Anne Sullivan: Ireland's gift to America of courage and strength

 

The face that I see, in the portrait of the late Anne Sullivan before me, is beautiful but strong. It is the face of a woman who has endured much but refuses to let adversity keep her down. Today, April 14, is her birthday.

 

Of course most of us know her as the late Helen Keller’s gifted, determined and devoted teacher – ultimately her life-long friend. She is the woman who helped Helen – blind and deaf – escape from the prison of non-communication.

 

But Anne has a story, too. Of suffering, of pain, of sheer grit. Born to poor Irish immigrants in Massachusetts, she contracted an eye infection in childhood that was so dreaded in those days that it was specifically checked for at the Ellis Island immigration center – trachoma. If you had it, back on the boat you went. Left untreated, it usually led to blindness. Today, this disease still plagues millions in the developing world, where ever sanitation or antibiotics are lacking.

 

Anne was eight when her mother died from tuberculosis. Ten when her father abandoned her and her two young siblings. To a run-down almshouse she and her little brother Jimmy went and he died soon after. Imagine after all that, having to endure two eye operations with the limited anesthesia available at the time. Only to have them both fail.

 

But Anne had that Irish steel in her soul. During his inspection of the notorious Tewksbury almshouse where she had been forcibly returned after a stint at a charity hospital, she caught the attention of the state inspector of charities and pled with him for admittance to the Perkins School for the Blind.

 

Her request was soon granted. She battled to overcome the deprivations of her upbringing, she learned the manual alphabet, and after graduating – as valedictorian – she went to work for the Keller family. The rest is history.

 

More eye operations aided her for a time, but in her later years, she went completely blind.

 

If I were to choose one recipe that Anne probably enjoyed in her life – as a daughter of struggling Irish immigrants, and as someone who never lived lavishly – I think she probably more than once tasted the simple potato dish of “colcannon” from their homeland.

https://www.dochara.com/the-irish/food-recipes/colcannon/



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