(July 1888 in Brewster, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, showing eight-year-old Helen Keller seated next to her teacher, Anne Sullivan, as they hold hands)
A new photograph of Helen Keller has been discovered showing her (in 1888) at age eight with Annie Sullivan. It's the earliest known photo of the two of them together -- Annie Sullivan came to work with Helen in 1887. Much is also being made of the fact that it shows Helen with her "beloved doll", an item which did play a role in her breaking through the language barrier. I'm glad to see a previously unknown image of her, but I am also struck by the persistently inaccurate portrayal of Helen Keller.
When I was around nine, I saw The Miracle Worker on television, and besides getting a severe crush on Patty Duke, it spurred me to check out Helen Keller's autobiography, The Story of My Life, from our school library. It was a dense read; English, after all, was not her first language. Over the next few years, I read a couple more of her books. I felt a strong empathy with her, because as a child I was an invalid much of the time and language was my only doorway to the rest of the world. I could not imagine existence without the ability to communicate.
(Helen Keller with her pet terrier Phiz, 1902)
I was also intrigued because I had an uncle who had been rendered deaf by a fever at around the same age as Helen Keller, but our family did not have the money to hire help for him. Born in 1913 in rural North Texas, 33 years after Helen Keller, Uncle Joe had suffered tremendously as a child from not being able to connect with his family (my mother's side). At the age of seven, he was shipped off to board at the Texas State School for the Deaf (a campus only a few blocks from where I live now). He came home on holidays if there was money for a train ticket. Otherwise, the state school was his entire existence.
He was forced to learn lip-reading and speech, as was the custom in those days, and he was terrible at both. He picked up rudimentary sign language from the other students, not ASL or anything well-constructed because they were forbidden to sign, so it was an underground language. He was taught a trade -- shoe repair -- and when he graduated at age eighteen, he married another deaf woman ten years his senior and they moved to Brownwood, away from both their families, where Joe set up a shoe repair shop and Era gave birth to their only child, our cousin Florence Lou -- a child who was not deaf.
Uncle Joe felt abandoned by his family, at least the older members of it. He did stay in touch with his siblings, adopted and biological, including my mother. At least once a year, he and Era would arrive in a battered old car and spend a day or two with us. Uncle Joe was loud, monstrously atonal but also furious most of the time. Tall, lanky, dark-eyed and grimly determined to be understood, he would pound on the table and walls, stomp his feet, wave his hands and write pidgin scrawls on endless sheets of note paper to get meaning across. I was mortified by his inability to spell or even form letters correctly, at least at first. But I watched my mother's patience with him, how often both my parents laughed out loud at something he said, sending him into loony exuberant laughter as well when they got his jokes, and I relaxed around him.
I have a small photo of him at around age eight, sent home from the State School to his parents. He looks absolutely terrified.
By the time I was in high school, I was aware that Helen Keller was not any more subdued than Uncle Joe, although her language skills were infinitely better. Most people don't know she was a Socialist, a member of the Wobblies, and that the FBI had a file on her. She spoke out whenever she could about how class and race privilege were the only reason she was assisted from silence and darkness into connection with the rest of the world. She was also a suffragist, a fierce advocate for the rights of women and for birth control. And she had three passionately intimate relationships with women, "companions" who lived with her in what appear to be some version of Boston marriages: Annie Sullivan, Polly Thompson, and Winnie Corbally.
(Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan)
But the public portrayal and image of Helen Keller is her as a child, being rescued by Annie Sullivan with water cascading over her small palm and the word "wah-wah" bursting like a bottle rocket into her feral brain. We may know she went to Radcliffe, and that she wrote books, traveled around and spoke here and there as an adult (although the content of her speeches are seldom relayed to us, especially the political content). We hear she was brave, extraordinary, strong-willed -- but that's not a picture of a human being, that's the crip caricature, how disabled people are always reduced to an inspirational null. The same way Native Americans are viewed as either tribes before white contact or dwindling wretches hidden away on reservations, a dead or dying people. And women are identified by their appearance, their marital status, and whether they are mothers before all else.
