The Story of My Life
Nevertheless, it was the only sign she ever made for water, and not
until she had learned to spell the word with her fingers did she forget
the spoken symbol. The word water, and the gesture which corresponds to
the word good-by, seem to have been all that the child remembered of the
natural and acquired signs with which she had been familiar before her
illness.
As she became acquainted with her surroundings through the sense of
feeling (I use the word in the broadest sense, as including all
tactile impressions), she felt more and more the pressing necessity of
communicating with those around her. Her little hands felt every object
and observed every movement of the persons about her, and she was
quick to imitate these movements. She was thus able to express her more
imperative needs and many of her thoughts.
At the time when I became her teacher, she had made for herself upward
of sixty signs, all of which were imitative and were readily understood
by those who knew her. The only signs which I think she may have
invented were her signs for SMALL and LARGE. Whenever she wished for
anything very much she would gesticulate in a very expressive manner.
Failing to make herself understood, she would become violent. In the
years of her mental imprisonment she depended entirely upon signs, and
she did not work out for herself any sort of articulate language capable
of expressing ideas. It seems, however, that, while she was still
suffering from severe pain, she noticed the movements of her mother's
lips.
When she was not occupied, she wandered restlessly about the house,
making strange though rarely unpleasant sounds. I have seen her rock
her doll, making a continuous, monotonous sound, keeping one hand on her
throat, while the fingers of the other hand noted the movements of
her lips. This was in imitation of her mother's crooning to the baby.
Occasionally she broke out into a merry laugh, and then she would reach
out and touch the mouth of any one who happened to be near her, to see
if he were laughing also. If she detected no smile, she gesticulated
excitedly, trying to convey her thought; but if she failed to make her
companion laugh, she sat still for a few moments, with a troubled and
disappointed expression. She was pleased with anything which made a
noise. She liked to feel the cat purr; and if by chance she felt a dog
in the act of barking, she showed great pleasure. She always liked to
stand by the piano when some one was playing and singing. She kept one
hand on the singer's mouth, while the other rested on the piano, and
she stood in this position as long as any one would sing to her, and
afterward she would make a continuous sound which she called singing.
The only words she had learned to pronounce with any degree of
distinctness previous to March, 1890, were PAPA, MAMMA, BABY, SISTER.
These words she had caught without instruction from the lips of
friends. It will be seen that they contain three vowel and six consonant
elements, and these formed the foundation for her first real lesson in
speaking.
At the end of the first lesson she was able to pronounce distinctly the
following sounds: a, a", a^, e, i, o, c soft like s and hard like k,
g hard, b, l, n, m, t, p, s, u, k, f and d. Hard consonants were, and
indeed still are, very difficult for her to pronounce in connection with
one another in the same word; she often suppresses the one and changes
the other, and sometimes she replaces both by an analogous sound with
soft aspiration. The confusion between l and r was very noticeable in
her speech at first. She would repeatedly use one for the other. The
great difficulty in the pronunciation of the r made it one of the last
elements which she mastered. The ch, sh and soft g also gave her much
trouble, and she does not yet enunciate them clearly. [The difficulties
which Miss Sullivan found in 1891 are, in a measure, the difficulties
which show in Miss Keller's speech today.]
When she had been talking for less than a week, she met her friend, Mr.
Rodocanachi, and immediately began to struggle with the pronunciation of
his name; nor would she give it up until she was able to articulate the
word distinctly. Her interest never diminished for a moment; and, in her
eagerness to overcome the difficulties which beset her on all sides, she
taxed her powers to the utmost, and learned in eleven lessons all of the
separate elements of speech.
Enough appears in the accounts by Miss Keller's teacher to show the
process by which she reads the lips with her fingers, the process by
which she was taught to speak, and by which, of course, she can listen
to conversation now. In reading the lips she is not so quick or so
accurate as some reports declare. It is a clumsy and unsatisfactory way
of receiving communication, useless when Miss Sullivan or some one else
who knows the manual alphabet is present to give Miss Keller the spoken
words of others. Indeed, when some friend is trying to speak to Miss
Keller, and the attempt is not proving successful, Miss Sullivan usually
helps by spelling the lost words into Miss Keller's hand.
President Roosevelt had little difficulty last spring in making Miss
Keller understand him, and especially requested Miss Sullivan not to
spell into her hand. She got every word, for the President's speech is
notably distinct. Other people say they have no success in making Miss
Keller "hear" them.
A few friends to whom she is accustomed, like Mrs. A. C. Pratt, and Mr.
J. E. Chamberlin, can pass a whole day with her and tell her everything
without the manual alphabet. The ability to read the lips helps Miss
Keller in getting corrections of her pronunciation from Miss Sullivan
and others, just as it was the means of her learning to speak at all,
but it is rather an accomplishment than a necessity.
