More than the Water Pump Moment: Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan
Here’s a famous moment: It was 1887. Seven-year-old Helen Keller had been blind and deaf since toddlerhood. She was completely wild and undisciplined (she had a terrible temper and her parents couldn’t bear to frustrate her further). Her teacher, Anne Sullivan, was trying to get her to understand that there were words for everything. She put Helen’s hands under the water pump outside her house, fingerspelled the letters “W-A-T-E-R” to her, and suddenly Helen got it. Her face lit up, she spelled the letters back to Anne Sullivan, and she vocalized her long-lost baby word for “water.”
That moment was a breakthrough for student and teacher; a true epiphany. It was the climax of the play and movie “The Miracle Worker” based on Helen’s early life. And now it’s been memorialized in a statue of Helen Keller that has just been added to the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol.
For many disabled people, and for non-disabled people (like me) who have been fascinated by Keller and Sullivan since childhood, news of this statue is both a thrill and something of a source of frustration: because that famous moment was the end of the movie, but it was just the start for Helen Keller. She learned to fingerspell and read and write Braille and even to speak. She graduated with honors from Radcliffe at a time when hardly any women went to college, and went on to become a scholar, author, world traveler, public speaker, and political activist, advocating for women’s suffrage and for peace. She was friends with Mark Twain and Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a person to reckon with.
It’s true that, as a narrative for kids, it’s hard to beat the water-pump story. I have a theory that the story of Keller’s struggle to communicate has a special resonance for children who are having a hard time learning to read, and also for those who love reading, because it’s all about the power of language and also about the amazing things that a passionate and determined kid can accomplish. Plus, Anne Sullivan, Helen’s teacher and lifelong companion, is an equally compelling character: not only was she just as passionate and determined as her student, but she was barely out of her own teens when she started working with Helen, was partially blind herself, and was still shadowed by a childhood of miserable poverty that’s like something out of Dickens.
One book that tells Sullivan’s story is Helen Keller’s Teacher, by Margaret Davidson. I read this one as a kid and still remember the wrenching chapters about her childhood in an almshouse. Miss Spitfire: Reaching Helen Keller, by Sarah Miller, published just a few years ago, is a masterful retelling of Sullivan’s story. Although the book is published as fiction, as the author imagines herself into Sullivan’s thoughts and writes in her first-person voice, it’s prodigiously well-researched and is based on Sullivan’s writings and on actual events.
There is no shortage of kids’ biographies of Helen Keller herself. The World at Her Fingertips, by Joan Dash, also amply covers Keller’s adult life and her formidable personality, in a narrative format. Helen Keller: Rebellious Spirit, by Laurie Lawlor, is a great introduction for older kids (about 10 and up) and adults. There are lots of photos, and the author doesn’t shy away from relating the more controversial aspects of Helen’s life, such as her support for socialism.
Of course, books like the ones I’ve listed have an advantage over stand-alone statuary: they can use words to depict a series of events, to at least try to capture the totality of someone’s life. A statue has to pick one representative moment, and I’m not sure that the moment depicted in the U.S. Capitol statue is the one I would’ve chosen, despite its fame and its narrative power. I wish there was a way for that statue to honor the accomplished adult person that Helen Keller became, who harnessed that stubbornness and intelligence that had made her such a difficult kid, and used them not only to fingerspell “Water” but to become a force for change in the world.
