Books |
The Story Of My Life: The Autobiography of Helen Keller
By
Published: Jul 15, 2019
Category:
Memoir
When Charles Dickens toured the United States in 1842, he made a special point of visiting institutions. In Boston, he visited the Perkins School for the Blind, where he met Laura Bridgman, a 12-year-old deaf-blind girl who had learned to read and communicate. Impressed, he wrote 14 pages about that visit in “American Notes” — and paid to have 250 copies of his book printed in Braille and given all of the blind schools in the country.
In 1886, Helen Keller’s parents read Dickens’ praise for the Perkins School and wrote to the school about educating her deaf-blind daughter.
The school sent her a teacher: nearly blind Annie Sullivan. She would bring Helen to Perkins. And Helen would go on to graduate from Radcliffe, become a shining example of persistence and spirit, and write a short, remarkable book. [To buy the paperback of “The Story of My Life” from Amazon, click here.]
There’s a story that prompts this piece. It’s told by Brian Morris in a Cape Cod newspaper.
Helen Keller spent time in Brewster during several summers as a child. Keller’s connection to Brewster was through a local woman named Sophia Crocker-Hopkins, who ran a boarding house for summer visitors.
After the sudden death of her 16-year old daughter Florence, Sophia made her way to Boston and found a job at the Perkins School. She quickly became good friends with Annie Sullivan.
When Annie went to Alabama to work with Helen Keller, she kept in close touch with Sophia, and they arranged for Annie and Helen to visit Sophia in Brewster during the summer of 1888, when Helen was eight years old.
When Helen arrived for her first visit, Sophia gave her some dolls, a doll bed and a carriage, and said they were gifts. Annie never told Helen that Sophia had a daughter who died at the age of 16. Nor did she explain to Helen that the gifts that had been given to her had once belonged to Sophia’s daughter.
One day Helen, Annie and Sophia walked a short distance from Sophia’s house to Brewster Cemetery. Annie Sullivan had this recollection of that visit:
“She examined one stone after another and seemed pleased when she could decipher a name. Her attention was drawn to a marble slab with the name ‘Florence’ in relief. She dropped upon the ground as though looking for something, then turned to me with a face full of trouble and asked, ‘Where is poor little Florence?’ I evaded the question but she persisted, turning to my friend and asked, ‘Did you cry loud for poor little Florence?’ Then she added, ‘I think she is very dead. Who put her in big hole?’ As she continued to ask these distressing questions, we left the cemetery.”
When they got back to the house, Helen gathered up her dolls, took them to Sophia Hopkins, and said she knew they belonged to her daughter Florence.
Annie Sullivan later wrote: “This was true, although we were at a loss to understand how she guessed it.”
I too am at a loss. But sometimes I’m not.
(Many thanks to Christine Franklin)
