Beyond the Miracle Worker

It’s temp ting to begin this book like a fairy tale. Once upon a
time a poor, blind, and orphaned child named Annie magically grew into a
happy, sighted, and successful adult woman. She became a miracle worker,
lighting the intellectual fire and imagination of the deaf-blind girl Helen
Keller at a water pump in the wilds of Alabama. We know this kind of
story. Many of our books and movies, the morality tales and parables
we tell, even the heroes we’ve created, are versions of the same inspirational
tale. The cheerful and uplifting message is that yes, you too can
conquer anything in order to do the impossible.
 
But I won’t.
 
“Any book about me,” Anne Sullivan Macy reflected near the end of
her life, “must be full of contradictions.”1 Beyond the Miracle Worker is
a book that reflects these contradictions—the contradictions of a delightful,
gloomy, charismatically fascinating, and annoying woman who
was neither blind nor sighted. Though she was born in 1866, her life
is a surprisingly contemporary tale. It is the story of a caring, fiercely
proud, and intelligent woman trying to forge meaningful human relationships
despite her own ingrained flaws and wounds. It is the story
of a woman deeply frightened of depending upon anyone else for emotional,
economic, or social sustenance.
 
And yet—in one of those contradictions that Macy warned us
about—she made one notable exception: she did not hesitate to lean
on her famous student, and later friend, Helen Keller. While the whole
world assumed that Keller’s deaf-blindness forced her to depend on
her teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy, my research suggests that the reverse
more accurately characterizes their relationship of nearly fifty
years. Macy leaned on Keller, juggling her uneasy combination of emotional
vulnerability and a fierce desire for independence. Her lifelong
struggle with chronic illness and depression was far more debilitating
than Keller’s deaf-blindness. Keller provided love, acceptance, daily assistance,
an income, and a home. Their deep friendship, and Macy’s
willingness to allow herself to be dependent on Keller, gave meaning
to Macy’s life. Macy regarded herself as a “badly constructed human
being,” perceptively providing a way to understand the complex adult
that the orphaned and deserted child of the Tewksbury Almshouse
became. Yet, we shouldn’t confine her to that characterization. As she
herself admitted, “some of us blunder into life through the back door.”
 
Though it may have been through the back door, and blunder she did,
she entered into life fully.
 
Indeed, she saw the benefits of blundering, and faltering through life
didn’t bother her. “If all people knew what was good for them and acted
accordingly, this world would be a different world, though not nearly
so interesting. But we don’t know what’s good for us, and I’m spending
my days in experimenting. The experiments are amusing—and sometimes
costly, but there’s no other way of getting knowledge.”
 
This remark characterizes Anne Sullivan Macy perhaps better than
anything else. From childhood on, many others had held firm opinions
about what was good for her. Those opinions could amuse her, wound
her, or strengthen her, but in the end her determination to discover
her own life path lay at the very core of her character. She knew she
had made mistakes—some of them profoundly painful. Whatever the
benefit, whatever the cost, she had to discover for herself what was
best. The marvel is the ferocity with which she thirsted to discover life,
in its pains and its joys, for herself. As she said in concluding one of
her 1916 letters to Helen, “We have only to keep a stiff upper lip and
do our damnedest.”
 
After comp leting two previous books on Helen Keller I swore
I would never again write anything even remotely related to her. I
started a project far removed from Keller. I informed everyone in my
professional circle about that far-removed project in order to commit
myself to it.
 
Then I reread Anne Sullivan Macy’s 1916 letters to Helen Keller.
Macy had written them as she dealt with the illness that she thought
would kill her. The letters reveal an introspective woman trying to
understand her life. Vacillating between urgency and detachment, she
reflected on pleasure, anger, complacency, and amazement. It struck
me that her life embodied both contradictions and intensity: physical
pain, emotional pain, isolation, friendship, joy, intellect, tenacity, success,
and near constant self-doubt. Yet, as she thought about death,
as she pondered her life, she took immense joy in the daily life of the
Puerto Rican countryside where she was staying.
 
As I reconsidered Macy, I became convinced that I, and nearly everyone
else, had shortchanged the woman known only as the teacher
of Helen Keller. A new biography of Anne Sullivan Macy is greatly
needed, not only to do justice to her and to provide a peephole into
Keller and Macy’s multifaceted, and often surprising, friendship, but
also because our cultural memory mythologizes and simplifies Macy
as a straightforward educational superhero. She deserves more.
In addition, the increasing but still slow integration of people with
disabilities into education, the workplace, and the public world makes
this project significant. Macy’s disability did not occur in a vacuum,
isolated and abstract. Her daily experience of it was often defined by
context—by institutions, by the expectations of others, and by the
lack of social welfare support. Her life story, particularly when placed
alongside that of Keller, reminds us of the diversity of disability experiences
historically and today—and of the multiple ways that we, as individuals,
as institutions, and as a country, contribute to the disabling
nature of physical and mental impairments.
 
