Anne Sullivan Macy : The Story Behind Helen Keller (Chapter 1)

CHAPTER ONE

On the Edge of the Famine

SHE would be so pretty if it were not for her eyes,” Out of the vagueness that enwraps the beginnings of Annie Sullivan those are the first words that she can remember. The words are completely disembodied, and all her efforts to attach them to a person have failed. This may be because half-blind children have so little memory for faces and so much for voices, but she thinks, from the way the words are scorched into her mind, that perhaps there were many different voices at many different times, all blended now into one unhappy memory. There has never been a time since, that, sooner or later, no matter what was said of her, the dreadful thought was not added. What might she have done, what might she have been—but for her eyes.

The eyes were good when she was born, and it was not her fault, nor truly anybody’s fault, that they did not remain good. She was a small atom tossing on the edge of a great movement, and it was inherent in the movement that such things should happen. Her father and mother had come from Limerick, Ireland, just seventeen or eighteen years after the Great Famine of 1847 which set in motion one of the most extensive migratory movements known to human history. Annie’s mother, Alice Chloesy, was two years old when the famine came, her father, Thomas Sullivan, perhaps a little older. They had both been brought up on stories of starving children clinging to mothers already dead, of men in their madness eating grass by the roadside, of cholera on transport ships, and other horrors too lurid and too terrible to be set down in print.

Like most of their countrymen who sought the United States during the years which followed the famine, Thomas and Alice Sullivan brought nothing—they had nothing to bring. They had money enough to pay their passage, but it had not come from Ireland: it was sent to them from New England. They were both Roman Catholics, and Irish Roman Catholics had been persecuted so long that Daniel O’Connell said he could always tell them from other Irish by the way they slunk along the streets. Neither had ever been to school; neither could read or write, and neither had been trained to do skilful labour of any sort, in all of which they were no worse off than thousands of their companions most of whom in the beginning made their livings by digging ditches and canals and building railroads and working as hired men on farms belonging to other people.

Thomas, as a matter of fact, had an advantage, in that he knew exactly where he was going and almost exactly what he was going to do. The money which brought him—steerage passage at that time cost about twenty-five dollars—came from his older brother John, who was working on a “Yankee” farm in a village called Feeding Hills, not far from Springfield, Mass.

There was already quite a settlement of Irish there. Most of the refugees from the Emerald Isle during this period stayed somewhere near the Atlantic coast, dropped there, one writer has it, “like tired migratory birds.” Three fourths of them stayed in New York, Pennsylvania, and New England, and of those in New England, the majority were in Massachusetts, where the native Puritans gave them a frigid and contemptuous reception. The New Englander had never been cordial to anyone not like himself, nor was he ever able to understand, any more than the old Englander had been, the brilliant, joyous, irrational, unmanageable Celt. It is an accident of geography that certain New England opinions were not spoken on the floor of the House of Commons. The Irish were, say the children of William Lloyd Garrison, “the lowest class of the white population at the North.” “They were,” adds Henry Cabot Lodge, “an idle, quarrelsome, and disorderly class, always at odds with the government.” What the established New Englander wanted from them was cheap, ignorant labour. Anything else was an impertinence.

Thomas got work almost immediately either on the Smith or on the Taylor farm—he worked on first one and then the other intermittently throughout his fretted sojourn in Feeding Hills—and he and his wife went to live with several other families, all Irish, in a shabby old Colonial house called, in derision, the Castle, where, on April 14, 1866, a child was born who later was taken to the cathedral in Springfield and christened Joanna. Practically speaking, the name was for christening purposes only. The child was called Annie.

