Suspicion haunts fame; unbelief lies in wait for great fame. At least three times—at the ages of eleven, twenty-three, and fifty-two—Helen Keller was assailed by accusations, doubts, and open disbelief. she was the target of skeptics and the target of idolaters. mark twain compared her to joan of arc and declared her “companion of caesar, alexander, napoleon, homer, shakespeare and the rest of the immortals”. her renown, she said, would last a thousand years.
So far, it’s lasted over a hundred, while constantly dimming. Fifty years ago, even twenty, almost every ten-year-old knew who Helen Keller was. “The Story of My Life,” her youthful autobiography, was on the reading lists of most schools, and its author was popularly regarded as a heroine of unusual grace and bravery, a kind of worldly saint. much of that worship has receded. no one today, without the intention of satire, would place her next to caesar and napoleon; And, in an era of serious disability legislation, who would think to accuse a stone blind and deaf woman of faking her experience?
However, as a child, she was accused of plagiarism and, in adulthood, of “verbalism”, substituting repeated words for first-hand perception. all of this happened because she was both liberated by language and enslaved by it, in a way that few other human beings can understand. the merely blind have the window of her ears, the merely deaf hear through her eyes. For Helen Keller there was no “just” enhancer; what she suffered was a totality of exclusion. the disease that annihilated her sight and hearing, and left her mute, has never been diagnosed. in 1882, when she was four months short of her second birthday, medical knowledge could only state “acute congestion of the stomach and brain”, although later speculation proposes meningitis or scarlet fever. Whatever the cause, the consequence was ferocity—tantrums, kicks, rage—but also an invented system of sixty simple signs, cues of intelligence. the girl could imitate what she could not see or hear: putting on a hat in front of a mirror, her father reading a newspaper with his glasses on. she could fold clothes and pick out her own things. such quiet moments were few. having discovered the use of a key, she locked her mother in a cupboard. she knocked over her little sister’s crib. Her desires were physical, impatient, helpless, and almost always belligerent.
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was born in tuscumbia, alabama, fifteen years after the civil war, when the confederate conscience was still inflamed. His father, who had fought in Vicksburg, called himself a “gentleman farmer” and edited a small Democratic weekly until, thanks to political influence, he was appointed US Marshal. he was a keen hunter who loved his guns and his dogs. money was generally tight; there was an escalation of marital anger. His second wife, Helen’s mother, was twenty years his junior, a forceful woman of intellect doomed to farm work. She had a strong literary side (Edward Everett Hale, the New Englander who wrote “The Man Without a Country,” was a relative) and read earnestly and searchingly. In Charles Dickens’ “American Notes,” he learned of Laura Bridgman, a deafblind farm girl who was being educated at the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston. Ravaged by scarlet fever at the age of two, she was even more circumscribed than Helen Keller: she couldn’t smell or taste. She was confined, Dickens said, “in a marble cell, impervious to any ray of light or particle of sound,” lost in language beyond a handful of univocally assembled words.
The news of Laura Bridgman ignited hope (she had been socialized into a semblance of a person, while Helen remained a little savage) and hope led her, eventually, to Alexander Graham Bell. by then the invention of the telephone was behind him and he was doggedly committed to teaching the deaf to speak intelligibly. his wife was deaf; his mother had been deaf. When he brought six-year-old Helen to him, he sat her on her lap and instantly calmed her down by letting her feel the vibrations of her pocket watch striking the time. her responsiveness didn’t register on her face; she described it as “chillingly empty”. But he judged her teachable and advised her father to ask Michael Anagnos, the director of the Perkins Institution, to send a teacher to Tuscumbia.
anagnos chose anne mansfield sullivan, a former perkins student. “mansfield” was her own embellishment; she had the sound of gentleness. If the invented name was intended to confer high status, it was because Annie Sullivan, born into penury, had no status. she at five she contracted trachoma, an eye disease. three years later, her mother died of tuberculosis and she was buried in the potter’s field, after which her father, a drunk prone to beating her children, abandoned the family. Annie, half blind, was thrown into the workhouse in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, among syphilitic prostitutes and the insane. Decades later, recalling its “strange, grotesque, and even terrible,” Annie Sullivan wrote, “I doubt that life, or indeed eternity, will be long enough to erase the terrors and ugly stains etched on my mind. during those sad years from 8 to 14 years old. .”
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She was rescued from Tewksbury by a committee investigating her growing notoriety, and luckily transferred to Perkins. he learned braille and the manual alphabet (finger positions that represent letters) and, at the massachusetts eye and ear infirmary, underwent two operations that allowed him to read almost normally, although the condition of his eyes was fragile and inconsistent during his lifetime. After six years, she graduated from Perkins as valedictorian of the class. but what would become of her? How was she going to make a living from it? someone suggested that she might wash the dishes or sell knitting. “Sewing and crocheting are inventions of the devil,” she sneered. “I’d rather break stones in the king’s way than fold a handkerchief.”
she went to tuscumbia instead. She was twenty years old and inexperienced for what she would find in the despair and chaotic defeats of House Keller. the boy she had come to educate dropped silverware, pinched, grabbed food from plates, knocked over chairs, screamed, struggled. she was strong, beautiful except for one bulging eye, earnest, painfully untamed: practically her first act upon meeting her new teacher was to break one of her front teeth. the woes of the marble cell had become woes. Annie demanded that Helen be separated from her family; her father couldn’t bear to see her little daughter disciplined and her ruined. Her teacher and her recalcitrant student retired to a cabin on the grounds of the main house, where Annie would be her sole authority.
what happened then and afterwards he recounted in letter after letter, to anagnos and, more confidently, to mrs. sophia hopkins, perkins’s housewife who had given him shelter during the school holidays. mark twain saw in annie sullivan a writer: “how she stands out in his letters!” he exclaimed. “Her brilliance, insight, originality, wisdom, character of hers, and the excellent literary skills of her pen, are all there.” Jubilantly, he noted the almost hour-by-hour progress of an exuberant release far more remarkable than Laura Bridgman’s fragile, inarticulate release. Annie Sullivan’s method, insofar as he formally recognized it as a method, was pure freedom. like any writer, she wrote and wrote and wrote, all day: words, phrases, sentences, verses, descriptions of animals, trees, flowers, weather, skies, clouds, concepts, everything that came to her mind or . . she did not write on the paper with a pen, but with her fingers, spelling rapidly on the girl’s alert palm. Mimicking unknown configurations, Helen spelled the same letters, but it wasn’t until a connection was made between the movement of the fingers and their referent that the mind was freed.
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