June 1st Tuscumbia, Alabama

Today was a long day. I woke up at 4:30 a.m., packed up my car and was on the road an hour later, leaving South Carolina. My first stop is Tuscumbia, Alabama, birthplace of Helen Keller. I first learned about Helen when I was in the 4^th grade, so it was really cool to be able to see where she lived.

Helen lost both her hearing and vision when she was just 19 months old. When she was six, help finally arrived in the form of Annie Sullivan, a young teacher for the Perkins Institution for the Blind. With Annie’s help and perseverance, Helen went on to become the first deaf-blind person to graduate from college. In 1904, she graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This is the front of the house. It's a lot smaller than I imagined. They were in the post-Civil War Deep South, so I thought I was going to see this enormous mansion rather than a modest home. But the grounds of the Keller home more than made up for it.

Here is the dining room where Annie Sullivan, upon arrival, decided that Helen would no longer be permitted to act wildly just because she was blind and deaf. She would still be expected to sit properly at the table, eat her food, and not get up and sample from everyone else's plates. This caused Helen to throw a HUGE temper tantrum as she was used to getting her way. But in the end Annie won and gradually Helen began to behave the way any well-mannered child should.














The FAMOUS water pump. For months Annie Sullivan had been spelling words into Helen's hand; d-o-l-l for doll, w-a-t-e-r for water, but none of it made sense to Helen. Suddenly one day, everything clicked and it was here at the pump that the cloud lifted and Helen understood that w-a-t-e-r was that cool refreshing wet stuff coming out of the pump.















In her autobiography, Helen talked about how, even as a blind, deaf child, she would walk through these beautiful grounds, smelling the flowers, feeling the summer breeze on her face.