The young mother must have been lonely before Annie came. She was little more than a girl herself, and she was in a strange country. What relatives she had, and we are not sure of any, were in Limerick. Her husband, it is true, was surrounded by Sullivans. He had his brothers John and Dan, his half-brother Jimmie, his sister Ellen, and an assortment of cousins. She had no one, and it is a charming tribute to her that the Sullivans, who in time came to be bitterly ashamed of her husband, always loved her. The old men and women around Feeding Hills remember her as slender and laughing, “a person people loved to be with.” Her dark hair and brown eyes and her gentleness, so in contrast with Thomas’s ruddy countenance and robustious behaviour, gave Annie the idea, when she thought of it years later, that her mother might not be Irish at all but French. There were a good many French Canadians at work on the New England farms. But later still she learned that her mother was as Irish as her father. It was a comfort to know this, for Alice Sullivan was a lonely girl, and it must have given her no small sense of security to know that she was among her own and to be able, on Sunday, to go to church and worship with people who, like herself, had lived in Limerick or whose names and ancestors, at least, had come from there—the Sheas and the Fitzgeralds and the Kelleys and the Barrys and the Carrolls.

What these Irish did was not chronicled in the local papers. Close to the soil they lived out their lives, and when they were done the soil received them again, and there was no record of anything except what might go on a tombstone, if there was a tombstone. In the case of Thomas’s wretched little family, it so happened that there were no tombstones, nor anything but a few bleak lines in the ledgers that belonged to the town and to the church. The big disaster from which the other disasters came, or seemed to come, was never written down, and there is no sure way of telling when it happened. It was while Annie was small, for her recollection is confused, and it must have been after the second baby came, for this second little girl, Ellen, named after Thomas’s sister, was, so far as we can tell, perfectly healthy when she was born. At any rate, while Alice was still young (indeed she died long before she was old) she fell against the stove, the pipe disjointed, the stove plunged forward—and she never was able to walk again except on crutches. She already had tuberculosis, or developed it very soon after this, and the disease and the lameness aggravated each other; but the old people at Feeding Hills, where her memory has become a dim sweet legend, speak of her moving blithely about on crutches, merry still.

The merriness had faded, however—for even the stoutest heart has its breaking point—by the time Annie was three or four years old; in the vivid pictures of her which remain in Annie’s mind Alice Sullivan is not laughing. She is lying in bed or sitting in a chair propped up on pillows, and she is very white and very thin and very tired.

We can guess that Thomas was beginning to get a toe-hold in the new country when the accident happened, for he had moved from the Castle and was living in a tenant’s cottage on the Taylor estate. But Thomas had neither philosophical nor material equipment with which to meet his new difficulties. He was a rough-and-ready out-of-door Irishman who knew only one way to handle trouble, and that was to drown it. When he could find nothing stronger he took hard cider sprinkled through with red pepper, and when he brought his cronies to the house there was a flash of Alice’s old manner as she tried to entertain them.

She was hobbling about on her crutches now, and was no longer able to take care of a home. She was ill and lame, and there was a child coming. Always there was a child coming. Jimmie, the third in line, was born on January 14, 1869, with a tubercular hip.

Neighbours helped wash the clothes and clean the house and cook the meals, but they came irregularly. They were hard-working women who had to take care of their own houses and help their men in the tobacco fields. Some of them took in washing, some of them had places as maids in “Yankee” houses; Aunt Ellen, who was a little more elegant than the others, took in sewing. All of them were struggling desperately —it was the Puritan struggle in a different tempo—but because they dropped their own problems for a few minutes to look after Alice’s, hunger is not among the unhappy memories of Annie’s childhood. In fact, she has kept three vivid, agreeable, gustatory impressions. The Taylor girl once invited her into the big house and gave her a piece of apple pie with sugar sprinkled on top. On another occasion, when was she taking her father his dinner in a bucket—this was later, when she was living in a poorer house farther up the road—she came upon the most extraordinary performance on the lawn in front of the Methodist church, where fine ladies were seated at little tables while other fine ladies moved gracefully about among them bearing dishes. It was a strawberry festival. Annie put the bucket down and gazed rapturously at the scene. Presently one of the fine ladies detached herself from the others and brought her a dish of strawberries with cream on them. She sat down on the curb and lapped it up. At home the only delicacy was a brown syrup with mustard in it which was kept on the back of the stove to cure colds. A bit of it now and then had the value of candy to one who did not, at that time, know what candy was.

