Helen Keller in Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

stage, the rustling of the crowd a welcome wave of warmth. After flattening his tie against his shirt with one hand, and then faltering a bit—I felt his weight press heavily into the wooden floorboards—his voice rang out into the air. For ten minutes he told the crowd of how at age seven I was a child with no language who fought Annie at every turn, but after weeks of spelling words into my hand Annie finally took me to the water pump in our yard. In the heat of the day Annie splashed that water over my hand, her fingers flying in mine: w-a-t-e-r. W-a-t-e-r. I leaped up, awakened. Everything had a name. Life penetrated my muffled world.
    Beside Peter, I held his arm, and the way he pulled me close told me that the story thrilled him.
    The crowd applauded my “miracle” for so long, the stage reverberated under my feet.

    Thetruth is, I don’t remember the moment at the water pump. For two decades I’ve heard it hundreds of times. I know it like my name. I’ve stood by Annie as she told crowds in Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and tiny towns like Albion, and Rock Creek, Michigan, about my awakening. I’ve even written about it in my books. But I have no memory of it at all.
    What I do remember is this: It was June 1888. Annie took me to be examined by Alexander Graham Bell, then a prominent doctor for the deaf in Washington, D.C. Was there any way my hearing might be improved? I was eight years old. Dr. Bell said no, I would never hear. But he told Annie that he had an exciting new invention. It allowed anyone who didn’t know manual fingerspelling to “talk” with the deaf.
    “This could work for Helen,” Dr. Bell said to Annie. She spelled his words to me, and then he slid a large, bulky “glove” over my small hand. Printed on it were letters of the “normal” alphabet. Raised, they could be felt by the wearer. I felt them on my palm. Dr. Bell tapped first the
h
, then the
e
. Then, he pressed down harder, on the
l
two times. Last came the
o
.
    “Hello,” I answered back. A feeling of intense pleasure flooded through me.
    With my free hand, I took his. I had “spoken” to someone without Annie interpreting. Dr. Bell said that with practice, hearing people could easily learn how to use his invention to talk to me. “Helen will have freedom,” he said to Annie, who spelled his words to me.
    I couldn’t wait.
    All the way back to Tuscumbia on the train I spelled to Annie that soon I would be able to speak with Father, who never was good at the manual fingerspelling, and my Auntie Ev, or anyone else.
    “No,” Anne spelled back. “It’s not a good idea.” She said I wouldn’t need to communicate with others because while she was with me, she would tell me everything I needed to know. I wouldn’t need to talk to anyone else.
    Shewanted to keep me close because of her own loneliness. People say together we were miraculous. We were. But we were also isolated; loneliness engulfed me in those years. I’m older now. I realize I want more than a story frayed from its telling.
    As the Wisconsin crowd’s applause receded, the stage became still. I held Peter’s hand more tightly in mine as, fingers tense, he introduced me to the crowd: “For twenty-five years Helen Keller has called for the rights of the deaf and blind around the world. But she has more to say than that,” Peter said, spelling his words into my hand, then giving me a nudge so hard I almost bolted forward.
    So as Peter called out my words to the audience, while I spelled them into his palm, I said everything Annie warned me against: the floorboards of the stage jutted out and warped beneath my shoes as I stepped forward, my hand in Peter’s, aware that he would boom my words out to the waiting crowd. “Let no capitalists send our innocent boys to slaughter. We’ve suffered long enough at the hands of a government that sends boys to war for its own profit. This must
stop
. Strike, strike, strike against the war.”
    I