>>MC: Please start clapping right now for Kambri Crews. Come on, give her a round of
applause.
[audience applause]
>> Kambri Crews: So I grew up in a deaf family. My mom is deaf, my dad is deaf. My mom’s
parents are deaf. Almost all of my aunts and uncles, they were all born deaf. And this
usually prompts a lot of questions, I’m sure you’ve got some, so you know what,
I’m just going to answer the top three questions that I usually get when people find this out
so we can just get that out of the way.
Uh. Yes, I know sign language. Uh. I learned how to talk because I’m not deaf. [audience
laughter] And, yes I’ll teach you all the dirty words, but after the show. [audience
laughter]
Now, when I was seven years old, my dad moved us to the woods of Texas. And I say woods,
but this was snake infested forest, and we camped in tents. We didn’t have running
water, no electricity. We didn’t have plumbing so we used an outhouse.
And we did all of this while we were clearing the land for preparing for the arrival of
a trailer. And eventually my dad built us a one room tin shack that we all shared and
my dad led this expedition for this trailer. And he dug a waterline that tapped into natural
spring well. He dug a septic tank and created a plumbing system so we didn’t need that
nasty outhouse anymore. He even brought us electricity.
He did this all on his own. And to me as a kid, man. This was like...he was like Daniel
Boone and Frank Lloyd Wright and Ben Franklin, just all rolled into one. And I was his baby
girl. He would have done anything for me, including risk his life. There was this one
time on the ride back from Galveston B each and I riding in the back of our Chevy pickup
truck and my flip-flop just tumbled out of sight. I even don’t know how I lost it,
but seeing it tumble down the Houston highway made me burst into tears. And my dad saw this,
saw me crying in the rearview, and he would have none of that. So he brought the Chevy
to a screeching halt, backed up down the highway, jumped out and ran across four lanes of traffic.
Cars are swerving, dodging, people are screaming and honking. It was mayhem and I wasn’t
crying anymore. And my dad, he got that flip-flop. He raised it up like a trophy, he ran back
swerving through, dodging cars. He was… he gave it back to me and he said, ‘Don’t
cry baby girl. Don’t cry.’ He was a super hero. And he was my dad.
But he was also a husband. And not a very good one, according to my mother. After 22
years of marriage and she gotten fed up with this spontaneous lifestyle of his, this wild
life of the party and you know, the financial troubles that came with it. Oh, we had gotten
the trailer, but the trailer got repossessed. And we moved back into that one room tin shack.
And we relocated to Fort Worth. My mom and I shared a two bedroom apartment and my dad
got some crappy studio down the street. And now I knew about the money troubles because
as a child of deaf adults, or a CODA, I answered the phone. And interpreted the bill collectors
calls. I negotiated payments. So I knew about this side of this, of their troubles.
But I didn’t really know about their fighting because unlike hearing parents who might shout
and you might overhear shouting, I didn’t hear them because they fought behind closed
doors so I also didn’t see them. But one night, one night I did see them fight.
It was August 15th, 1988. And something woke me up. Which as a CODA, should have been a
signal that something was not right . Because, you know, one of the false assumptions about
deaf people is that they’re quiet. No. They have no regulation of sounds. They are burping
and slamming cabinets and banging pots and pans. They are obnoxiously loud. And as a
CODA, you just tune out the sounds of everyday life.
But this night, it was like three in the morning and something woke me up and I went to investigate.
And I saw light was on in my mom’s bedroom and I peered in and I see her laying on the
floor and my dad is straddling her and his arm is cocked back ready to punch. And seeing
me in the doorway made my mom, like, shift her head and in that split second my dad [makes
a punching sound] hit the floor. And missed her face by a fraction of an inch. If I hadn’t
been in the doorway he surely would have hit her. And hearing this thunderous crack of
his knuckles on the concrete floor with that cheap carpeting over it, it stunned me and
I just backed up away from them. They scrambled to their feet and everyone’s screaming and
crying and my dad is threatening to kill her and then kill himself.
I had never seen my dad hit my mom. I’d never had him lay a hand on me. He’d never
spanked me in my whole life. This was terrorizing. So I raced to my bedroom and I called 911.
Now my first instinct was to protect my dad. See in the deaf community, stories were often
circulated about how the police would show up and a deaf man wouldn’t know the police
were commanding him to stop or drop their weapon or put their hands up and the deaf
person of course they wouldn’t know they were being yelled at, and so didn’t obey
these commands and they were shot dead. This is a story that I would hear all the time.
And so my first thought to the operator was please make sure, make sure that the cops
know my dad is deaf and he might not do what they say and I’ll be here. I’ll take of
it. And so I tell my parents that the cops are on their way and they calm down and they
sit in the dining room and that’s when I notice there are holes all over the dining
room wall. And I think, maybe that’s what woke me up. I don’t know.
But when the cops arrive, they don’t care about the holes in the wall. They don’t
care what I witnessed. They don’t care about what the 911 operator told them. All they
really wanted to know was the status of my parents relationship. Were they still married?
Now yeah, technically they were still married, but my you know, they were separated. ‘His
name isn’t even on the lease,” I told them. Well that didn’t matter. Did he have
personal belongings here? Well yeah, he had some clothes hanging in the closet and toiletries.
