Bill Robinson: Why didn’t Helen Keller return?

Bill Robinson
Published: July 9, 2008

At 19 months, Helen Keller was stricken with an illness that left her deaf and blind. When Anne Masefield Sullivan wasn’t brought to Helen’s home in Tuscumbia on March 3, 1887, a new world was slowly opened to the little girl.

Helen was just weeks away from her seventh birthday (June 27). Annie Sullivan, later to become the beloved Teacher to little Helen, taught her first word — “water.” She “finger-tapped” the word to Helen, out by an old iron-pump well in the yard. Helen tapped the word “water” back to Annie Sullivan, and thus a miracle was born. Helen Keller would become a world-famous writer and lecturer. But at age 10, she could only communicate with the sign language of the deaf-mute. Yet, she decided on further lessons from a teacher of the deaf, and by the time she was 16, she was speaking so well that she decided on a prep school. And then it was on to college, and the school was among the nation’s best: by the time Helen was 24, she was graduating cum laude from Radcliff.

And there was Annie Sullivan right there by her side. Then, Helen became concerned with the deaf and the deaf-blind, and Annie was still right there with her, interpreting lectures and class discussions.

Helen Keller lectured in 25 countries over the many years. She was active with the American Foundation for the Blind and with the American Overseas Foundation for the Blind. Meanwhile, she wrote books, and she gave lectures. And later, after two world wars, she tried to better the living conditions for the war-ravaged populations of torn countries and the then-underdeveloped countries. In short, Helen Keller became the finest export that Alabama delivered to the world. And, fittingly, Helen became known as “The First Lady of Courage.”

It was inevitable that little Helen, learning rapidly from Annie Sullivan, would turn to religion. She had suffered, and she had been in darkness from age 19 months until she was past seven years. She approached “Teacher”... “She asked,” explained Annie Sullivan, “‘what is a soul?’ ‘No one knows,’ I replied, ‘but we know it is not the body, and it is part of us which thinks and loves and hopes ... and is invisible.’

“Helen then said: ‘But if I write what my soul thinks, then it will be visible, and the words will be its body.’”

This happened in 1891. Thirteen years later, as we have documented, Helen Keller graduated with honors from one of the nation’s finest colleges for women. How could a child, so cruelly handicapped, come so far and so fast? Miss Sullivan knew that she first must take Helen away from her parents who naturally over-indulged almost her every wish. Helen would look helplessly up at her mother, press her thumb to her mouth, trying to speak. Heartbreaking. But Helen could be mean, too; she tried to overturn her baby sister’s cradle as the child slept, and she would run around the house, pulling down things, if she couldn’t get her way. Annie knew she must separate Helen from her parents — the child needed a foundation of discipline. Annie moved Helen to the small cottage (the place where she had been born). Later, of course, Annie and Helen rejoined the official family, but by then the small child had realized she could live.

Helen Keller would later explain her infirmities: “They took away what should have been my eyes, but I remembered ‘Milton’s Paradise.’ They took away what should have been my ears, but Beethoven came and wiped away my tears. They took away what should have been my tongue. But I had talked with God when I was young. He would not let them take away my soul. Possessing that, I still possessed the whole.”

Miss Keller made her last visit to Ivy Green, her ancestral home in Tuscumbia, in 1954. She lived for many years in a white country house on the distant outskirts of New York City. It seems so sad to me: here was a person who dearly loved Alabama, and its rich land that grew abundant flowers, and abounded with trees and plants.

She could smell old boxwoods when she was a child in the 1880’s; there were magnolias and mimosas, other trees of rich fragrance. And there was the ever-present ivy, for the Keller place was known as Ivy Green, and there was honeysuckle and smilax.

I was living in New York in 1954, and I wish I had known of Miss Keller’s last visit to Alabama. The occasion was the state of Alabama making Ivy Green a permanent shrine, and it was thereafter included on the National Register of Historic Sites.

Why did she never return? I don’t know, but I find it very sad. Helen Keller lived 14 years after that final journey home, What happened? I must find out, and when I do ... well…

Bill Robinson lives in the Buffalo community of Chambers County and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.