My Mother

Helen Keller (1880–1968)
From Helen Keller: Autobiographies & Other Writings

Interesting Links

Video: Helen Keller with Mother & Brother, from the 1919 film Deliverance (YouTube)

Online exhibit: “Anne Sullivan as Teacher, 1886–1904” (American Foundation of the Blind)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “My Future As I See It,” Helen Keller
• “The Unnatural Mother,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• “The Empress’s Ring,” Nancy Hale

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Helen Keller: Autobiographies & Other Writings
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“Miss Keller’s mother, Miss Sullivan (Mrs. Macy), Miss Keller.” Photograph by the Gerhard Sisters, St. Louis, 1914, reproduced in Helen Keller’s memoir Midstream (1929).
    A year or two after the photography session, Emme Gerhard wrote: “While being photographed Miss Keller was an ideal subject, radiating spiritually, which is absolutely necessary in order to reproduce the mind, life or soul. Without this—in other words, with merely flesh and bone—a picture is dead. She responded so quickly to thought as to convince us that when material senses were taken from her she developed the spiritual, which is far greater. . . .
    “Mrs. Keller, Helen's mother (the name ‘Mother’ would imply all we could say of her) is a sweet, kind motherly looking woman. . . . Thankfulness and resignation were written on her brow.”

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During the course of her life, Helen Keller met and befriended countless world leaders, politicians, actors, writers, and other famous celebrities. It is perhaps fitting, then, that her education occurred in no small part because of the world’s most famous English-language author of the nineteenth century, who died fifteen years before she was born. As she explains in The Story of My Life:

My mother’s only ray of hope came from Charles Dickens’s “American Notes.” She had read his account of Laura Bridgman, and remembered vaguely that she was deaf and blind, yet had been educated. But she also remembered with a hopeless pang that Dr. Howe, who had discovered the way to teach the deaf and blind, had been dead many years. His methods had probably died with him; and if they had not, how was a little girl in a far-off town in Alabama to receive the benefit of them?

At the age of six, Keller was a “wild, uncouth little creature” (according to one account she herself would later quote) and the means of raising, much less educating her was beyond the abilities of her parents. By the time Helen was six, Mrs. Keller had another daughter to raise, and the attention demanded by Helen distressed her. (“Fate ambushed the joy in my heart when I was twenty-four and left it dead,” she told a friend in a weak moment.) Many of her family members insisted that Helen should be institutionalized; her mother’s brother, Uncle Fred, even banned Helen from visiting her grandmother in Memphis.

Yet Kate Keller refused to acquiesce to these demands. During the summer of 1886, Helen visited a Baltimore oculist with her parents, and he referred them to Alexander Graham Bell in Washington, DC, who in turn recommended them to the Perkins School for the Blind—the very institution that had been home to both Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and Laura Bridgman. In March 1887, Anne Sullivan was dispatched from the Perkins School to the Keller home. Sullivan had in fact shared a cottage with Bridgman for six years. She read Dr. Howe’s reports and the old files on her housemate’s childhood in preparation for her new post. “The morning after my teacher came,” Keller wrote, “she led me into her room and gave me a doll. The little blind children at the Perkins Institution had sent it and Laura Bridgman had dressed it; but I did not know this until afterward.”

Unsurprisingly, as Keller’s behavior improved and her education advanced, there were occasional moments of strife and competition between the Kellers and Sullivan, but Helen’s teacher ultimately earned the complete confidence of both Helen and her parents. The final showdown came in 1897, when Helen was seventeen. Arthur Gilman, the headmaster of the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Helen was preparing herself for college, believed that Sullivan had too much power over Helen and disagreed with the plans for her student’s education. Claiming that Helen was being overworked to the detriment of her health and accusing Sullivan of cruelty and even of mental instability, he and some of his colleagues sent a barrage of letters to Kate Keller, with the goals of separating Anne and Helen and of assigning legal guardianship to him. Since Helen’s father had died the previous year, Mrs. Keller was faced for the first time with making a major decision concerning Helen without his advice and, alarmed by the letters, she sent her approval to Gilman. As Kim E. Nielsen points out in her biography of Sullivan, Gilman’s guardianship could have rendered Helen non compos mentis—unable to manage her own finances and property or to make legal decisions—although it’s not clear whether Gilman’s intentions were so nefarious.

