Helen Keller

In 1955, in her seventy-fifth year, Helen Keller, a woman heaped with honors, still resolute in the service of the blind, esteemed by all and loved by those close to her, at long last finished her book about her teacher Anne Sullivan Macy. Although she lived another thirteen years, it was her last book. She subtitled it A Tribute of the Foster-Child of Her Mind. "To this day," she wrote-and it was nineteen years since the death of the woman she always called Teacher-"I cannot 'command the uses of my soul' or stir my mind to action without the memory of the quasi-electric touch of Teacher's fingers upon my palm." Nella Braddy Henney, whom Helen Keller described as "beloved friend and literary counselor" and who had written the definitive biography of Teacher, noted in her introduction to Helen's memoir that "as long as Annie Sullivan lived, and she died in 1936, a question remained as to how much of what was called Helen Keller was in reality Annie Sullivan. The answer is not simple. During the creative years neither could have done without the other." It is impossible to write a book about Helen Keller that is not also a book about Annie Sullivan, and the story therefore begins with her.

The Howes were a dominating influence on Annie during her stay at Perkins. Dr. Howe's work with Laura Bridgman shaped her own approach to Helen Keller, while her detestation of Julia Ward Howe fanned a rebelliousness and independence that carried her beyond Dr. Howe and made her one of the greatest teachers in American history.

When Annie arrived there, Perkins was led by Howe's successor, his son-in-law, an enthusiastic, ardent and affectionate Greek, Michael Anagnos. He would have a great influence on Annie and later on Helen, and was an important figure in the Helen Keller story. Subsequently, relations between them were ruptured; and Annie and Helen seem never to have forgiven him, going out of their way to deprecate his influence.

Mrs. Howe's prominence in the suffrage movement may have been the reason Annie never worked up any enthusiasm for it, even later when Helen Keller and her mother became ardent converts. She considered class discrimination more insufferable than sexual discrimination; and Nella Braddy conveyed Annie's attitude by citing a statement of Mother Jones, the militant leader of the mine workers, "You don't need a vote to raise hell! You need convictions and a voice!"

There has never been a definitive diagnosis of the disease that ravaged nineteen-month-old Helen Keller. The family doctor, according to Helen, called it "acute congestion of the stomach and brain." The high fever that had accompanied it subsided "as mysteriously and suddenly as it had come," and then the young mother discovered that her firstborn could no longer see or hear. "Congestion"-like another much overworked medical term at the time, "the flux"-could mean anything.

If we have once seen, 'the day is ours and what the day has shown.'" Recent psychological studies of infancy have confirmed Helen Keller's insight. There is a growing consensus among investigators from diverse fields, Dr. Selma Fraiberg has written, "that the human capacities for love and learning [are] rooted in the first two years of life, the embryonic period of personality development." Her own studies of blind children (Insights from the Blind) confirm this observation, for they indicate that children blinded postnatally-as Helen Keller was-are less likely to show "abnormalities in development and behavior" than children blinded at birth.

Helen Keller was born June 27, 1880. Her father, Captain Arthur H. Keller, fought with the Confederate army at the siege of Vicksburg. He was descended of Swiss stock on his father's side. His mother was the great-granddaughter of Alexander Spotswood, the first colonial governor of Virginia.