Her liberator was Anne Sullivan, a young woman hired by Keller’s parents to serve as her teacher and governess. It would be months before Sullivan would make any headway with the tempestuous girl, but the miracle moment eventually arrived when Helen Keller found a way to communicate. It was a story soon known around the world.
Johanna “Anne” Sullivan was born in 1866 in Feeding Hills, Mass., to immigrants from County Limerick. From the start her life presented a series of major setbacks. She lost most of her eyesight when she contracted trachoma. Then her mother died and her father disappeared. By the time she was 10, Anne was all alone. State officials sent her to an orphan asylum where she spent the next four years. At 14, she gained admission to the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston. There, in addition to an education, she received treatment for her eyes and regained some of her sight. In 1886, at age 20, she graduated first in her class.
Compared to Sullivan, Helen Keller came from the opposite end of the social spectrum. Born in 1880 in Tuscumbia, Ala., she was the daughter of ex-Confederate Captain Arthur H. Keller, a successful newspaper editor, and Katherine Adams, a Southerner related to the famous Boston Adamses. By all appearances she was a happy and healthy child, but at 18 months she was stricken with a fever (probably scarlet fever). She survived, but lost her sight and hearing as a result.
Few proven theories and methods for rearing a deaf and blind child existed in the 1880s, leaving the Kellers to make due the best they could. Unable to communicate with their daughter and eager to make her happy, they babied her and imposed no discipline. By age 7, Helen Keller was by all accounts a wild, unruly child with parents desperate for help. They contacted the famed invented Alexander Graham Bell when they learned that he was at work on a device to help the deaf hear. He was unable to help them, but put them in touch with the Perkins Institute. Doctors and teachers there decided to send their prized graduate — Anne Sullivan — to Tuscumbia to teach and care for the young girl.
Sullivan arrived on March 3, 1887, a day Keller called “The most important day I can remember in my life.” Sullivan had been trained in an experimental method for teaching words to deaf and blind children. It called for presenting familiar objects to the child and then spelling out the letters in the palm of their hand. Sullivan first used a doll, spelling out D-O-L-L on Helen’s hand. Before long Helen could repeat the letter patterns, but she had no idea what they meant. The breakthrough moment came at the water pump when Sullivan held one of Helen’s hands under running water while spelling out W-A-T-E-R on the other, a scene immortalized in the film “The Miracle Worker.” Suddenly Keller understood the concept of words and by that evening she’d mastered 30 of them.
From that moment teacher and student formed a bond that lasted nearly 50 years. Helen proved an eager learner with a bright mind who told anyone who would listen that she planned to go to college. In 1894, she moved to New York to attend a school for the blind. Four years later she enrolled in the Cambridge School for Young Ladies to prepare for admission to Radcliffe, one of the nation’s premier women’s colleges. In 1899, Keller took and passed the entrance exam to Radcliffe. Four years later she graduated cum laude. An additional degree could have easily been awarded to Sullivan, for she attended every class and spelled out every lecture into Keller’s hand. She also spent hours every day reading books to her by the same method.
By the time of her graduation in 1904, Keller was already famous. Her autobiography, “The Story of My Life,” became a bestseller when published in 1902. For the rest of her long life, Keller remained a high-profile public figure, giving speeches, writing books, and supporting a wide range of progressive causes, including women’s suffrage, socialism, racial equality, pacifism and efforts to abolish capital punishment and child labor. She also helped found the American Foundation for the Blind in 1921 and lobbied for federal support for research into blindness prevention and cure.
Through it all she relied on Anne Sullivan to act as her eyes and ears. Sullivan never wavered, despite experiencing health and marital problems. Her husband, John Macy, whom she met while he helped Keller write her autobiography, left her in 1914. She later developed tuberculosis but never let it keep her from accompanying Keller on her lecture tours. Sullivan died in 1935 at the age of 69. Her ashes were placed in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., making Sullivan the first woman to receive this honor.
Keller remained active in public life until the early 1960s, when she retired to Westport, Conn. She died in 1968 at 87 and had her ashes placed next to Sullivan’s in the Washington Cathedral.
HIBERNIAN HISTORY WEEK
March 4, 1943: James Cagney wins an Academy Award for Best Actor for his depiction of George M. Cohan in “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
March 5, 1770: Patrick Carr, an Irish-born leatherworker, is one of five men to die at the hands of British soldiers in the Boston Massacre.
HIBERNIAN BIRTHDATES
March 1, 1954: Actor and director Ron Howard is born in Duncan, Okla.
March 2, 1793: The founding father of Texas, Sam Houston, is born in Rockbridge County, Va.
March 4, 1778: Patriot Robert Emmet is born in Dublin.