When she heard from Sullivan, Mrs. Keller realized her mistake and hurriedly responded, “I always think of Helen as partly your child and whilst in this I think first of her I think of you too, and utter ruin to the life you have striven so patiently to develop and round out. That I would support anyone rather than you is not a tenable position because I have always loved and trusted you. . . .” Mrs. Keller immediately traveled from Alabama to the school, found Helen “in perfect physical condition,” and met with several of Sullivan’s supporters, including Helen’s sister Mildred, who was also enrolled at the school. She then helped Sullivan remove Helen from the school to continue her education with private tutors. When Helen was asked what her own preference would be, she responded, “I will go with Teacher. She has meant more to me than my mother has. She has made me everything that I am.”

Anne Sullivan became the permanent companion to and mentor of Helen Keller. They would often be visited by Helen’s mother over the next quarter century, and during the summer of 1921 she stayed with them, after recovering from an unspecified illness, in their home in Forest Hills, in Queens, New York. Kate Keller died that November, and Helen recalled in a letter to Mildred the last memory of her mother:

Just as she was leaving me at the station in New York, she said suddenly, “Helen, you will not see me again, but whatever happens, I shall wait for you.” Afterwards she wrote, “Do not let your feelings or nerves spoil your work, always do the best you can, and think of mother watching until you come.” I am sure, sister, she is much closer to us now than ever, and her dear spirit will give us comfort as time passes.

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Notes: The letters of Jane Carlyle, wife of the writer Thomas Carlyle, were first collected after her death in The Early Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1889). Sydney Smith was an Anglican minister and a noted wit in the early nineteenth century. D. H. Lawrence’s books published during Kate Keller’s lifetime include Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920). The poem paraphrased by Mrs. Keller is Sidney Lanier’s “A Song of the Future” (1878).

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs

My Mother

It was while I was in vaudeville that the first bereavement came which struck at the very roots of my life. My mother died while we were appearing in Los Angeles. My father’s death, which occurred while I was a young girl sixteen years old, never seemed so real to me. But I had had my mother all those years and fine ligaments of love and sympathy had knit us together.

I have no vivid recollections of her before my education began. I have a dim sensation of arms about me, and hands that wiped away my tears; but such memories are too vague to bring before me a picture of her.

She used to tell me how happy she was when I was born. She dwelt on her memories of the eighteen months when I could see and hear. She told me how, as soon as I could walk, I chased sunbeams and butterflies, how I held out my little hands to pet every creature I saw and was never afraid. “And what wonderful eyes you had!” she would say, “you were always picking up needles and buttons which no one else could find.” She had a pretty workbasket which stood on three slender legs, quite high above the floor. It had holes all round near the top. She loved to tell how I would come to her knees and lisp something which she interpreted to mean, “I wonder when I shall be tall enough to look through those holes and see what is in the basket.” She also remembered my delight in the open wood fire, and told how I insisted upon sitting up late watching the sparks and laughing as they danced up the chimney. “Yes, life was good to us both for a few brief months,” she would say wistfully. Then when she was twenty-three came the illness which left me deaf and blind, and after that life was never the same to her. It was as if a white winter had swept over the June of her youth; I know, although she never said it, that she suffered more through me than through her other children. Her nature was not expansive or happy. She made few close friends, and wherever she sojourned, the sorrow and loneliness of her spirit persisted. The larger opportunities for enjoyment and intellectual enrichment which she gained on her journeys with us or her visits in our home at Wrentham did not erase from her heart the sense of tragedy and denial which my limitations kept always before her. That her suffering was crushed into silence did not lessen its intensity. But there was nothing selfish in her sorrow. What she had suffered broadened and deepened her sympathy for others.

She never talked about herself. She was sensitive even to the point of pain, and shy of revealing herself even to her children. But, veiled as her personality was, she was always an intimate part of our lives. It was inexpressibly sweet the way she said to me that her last thought at night and her first thought in the morning was of me. She suffered much from rheumatism in her hands, and she found it most difficult to write in braille, which disappointed her keenly because she never liked to have anyone read her letters to me.

It is a comfort to me to believe that all she hoped and prayed for was fulfilled in her second child, my lovely sister Mildred. Five years after her birth came my brother Phillips, who bears the name of one of my earliest and dearest friends, Phillips Brooks. When my father died, my mother devoted herself to the bringing up of her two younger children. (I was away from home most of the time, in New York and Boston.) Then Mildred married Warren L. Tyson of Montgomery, Alabama, and my mother spent the later years of her life partly with them and with me.

