. The same year, the Winnetka-Northfield Chamber of Commerce awarded Geraldine as the Winnetka Teacher of the Year. She was honored during the Winnetka-Northfield chamber's 35th Annual Recognition Lunch on May 4, 2011 at the Winnetka Community House. Miss Lawhorn received many other accolades in her lifetime: She was introduced into the Disabled Persons Hall of Fame in Chicago; she received the Hadley School's Challenge of Living Award. Furthermore, Geraldine was treasurer for the Club of Blind-Deaf Adults in Chicago for many years and served at the Illinois Advisory Board for Services for Persons Who are Deaf-Blind directed by James Thompson, former Illinois governor.
Geraldine Lawhorn died on Sunday July 3, 2016 at Weiss Memorial Hospital on the North Side of Chicago. Her friends, relatives, and students described her as an open, joyful and optimistic woman. Miss Lawhorn left all of her estate to the Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
List of books written
Lawhorn, Geraldine (1991). On different roads : an autobiography (1st ed.). New York: Vantage Press. ISBN 0533088240.
Lawhorn, Geraldine. Petals of View. American Printing House for the Blind.
Geraldine, Lawhorn (1954). While It Is Day. American Printing House for the Blind.*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Lawhorn
AHAU
Kin 180: Yellow Spectral Sun
I dissolve in order to enlighten
Releasing life
I seal the matrix of universal fire
With the spectral tone of liberation
I am guided by my own power doubled
I am a polar kin
I transport the yellow galactic spectrum.
Prana is a function of a holonomic feedback system involving the generation and re-circulation of cosmic electricity.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2018-2019.
www.lawoftime.org
www.tzolkincosmology.com
www.13moon.com
www.mayanmajix.com
The Sacred Tzolk'in
Visshudha Chakra (Alpha Plasma)
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