After the Miracle, page 15
Dear Mr. Villard,
It has been my intention to write to you every day since I received your letter—an appeal which smote me to the depths of my soul… What a comment upon our social justice is the need of an association like yours! It should bring the blush of shame to the face of every true American to know that ten million of his countrymen are denied the equal protection of the laws. Truly no nation can live and not challenge such discrimination and violence against innocent members of society as your letter describes. Nay let me say it, this great republic of ours is a mockery when citizens in any section are denied the rights which the Constitution guarantees them, when they are openly evicted, terrorized and lynched by prejudiced mobs, and their persecutors and murderers are allowed to walk abroad unpunished. The United States stands ashamed before the world whilst ten million of its people remain victims of a most blind, stupid, inhuman prejudice. How dare we call ourselves Christians? The outrages against the colored people are a denial of Christ. The central fire of his teaching is equality. Yet there are persons calling themselves Christians who profit from the economic degradation of their colored fellow-countrymen. Ashamed in my very soul I behold in my own beloved southland the tears of those who are oppressed, those who must bring up their sons and daughters in bondage to be servants, because others have their fields and vineyards, and on the side of the oppressor is power. I feel with those suffering, toiling millions, I am thwarted with them… Let us hurl our strength against the iron gates of prejudice until they fall, and their bars are sundered.23
Accompanying Helen’s message was a check for $100—a not inconsiderable sum in 1916. It’s hard to imagine that she did not anticipate the maelstrom that would ensue from such a letter, which Du Bois published in The Crisis in February 1916. That same month, an anonymous benefactor who simply billed himself as “Alabamian” paid to have the Crisis piece reprinted in the Selma Journal—the daily newspaper of a city where a number of Helen’s relatives resided, including her cousin Elizabeth Lassiter. The fallout was almost immediate. Helen had long become accustomed to the controversy surrounding her radical politics, even among members of her own family. Kate Keller had made no secret of the fact that she disapproved of Helen’s maverick beliefs. “My mother talked intelligently, brilliantly about current events and she had a southerner’s interest in politics,” Helen later recalled. “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.”24
Now, wading into the explosive issue of racial equality, Helen had clearly crossed a line. More than any other state during this era, Alabama was firmly entrenched in its commitment to the dominance of the white race—so much so that the concept had been enshrined in the state’s constitution in 1901 when Alabama Democrats convened a convention “to establish white supremacy in this State.”25
Predictably, the anonymous Alabamian couldn’t bring himself to believe that a “wonderful girl” like Helen was responsible for the blistering attack against racial segregation. In a piece printed alongside Helen’s letter to the NAACP, he insisted that it could only have been the Northerners around her who had turned her “against” her native South. “The people who did such wonderful work in training Miss Keller must have belonged to the old Abolition Gang for they seem to have thoroughly poisoned her mind against her own people,” he wrote.26 The Selma Journal soon took up this theme and described Helen’s letter as “full of untruths, full of fawning and boot-licking phrases directed toward Northern white and Negro fanatics.”27
Susan Fillippeli, a professor at Alabama’s Auburn University, provides a stark reminder about the potential consequences for Helen as she waded into the fraught territory of racial politics during this period. “You have to remember that if she were anybody but Helen Keller, she could very well have been lynched for expressing those views in 1916,” Fillippeli explains. “She was an outspoken feminist and a socialist who came into Alabama and spoke out against Jim Crow. Those were dangerous views back then. There were white people killed in the South as late as the 1960s for preaching racial equality.”28 Fillippeli’s alarming assessment is anything but hyperbole. Of the 347 people recorded as having been lynched in Alabama between 1882 and 1968, in fact, a sizable minority of at least 47 were white.29
In the midst of the storm, Kate begged her daughter to do something to preserve the family’s honor. Within days, it appeared that Helen had acquiesced to her plea when the Selma Times announced that they had received a copy of a statement from Kate Keller, purportedly composed by Helen:
I have gone through my letter to Mr. Oswald Villard… printed as a paid advertisement in the Selma Journal, sentence by sentence and I do not find a phrase that justifies the editor’s assertion that I advocate the social equality of white people and negroes, so repugnant to all. The equality I advocated in my letter is the equality of all men before the law, which the constitution of the United States is supposed to guarantee to every American citizen.30
One can imagine that it may have been Kate, not Helen, who included the uncharacteristic phrase about the repugnance of racial equality, but there is no question that Helen had dialed back her strongly held convictions to appease her family. Alas, her retreat would not be the last time she would backslide in the face of intense pressure from those around her.
