In her autobiography, The Story of My Life, Helen Keller recalls the day in March 1887, when her teacher, Annie Sullivan, came to her home in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Helen Keller was seven years old. She’d been deaf, blind, and mute for some five and a half years. In her autobiography, Keller called the day Sullivan arrived her “soul’s birthday,” because on that day Sullivan set out to give her young charge the gift of language. It took some time. Helen had not yet made the essential connection between word and object, or word and action. But Sullivan kept at it, finger-spelling repeatedly on the palm of Helen’s hand. One day, the link was forged. Sullivan ran cool water over one of Helen’s hands while spelling w-a-t-e-r on the palm of the other. Suddenly, Helen understood. She describes the moment in her autobiography, “I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of [my teacher’s] fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!”[1]
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