Surprisingly, telling the life story of Anne Sullivan Macy with her
as the central figure is a markedly new strategy. Numerous Keller biographies,
both older and more recent, discuss Macy but primarily as
an ancillary figure to the real star of the story. These include Joseph P.
Lash’s Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan
Macy (1980) and Dorothy Herrmann’s Helen Keller: A Life (1998).
Helen and Teacher provides the most complex analysis of Macy but retains
a nearly exclusive focus on her development and life as a teacher.
The most comprehensive biography of Macy is that of Nella Braddy
Henney, Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story Behind Helen Keller (1933). Endorsed
by Keller, approved by Macy, and written by an intimate friend
of both women, this book sought to establish Macy as a pedagogical
hero. Macy’s most recent adult biography, published over forty years
ago by Lorena Hickok, also defines her only according to Keller—even
in its title: The Touch of Magic: The Story of Helen Keller’s Great Teacher,
Anne Sullivan Macy (1961). Macy was Keller’s teacher, and proud of it,
but her life story is so much more complicated and interesting than
that single-minded characterization.
 
The goal of Beyond the Miracle Worker is to present Anne Sullivan
Macy in all of her complexity. First and foremost, by telling and analyzing
Macy’s life as her story—not Helen’s—this biography tells a new
tale. Beyond the Miracle Worker follows the accidental and unexpected
path an orphaned asylum child took to become a world-famous educator.
This includes an intimate depiction of growing up amidst the
horrors of a mid-nineteenth-century asylum, a rarely if ever told story
in U.S. history. It chronicles a tumultuous marriage. It analyzes the
adult life of a chronically ill, disabled woman whose public identity
excluded nearly all acknowledgment of her disability. It follows a smart
and ambitious woman trying to make a professional life in a patriarchal
society. And it traces the ever-changing friendship between Macy and
Keller, in which the deaf-blind Keller eventually cared for and became
the personal aid of her former teacher.
 
In many ways, Macy resembles an archetypal American figure—the
self-made man. As a young orphan housed in Massachusetts’s Tewksbury
Almshouse, she pleaded her way out with single-minded determination
by literally pulling on the sleeves of touring philanthropists
and begging for an education. Later on in her life, she exercised further
determination and retained control of the child Helen Keller—and
thus of her own professional life—despite the machinations of numerous
others who were far more powerful. With intense purposefulness,
she repeatedly created herself. The obvious complication, however, is
that though a “self-made man,” she was female, disabled, and of (to her)
shameful beginnings. Her life raises questions about the opportunities
available to women to reinvent themselves in turn-of-the-century
America.
 
A related theme is that of the narrow but changing economic and
professional opportunities available to women. Macy is contemporary
with the first generation of female college students who embraced pivotal
and important roles in U.S. social reform, education, and civic life.
She is a contemporary of those who—like Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop,
and Florence Kelley—developed and energized the settlement
house movement. She is, however, dramatically different. Though an
extremely brilliant woman, she lacked any educational training or advanced
degree, came from a family with no connections to wealth or
prestige, was deeply ashamed of her past, and had little involvement
in broad social reform. Other than her relationship to Keller, she had
few opportunities to build on for personal advancement. Those she
had came from flirtatious relationships with older men. From the time
of Keller’s college graduation in 1904 until the early 1920s the two
constantly sought new economic opportunities and stability as various
money-making attempts failed. While she and Keller clearly valued
one another, Macy clung to the relationship with such tenacity partially
because of the narrow options available for a woman of her class
and background, let alone one with a disability.
 
Also important to this biography and Macy’s life is the theme of
education. As a child, Macy grasped for an education as an escape,
and a redemption, from poverty and the almshouse. As an untrained,
inexperienced, and isolated young woman she accomplished a task
many had thought impossible: teaching language to the almost sevenyear-
old deaf-blind Helen Keller. Though not a Radcliffe student, she
attended the prestigious female college alongside Keller, fingerspelling
for her all lectures and books. Ironically, the woman who became
one of the world’s most famous educators had no educational training,
and did little regarding the education of others after her one student
became an adult.