Anne Sullivan at the well

Some doors are opened by force and some by patience, but the rarest are opened by a single object placed in a child's hand at the exact moment the hand is ready to receive it. The teacher who finds that object is seldom the one the world expected. More often she is a young woman with a difficult history of her own, who has learned in her own body what it is to be shut out of the seeing world, and who therefore knows, with a precision the seeing cannot teach, where the latch is hidden.

THE GIRL FROM FEEDING HILLS

Anne Mansfield Sullivan was born at Feeding Hills near Springfield, Massachusetts, on the fourteenth of April 1866, daughter of Thomas Sullivan, a Famine emigrant from County Limerick who had crossed in 1860, and Mary Cleesy of Newry. Her mother died of consumption in 1874. Her father, broken by drink and grief, gave up the three Sullivan children to the Massachusetts State Almshouse at Tewksbury in February 1876. Her brother Jimmie, eight years old, died there the following year on a cot beside hers. She was nine. She had been classed as functionally blind since the age of five, her eyes scarred by trachoma. At Tewksbury, she heard a state inspector visit the wards and she threw herself at him and asked to be sent to school. The Perkins Institution in Boston took her in 1880. Eight surgeries between 1882 and 1886 recovered partial sight. She graduated valedictorian of the class of 1886, still half-blind, with no money and a temper she had not yet learned to govern. When the offer came in February 1887 to teach a deaf-blind child in Alabama, she took it because there was no other offer to take.

IVY GREEN, MARCH

She arrived at the depot in Tuscumbia on the third of March 1887, a Thursday, in a black wool dress that did not suit the latitude. The Keller place stood at 300 West North Common Street, a low white house behind a fence of climbing ivy. Captain Arthur Keller, formerly of the Confederate cavalry, met her at the gate. Inside, Helen Adams Keller, six years and eight months old, deaf and blind since a fever at nineteen months, was waiting on the porch. The child struck her in the face within the hour. She knocked out one of Sullivan's front teeth a week later. The household, by long habit of pity, had fed Helen from every plate at the table and let her go where she pleased. Sullivan moved the child and herself into the small garden cottage and shut the door. For two weeks she fought Helen for the spoon, for the napkin, for the right to comb the tangled hair. By the end of March the child would sit at table and fold her napkin. That was the first work. The second work, the harder, had not yet begun.

THE FINGER ALPHABET

From the day of her arrival, Sullivan had been spelling words into Helen's palm in the manual alphabet she had learned at Perkins from her friend Laura Bridgman's old teachers. Three or four hundred words a day. D-O-L-L for the doll. C-A-K-E for the cake. M-U-G for the mug. Helen returned the patterns with quick, accurate fingers, and Sullivan understood with growing dread that the child was imitating, not naming. The shapes were a game played on the skin. They had not crossed into meaning. By the Perkins theory, language begins when the sign and the thing meet inside the mind. Sullivan had read Dr Howe on Laura Bridgman. She knew the meeting could not be forced. She knew also that without it the child before her would remain, for the rest of her life, what the Captain's relatives in the dining room had already pronounced her: a creature, not a person. On the fifth of April, the morning quarrel had been over the words mug and water. Helen had confused them, and when corrected had thrown the mug on the floor. Sullivan, by her own admission in the letter she wrote that night, was almost discouraged.

THE PUMP

Just before half past three on the afternoon of Tuesday the fifth of April 1887, the Alabama sun had softened. The dogwood by the kitchen door was in flower. Sullivan took up a broken mug from the floor of the dining room, put it into Helen's hand, took the child by the wrist and walked her down the back steps into the yard. The pump stood against the brick of the kitchen ell, an iron handle and a curved spout above a flagstone. Sullivan placed Helen's right hand under the spout and worked the handle with her own left. Cold well-water came down across the child's palm and ran between her fingers onto the stone. With her free hand Sullivan spelled into Helen's other palm, slowly, the four letters: W-A-T-E-R. Once. The handle came up. Again. W-A-T-E-R. No change in the small face under the bonnet. A third time. The water was very cold. A fourth time, and at the fourth time the world turned on its hinge. The child stood absolutely still. Her free hand groped, found Sullivan's fingers, held them. Something behind the unseeing eyes, which had been a closed room for four and a half years, opened. A tear went down her cheek. The mug fell on the flagstone and did not break. Helen put both her hands on the iron of the pump and spelled, of her own accord for the first time in her life, the four letters back. By Sullivan's letter to her old housemother Sophia Hopkins, written at the Keller dining table that night: The word and the cool flowing thing came together. It was the key.

THE NAMES OF EVERYTHING

What followed has the quality of a thing released. Helen would not leave the garden. She struck the ground at her feet and Sullivan spelled G-R-O-U-N-D. She touched the trellis and Sullivan spelled T-R-E-L-L-I-S. The dogwood. The gate. The pump again, and again, and again. The dog came up and was named. The chickens were named. Helen pointed to herself, mouth open in the silent O of a child who has discovered a fact, and Sullivan spelled H-E-L-E-N. Within the hour she had asked, by the only means she had, for the name of her infant sister sleeping in the house, and Sullivan spelled B-A-B-Y, and then M-I-L-D-R-E-D. Thirty new words by sundown, by Sullivan's count. The child went to bed that night and, by Sullivan's letter, kissed me for the first time. The teacher sat at the dining table after the family had gone up, and wrote to Boston with the candle guttering. She was twenty years old. Her twenty-first birthday was nine days away. She did not, in the letter, claim any credit. She wrote only that she had seen a soul take possession of its own house.

THE FORTY-NINE YEARS

She stayed. That is the sentence on which the rest depends. She stayed for forty-nine years. She went with Helen to the Wright-Humason School in New York, to the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, and in 1900 to Radcliffe, where for four years she sat beside her pupil in every lecture and spelled every word of every professor into her hand. Helen Keller took her BA cum laude in 1904, the first deaf-blind person in the world to hold a university degree, and the degree was as much Sullivan's as her own. There followed twelve books under Helen's name, beginning with The Story of My Life in 1903; lecture tours through thirty-five countries; the long campaign, under the American Foundation for the Blind, that turned the condition of the blind in America from charity case into civil claim. Sullivan married John Macy in 1905 and the marriage failed; she lost what sight she had recovered; she went on spelling. She died at Forest Hills, New York, on the twentieth of October 1936, seventy years old, with Helen's hand in hers. Helen lived another thirty-two years and died at Easton, Connecticut, on the first of June 1968.

THE PUMP STILL STANDS

The end of an age of silence is not always closed by the one who suffered the silence. Sometimes it is closed by another, who knew silence of a different kind, in a Famine-Irish almshouse ward in Massachusetts, and who carried out of that place the obstinate Limerick conviction that a child is not a creature. The iron pump at the back of Ivy Green stands where it stood on the fifth of April 1887, on its own flagstone, against the brick of the kitchen ell. Each year on that date, deaf-blind students from the fifty states come to Tuscumbia and lay their hands on the spout while a teacher spells four letters into the other palm. The water is still cold.