Anne Sullivan

Anne Sullivan grew up largely blind, her eyes ruined by trachoma at five, in a house with a father the record calls abusive and often drunk. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Anne was eight; two years later her father simply left. The state sent her and her younger brother to the almshouse at Tewksbury, Massachusetts, where he died of tuberculosis within four months and she stayed on for years afterward, half-sighted and effectively parentless. In 1880, cornering a visiting state inspector, she threw herself in front of him and demanded a place at school. He got her into the Perkins School for the Blind, where surgery restored some vision, she learned the manual alphabet from another deaf-blind student, and in 1886 she graduated as class valedictorian.

Sullivan arrived at the Keller house in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on March 3, 1887, to teach a six-year-old who had been deaf and blind since infancy and had, as far as anyone could tell, no language at all. The breakthrough came at a water pump: Sullivan spelled w-a-t-e-r into Keller's palm while water ran over her other hand, and something connected. Within six months Keller knew 575 words, along with multiplication tables and Braille. Sullivan stayed at Keller's side for the rest of her working life, translating lectures and interpreting a world Keller could not see or hear, through Radcliffe College and decades of public lecturing afterward. In 1905 she married Harvard instructor John Macy, who helped edit Keller's early books; the marriage had effectively ended by 1914, though the two never divorced.

The work cost her the eyesight that had made teaching Keller possible at all. Decades of close, exacting vision work eroded what the Perkins surgeries had restored, and by 1935 Sullivan had gone completely blind herself. Her own life all but disappeared inside Keller's — a marriage that could not survive sharing a household with them both, and a career spent almost entirely translating somebody else's world rather than living her own. Public tellings of the water-pump breakthrough, then and since, tend to cast it as Keller's miracle, with Sullivan reduced to the hand that happened to be there, even though it was her method, relentless and physical, spelling into a resistant child's palm for weeks before anything connected, that made it happen. She arrived at that moment from the Tewksbury almshouse with barely any schooling of her own.

Sullivan died of a coronary thrombosis on October 20, 1936, in the Forest Hills section of Queens, with Keller holding her hand. She became the first woman whose ashes were placed at Washington National Cathedral. The stage and film versions of The Miracle Worker later fixed her name permanently alongside Keller's in American memory, mostly for that one scene at the pump, compressing forty-nine years of teaching and constant physical labor into a single moment of contact. In 2003 the National Women's Hall of Fame inducted her on her own account, decades after most retellings had already made her the supporting character in somebody else's story.

Anne Sullivan's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Manual-alphabet teaching method for Helen Keller other
  Adapted the Perkins Institution's tactile alphabet into a full teaching system 1887
• Letters and journals in The Story of My Life book
  Keller's memoir draws heavily on Sullivan's own letters describing the teaching 1903
• Radcliffe College interpreting other
  Spelled every lecture into Keller's hand through four years of college 1900
• Public lecture partnership with Helen Keller speech
  Toured for decades, interpreting for audiences nationwide 1913

• April 14, 1866 aged 0 Born in Feeding Hills, Massachusetts
• 1874 aged ~8 Her mother dies of tuberculosis
• 1876 aged ~10 Her father abandons the family; she is sent to the Tewksbury almshouse
• October 7, 1880 aged 14 Begins studies at the Perkins School for the Blind
• June 1886 aged 20 Graduates from Perkins as class valedictorian
• March 3, 1887 aged 20 Begins teaching six-year-old Helen Keller in Tuscumbia, Alabama
• May 3, 1905 aged 39 Marries Harvard instructor John Albert Macy
• 1935 aged ~69 Becomes completely blind
• October 20, 1936 aged 70 Dies in Forest Hills, Queens, with Keller at her side

• Helen Keller 1880–1968
  Deafblind author and lecturer who became the leading American advocate for blind and disabled people. taught
• Alexander Graham Bell 1847–1922
  Inventor of the telephone and founder of AT&T, transforming global communication. directed the family to Perkins
• Mark Twain 1835–1910
  Author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, often called the father of American literature. championed Keller's education