It must be remembered that speech contributed in no way to her
fundamental education, though without the ability to speak she could
hardly have gone to higher schools and to college. But she knows better
than any one else what value speech has had for her. The following is
her address at the fifth meeting of the American Association to
Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, at Mt. Airy, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, July 8, 1896:
ADDRESS OF HELEN KELLER AT MT. AIRY
If you knew all the joy I feel in being able to speak to you to-day, I
think you would have some idea of the value of speech to the deaf, and
you would understand why I want every little deaf child in all this
great world to have an opportunity to learn to speak. I know that much
has been said and written on this subject, and that there is a wide
difference of opinion among teachers of the deaf in regard to oral
instruction. It seems very strange to me that there should be this
difference of opinion; I cannot understand how any one interested in our
education can fail to appreciate the satisfaction we feel in being able
to express our thoughts in living words. Why, I use speech constantly,
and I cannot begin to tell you how much pleasure it gives me to do so.
Of course I know that it is not always easy for strangers to understand
me, but it will be by and by; and in the meantime I have the unspeakable
happiness of knowing that my family and friends rejoice in my ability
to speak. My little sister and baby brother love to have me tell them
stories in the long summer evenings when I am at home; and my mother
and teacher often ask me to read to them from my favourite books. I also
discuss the political situation with my dear father, and we decide the
most perplexing questions quite as satisfactorily to ourselves as if
I could see and hear. So you see what a blessing speech is to me. It
brings me into closer and tenderer relationship with those I love, and
makes it possible for me to enjoy the sweet companionship of a great
many persons from whom I should be entirely cut off if I could not talk.
I can remember the time before I learned to speak, and how I used to
struggle to express my thoughts by means of the manual alphabet--how my
thoughts used to beat against my finger tips like little birds striving
to gain their freedom, until one day Miss Fuller opened wide the
prison-door and let them escape. I wonder if she remembers how eagerly
and gladly they spread their wings and flew away. Of course, it was not
easy at first to fly. The speech-wings were weak and broken, and had
lost all the grace and beauty that had once been theirs; indeed, nothing
was left save the impulse to fly, but that was something. One can never
consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar. But, nevertheless,
it seemed to me sometimes that I could never use my speech-wings as God
intended I should use them; there were so many difficulties in the way,
so many discouragements; but I kept on trying, knowing that patience and
perseverance would win in the end. And while I worked, I built the most
beautiful air-castles, and dreamed dreams, the pleasantest of which was
of the time when I should talk like other people, and the thought of the
pleasure it would give my mother to hear my voice once more, sweetened
every effort and made every failure an incentive to try harder next
time. So I want to say to those who are trying to learn to speak and
those who are teaching them: Be of good cheer. Do not think of to-days
failures, but of the success that may come to-morrow. You have set
yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere,
and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles--a delight in climbing
rugged paths, which you would perhaps never know if you did not sometime
slip backward--if the road was always smooth and pleasant. Remember,
no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.
Sometime, somewhere, somehow we shall find that which we seek. We shall
speak, yes, and sing, too, as God intended we should speak and sing.
CHAPTER V. LITERARY STYLE
No one can have read Miss Keller's autobiography without feeling that
she writes unusually fine English. Any teacher of composition knows that
he can bring his pupils to the point of writing without errors in syntax
or in the choice of words. It is just this accuracy which Miss Keller's
early education fixes as the point to which any healthy child can be
brought, and which the analysis of that education accounts for. Those
who try to make her an exception not to be explained by any such
analysis of her early education, fortify their position by an appeal
to the remarkable excellence of her use of language even when she was a
child.
This appeal is to a certain degree valid; for, indeed, those additional
harmonies of language and beauties of thought which make style are the
gifts of the gods. No teacher could have made Helen Keller sensitive
to the beauties of language and to the finer interplay of thought which
demands expression in melodious word groupings.
At the same time the inborn gift of style can be starved or stimulated.
No innate genius can invent fine language. The stuff of which good style
is made must be given to the mind from without and given skilfully. A
child of the muses cannot write fine English unless fine English has
been its nourishment. In this, as in all other things, Miss Sullivan has
been the wise teacher. If she had not had taste and an enthusiasm for
good English, Helen Keller might have been brought up on the "Juvenile
Literature," which belittles the language under pretense of being simply
phrased for children; as if a child's book could not, like "Treasure
Island" or "Robinson Crusoe" or the "Jungle Book," be in good style.
If Miss Sullivan wrote fine English, the beauty of Helen Keller's
style would, in part, be explicable at once. But the extracts from Miss