O'Sullivan

On the last day of December 1602 a thousand O'Sullivans, men, women and children, set out from the burnt country of Beara on the south-west tip of Munster to walk to safety in Leitrim, two hundred and fifteen Irish miles north, through country garrisoned by their enemies, in midwinter. Their leader was Donal Cam O'Sullivan Beare, the last Gaelic lord of the peninsula, whose strongholds had been taken one by one through the year and whose cattle had been driven off and whose harbour had been blockaded. The walk took fifteen days. Thirty-five reached the gates of Leitrim Castle. The march itself, recorded in detail in the Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium of 1621, is one of the most affecting episodes of seventeenth-century Europe.

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On the early afternoon of the fifth of April 1887, in the back-garden of the Keller family house Ivy Green at Tuscumbia in northern Alabama, Anne Sullivan, twenty years old, the Irish-American Anne Mansfield Sullivan, born at Feeding Hills in Massachusetts on the fourteenth of April 1866 to Famine-emigrant Irish-Limerick parents (her father had emigrated from Limerick in 1860), schooled at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston 1880–86, in her fourth week as the private-tutor of the six-year-old Helen Keller, the deaf-and-blind daughter of the Keller family, brought Helen out into the back-garden to pump water into a mug at the water pump beside the house. As Helen held the mug under the pumped water, Anne Sullivan spelled the finger-letter pattern W-A-T-E-R into Helen's right palm, slowly, three times. The fourth time, Helen's face changed. By Sullivan's letter to her Perkins teacher Sophia Hopkins the next day (the Sullivan-Hopkins correspondence is the primary source for the event): I see a tear come down her cheek. The word and the cool flowing thing came together. It was the key. Helen Keller, by her 1903 autobiography The Story of My Life, had her six-year-old's mind opened to the fact that the world has names: that the objects she had felt for the previous five years are not only the objects-themselves but are also the names-of-the-objects, and that the names can be spelled into her hand. The finger-spelling lessons of Anne Sullivan over the next forty-nine years (until Sullivan's death in 1936) gave the deaf-blind Helen Keller her language, her Radcliffe College education (Helen Keller, Radcliffe BA 1904, the first deaf-blind person in the world to take a university degree), her twelve published books, and her fifty-year-career as the most-recognised disability-rights advocate of the twentieth century. The water-pump in the back-garden at Ivy Green is preserved on the original spot.

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