The Helen Keller Story

They took away what should have been my eyes
(But I remembered Milton’s Paradise).
They took away what should have been my ears,
(Beethoven came and wiped away my tears).
They took away what should have been my tongue,
(But I had talked with God when I was young).
He would not let them take away my soul -
Possessing that, I still possess the whole.
-Helen Keller

Helen Keller
1880 - 1968
Inscribed and signed in bold pencil across her image,
To: Dr. Kronouet with cordial greetings…
July 1st, 1940.

At a plain, black well-pump in the small southern town of Tuscumbia, Alabama, one of the world’s great miracles took place. It began one bright, spring day in 1887. Puffy white clouds floated overhead on a background of blue, while birds fluttered through oaks and maples and flowers burst forth from the fertile soil in an array of colors-all unheard and unseen by a pretty girl of seven.

Standing at the totally blind and deaf Helen Keller’s side was a young woman, Anne Sullivan. Miss Sullivan was steadily pumping cool water into one of the girl’s hands while repeatedly tapping out an alphabet code of five letters in the other-first slowly, then rapidly. The scene was repeated again and again as young Helen painstakingly struggled to break her world of silence.

Suddenly the signals crossed Helen’s consciousness with a meaning. She knew that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the cool something flowing over her hand. Darkness began to melt from her mind like so much ice left out on the sunny March day. By nightfall, Helen had learned 30 words.

Helen Adams Keller was born a healthy child on June 27, 1880, to Captain Arthur H. and Kate Adams Keller of Tuscumbia. At the tender age of 19 months, she was stricken with a severe illness which left her blind and deaf.

At the age of six, the half-wild, deaf and blind girl was taken by her parents to see Dr. Alexander Graham Bell. Because of her visit, Helen was united with her teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan on March 3, 1887. After Helen’s miraculous break-through at the simple well-pump, she proved so gifted that she soon learned the fingertip alphabet and shortly afterward to write. By the end of August, in six short months, she knew 625 words.

By age 10, Helen had mastered Braille as well as the manual alphabet and even learned to use the typewriter. By the time she was 16, Helen could speak well enough to go to preparatory school and to college. In 1904 she was graduated “cum laude” from Radcliffe College. The teacher stayed with her through those years, interpreting lectures and class discussions to her.

Helen Keller, the little girl, became one of history’s remarkable women. She dedicated her life to improving the conditions of blind and the deaf-blind around the world, lecturing in more than 25 countries on the five major continents. Wherever she appeared, she brought new courage to millions of blind people.

Her teacher, Anne Sullivan is remembered as “the Miracle Worker” for her lifetime dedication, patience and love to a half-wild southern child trapped in a world of darkness.

At the age of 19 months, Helen Keller suffered an illness that left her overwhelmingly deaf and blind. She overcame these disabilities with the help of a dedicated teacher, Anne Sullivan, who taught Helen how to read and write in Braille. Helen also learned to speak, excelled in her studies, and graduated from Radcliff College in 1904.

After graduation from Radcliffe College in 1904, Keller devoted herself to a range of social causes. 1909 she joined the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World and devoted herself to a range of social issues. In 1916 she campaigned against U.S. entry into World War I. Helen also campaigned in favor of women’s suffrage.

In 1924 Helen turned her attention to the American Foundation for the Blind and became their national spokesperson. As a national symbol of personal bravery in the face of adversity, her books, and William Gibson’s popular play, The Miracle Worker convinced the American people that physical limitations need not compromise a person’s intellectual potential.

In New York, Sep 4, 1948 Helen wrote

“…Try to imagine, if you can, the anguish and horror you would experience bowed down by the twofold weight of blindness and deafness, with no hope of emerging from an utter isolation! Still throbbing with natural emotions and desires, you would feel through the sense of touch the existence of a living world, and desperately but vainly you would seek an escape into its healing light. All of your pleasures would vanish in a dreadful monotony of silent days. Even work, man’s Divine Heritage-work that can bind up broken hearts- would be lost to you. Family and friends might surround you with love, but consolation alone cannot restore usefulness, or bring release from that hardest prison- a tomb of the mind and a dungeon of the body…”
-
The Life of Helen Keller.

When Helen Keller was made blind and deaf through fever at the age of nineteen months, the prospects for her seemed anything but rosy. Born in 1880, at a time when blind/deaf people were likely to be consigned to the poor house or asylum, she went on to live a fuller and more adventurous life than many before or since.

Robbed by illness of two of her senses, she used the others to try and fully experience and learn about the world she lived in. As a child, she had invented a vocabulary of around sixty signs to communicate with those around her. She learned to do certain tasks around the house, and to identify people by feeling their clothes and faces.

Nevertheless, the difficulties of communicating meant that often Helen could be a rather riotous child and prone to tantrums. She would through things around, and even locked her mother in the pantry. Perhaps even in this we see the kind of fighting spirit that characterised much of Helen’s life!

It’s not hard to imagine that Helen’s behaviour, born of frustration with the limits placed on her life, was frustrating for her parents too; eventually they decided to hire a private tutor-cum-governess to assist with her education and upbringing. For Helen, this was a world-changing day, and one she was later to describe as “the most important day in all my life”.

Anne Sullivan, 21 years old and a recent graduate of Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston, was that woman. Herself visually impaired, Sullivan had earned the reputation of being a rebellious pupil. To the extent that she shared this common ground with Helen, she was perhaps the ideal woman for the task. She became not only a teacher to Helen, but a friend and companion to her until she (Anne) died.

While she set herself the task of changing Helen’s behaviour, this was only to be the first of Helen’s many steps on a life-long journey.

