One of the most moving stories of human history comes from an unlikely place. Not, mind you, from a battlefield or the halls of Congress or of the United Nations, and not even from a Nobel Prize-winning laboratory — but from a conversation (if I may call it that) between a 7-year-old child and her teenage teacher.
The little girl was Helen Keller, who lost both her hearing and her sight when she was 18 months old. Unable to hear and unable to see, yet with a memory of a time when she could do both, she became — as she herself later said — “wild and unruly,” giggling and chuckling when she felt pleasure and screaming, kicking and scratching when she was frustrated by the imprisonment of her peculiar, quite terrifying world.
Then one day the patient young teacher, Annie Sullivan, spilled water on Helen’s hand, and spelled out w-a-t-e-r on the little hand. And as Helen Keller explained later, “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. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, joy, set it free!” Now that Helen Keller’s brilliant mind had a language, there was no stopping her. She became one of the most famous women of the 20th century, author of books printed in more than 50 languages and the recipient of endless honors around the world.
And it all began when she was able to write and then to speak in her native tongue.
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