Perhaps embarrassed by her insincere retraction, she soon had the opportunity to confront the issue once again when she appeared with Annie for a talk at Selma High School that same week. At this appearance, a man that Helen later described as a “Negro-baiter” asked her whether she had really given money “for the defence of Negroes.” When she confirmed that she had done so, he asked her whether she believed in marriage between Blacks and whites. “No more than they do,” she replied. She then conspicuously refused to shake hands with the man when he approached her. “I saw at once what he was,” she told her friend Van Wyck Brooks.31
Likely unaware of Helen’s retreat, Du Bois himself would later write about Helen’s bold stand on behalf of his people: “Finally, there came the thing which I somehow sensed would come. Helen Keller was in her own state of Alabama, being feted and made much of by her fellow citizens. And yet courageously and frankly she spoke out on the iniquity and foolishness of the color line. And so, it was proven, as I knew it would be, that this woman who sits in darkness has a spiritual insight clearer than that of many wide-eyed people who stare uncomprehendingly at this prejudiced world.”32
Eventually, she would once again publicly take up the battle against racial discrimination, but for now, she appeared to believe that her retraction was enough to mollify her chastened family. Little did she know that her brief foray into the minefield of Southern racial politics would soon play a profound role in the most tragic episode of her life.
Chapter Twelve
“A Little Island of Joy”
When Helen was a teenager preparing to enter Radcliffe in the 1890s, Alexander Graham Bell, who had become something of a father figure, offered some words of counsel. Although he had famously waged a eugenic crusade devoted to the prevention of deaf people marrying each other, he held no such concerns about Helen since she had not been born deafblind and therefore could not pass on her disability. Bell sensed that it was only a matter of time before Annie, who had remained a constant presence in her life for more than a decade at that point, might marry. It was time for Helen to think about her future. Just because she couldn’t see or hear, he argued, didn’t mean she was precluded from the “supreme happiness” of marriage. “Heredity is not involved in your case, as it is in so many others,” she recalled him telling her.1
“Oh, but I am happy, very happy!” Helen responded. “I have my teacher and my mother and you, and all kinds of interesting things to do. I really don’t care a bit about being married.”
“I know,” he countered, “but life does strange things to us. You may not always have your mother, and in the nature of things Miss Sullivan will marry, and there may be a barren stretch in your life when you will be very lonely.”
“I can’t imagine a man wanting to marry me,” she told him. “I should think it would seem like marrying a statue.”2
It wasn’t long after this conversation that John Macy entered their lives and Bell’s words would appear prophetic. Helen later recalled a conversation with Bell shortly after John and Annie announced their engagement.
“I told you, Helen, she would marry,” he said. “Are you going to take my advice now and build your own nest?”
“No,” she replied, “I feel less inclined than ever to embark upon the great adventure. I have fully made up my mind that a man and a woman must be equally equipped to weather successfully the vicissitudes of life. It would be a severe handicap to any man, to saddle upon him the dead weight of my infirmities. I know I have nothing to give a man that would make up for such an unnatural burden.”3
But by 1916, she appeared to have reevaluated that self-deprecating stance. Asked by an audience member during a lecture that year whether she would ever marry, she was unequivocal in her response: “Of course I shall marry if the right man comes along. Everyone is better married. I’ll tell you what he must be like. First of all, he must be a socialist. Of course, he will be handsome, for eugenic reasons… for I shall see his face with my fingertips… He must have a sense of humor, for victory often turns on a laugh. He doesn’t have to be rich. I am paying my own passage through the world and am proud of it.”4
Unbeknownst to her audience at the time, she had already met the man who fit that description to a tee. Before he left Annie for good nearly two years earlier, John Macy had hired a friend from radical political circles named Peter Fagan to handle Helen’s correspondence while she traveled the country on the Chautauqua lecture circuit.5 After a brief stint as a reporter on the Boston Herald, Fagan—who had learned the manual alphabet to communicate with Helen—had recently been hired on again as her secretary while Polly Thomson left the country for an extended period to visit her family in Scotland. Relatively little is known about Fagan’s background. His former newspaper described him as a “fair-haired, slender free-thinker” who liked to write on topics “allied to socialistic matters” and who, as a boy of fourteen, “preached in churches of the middle west.”6
In her 1929 memoir, Midstream, Helen would later describe the fateful turning point in their relationship:
I was sitting alone in my study one evening, utterly despondent. The young man who was still acting as my secretary in the absence of Miss Thomson, came in and sat down beside me. For a long time, he held my hand in silence, then he began talking to me tenderly. I was surprised that he cared so much about me. There was sweet comfort in his loving words. I listened all a-tremble. He was full of plans for my happiness. He said if I would marry him, he would always be near to help me in the difficulties of life. He would be there to read to me, look up material for my books and do as much as he could of the work my teacher had done for me. His love was a bright sun that shone upon my helplessness and isolation. The sweetness of being loved enchanted me, and I yielded to an imperious longing to be part of a man’s life.7