Well, that gave him a right to be there. The laws were different then. This is before the
Violence Against Women Act. This is 1988 and what happened behind a family’s closed doors
was their business. A weird Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. He therefore had a right to be
there. All they could do was ask him to leave. Ask him to leave, not tell him.
So after twenty minutes of negotiating, my dad finally says, ‘Okay, fine, I’ll go.’
And the cops assure me that they will follow him and make sure he was out of harm’s way,
our way. Even though he was clearly blitzed and in no condition to drive. But hey, if
they didn’t care, I didn’t care and they were gone.
And my mom and I just...we didn’t even hug. We were just shocked, stunned, I guess. And
we just went back to our bedrooms. I mean, like, what do you do after what do you after
you’ve witnessed this? Go to sleep. So I’m waiting, trying to fall asleep with the adrenaline
still pumping through me. And I’m thinking about work and the next morning. And that’s
when I hear this tremendous crash and I leap out of bed and I see my dad charging down
the hallway straight at me. In one body slam, he has knocked the front door completely off
its hinges. Just destroyed it.
And I grab this rotary phone that’s sitting by my bed and I start to dial 911.
Which, I gotta say, in the age of rotary phones. Nine? Really stupid number [audience laughter]
to have to dial in an emergency.
It hasn’t even gotten back to its starting position and my dad’s already reached me.
He’s got the cord in his hands like he’s gonna crack a bullwhip, and he goes, ‘Whip!’
[makes a whipping sound] like that. And rips it right out of the wall.
He corrals us and he pushes us into the dining room. And he makes me and my mom and him sit
there, while he interrogates my mother about who she’s sleeping with. And I, you know,
I can’t hear them fight obviously, so I just cover my eyes. This is a way to, I guess,
maintain some dignity for my mother and also because I don’t want to know these details
about my parents relationship.
And hours pass and I can see that the sun is rising. I’m not going to work in the
morning and my mother is not giving my father any emotion. She’s just a blank slate. And
this starts to, I guess just get on my dad’s nerves to the point where he decides to turn
his attention to me. He wants to make sure that I know what a horrible human she is and
what a horrible wife she is. And he start to graphically describe her sex life to me.
‘Your mother is an S-L-U-T. Slut!’
I search his face for a sign of who, who is this person? Where is my dad? And he’s searching
my face for a sign that I’m on his side. And I wasn’t. This made him snap. He grabs
my mother by the neck, in one move slams her against the wall and starts choking her to
death. And her heels are digging into the wall like she’s trying to pull herself up.
And she’s got her hands around his wrist like just trying to get some leverage. Anything.
And I think okay what can I do, I -- I can grab a finger. If I can just grab one finger
and bend it backwards, he’ll have to let go from the pain. So I just try to focus on
just one finger. If I could get my fingers behind one finger. And I couldn’t, he was
so strong. He was too strong.
And my mom’s face is turning purple, her eyes are bugged out and the vein on her forehead
is fat and might burst. So I changed tactics. He’s so focused on my mom’s eyes, that
I get between their faces, and I make my dad look at me. ‘Look at me! It’s Kambri,
your baby girl.’ And his eyes start to well up with tears. And I see, oh it’s working,
it’s working, I’m gonna keep doing this. So I keep saying it, ‘It’s me, your baby
girl, your baby girl.’ And with that, he just lets her go.
So I race to the dining room phone, which thank God was a touch tone and dialed 911.
And I hear the operator say 911, this is an emergency or what’s your emergency. But
my dad but he’s already reached me. He grabs the phone and slams it into the cradle. He
grabs my mother by the back of her hair, forces her into a seat and pulls her head back and
now has a knife that he’s pulled out of his back pocket at her throat, that he’s
made long and lean. But since he’s deaf, what he doesn’t know, is that the whole
time, the phone is ringing. 911 had called immediately back.
And I have a choice. The whole time I’m thinking I have a choice. I can either try
this baby daughter routine or I can grab the phone. And I know the baby daughter routine
won’t work. I’m the enemy now. He sees this.
So I made a choice and I ran for the phone and I screamed, ‘He’s back!’ And in
that instant seeing my mouth moving, my dad, he knew the jig was up. He knew it was done.
So he dropped the knife and tried to make everything look like it was in order again.
And the cops, they were there in a blurry instant. And one officer is tending to my
mother. And while they’re working with her, the other one asks me to interpret my father’s
Miranda rights. So I start to interpret them. ‘You have the right to remain silent.’
And that’s when the officer is like, ‘Um, maybe we can do that back at the station.’
Yeah. Maybe. And they off tromp through the front door.
And they left me and mom just to pick up the pieces. And for a variety of reasons, my mother
didn’t press charges. And because of the laws being what they were then, my father
was never really charged with anything too serious. He got four years probation.
And over time, I discovered that my father had been a cheat from day one. My mom...he
had cheated on my mom the day they were married. The whole first year of their marriage. He
had been abusing her the whole time too. But because she used to make him fight behind
closed doors where I couldn’t hear and I couldn’t see, I didn’t know these things.
And so she had given me this super hero of a dad. These crazy memories of just this wild
carefree father, and that’s the one that I have to choose to remember. That Daniel
Boone. That Ben Franklin. That Frank Lloyd Wright, all wrapped into one. The father who
would rescue my flip flop. Because he thought it meant to something to me. Thank you.
[audience applause]