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Helen Keller, was from a prosperous Alabama family. When only ninteen months old she was infected by an illness now thought to be scarlet fever or meningitis.This malady robbed her of her sight, hearing and speech. With the generous help of Martha Washington the young daughter of her family’s cook she learned a set of touch-based symbols, but that language had its limits.
At the age of ten, Annie Sullivan along with her brother Jimmie, wound up in the local Tewksbury poorhouse. Jimmie died there six months later. By all accounts it was an appallingly damaging environment. Young children were lodged in mean conditions alongside adults with severe physical and psychiatric conditions. As a result, for many years afterwards, she was plagued by episodes of terror and associated violent rage, generated by her time there.
While in this institution she discoverd a library locally and would spend time there and asking people to read to her. But she hungered for an education. In 1880 when she was just fourteen, the chair of the State Board for Charities visited the institution. She approached him directly and told him she wanted to go to school. That autumn she exchanged the house of poverty for Perkins School for the Blind in Boston.
Meanwhile, back in the heart of Dixie, Helen Keller’s mother Kate had read ‘American Notes’ in which its author Charles Dickens told of the education of a blind deaf woman Laura Bridgman. She found her way to Alexander Graham Bell inventor of the telephone. Bell, whose mother and wife were profoundly deaf also had a long-standing committment to penetrate ‘ the inhuman silence which separates’. He directed her to Annie Sullivan’s alma mater. Bridgman, the first person living with deafblindness in the USA to receive an education, had also studied at the school.
Annie hadn’t slotted neatly into Perkins when she arrived there. That she had never owned a comb, a nightgown or a needle and lacked social graces fed her insecurity. Her past experiences had instilled a toughness in her, and she gave the teachers a hard time. Michael Anagnos, himself no stranger to youthful poverty and the principal of the school with a couple of his staff encouraged her and overcame her aggression. Anagnos also suggested that she help with teaching younger students.
In 1887 Anagnos, asked Annie Sullivan to consider moving to Alabama and work with the then seven-year old Keller. As soon as she arrived, Annie had a quarrel with the child’s parents over the Civil War and the family’s then ownership of slaves. The younger Helen was every bit as headstrong and as given to violent rages as her tutor had been. Annie brought a doll as a gift for her charge. She then proceeded to tap out the letter’s d-o-l-l in manual language on Keller’s hand a mode of communication developed particularly for people living with deaf-blindness. Though their own initial contact passed uneventfully it wasn’t to last.
In 1962 Anne Bancroft starred in a feature film entitled ‘The Miracle Worker’. The storyline told the tale of Sullivan’s work with Keller. The physicality demanded of Bancroft and her co-star Patty Duke in order to capture the violent interaction between the two subjects, was such that they were required to wear body-padding for the shoot. This is particularly true of the cameo, ‘The Breakfast Scene’
(http://youtube/EHwoRFe70jk) which shows Sullivan, the miracle worker, attempting to teach Keller table-manners. The nine-minute sequence required three cameras and took five days to film and is a testament to the combatativeness of the relationship. The moment of their breakthrough, also enacted on celluloid, came when Sullivan pumped water on to Keller’s hand. She then spelled w-a-t-e-r on her palm. The young Helen joyously realised then, that everything she touched had an individual name (http://youtu.be/lUV65sV8nu0).
Though Sullivan wrought miracles in her charge’s life including teaching her to speak, it is Keller who is most often recognised. After gaining a university degree she spent the rest of her life writing and campaigning. She was an advocate for the rights of people living with disability, woman’s rights, radical social change, civil liberties and a world free of injustice. Indeed she became an active Christian, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World and of the Socialist Party. She died in 1968 having been a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Honour, three years before.
Annie Sullivan stayed with Keller and supported her efforts ‘til the end of her own life in 1936, a short marriage notwithstanding. Though the recognition accorded to her was largely confined to the movie and an earlier stage play, she was the person who made the difference. Sullivan’s biographer Nell Braddy, speaking of the unity of the pair and Sullivan’s role in Keller’s life declared that
“As long as Annie Sullivan lived a question remained, namely how much of what was called Helen Keller’s was in fact of Annie Sullivan.”
Their ashes now lie together in Washington DC’s National Cathedral. The 16th century playwright, John Heywood once said that, ‘ a hard beginning maketh a good ending’. If there was ever a coupling that provided proof of that aphorism, and of a triumph over adversity it was that of Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller.
