Anne Sullivan Teaches Helen Keller to See and Hear

She was twenty years old, half-blind herself, and had spent most of her childhood locked in an asylum. But Anne Sullivan stepped off the train in Tuscumbia, Alabama, carrying one crucial memory: the moment someone first spelled a word into her own palm. Helen Keller was feral, kicking, scratching, eating with her hands from other people's plates. The Kellers had already contacted an institution to commit her. Sullivan had six weeks to prove the girl wasn't hopeless. Their breakthrough didn't come at the famous water pump until five weeks later, after Sullivan moved Helen into a cottage away from her parents, breaking the child's dependence on pity. What nobody expected: Helen would eventually become Sullivan's interpreter too, as Anne's failing eyesight left her nearly blind. Sullivan arrived on March 3, 1887, having been recommended by Alexander Graham Bell, who had been working with deaf children and directed the Keller family to the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston, where Sullivan had been educated. Sullivan's own childhood had been harrowing: her mother died when she was eight, her father abandoned the family, and she spent five years at the Tewksbury Almshouse in Massachusetts, a facility so squalid that a state investigation later condemned its conditions. She entered the Perkins Institute nearly blind from trachoma and graduated as valedictorian. Her method with Helen was radical for the time: constant tactile communication, spelling words into the child's palm thousands of times until the connection between object and word ignited. The famous water pump moment on April 5, 1887, when Helen understood that the cool liquid flowing over her hand had a name, is the most retold scene in American educational history. Keller went on to graduate from Radcliffe College, write twelve books, and become one of the most famous people of the twentieth century, but Sullivan remained her constant companion and interpreter until Sullivan's death in 1936.