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Helen Keller
If Helen Keller were to shake hands with you today and then meet you and shake hands again five years later, she would rememeber you.
Mark Twain once said, “The two most interesting characters of the nineteenth century are Napoleon and Helen Keller.” When Mark Twain said that, Helen Keller was only fifteen years old. Today she still remains one of the most interesting characters of the twentieth century.
Helen Keller is totally blind, yet she has read far more books than most people who can see. She has probably read a hundred times as many books as the average person, and she has written seven books herself. She made a motion picture of her own life and acted in it. She is totally deaf, yet she enjoys music far more than many people who can hear.
For nine years of her life, she was deprived of the power of speech; yet she has delivered lectures in every state in the Union, for four years, she appeared as a headliner in vaudeville; and she has traveled all over Europe.
Helen Keller was born perfectly normal. For the first year and a half of her life, she could see and hear like other children and had even begun to talk. Then suddenly she was overwhelmed by catastrophe. She was struck down by an illness which left her deaf, dumb and blind at the age of nineteen months and blighted her whole existence.
She began to grow up like a wild animal in the jungle. She smashed and destroyed every object that displeased her. She crammed her food into her mouth with both hands; and when anyone tried to correct her, she flung herself upon the floor and kicked and thrashed and tried to scream.
In utter despair, her parents sent her to the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston, pleading for a teacher. Then, like an angel of light, Anne Mansfield Sullivan came into her tragic life. Miss Sullivan was only twenty years old when she left the Perkins Institute in Boston and undertook what seemed an impossible task, the task of educating of deaf, dumb and blind child. Her own life had been filled with tragic and heart-breaking poverty.
At the age of ten, Anne Sullivan had been sent with her hide brother to live at the poorhouse in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. The poorhouse was so overcrowded that the two children slept in what was known as the “dead room” – the room where dead bodies were laid out to await burial. The little brother was sickly and after six months, he died. And Anne herself, when she was only fourteen years old, had become so nearly blind that she was sent to the Perkins Institute to learn to read with her fingers. But she did not go blind. Not then. Her sight improved. It was only a half-century later, and shortly before her death, that the darkness finally closed in upon her.
I cannot possibly make clear in a few words the miracle Anne Sullivan wrought with Helen Keller, nor how in one short month, she succeeded in communicating with a child who lived in an utter darkness nd a withering silence. That story has been told unforgettably in Helen Keller"s own book, The Story of My Life. No one who has read that book can possibly help remembering the happiness of the little deaf, dumb and blind child on the day she first realized there was such a thing as human speech. “It would have been difficult,” she says, “to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time, longed for a new day to come.”
When Helen Keller was twenty year old, her education had advanced so far that she evtered Radclliffe College, and her teacher went with her. By that time, she could not only read and write as well as any other student at College, but she had even regained her power of speech. The first sentence she ever learned to say was “ I am not dumb now”. She said it over and over again, thrilled, elated at the miracle --- “I am not dumb now.”
Today she speaks like a person who has a slight foreign accent, she writes her books and magazine article on a typewriter that types in Braille, or raised dots. And if she wants to make corrections in the margin, she pricks little holes in the paper with a hairpin.
She lives in Forest Hills, a part of New York City. I live only a few blocks from her home; and when I go out walking with my Bostion bull pup, I sometimes see her strolling in her garden with her shepherd dog for a companion.
I have noticed that as she walks, she often talks to herself, but she doesn"t move her lips as you and I do. She moves her fingers, and talks to herself in sign language. Her secretary told me that Miss Keller"s sense of direction is no better than yours or mine. She often loses her way in her own home, and if the furniture is moved, she is at a complete loss. Many people expect her to have a sort of uncanny sixth sense because she is blind, yet scientific tests have shown that her sense of touch and taste and smell are just about like yours.
However, her sense of touch is so acute that she can understand what her friends are saying by placing her fingers lightly over their lips, and she enjoys music by putting her hands on the wood of a piano, or a violin; she even listens to the radio by feeling the vibrations of the cabinet. She enjoys singing by putting her fingers lightly on the throat of the singer, but she herself cannot sing or carry a tune.
If Helen Keller were to shake hands with you today and then meet you and shake hands again five years latr, she would remember by your handshake whether you were angry or happy, disappointed or gay.
She rows a boat and swims and loves to gallop through the woods on horseback. She plays checkers and chess with a set made especially for her she even plays solitaire with a deck of cards that has raised figures; and on rainy days, she often spends the time knitting or crocheting.
Most of us think that about the worst affliction in the world is to become blind. Yet Helen Keller says she doesn"t mind being blind nearly so much as being deaf in the utter darkness and silence which separates her from the world, the thing which she misses most is the friendly sound of the human voice.
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