(Helen Keller holding the Oscar she won for the documentary "In Her Story), 1954)
So, while I'm glad our knowledge about Helen Keller has been added to by this newly-discovered photograph, I want to balance it out with a picture of her as she lived the vast majority of her life: A woman deeply connected to other women, radical and vocal, using every means at her disposal to correct injustice. Here's an excerpt from a speech she made on television in June 1962, in connection to being awarded a medal of honor by President Kennedy:
"If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life that all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?"
"We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home; but are we to say to the world and, much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race except with respect to Negroes?"
There's a part of the Helen Keller story that seems to be all but buried: Annie Sullivan was not her first teacher. Before Annie's arrival when Helen was seven, she had 60 home signs to communicate with her family, apparently invented and taught to Helen by the African-American child of the family cook, a six-year-old girl named Martha Washington. In 1887 in North Alabama, Helen's family home (Ivy Green) was nominally no longer a plantation and its black workers were free, but Reconstruction had been sold down the river and nobody knew it better than the former slaves of that region. Yet it was one of their children who deserves at least part of the credit for keeping a doorway open in Helen Keller's hungry mind.
(Helen Keller reading in her home, 1956)
It is also important to remember that Annie Sullivan grew up an abandoned child, in dire poverty and hardship, and she was not much older than Helen herself. She was ill-equipped to manage life at Ivy Green, even without Helen as a pupil. It seems likely that she and Helen grew up together, in a sense. It also seems likely that she is the source of Helen's class consciousness education.
(Terry Galloway)
One of the chief mentors of my creative life has been Terry Galloway, an internationally-known writer, playwright and performer who was born hearing-impaired and also forced into lip-reading and speech rather than being given sign language. She founded Actual Lives, and like so many politicized disability activists, she has a love-hate relationship with Helen Keller. In 2002, Terry and her partner Donna Marie Nudd created a video comedy short, Annie Dearest, which has been shown around the globe. This is a black-and-white parody of the classic film The Miracle Worker, followed by a mock apologia by Terry. Annie Dearest has won major awards at International Festivals, was very favorably reviewed by BBC online and selected as one of the world’s 25 most “outstanding disability-themed films” produced in “the last five years” by Disability World.
One review of the video stated "Conceived by 'performance artist and playwright' Terry Galloway, it satirised the conventional view of the relationship between Helen Keller and her mentor Annie Sullivan, by portraying the Sullivan character as a brutal and cruel woman fiendishly obsessed with persuading Helen to say the word 'water'. A psychologist would probably conclude that our collective laughter at the young Helen having her head flushed down the loo was an important cathartic experience for us all. Others would say it was a clever dig at conventional notions of healing. Some would just say it was hysterical."
(Scene from "Annie Dearest")
Another review says "the video features gallons and gallons of wah-wah. The two-minute apologia that follows is a satire of another sort. Featuring the lip-reading video creator and her signing stand-in, it offers a critique under the guise of contriteness – addressing the outrage the video frequently inspires."
Outrage and hysteria -- I'd agree with both assessments. Do see Annie Dearest if you ever get the chance. It will act as antidote to the demure photographs and sanitized narrative of Helen Keller that have been pushed on us.
I'll leave you with a joke popular in the crip queer community:
Q: Why does Helen Keller masturbate with only one hand?
A: So she can moan with the other.
(Helen Keller, circa 1955)
RECOMMENDED LINKS:
Who's Helen Keller?, by Ruth Shagoury Hubbard, article in Teaching Tolerance magazine, Fall 2003
Helen Keller: Rethinking the Problematic Icon
How I Became A Socialist, from the Helen Keller Reference Archive
Works by Helen Keller at the Project Gutenberg, including The Story of My Life and The Song of the Stone Wall
Thursday, March 6, 2008
HELEN 'WHEELS' KELLER -- by Maggie Jochild
Sunday, September 16, 2007
TALKIN' BOUT CLASS AND CLASS"ISM" -- by Maggie Jochild
This post is a continuation of a conversation about class begun on another blog, not our regularly scheduled programming. Consider it a bonus round. Now, as we were saying...