But these impressions are scattered over eight years, and we must go back. What Ellen suffered from the squalor which surrounded her we do not know, for she died of a malignant fever when she was five years old; but all the rest of Annie’s life was affected by it, for it was in the midst of it and because of it that she developed that destructive granular inflammation of the eyes known as trachoma. This happened so early that her first conscious memory is the one of which we have spoken; “She would be so pretty if it were not for her eyes.” She was rather pretty anyway. She was round and chubby and pink like a cherub, with abundant dark hair like her mother’s, and luminous blue eyes—only the eyes were clouded.

Her mother was distressed about the eyes. “Wash them,” a neighbour told her, “in geranium water.” And Annie can still see her mother’s long thin fingers plucking the leaves from a geranium that bloomed in the window. There was not much that the mother could do. Doctors were expensive, and perhaps the eyes would get better anyway. It might be that the Blessed Virgin would intervene.

It was not only Annie’s eyes that distressed her mother. Annie was not then, nor ever after, what might be called a good child, nor, as many people were to learn, easy to manage. She was blindly and passionately rebellious in the way a child is so likely to be who is surrounded by unhappinesses too big for him to handle. No one ever tried to understand her, and the only way her father ever tried to control her was by beating her. This brutal treatment—the beatings were so severe that her mother used to help her hide—might have cowed a different person, but not Annie. The indomitable woman whom the world was later to know came from an indomitable child.

She herself can remember some of her tantrums. Once when a neighbour left her to look after some loaves of bread which she had put in the oven she burned her hand and dashed to the floor and ruined several of the loaves. Across the years she can still hear her mother’s voice crying, “Annie, Annie, Annie!” Bread was precious then. Once in anger she rocked her little sister clear out of her cradle and gave her a cruel scar on the forehead. She got one of her father’s whippings in return, but the whippings did not seem to do much good. Once again, on a winter afternoon, a neighbour came with a little girl in white shoes and white mittens, soft like little rabbits. Annie wanted the white mittens intensely, but the neighbour had brought red ones for her. “Aren’t they pretty, Annie?” her mother asked. “No, I don’t want them,” she cried. Rage took possession of her, and she threw them into the fire. “What a terrible child!” the neighbour said, with conviction. “What a terrible child!”

No cultural influences entered into Annie’s life during her childhood. The contempt of their neighbours as well as their own poverty kept the Irish to themselves. They might have moved ahead faster if their contact with their politer neighbours had been somewhat different, but rapid progress can hardly be expected of a poor and ignorant people who see no one but other people as poor and ignorant as themselves.

Nothing was ever read to her, but her father, who was jolly and agreeable when he was drunk enough to be unworried and sober enough to be lucid, told her stories of the Little People, and of the fairy folk who lurked in the tops of trees to throw things down upon whoever passed below, of the will-o’-the-wisp who led travellers astray over the marshes at night and of the toothless crone who used to waylay him as he went to and from his work. Sometimes he recited Gaelic poetry which she could not understand, but she loved the mournful sound of it. He talked of Ireland and told her how the Little People had carried him away in a sack when he was a baby, and how they stole his mother’s cow and brought it back when she cooked a pig for them. He warned her that if she ever met a woman walking with a crooked stick she must cross herself: the devil’s hand was in it. He was quite serious when he told these stories, and when Annie asked him where the Little People were, he assured her that some of them were under the flat stone in front of the house, and she had evidence beyond her father’s word that this was true, for the Taylor girl, who used to go by the house every day on her way to school, flaunted a parasol too divinely blue and beautiful to have come from a mortal source. Annie tried to lift up the stone so as to have a private word with the Little People on her own account, but it was too heavy.

This Taylor girl, goddess in her own way, once asked Annie to go to the school with her, not as a pupil—she was not old enough and could not see well enough—but as a guest. It was a romantic adventure, for while the school was only a school, ghosts lived next to it in a little dark house with flag lilies around it, and the old woman who came to chase them out when they tried to steal the lilies was a witch.

