Imagine being both blind and deaf and still earning a BA from Radcliffe College of Harvard University, being the author of 14 books and being named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century!
Ponder travelling to 35 countries around the world advocating for those with vision loss and giving hundreds of speeches and essays on topics such as women’s suffrage, labor rights and world peace.
And you will be discussing the life of Helen Keller.
Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27,1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama. She lost her sight and hearing after an illness when she was 19 months old.She would communicate using home signs until the age of seven when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan.
Her father was editor of the Tuscumbia North Alabamian. He was a captain in the Confederate Army. The family was part of the slave holding elite before the war. Her mother was the daughter of Charles W. Adams, a Confederate general.
She lived as she said “at sea in a dense fog.” She was able to communicate with the daughter of the family cook who understood Helen’s signs. By age seven, Helen had more than 60 home signs to communicate with her family.
She enjoyed the country and outdoor sports. She learned to row and swim and during the summers she “practically lived in my boat.” She also wrote that she liked to “contend with wind and wave. What is more exhilarating than to make your staunch little boat go slamming lightly over glistening tilting waves and to feel the steady imperious surge of the water!”
She found her favorite amusement to be sailing. The harbor of Halifax was her joy, her paradise in the summer of 1901 when she and Anne visited Nova Scotia. “Oh, it was all so interesting, so beautiful that the memory of it is a joy forever,” she wrote. She also counted many different trees as her friends. A splendid oak was the special pride of her heart. “I take all my friends to see this king tree. It stands on a bluff overlooking King Philip’s Pond in Wrentham. It may be a thousand years old.”
She felt that her entire body was alive to the conditions about her. She felt the “rumble and roar of the city or the grinding of heavy wagons on hard pavements or the panorama that is always present in the noisy streets to people who can see.” She enjoyed a leisurely walk and a spin on her tandem bicycle. ”It is splendid to feel the wind blowing on my face and the springy motion of my iron steed. The rapid rush through the air gives me a delicious sense of strength and buoyancy and the exercise makes my pulses dance and my heart sing.”
Helen’s autobiography The Story of My Life (1903)told of her education and life with Sullivan. It became a film with the title The Miracle Worker. Her birthplace has been designated and preserved as a Nation Historic Landmark. Since 1954 it has been operated as a house museum and sponsors an annual “Helen Keller Day”.
This remarkable soul who enjoyed a game of checkers or chess, or to knit and crochet or read “in the happy-go-lucky way I love” or to play a game of solitaire, could read lips and touch great works of art. She lived in perpetual night, and yet gave us eternal optimism and hope. Helen passed this life on June 1, 1968 at age 87. Her remains lie at the Washington National Cathedral.