Helen, thirty-six at the time, never disclosed how long the romance had been going on with her twenty-nine-year-old secretary when he proposed marriage, though she had hinted to a Chicago reporter as early as June that year of a “possible heart affair,” leading the reporter to write of a “certain young man who is attentive at this time.”8
Despite some gaps in the history, one thing appears certain. The relationship had been carried on for some time without the knowledge of those around her. Helen had never before kept anything from Annie and the deception troubled her. “The thought of not sharing my happiness with my mother and her who had been all things to me for thirty years seemed abject, and little by little it destroyed the joy of being loved,” she wrote years after the episode. “For a brief space, I danced in and out of the gates of Heaven, wrapped up in a web of bright imaginings.”9
By the first week of November 1916, Helen had finally made up her mind to reveal her engagement to Teacher. Annie, suffering another bout of ill health, had been preparing to depart that same month to spend time at a Lake Placid sanatorium to treat what was believed to be tuberculosis. “Naturally, I wanted to tell my mother and my teacher about the wonderful thing that had happened to me,” Helen recalled, “but the young man said, ‘Better wait a bit, we must tell them together. We must try to realize what their feelings will be. Certainly, they will disapprove at first. Your mother does not like me, but I shall win her approval by my devotion to you. Let us keep our love secret a little while. Your teacher is too ill to be excited just now, and we must tell her first.’”10
Before they could reveal their secret, however, circumstances conspired to take the decision out of their hands. They had been spotted kissing in the study by the houseboy, Ian, who immediately alerted Annie about what he had witnessed. It would appear that Teacher attempted to put a stop to the relationship, and when that failed, she alerted Mrs. Keller in an attempt to persuade Helen’s mother to intervene.11 Annie had long claimed that her teaching methods were designed with the purpose of making Helen “independent.” Now, with her pupil on the verge of achieving that goal, she may have sensed that marriage would threaten her own increasing emotional and financial dependence on Helen.
On November 18, the Boston Globe ran a front-page story revealing that Fagan had applied for a marriage license at the Boston registrar’s office.12 A week earlier, according to the paper, he had confided details about the relationship to a former colleague at the Boston Herald: “He told the editor that he and his employer were madly in love with each other and that they desired to be married in secret. They planned a literary career, and Miss Keller was to abandon the lecture field, in which Mrs. Macy was her necessary interpreter.”13 In fact, since Fagan knew the manual alphabet, he could have easily communicated Helen’s words to audiences on her lecture tours, presumably making Annie’s skills obsolete.
Boston registrar Edward McGlenen confirmed that the license was valid. “Fagan came to my office in city hall,” he told the Globe. “He wanted to keep the matter quiet, and I replied, ‘Absolutely no.’ I said that in a case where a person of national prominence was involved it would not be safe. I felt it was a very serious matter he was undertaking. One part of the license was filled in with a peculiar print-like writing, resembling that of a blind person. Mr. Fagan’s name was signed to the paper.”14
When the registrar refused Fagan’s request to keep the application a secret, he left the office, but not before he confided his reason for discretion. “It is understood that the secrecy requested is that Mrs. John Macy… seriously opposes the match,” the Boston Post reported. Fagan himself told a Post reporter that he had an “awful argument” with Annie and that she had frequently reproached him for spelling to Helen in public.15
Although it was clear that Annie strongly disapproved of the relationship, Helen’s later account of the episode mostly focused on the role of her mother, who was staying with her at the time, in coming between her and her fiancé:
Fate took matters into her own hands and tangled the web, as is her wont. I was dressing, full of the excitement of what I was going to communicate to my loved ones, when my mother entered my room in great distress. With a shaking hand, she demanded, “What have you been doing with that creature? The papers are full of a dreadful story about you and him. What does it mean? Tell me.” I sensed such hostility towards my lover in her manner and words that in a panic I pretended not to know what she was talking about. “Are you engaged to him? Did you apply for a marriage license?” Terribly frightened, and not knowing just what had happened, but anxious to shield my lover, I denied everything. I even lied to Mrs. Macy, fearing the consequences that would result from the revelation coming to her in this shocking way. My mother ordered the young man out of the house that very day. She would not even let him speak to me.16
As newspapers throughout the country breathlessly reported on the imminent betrothal, all parties involved rushed to deny the news. Fagan himself insisted that the rumor was “unalloyed rot” and blamed it on a “disgruntled servant.”17 Meanwhile, Kate and Helen emerged from a meeting with a downtown Boston law firm and issued a statement. Helen denied “emphatically” that there had ever been an engagement between herself and Fagan. “Such a thing has never even been remotely contemplated by me,” the statement read.18
Despite Helen’s denial, the Boston Globe reported that Fagan still had every intention of going through with the marriage. “Fagan told me all of his troubles,” a friend of his told the paper. “He told me the denials were necessary in order to soothe Mrs. Macy’s feelings. Fagan told me he was going to marry Miss Keller, and I know that he consulted a lawyer about the marriage laws in the southern states, through which they were to travel.”19