Annie used to be afraid of the ghosts and of the Little People. On one especial night when she and Jimmie and Ellen were huddled into a back room she was sure that the Little People had come, and thought, from the screams she heard, that they were after a woman in the next room—Annie thought the woman might be her mother but she was not sure. Shadows played weirdly against the walls from a kerosene lamp, and the three children crouched under the covers. Strangers were all over the house, and noise and confusion. Finally the screaming gave place to a small wailing cry, and a woman came to tell Annie that she had a baby sister. Much relieved, Annie crawled up for air. The child was a girl, and she was called Mary.

Of all the things that Annie loved in those desolate years the one that had her brightest and most particular affection was a sacred heart picture of the Virgin which hung above the bed in the front room. She temporarily lost faith in the Virgin, however, when she let go a dove which Annie had left in her care when she went to take her father his dinner, but this did not disturb her affection for the picture. Yet a curious thing happened.

Once when her father lay in bed, because in reaping wheat on Mr. Taylor’s farm he had cut his leg with a scythe, Annie climbed up beside him to hear more about the Little People. Accidentally she struck something against the picture. When she saw that it horrified her father she did it again and again until he held her hands to make her stop. Her father could not understand her, nor could she understand herself, for she loved the picture and would not for the world have injured it. Yet she could not help throwing things at it. Always she was like that.

It was somewhat in the same spirit that she threw whatever she could lay hand on at the small mirror her father used for shaving and smashed it. “You little devil!” She had been called a little devil before, but always until now in anger, not in fear. “You little devil! Look what you’ve brought to this house. Bad luck. Bad luck for seven years!”

The sequence to these memories is uncertain, but there came a time when the Thomas Sullivans were poorer than ever in a house with long flights of steps—not the house on the Taylor farm. In the room next to the one in which her mother lay ill, four men, one of them her father, sat under a lamp gambling for a turkey hanging on the wall. The men were boisterous and convivial, singing raucously in praise of the Little Brown Jug. Annie went in to watch them and reached out an inquisitive hand for one of the cards. Someone slapped it; someone else patted it. She went back to her mother. The other children were asleep. The night wore on, and the lamp burned low. The house shook with rowdy laughter and thumping feet, and the sick woman begged the child to ask the men to leave. Annie’s father, very drunk by that time, struck her sharply on the cheek. One of the men started towards the door, lurched and fell. The child, her face smarting, hoped passionately that he would die, but he rose unsteadily to his feet, took the turkey, and went away. The others staggered after him. The lamp guttered out. Her father stood by the open doorway through which an icy wind was blowing. Escape lay beyond the door, and for a frantic moment the little girl thought she would take it. But the stocky figure of a red-faced Irishman with reddish hair and a reddish beard stood in the way, and she did not go.

That was the first Christmas she remembered; and that is all of it she remembers.

During the last sad months of Alice Sullivan’s life three entries went into the town records.

Ellen, or Nellie, the second little girl, died in May, 1873, the record says of brain fever, but the Sullivans thought it was a form of the hoof and mouth disease that was ravaging horses that year. In June a son was born whose hold on life was so faint that two months later, when the town took pen in hand to write him down, his death was attributed simply to lack of vitality. Thomas Sullivan carried the coffin away on his knees, and Annie was glad to see it go. The baby had spent most of his two months crying: it was a relief to be rid of him.

Alice’s own vitality was nearly gone. The brown burial robe, the gift of one Catherine Fitzgerald, late of Limerick, was in the house. Mrs. Fitzgerald had forehandedly bought it for herself, but knowing there was no money here for one, she had given it away. She was always doing this. No one knows how many burial robes she bought for herself and gave away. Annie found the one intended for her mother and examined it curiously, not knowing what it was. But her mother knew.

The Sullivans were by this time in a boarding house again. The day came when a priest entered to administer holy unction. The devil was invited to choke all children who lifted their voices above a whisper, and the house was filled with people moving purposefully about. Alice Chloesy lay on a mattress very still, clothed in the brown burial robe with the white letters on the breast, her tired transparent hands crossed, her black hair drawn smoothly back from her small white face. A green ribbon was around her throat.

