The story of Helen Keller is the story of a child suddenly cut off from the world at a very early age, when she was nineteen months old. It is the story of her hard, slow, victorious
struggle to return to that world of which she had been deprived. That little blind, mute, and deaf girl became, with the passing of the days, the gifted writer of extraordinary intelligence who never flagged in working, writing, and struggling to better the condition of others and to help them. In short, her story is the story of a half-tamed animal that became with time a sensitive citizen of extraordinary intelligence, who created for herself a distinguished
place in our present history.
Helen Keller was born a normal child, in Tuscumbia, in the state of Alabama, on June 27, 1880. She was suddenly deprived of the blessings of sight and hearing as the result of a grave illness which the doctors diagnosed as brain fever. It was expected that the disease would leave its victim feeble-minded, according to the medical theory prevalent at the time; but our heroine, with her strong constitution, came out of it in good health, to enter upon a wild, disordered childhood, with a partial awareness of what went on around her.
It was when Helen reached the age of
seven that her teacher, Miss Anne Sullivan, was brought from the Perkins Institution in Boston, at twenty years of age. Her coming was advised by Mr. Alexander Graham Bell, moved by compassion, and the child's parents took his advice; and Miss Sullivan came to accompany Helen like her shadow until 1936, when she died. Anne Sullivan bore a responsibility that demanded inexhaustible patience and untiring courage. Anne brought her little pupil a doll from the students of the Perkins Institution, which she used in training her, attempting to link objects with letters by spelling into the little girl's palm by means of the manual alphabet, which pictures the letters by signs. Here Helen learned the letters with astonishing speed, but she did not know that she was spelling
a word, or that a thing called speech existed in this world. And so the number of words she had learned to spell in that mysterious way kept growing...
... And the days passed... and Helen's eagerness for knowledge, discovery, and experiment grew...
One morning she stood with her teacher in the open air beside a water pump, as someone was working the pump to draw water from the well... Miss Sullivan took Helen's hand and placed it under the spout; the child was pleased by the feeling of the water's coolness and kept her hand in it, while with the other hand her teacher began to spell the name of this refreshing liquid, first slowly, then quickly — and
behold, she grasped the meaning of what her hand had traced, for she knew that the word "water" meant that cool liquid running over her hand!! Then she bent down quickly and touched the earth and asked her teacher to teach her the letters of its name; and night had not let down its curtains on the evening of that day before Helen had learned thirty words. This was the first step toward Helen's culture and her breadth of learning. She mastered the alphabet with extraordinary speed in both its manual and raised forms which the blind
use, and this made reading and writing easy for her. In 1890 she astonished her teacher by asking to learn to speak, after discovering, in some way, that a deaf and blind girl in far-off Norway had managed to learn to talk. Miss Sarah Fuller of the Horace School for Men was the first to take that responsibility upon herself.
In her childhood Helen often repeated that phrase which astonished so many: "Some day I shall go to college" — and she did. In 1896 Helen entered the Cambridge School for Young Ladies to prepare herself for Radcliffe College, which she entered in the fall of 1900. And in 1904 she held the degree of Bachelor of Science. Miss Sullivan was the constant companion
the world.
... One of my friends asked her: "If you had one wish whose fulfillment you might ask, what would you ask?"
And her answer came at once... "Peace for the world."
This blind, deaf, mute woman, who has seen nothing of life's sweetness and the beauty of its nature — her wish, despite all her afflictions, was not for herself; rather self-denial and thought for others were her motto, and peace for the world the wish whose fulfillment she asks!! How great an example she is of self-denial, in this life in which the "I" has overwhelmed all else.