I assume that every class in our society operates under terror of being swept away. Fear of being deprived of the means to continue existing is what keeps most oppressions in place, and at its base, that’s classism. Economic threat (sometimes coupled with the threat of violence) is the glue that holds together oppression.
For purposes of clarity, let me state my terms: When talking of American classes, I divide us into poor/raised poor, working class, middle class, and owning class. About 80% of people who are working class in America (especially in the South) believe they are middle class; hence, why politicians appeal to “middle class” values, etc. Our actual middle class is very small. The poor category is large and growing.
Owning class refers to not just folks who “own the means of production” but who have inherited meaningful economic advantage in various forms. Forbes (I think) did a study several years ago where they asked the top 500 wealthiest people how they came their money, and almost 90% had been given the key advantages (education, influence, family business opportunities, etc.) that made them rich. Nobody’s earning their own wealth in this country, except for the tiny percentage of entertainment industry individuals (including sports figures) who are held up as examples to keep the rest of us from realizing how stuck we are.
Overwhelmingly, people with serious economic privilege frequent ONLY environments where they mingle with others like them, a bubble world. Children raised owning class have pounded into them the message that the rest of the world hates them and would like to see them taken down (which is mostly true). They are expected to do something meaningful without being given the tools for community connection or leadership. They live in mortal fear of being “found out” and cast aside as adults. They’re extraordinarily poor leaders as a result. We can all see how well this system is working out.
Although — I insist on pointing out — some owning class individuals are raised with a connection to community or acquire it as adults and use their entitlement altruistically. We have at least one such woman reading this list. Honesty about wealth and embracing community values tends to get rich folks ridiculed and ostracized by everybody. They’re not trusted as much as the upper classes who lie about their economic advantages and circumstances.
Poor and raised poor also grow up with the message we are an expendable class. We, too, feel a profound disconnect with the rest of the culture, and live a masquerade.
Working class people understand their survival is linked to community, and maintain community identity ahead of individual success. Middle class folks are the biggest believers in the myth of class mobility, especially the value of education.
But most of us, of course, are the products of mixed class backgrounds; cover-ups and denial abound.
Mary Cheney was raised in a cocoon of wealth she’s never left. Condi was not raised in it, but her parents did hammer relentlessly on her to rise up the class ladder. She “switched classes” without undoing or, likely, even recognizing the conditioning that creates class. A hundred years ago, Americans believed that class was a biologically measurable and inherited identity, like people still believe about race and gender. This essentialism remains in our confusion about the value and mechanism of “class mobility.”
So, Condi’s acquired identity of wealth has bought her entrance to a world where they talk about us as “the other” who despise them. On the day that Katrina destroyed New Orleans, the blackest city in America, Condi went shopping for obscenely expensive Italian shoes in New York. I suspect that was not an accident; the means of maintaining dissonance (and holding fear at bay) are few and predictable.
And, yes, Doctor E, you’re right that Ann Richards’ campaign would never have done the dirty tricks that Rove dreamed up. But — it can’t be stressed enough — they also did not begin to have the kind of money and economic influence W. was given by his Daddy’s friends. The difference is exponential.
The Bushes are extreme Northeastern owning class establishment. W. went to public school in Texas for part of seventh grade; otherwise, he was educated at expensive private schools, mostly in New England. His innate curiosity was crushed early. He was clearly never given an outlet for excellence or proving his value outside rigid owning class routines of playing around and abusing substances. He returned to Texas because he felt less like a failure here — the Texas owning class based on oil money is another example of how people can become rich without working for it, and they’re all equally uncomfortable with reality.
When it was decided by W.’s Daddy’s friends that he could get elected Governor, maybe (if they hid enough of his past), the coffers were bottomless. And I don’t mean just campaign money, but also the means of buying illegalities.