Jimmie and Mary were sobbing, and Jimmie was sitting on his father’s knee. Annie was not crying. None of those weeping around her seemed to belong to her or she to them. It was a pageant, and she was looking on. No emotion flamed up. She never had an emotion connected with her mother, only pictures, and all of the pictures, except the final one, were to her, even as a little girl, very disturbing.

There had been no money for the burial robe; there was none for the funeral. Thomas had never made more than a pittance on the farms, and that had gone partly, we may hope, for doc¬ tors for Alice. Some of it had gone for food and some of it (there was never much) had gone for drink. The other Sullivans had long since lost patience with their shiftless relative. The town helped defray the funeral expenses, and the interment would have taken place in the potters’ field if Mrs. Fitzgerald had not offered room in a lot of hers in an old cemetery from which most of the bodies had been moved into a new one. This at least is the way the story goes. No one truly knows where Alice is buried nor whether she lay beside her children or not.

All the neighbours came to the funeral and stayed at the house for a while afterwards. Annie went, and so did Jimmie and Mary, sitting in a black carriage with their father next to the hearse. It was on January 19th and bitter cold.

The first thing that happened as they set off down the road was a scramble between Jimmie and Annie for the best place to watch the horses from. Neither had ever been in a carriage before, and both wanted a front seat. Jimmie cried out that Annie had hurt him—very likely she had—and her father struck her harshly across the face. Hatred blazed in her heart, but a moment later, so volatile is the temper of childhood, it vanished, and the little girl gave herself over to as complete enjoyment as she had ever known.

They were on their way to Chicopee, where the first Sullivans had settled and where the dead ones were buried, and the horses were clumping along under the covered bridge across the Connecticut River, the splendid reverberation of their hoofs making a grand and wonderful funeral march.

It was a memorable day. In a little white church, completely detached from the people around her, Annie sat on a light brown bench wide-eyed and eager and watched a rainbow across her mother’s coffin. The rainbow came from a cheap window of coloured glass high up in the church walls, but Annie had heard of heaven and thought she had somehow got there.

By the time they were ready to go home she was tired and cross, and the shrill voice of a woman in the carriage with her and Jimmie and her father irritated her. The house was dark and cold when they reached it, but the funeral crowd stayed to make holiday with feasting and drinking and bawdy laughter. The woman with the shrill voice gave Annie something to eat, which Annie threw angrily back at her. The smell of smoke and liquor filled the room, but after a while, mercifully, the light was blotted out, the smell faded, the voices receded, and the child sank into the dreamless sleep of exhaustion.

The Thomas Sullivans were even more of a problem to their relatives now that Alice was gone. Thomas’s brother, John, took Jimmie and Mary, while Annie tried to keep house for her father in a little cabin on her Uncle John’s place. Subsequent events so blackened Thomas’s reputation in Feeding Hills that no one had a good word for him, but it can be checked to his credit that Annie’s eyes were a matter of concern to him as they had been to her mother. Once—it must have been in a fleeting moment of prosperity—he took her to Westfield to have a doctor look at them, and bought her a white hat with a blue ribbon on it, and a pink rose. The Taylor girl had never had so beautiful a hat, nor did Annie ever again. Nor has anyone since.

The doctor in Westfield could not do much, but Annie’s father told her that a single drop of water from the river Shannon would cure her eyes, it was that holy. When she asked him what made it holy, he said that it was because it began in the eyes of the Lord himself. Looking down from his high place and seeing the beautiful green land of Ireland that he had created, not minding what he was doing, tears gushed from his eyes, like springs out of the hills, and there in the great plain before Limerick the Shannon began. ‘‘Galway and Killslie have the mountains, I hear say; but Limerick has the river Shannon for her glory.”

Sometimes he talked to her not of Ireland but of England. There was no way to punish England, but hatred of her was smouldering in his heart, and he told his daughter in the hearts of all the Irish, like a turf fire.

