Transcription

AN EPIC OF COURAGE: "SEE"
by
Helen Keller

She tells of her visits to the war wounded, "valiantly claiming their wrecked abilities."

When a year and a half ago I began my work among the soldiers by visiting the hospitals at Valley Forge and Butler, Pa., to try to brace the newly blinded and the newly deafened, my comrades along the roads of darkness and silence, I did not expect to be among those privileged to visit the wounded in general. Without wishing to imply a complaint, I supposed they would pay no more attention to me than do many other people whom I encounter amid their light-filled occupations who regard me as "a poor creature," shut out from all they see and hear, knowing little or nothing of world events, let alone global war and its complexities.

Already I was only too glad of a task I could perform, as the crippled are always too glad to be able to limp somewhere. But blindness with a big "B" has never interested me. I have always looked upon the blind as a part of the whole society, and my desire has been to help them regain their human rights so as to enable them to keep a place of usefulness and dignity in the world economy. What I say of the blind applies equally to all hindered groups--the deaf, the lame, the impoverished, the mentally disturbed.

In spite of the sweet, cherished things that have come to me in my work for the blind and my occasional work for the deaf I have had an obscure sense of bafflement. My life remained within narrow bounds and the feeling of being pushed into a corner troubled me in the back of my head, so to speak. Yet I had a timidity about moving out of my corner. I wanted to see the whole, but duty forbade me to venture beyond the confines of my limitations.

One day I was talking with Nella Braddy, author of the biography of my teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy. She had perceived how the war had coiled itself about my mind with burning anguish, and without preface or apology she blurted out on her fingers to me, "Why not go to the wounded soldiers and find out for yourself what you can do for them? You have your two hands, your heart and your faith in their strength to rise above circumstance. Remember, they have adjustments to make just as you had when you were a child. You have forgotten the very traces of the dark and silent horror that clutched you. You owe a debt to the soldiers. We all do. Perhaps you can pay yours. Paying it will enable you to accept their sacrifice--their sacrifice for us, for each other, and the unrealized dream we call civilization."

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After Nella Braddy's challenge I felt wonderfully released from scruples about my broken speech, my clumsiness, my slowness. I plucked up courage to lay the question of visiting military hospitals throughout the country before the American Foundation for the Blind, with which I have worked for twenty years in the service of the blind. The magnanimity with which the Foundation has met and continues to meet my wishes has made possible whatever I have accomplished or may accomplish in my new undertaking.

Almost before I realized what was happening, my devoted sharer of all responsibilities, Polly Thomson, at whose faithful guiding hand and cheery readiness to carry out my plans I never cease to marvel, and I go on our way to visit groups of service men in hospitals in Washington and Atlantic City. It was like leaving an island, which blindness and deafness really is, for a continent of heterogeneous landscapes and devious rivers. Since then I have visited more than fifty hospitals in various parts of the country. Only recently I discovered that the lifelong sense of frustration was dissolved. The huge variety of contacts with all kinds of people and the new light shed upon my work for the blind and the deaf have made me feel that I now live in a knowledge of the whole instead of hobbling along with a fragment.

Polly and I began in the wpring (sic) of 1944. After these first visits the Foundation completed the multitudinous details involved in arranging further tours, which began in November, and have not yet ended. We started in Hot Springs, Ark., in a hospital for paralyzed service men, and went on to Oklahoma to the progressive Borden Center for deafened soldiers at Chickasha. We continued through Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, California, Oregon and Washington State.

At first I had carte Blanche to enter Army hospitals only, but when I wrote Admiral McIntire for permission to visit those of the Navy also, He (sic) consented most graciously. In the spring Polly and I both worked at Army and Navy hospitals, in Brooklyn and on Staten Island and in Charleston, B.C. (sic) in Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina. This is outwardly a bare itinerary, but to my memory it sings, glows and throbs with a legion of warm friendships, the heroic and often triumphant efforts of the wounded to surround obstacles, and with the electrifying progress of the art of rehabilitation during the last decade. Thousands, as I can testify, whose lot would not so long ago have been declared past betterment are valiantly reclaiming their wrecked abilities.

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It is light in my darkness to behold them not merely breakking (sic) away from invalidism, but laughing and joking over their difficulties and even acquiring fresh vitality as they realize that their place is still good in the golden chain of usefulness which binds society together. Of course, they slip back or run up against the sharp edge of unforeseen barriers, they endure grueling days of slow effort and self-discipline, but this is true of all education deserving the name. As I moved among the soldiers, hundreds and hundreds confined to their beds, I was awed by a fact as lifegiving as sunshine--their brave healthy-mindedness.

Something else that impressed me was that there were so few sullen patients. I had been prepared to find many, considering as I did the frightful burden that combat had laid upon them, the extremes of mold, heat and benumbing fatigue, they had borne, the inferno of bombs and tanks, the anguish of wounds in foreign lands. Instead, I was touched by the quickness with which they cast aside their ferocity, their rough-and-tumble, kill-or-be-killed outlook and again become friendly in a gentle society. Here is a quality not sufficiently appreciated. The men are taken too much for granted as "heroes" and not remembered enough as creatures of perishable, aching flesh, daily facing the ordeal of choosing between moroseness and perseverance.

The attempt to do justice to the epic through which I have lived and in which I am still living appalls me. It is an international epic, greater than Homer's, gathered out of many ages and lands. Men of all intelligenceses, tastes, qualities, occupations, of every shade of religious and political belief, descendants of nearly every nation, including East Indians, Filipinos, Chinese and Japanese--loyal Americans all have their part in it.

