Helen Keller

Helen Keller was born in Alabama in 1880 to a family that had lost its farm in the war and never quite recovered. At nineteen months an illness, probably scarlet fever or meningitis, left her deaf and blind. Before she was seven she had invented about sixty signs of her own to get through the day, pulling at people’s sleeves, and she knew only that the world was dark and everyone was frustrated with her.

When she was nearly seven a teacher arrived from Boston, a young woman almost blind herself, named Anne Sullivan. Sullivan spent the first weeks spelling words into her hand, cup, doll, water, with no idea whether anything was going in. One afternoon at the well pump she ran water over one hand and spelled w-a-t-e-r into the other, and Keller later wrote that she understood then that everything had a name, and that she went around the yard touching things and asking for their words.

She learned to read English, French, German, Latin and Greek in raised letters, learned to speak well enough to lecture on stages, and graduated from Radcliffe in 1904 with honours, the first deafblind person to take a degree from any college anywhere. Anne Sullivan sat beside her in lectures, spelling the teaching into her hand. Keller wrote a dozen books, her autobiography among them, learned to type on a machine that let her answer letters herself, and travelled to more than thirty-five countries to argue that blind children should be in school.

The activism outlasted the schoolbooks. She campaigned for the American Foundation for the Blind from its beginning, helped found the group that became the American Civil Liberties Union, and argued for workers, women, peace and people with disabilities, at a time when many people thought a deafblind woman should not be speaking in public at all. Some of it made her unpopular. In 1964, four years before she died, she was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the country.

The pump is still there, on the grounds of a school in Alabama, with a plaque under it and two words in Braille on the front. Every year children visit to spell the same word into the air: water. Sullivan stayed with her for nearly fifty years, and Keller spent the rest of her life writing and lecturing, because one afternoon at a well someone refused to stop explaining things to her.