By temperament my mother was not domestic; but after she married my father, she had a large Southern household to manage. She carried the whole burden of housekeeping, supervision of negro workers, gardening, looking after the poultry, preparing hams and lard, sewing for the children, and entertaining the guests whom my father brought home to dinner almost every day. She was an expert in the science of poultry-raising. Her hams were praised all the country round; her jellies and preserves were the envy of our neighbours. She went about these homely tasks silent, unutterably sad, with me clinging to her skirts. Tall and stately as Juno, she stood beside the great iron kettles, directing the negroes in all the processes of making lard. My teacher often wondered how such a sensitive, high-strung woman could endure this sort of work; but my mother never complained. She threw herself into these tasks as if she had no other interest in life. Whatever the problem, whether in the house, the chicken yard or out on the farm, for the time being she gave her whole mind to it. She said to Miss Sullivan once, “Of course lard-making hasn’t the charm of sculpture or architecture or poetry; but I suppose it has its importance in the universal scheme of things.”

She was passionately devoted to her gardening and to her flowers. Nothing delighted her more than to nurse a plant weakling into strength and bloom. The wealth of her heart had to spend itself even upon the most unworthy of nature’s children. One early spring morning she went out to look at some young rose bushes which she had set out some time before, thinking that the warm days were surely coming. She found that a heavy frost had killed them, and she wrote me that very morning that “like David when his son died, she lifted up her voice and wept.”

Her love of birds was equal to her love of flowers. She would spend hours in the little wood near our house in Wrentham watching their pretty antics when they made love, or built their nests, or fed the young birds and taught them to fly. The mocking bird and the thrush were the darlings of her heart.

My mother talked intelligently, brilliantly, about current events, and she had a Southerner’s interest in politics. But after my mind took a radical turn she could never get over the feeling that we had drifted apart. It grieves me that I should have added to the sadness that weighed upon her, but I have the consolation of remembering that no differences could take away from us the delight of talking together.

She was an omnivorous reader. She welcomed all books new or old, in the English of Chaucer or the English of Ruskin. She had a horror of mediocrity and hypocrisy. I remember the scorn in her words as she quoted some bromide that was pronounced by a dull celebrity. In keenness of wit she resembled Mrs. Carlyle, whose letters she read with pleasure. Mr. Macy introduced her to Sydney Smith, and she used to say that his sayings were a silent accompaniment to her thoughts. Boswell’s Johnson also gave her many bright moments. Bernard Shaw irritated her, not because he was radical or sarcastic, but because he was a chronic iconoclast. She had no patience with Lawrence’s books. She would exclaim, “He seems incapable of conceiving purity and innocence in a woman. To him love is indecent. No modest violets grow in the fields of life for him.”

But in the presence of true genius her humility was complete. Walt Whitman did not shock her. She knew several of Balzac’s books almost by heart. She read Rabelais, Montesquieu, and Montaigne. When she read Lanier she said “his ‘gray and sober dove,’ with the eye of faith and the wing of love, nestled in her bosom.”

One memorable summer we rented a cottage on Lake St. Catherine, in Vermont. How we all enjoyed the lovely lake, the pine-covered hills, and the winding green alleys they call roads in Vermont! I have a mental picture of her which I treasure, seated on the little porch which overlooked the lake, in the evening, her dear hands idle for a few minutes, while she watched the children and young people in boats and canoes, with a tender, wistful expression on her beautiful face as the sun disappeared behind the green hills.

When the World War burst upon us she refused to talk about it, and when she saw the thousands of young men who were encamped round about Montgomery, her heart yearned to shield them from the horrors which awaited them. When Russia offered her splendid peace terms to the Allies, my mother said she wanted to stretch her arms across the ocean and embrace the one country which had the courage and the generosity to call war a crime against humanity.

Her death came as she had always prayed it would, swiftly, before she was old and dependent. She had dreaded illness and the slow parting scenes that usually precede death, and she desired that she might die in her sleep, or suddenly. So it was according to her wish that the end came. She was with her dear ones in Montgomery, but no one saw her die.

I received the telegram telling of her death two hours before I had to go on the stage. I had not even known she was ill. Every fibre of my being cried out at the thought of facing the audience, but it had to be done. Fortunately, they did not know what I was suffering, and that made it a little easier for my teacher and me. One of the questions asked me that day was, “How old are you?” How old, indeed! I felt as old as time, and I answered, “How old do I look?” The people laughed, pleased that I had evaded telling my age, which they supposed would have been embarrassing to me. Another question was, “Are you happy?” I swallowed hard and answered: “Yes, because I have confidence in God.” Then it was over, and for a little while I could sit alone with my sorrow. I had absolute faith that we should meet again in the Land of Eternal Beauty; but oh, the dreary blank her going left in my life! I missed her everywhere I went over the road she had travelled with me. I missed her braille letters, and she seemed to have died a second time when I visited my sister in Montgomery the following April. The only thought that upheld me was that in the Great Beyond where all truth shines revealed she would find in my limitations a satisfying sense of God’s purpose of good which runs like a thread of gold through all things.

First published in Midstream: My Later Life (1929).