She began to teach her the manual alphabet, spelling individual letters into her hand for Helen to feel. Although she learned the shapes, she did not yet realise the link between these shapes and words, or the ideas the words represented.

This changed one day during a walk to the well. Anne spelled the letters W-A-T-E-R on to Helen’s hand, and then pumped water on it. With some repetition, her pupil realised that the letters were a way of referring to the liquid. For most people, the concept of names is so obvious as to almost believe it’s knowledge we have at birth. Yet to Helen, the idea that every object had a name was a complete revelation. She ran around the house feeling everything and eager to learn its name. Speaking of the change that this discovery wrought in Helen, Anne Sullivan said:

“Helen got up this morning like a radiant fairy. She has flitted from object to object, asking the name of everything and kissing me for very gladness. Last night when I got into bed, she stole into my arms of her own accord and kissed me for the first time, and I thought my heart would burst, so full was it of joy.”

This shows something of the depth of the relationship which was to develop between the two women. Anne encouraged conversation which was interesting to Helen, and used sentences rather than single words. Her reasoning was that, as with hearing children, language is learned through observation and copying the way those around us communicate. In this way, Helen began to learn the nuances of language.

Despite being blind and deaf it was clear that Helen had a remarkable gift for communication. She learned to read and write Braille, and to read lips by feeling the shapes and vibrations formed by people’s mouths as they speak. This form of lip-reading (Tadoma) is one that is very difficult, and few people ever manage to do successfully.

It became clear that Helen needed better learning facilities if she was to reach her potential, and she was enrolled in Perkins Institute for the blind. This was Anne Sullivan’s old school, and a world-famous institution for the education of blind children. Anne went through school with her, interpreting and transcribing books into Braille for her.

Helen learned to write around this time, and did so prolifically, even learning phrases of Latin, German and French which she incorporated. At 9, she begun to learn to speak. Although it was difficult, her determination was such that practicing and improving her speech far into adulthood.

In 1904 she graduated from Radcliffe College, disproving those who said that she couldn’t hope to compete with sighted and hearing students. In fact, her determination and uncanny memory made her an excellent scholar. While at college, she wrote “The Story of My Life”, the editor of which (John Albert Macy) went on to marry Anne Sullivan.

In 1914, Anne’s health was failing, and Polly Thompson was hired to help Helen with housekeeping. She became Helen’s friend and companion until she died in 1960.

Helen starred in a silent movie about her own life in 1919. It wasn’t successful, but it paved the way for a four-year vaudeville tour. After the 1921 founding of the American Federation for the Blind, Helen travelled, wrote and spoke extensively in her role as spokeswoman.

In a world of injustice and poverty, where women the disabled and the working class were effectively disenfranchised, Helen railed against the inequality she found. A woman of deep personal religious convictions, a suffragette and a socialist, she fought against inequality and the abject poverty which even today makes millions blind the world over, through diseases which are entirely preventable.

Through her work, Helen drew attention to the people who had often been overlooked. She became almost a household name by the time she died at the age of 88. Asked by a journalist which American presidents she had met, she replied that she didn’t know how many, but she’d met every one since Grover Cleveland! After her death, the Helen Keller International was founded to fight the scourge of blindness in the developing world.

Helen Keller wasn’t the only disabled person who succeeded in living life to the full. Many more have since, and will no doubt continue to. She was, however, a giant inspiration for millions the world over; millions who are deaf, blind, both, or neither. Helen’s success would have been impossible without the cooperation of others like Anne Sullivan, and stands as a reminder that only through cooperation and dogged determination combined can any human being live a life which is worthy of the name.

Quotes of Helen Keller.

The deeper into Helen’s life we look, the deeper her personality appears. She was certainly a very determined woman; the first deafblind woman ever to graduate from university, she also became renowned worldwide as a champion of social justice, a talented public speaker, and an inspiration to millions around the globe.
It isn’t only that Helen was able to overcome the barriers of being blind and deaf in a time when they were much greater disadvantages than they are now; her intelligence and perception speak to many people, blind or sighted, deaf or hearing, regardless of boundaries. Here are just some of the many insightful quotations that pepper her speeches and writing.

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature… Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

We can do anything we want to do if we stick to it long enough.

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.

The highest result of education is tolerance.

It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance it allotted length.

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Eleanor Roosevelt called her “America’s goodwill ambassador to the world.” Helen Keller called herself “an international beggar.” She remains, quite simply, Alabama’s most famous and celebrated citizen. The winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the United States, and friend of ten presidents, she was eulogized by Senator Lister Hill as “one of the few names born not to die.”

Born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1880, she lost her sight and hearing at the age of 19 months as a result of illness. Yet she became the first blind and deaf person to communicate effectively with mankind, largely through the efforts of an extraordinary teacher, Annie Sullivan, a 21-year-old partially blind orphan. Mark Twain called Sullivan “The Miracle Worker.”

Keller was the first blind and deaf person to complete college, graduating cum laude from Radcliffe.

Throughout her life, Keller traveled the world, dedicating herself not only to the sightless and the afflicted, but to all of humanity. She gave 97 lectures in 39 cities on tours to Japan; during World War II, she made countless trips to comfort those in military hospitals, calling this period “the crowning experience in my life.” Between 1946 and 1957, she visited 35 countries on five continents, urging governments to begin schools for the deaf and blind.

Helen Keller received an Oscar for her role in a documentary about her life; the French government saluted her with its highest honor; and she was the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Harvard. The author of many books, Keller also was a compelling speaker who enthralled audiences even when she could not speak their native languages.

“Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing,” wrote Keller, whose personal miracle of speech singularly embodies the human aspiration to communicate. “It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks.”