Anne Sullivan at the well

It is twenty past three on the afternoon of Tuesday the fifth of April 1887, in the back-garden of the Keller family house Ivy Green at 300 West North Common Street in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in soft early-spring Alabama sun. She is twenty years old. She is Anne Mansfield Sullivan, born at Feeding Hills near Springfield, Massachusetts, on the fourteenth of April 1866 (her twenty-first birthday is in nine days), daughter of the Famine-emigrant Limerick farmer Thomas Sullivan and the Newry-emigrant Mary Cleesy, schooled at the Massachusetts State Almshouse at Tewksbury 1876–80 (her mother had died of tuberculosis in 1874, her father had abandoned the three Sullivan children at the almshouse in 1876; her eight-year-old brother Jimmie died at the almshouse in 1877), schooled at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston 1880–86 (she had been classified as functionally blind by trachoma from age five; eight surgical operations between 1882 and 1886 had recovered partial sight), valedictorian of the Perkins class of 1886.

She has, since the third of March 1887, been the resident private tutor of Helen Adams Keller, the six-year-old daughter of the Captain Arthur Keller family of Tuscumbia. Helen Keller had been left deaf and blind by a infant fever (probably meningitis or scarlet fever) at nineteen months in February 1882. Helen had grown into a uncontrollable five-and-a-half-year-old by the time of Sullivan's arrival on the third of March 1887; Sullivan's private-tutorial position is, by the Keller-family agreement of the twenty-fifth of February, to break the uncontrollable behaviour, establish basic table-and-personal-conduct, and (the third and most ambitious objective) attempt to teach Helen the finger-spelling language Sullivan herself had been taught at Perkins.

Sullivan has, in the past four weeks since the third of March, been spelling the finger-letters into Helen's palm at the rate of about three or four hundred words a day. Helen has been imitating the finger-spelling pattern back to Sullivan, but, by Sullivan's judgement, has not yet made the connection between the finger-spelling and the meaning of the words. The connection is, in plain reading, the question of whether Helen will ever have language.

Sullivan thinks, by her letter to Sophia Hopkins of the fifth of April: I have been spelling W-A-T-E-R into her palm for four weeks every time we pass the pump. Helen has been spelling W-A-T-E-R back to me. The spelling has been the mechanical-imitation only. The meaning has not, on my evidence, attached.

Sullivan thinks: I will take Helen to the back-garden pump now. I will pump the water into the mug. I will hold the mug under the water for Helen to feel the flowing water. I will spell W-A-T-E-R into Helen's other palm at the same time. The two sensations (the cool flowing water in one hand, the finger-spelling W-A-T-E-R in the other) will, on the Perkins pedagogical theory, attach the meaning to the name.

Sullivan takes Helen by the hand and leads her down the back-steps to the pump in the yard. She places Helen's right hand under the spout. She pumps the handle with her left hand. The water flows out cold onto Helen's right palm. With her right hand, Sullivan spells W-A-T-E-R slowly into Helen's left palm, once. Helen does not react. Sullivan spells it a second time. No reaction. A third time. No reaction. A fourth time, with the water still flowing.

By Sullivan's letter to Hopkins of the next morning, written that night at the Keller dining-table: suddenly Helen's face changed. I saw a tear come down her cheek. The cup fell from her hand. She put both her hands on the pump and said the finger-spelling of W-A-T-E-R back to me, the first time she had spelled it of her own initiative. The word and the cool flowing thing had, in her mind, come together. It was the key.

Helen Keller, by her 1903 autobiography The Story of My Life, ran through the Tuscumbia garden for the next two hours asking Sullivan, by the finger-touch of every object she came to, for the name of every object. By the end of the afternoon, by Sullivan's evening letter, Helen had learned about thirty new words: tree, gate, bird, dog, mother, father, sister, baby (Helen's infant sister Mildred), water (the foundational word), well, garden, ground, sky. By the evening, Sullivan, the finger-spelling lessons, and Helen herself had founded the language of the six-year-old deaf-blind child.

Anne Sullivan continued as Helen Keller's private teacher-and-companion for the next forty-nine years (until her death at Forest Hills, New York, on the twentieth of October 1936, seventy years old). Helen Keller took her Radcliffe College BA in 1904 (the first deaf-blind person in the world to take a university degree), wrote twelve books (the 1903 Story of My Life and the 1929 Midstream: My Later Life the most-read), travelled to thirty-five countries as a disability-rights advocate on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind from 1924 to 1968. She died at Easton, Connecticut, on the first of June 1968, eighty-seven years old. The water-pump in the Tuscumbia back-garden of Ivy Green is preserved on the original spot; the Keller homestead is, since 1954, a museum (the Helen Keller Birthplace at Ivy Green). The annual pilgrimage to the water pump on the fifth of April (the anniversary) is, by the Helen Keller Foundation, attended by deaf-blind students from all fifty US states.