I love stories like this; it’s so emblematic of my home state.
Picture of the statue here- it’s kind of eerie. Looks like something that would come to life in a Christopher Lee movie.
So as every one knows Helen Keller was the truly inspiring inspiration for The Miracle Worker (or as my brother-in-law once described it when he couldn’t remember its name “that movie where the Yankee woman comes down here and beats up the blind kid til she talks”). Personally I think Annie Sullivan should have been in the statue since she’s every bit as much responsible, but then she’s not Alabamian and it’s they’re dime so c’est la vie; she’s dead anyway. Helen Keller is deserving of every accolade she got, no question; her story truly is wonderful and still commands tears every year when people see the movie or the play for the first time.
Here’s the thing: The Miracle Worker took place in 1887 when Helen was 7 years old. Her life didn’t freeze frame there. She grew up. She grew old. For perspective the water pump event happened when Grover Cleveland was president (his first term in fact), the phonograph was a new gadget that only a few people had, Jefferson Davis was still alive and Mark Twain was the bestselling author in the nation. Helen died the same week as Bobby Kennedy by which time the Beatles were recording The White Album and Sgt Pepper had been on sale for a year, Patty Duke had already gone on to star in Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls and Michael Jackson was already singing professionally. That last 81 years of her life gets glossed over just a tad however.
It was eventful. She left Alabama the year after “the Miracle”, and though she’d returned frequently for visits to her family, some of them long visits, she’d never actually live here full time again. At 24 she graduated with honors from Radcliffe (Mark Twain arranged her scholarship), spent years hustling for a buck on Chautauqua and later Vaudeville and met… well, everybody.
Bittersweet story: one of the men she fell in love with wanted to marry her, and when her family went ballistic they secretly arranged to elope. She was to meet him on the porch of her sister’s house in Montgomery, AL, where she was visiting. He never showed up. Those who knew them believe it was not her family but her beloved Teacher, Annie Sullivan, who convinced him to break off the relationship; Annie knew from her own experience and her own ruined marriage that being Helen’s lifepartner was a near 24/7 commitment and explained to him that because she needed continual “input” his life would never again be his own. It seems cruel perhaps, but I think she did it as an act of kindness.
She ceased speaking with her mother (no pun intended here or in any other reference to a sense she didn’t have) due to what she considered her mother’s benighted views on race, and while they eventually reconciled she blasted her homestate and other southern states on stage and in print for their Jim Crow laws. She did so on stage even when it was clear the audience was against her. She was also a militant suffragette. So far, so admirable; some of these views were controversial in their day but today racism/Jim Crow and denying women the vote seem good things to fight against.
But then…
Her essay on why she became a socialist was published long before she had the right to vote. She denounced Woodrow Wilson and America’s entry into World War I. She said that capitalism was the greatest evil of the modern era. Once women were allowed to vote she campaigned and stumped for Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs, not once but several times. Asked who she thought the greatest men of her time were she responded (not once but several times) Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin, and… Vladimir Lenin. She referenced Karl Marx continually in her writings as a major influence on her.
She joined the Communist Party for a time. She did later quit them, but never denounced them. J. Edgar Hoover had a file on her, and the only reason she wasn’t called before HUAC or McCarthy was because… well, she was Helen Keller wasn’t she? Even Joe knew that nobody wanted to see an elderly deafblind lady get read the riot act.
In all she was a fascinating person, but the image of her as “Blessed Helen Ever Virgin” is somewhat funny to me. She donated money (something she never had a lot of) to Margaret Sanger because she believed birth control and abortion should be legal. Whether she was a virgin all her life I’ve no idea but I would tend to doubt it for she was very open minded for her time about sex and as mentioned she definitely fell in love a couple of times in her life and had an extreme curiosity about all facets of “normal” life (and what could be more normal than sex?)
An odd story about her: she was very vain. Though she could not see herself she knew that she did not ‘feel’ like other people’s and that they did not look like other people’s, and when she went on one of her speaking tours she had them surgically removed and replaced with beautiful prosthetics. After her death her glass eyes, along with her papers and most of her effects, were kept in vaults at the headquarters for the National Foundation for the Blind at the World Trade Center. Some of her effects were recovered from the rubble, but most of course were destroyed. The academic loss is as nothing when one considers the human toll, but a tragedy no less.
Anyway, I think Helen Keller is much to be admired. When I worked in hotels in Montgomery we had some Japanese businessmen stay with us who were disappointed to learn that Ivy Green (her birthplace in Tuscumbia) was about as far from Montgomery as you can get and still be in Alabama, for evidently she is a godlike figure in Japan, and understandably so. While I disagree with her on politics I think she was an exceptionally intelligent person and given her unique perspective on life her views are almost poetic.
However, I’ve always thought it was funny as hell that Alabama, the conservative “10 Commandments tombstone” lovin’ state where evolution is always in the news and you can count on some group loudly demanding the (wrong) Confederate flag fly over the capitol and that is always red in elections and where Fox News is huge was the first and to my knowledge only state to put a member of the Communist party on its state quarter. And now, it’s coughed up $325,000 to cast her in bronze in the U.S. Capitol.
If you made this story up for a work of fiction critics would probably criticize the heavy handedness of the symbolism. “Let’s ignore that woman who became a Lenin lovin’, abortion advocatin’, Dixie denouncin’, born again New England Yankee Cawmniss and concentrate on the sweet li’l blind girl she used to be… in fact, let’s dip her in bronze so she stays that way, ‘forever and ever Annie, forever and ever…’. This way folks can git inspired by her… and let’s face it, ain’t none of ‘em e’er gone read up on her, they’re just gone know she overcome bein’ blind and deaf through the help of Jesus and a half blind white trash Boston Yankee gal. And hell, our education system here bein’ what it is, if they do decide to learn up on her after seein’ the movie they’ll probably just think she got her sight and hearin’ back, moved to the big city, and found out she had an identical twin cousin over in Old England way.”
