Water at the Pump

Helen Keller was born in 1880 in Tuscumbia, a small town in Alabama, in the southern United States. She was a healthy, lively baby.

When she was about nineteen months old, she became very ill with a high fever. Doctors at the time did not know what it was; today some think it may have been scarlet fever or meningitis. Helen recovered. But the illness left her completely blind and completely deaf.

Locked in

As she grew, Helen could not see faces, or hear voices. She had no way of learning words. She made up about sixty simple signs of her own to communicate with her family, but her world was dark, silent and confusing.

She grew wild and frustrated. She had tantrums. She smashed things, kicked and screamed, grabbed food from other people's plates. Some relatives thought she should be sent away to an institution.

Her parents refused. They had read about a deafblind woman called Laura Bridgman, who had been educated at the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston. They wrote to ask for help, and Perkins sent them a teacher.

Teacher

Her name was Anne Sullivan. She was twenty years old, and she was nearly blind herself. She had grown up in great poverty and spent years in a grim poorhouse, before she was sent to Perkins, where she had several operations that partly restored her sight. She had just graduated, at the top of her class.

Anne arrived at the Kellers' house on 3 March 1887. Helen later called it the most important day she could remember in her life.

Anne began straight away. She gave Helen a doll, and then spelled the word d-o-l-l into her hand, using a finger alphabet, where each letter is a different shape made with the fingers.

Helen copied the movements. She learned to spell doll, cake, cup and many other words. But it was only a game to her. She did not understand that the shapes in her hand were names, that everything in the world had one.

A battle of wills

Anne soon realised that before she could teach Helen, she had to stop her tantrums. There were fierce battles. One famous fight at the breakfast table lasted for hours, until Helen at last agreed to sit in her own chair, eat from her own plate and fold her napkin.

Anne persuaded the family to let her live alone with Helen for a few weeks, in a small cottage in the garden, so she could teach her patience and trust. Gradually, Helen calmed down.

The pump

One morning in April 1887, about a month after Anne arrived, the two of them were walking in the garden, and they came to the water pump.

Someone was drawing water. Anne put one of Helen's hands under the cool stream. Into her other hand, she spelled w-a-t-e-r, first slowly, then quickly.

Helen stood still.

Years later, in her autobiography, she described what happened in that moment:

"Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!"

She knelt down and touched the ground, and wanted to know its name. She pointed to the pump, and to the trellis. Then she turned and asked for Anne's name. Anne spelled t-e-a-c-h-e-r.

By Anne Sullivan's account, Helen learned thirty new words that day.

A mind set free

After that, there was no stopping her. Helen learned to read Braille, a system of raised dots that can be read with the fingers. She learned to write. She learned to speak aloud, though her voice was hard for strangers to understand. She learned to "listen" to people by placing her fingers on their lips and throat.

She learned French, German, Latin and Greek.

In 1904, she graduated with honours from Radcliffe College, the women's college of Harvard University, the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor's degree. Anne Sullivan sat beside her in every lecture, spelling the words into her hand.

A life of work

Helen Keller became one of the most famous women in the world. She wrote twelve books and many articles. She travelled to more than thirty-five countries, including India in 1955, speaking for the rights of blind and deaf people, women and workers. She helped raise money for the American Foundation for the Blind for more than forty years.

Anne Sullivan stayed by her side until she died in 1936. Helen always called her simply "Teacher".

Helen Keller died in 1968, at the age of eighty-seven.

Want to read more?

Helen Keller's autobiography, The Story of My Life, which she wrote while still a student at Radcliffe, is in the public domain and free to read. It includes letters by Anne Sullivan describing the early days of teaching her. The Miracle Worker, a famous play and film, also tells the story.