Meantime there was the house to keep. And, even with the best of intentions, a drunken man, and that is what Thomas was much of the time, and a half-blind child cannot keep house with any degree of dignity or grace.

Thomas went to live with one of his relatives, and Annie went up the road to stay with John and Anastatia Sullivan who had several children of their own and lived in a large house with French windows. It was the largest house Annie had ever been in, and Anastatia’s name—a princess’s name —she used to repeat to herself because she loved the sound of it. John—“’Statia’s John,” he was called, to distinguish him from the other John Sullivans—was a tobacco man and, in contrast with Thomas, well-to-do. He owned his farm or was in process of owning it.

This was rather a happy time for Annie. Anastatia was an excellent housekeeper, neat almost to a fault, and Annie loved the rhythm of order. She used to play with the other children in the big red tobacco barns, and would have gone to school with them if it had not been for her eyes.

She was a strange child to them, that Annie. She could rage like a young leopard and tear the house to pieces, but she could also lie so still on the grass under the apple and cherry trees that she could catch the unwary birds that hopped about, but when John Sullivan sent her to watch the cows while they grazed on the hills from which the hamlet got its name, she would forget the cows and let them go into the neighbours’ fields while she wandered dreamily off in some other direction. Once a man found her two miles from home in a reverie on the bank of a little stream.

Sometimes she was almost dangerous. Once when a friend of her father’s—she did not like her father’s friends—came to John Sullivan’s when no one was at home but herself, she threatened to set the dog on him if he entered the gate. The dog was a bloodhound and chained. The man looked at Annie and ran. This story is still told in Feeding Hills.

When Christmas was about to come again Annie heard talk she had never heard before of presents and knew that presents were to be given and, moreover, that they were already in the front room with the French windows and that no one was supposed to go near them. So in she went.

Among other delectable objects she found a doll with blue eyes and golden hair which her starved heart petted and loved and claimed for its own. Again and again the lonely little girl slipped in to see it. By Christmas morning she had persuaded herself that the doll was hers, and when she saw it handed over to one of Anastatia’s daughters she felt outraged and defrauded. She was never able to get over a feeling that the doll was hers, and in a certain sense it always was, for it came somehow to be a part of her dreams of herself and the fairies and the Little People and the Taylor girl.

Contempt for her father grew in this atmosphere. From the way she began to scorn his incompetence, his intemperance, and his illiterate brogue she knows there must have been much talk of him. The Sullivans resented him. Here they were, young and ambitious, with growing children of their own. Their limited patience came to an end, and, not being able to get satisfaction from Thomas, they appealed to the town. All the Sullivans had by that time lost all their patience.

Aunt Ellen, if Annie’s recollection is accurate, took Mary. Mary was sound and healthy and lovable—cuddly. But no one wanted either Annie or Jimmie. Annie was more than half blind. She was proud, defiant, and unmanageable. No one had ever cuddled her. They were afraid of her. Jimmie, like his mother, was on a crutch, and the bunch on his hip,

which was about the size of a teacup, seemed to be growing bigger; he was pale and thin. He was just five years old. There was only one place where he and his sister could be sent to be looked after, and that was the place where all the people nobody wanted were sent.

Why Washington’s Birthday should have been chosen as the day of departure no one knows, but it was on February 22, 1876, that a hack drove up to the door with Jimmie in it. This was surprising, for Jimmie was seldom allowed to go anywhere, on account of his lameness. Mary was there, too, and some of the other relatives. Anastatia told Annie that she and Jimmie were going to Springfield and ride on a train, but there was something queer about it, for Anastatia was crying and wiping her eyes on her apron. She tried to kiss Annie goodbye, but Annie would not permit so strange a performance. Anastatia had never offered to kiss her before. The woman dried her tears. She was justified now. “You might at least be a good girl on the last day,” she said resentfully. That was all. The hack clattered off down the road carrying two pleased and happy passengers. Even yet Annie did not know where she and Jimmie were going.