The variety of their hands is infinite--hands hardened by manual labor, slender hands aquiver with thought; powerful nervous hands, hands meant for a violin, not a gun; hands pitifully defaces (sic) by burns, hands twisted and mutilated by indomitable. (sic) These hands, pulsing with emotion--moist, hot, cold--seemed trails crossing and recrossing my palm of a vast exodus from one era into another. "Does it not make you sad taking all those hands scored with pain and fatigue?" I was once asked. "No," I said decidedly. "I love the courage throbbing through them, their irrepressible humor, their responsive comradeship."

And their faces? There was no homogeneity. Out of the thousands I have touched so as to read their lips no two were alike. Apart from any race pattern, they presented an ever-changing play of shape, feature and emotion to my finger-eyes. Most were sensitive.

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Some were ruggedly handsome, others delicately so. As I moved from bed to bed--and Polly and I walked miles every day--whimsical faces, set lips, the indescribable finger-picture of incorrigible joker, countenances drawn with pain, expressions of manly pride or thoughtful humility shifted tantalizingly under my observation. Faces of aliens were especially appealing in their response when I spoke a few words (alas, how brokenly) in Italian, French or Spanish.

Although I could stop for only a little while with each soldier, their words were eloquent to my imagination. My thoughts jumpped (sic) over land and sea as I heard the various fronts mentioned. I was dumb in the midnight silence under which the giant armada put troops ashore in North Africa-- shaken by the explosion that blew this or that soldier out of a ship; I was traversing the icy wastes of the North Atlantic or creeping through the tropical jungle--crouching stunned with the infantry in a universe of smoke and dust and dreadful sound as air raids shook the earth--marching with fighters in the desert--straining up the mountains of Italy--enduring deadly loneliness on the bleak Aleutians--shut in with emaciated prisoners of war in Germany. Deep beneath what they said their modest and valiant souls gleamed as stardust.

I found the boys not so anxious to talk about their illness as to have their war experiences understood, the agony and exultation they had borne, the everhaunting homesickness. I think there has not been such mass homesickness. (sic) in history. More than ever I was glad of the years I had journeyed back and forth through the cities and along the rivers of the United States; it was such a pleasure for the men to hear some one (sic) speak of the places where they live, to understand how "sick for home" they were.

Always there were tears in my heart as I vibrated to their pathetic relief at being far from the horrible cataclysm of blood, sweat and fear through which they had gritted their teeth for so many months. Humbly I considered how little most of us civilians appreciate the ordinary comforts and charms which are life-saving boons to the service men so long torn away from natural conditions, like seaweeds from the rocks--nice beds, regular meals, quiet to wrap themselves in, pleasant objects to look at in soft light, the coziness of dry clothes and shelter from violent heat or cold, even delicate whiffs of perfume. Again and again the men would say "How pretty your blouse is" or "What a happy look in your blue eyes." Polly and I always felt repaid for trying to put fresh touches to our appearance and to be serene under sudden tests.

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One man spoke of having his sweetheart near; another of his concern about the job he had left for the front and wanted to take up again. Or perhaps it was the baby he had not seen or the woods and streams where he wanted to go hunting or fishing. Again one was eager to resume his college education or jump into the arena of political discussion. We found men surrounded by their fam-lies (sic) in happy reunion. The brightness with which the amputees welcomed us when Polly and I ate with them or watched their cleverly adapted games and muscle-building exercises in bed or gymnasium consoled me for the pain I could not escape when I thought of my imperfect speech when I wanted my message to reach them in inspiring tones.

Often it was not verbal encouragement that was asked of me, but a kiss or the laying of my hand on a weary head. This always made me feel as if I were partaking of a sacrament. A patient, appealingly young, came up to rest his head on my shoulder and was silent for a moment, evidently bracing himself for a new try at life. A drop of sweetness stole into my grief over the paralyzed as they tried to put their wasted arms around me, not always successfully, but their wish was a benediction I shall treasure forever.

A boy of 18 on his way to the operating table said he knew he would come through all right after I had embraced him. Another to whom I wished speedy recovery after an operation said, "I don't want your wishes, but your love," and seemed cheered by my assurance that he had it. Another soldier, obviously dying, held my hand as if I had been his mother. One said, "My, I had not had a kiss like that in years. My mother used to kiss me that way."

The courage of these soldiers is the highest kind I have found among the handicapped. We who have long faced deafness and blindness are not conscious of the restraints and denials which have fallen upon these boys all in a heap, as it were. Yet sometimes they would ask me, "What gives you the courage to go on?" I answered, "The Bible and poetry and philosophy." When they asked, "How do you feel when God seems to desert you?" I had to answer, "I never had that feeling."

Veritably I have explored the foxholes of limitation in which the stricken ones of the war fight on and I know there is no darkness that does not open to a prospect of coming victory over the crippling, separative effects of life-harming wounds and illnesses. Miracles of reconditioning have been wrought by the inventiveness and skill of surgeons and the alert devotion of staffs. From first-hand knowledge I can say that the war blinded and deafened are being re-equipped for public service and self-support to an extent unparalleled in the history of rehabilitation.

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These two branches of retraining are the more inspiring because they are freeing the patients from all thought of humilitating (sic) charity or segregation. Medical staffs today are alive to the patient's dread of being isolated, even for his own best interests, in special institutions or colonies and to his desire to take his chance with the able-bodied in the world of affairs and enjoy their natural ways like everyone else.

The success of each division of the handicapped illustrates the rest and the day draws nearer when the disabled everywhere will be elevated to responsible citizenship. This springs from fearless experimentation, social conscience and the cooperation of science, medicine, surgery and the art of teaching. In fact, the colossal corps of medical men drawn together by the war has effected a dramatic resurrection in the art of healing.

When one considers the enormous battery of enthusiasm, forward-looking thought and hgh-grade (sic) skill these surgeons and doctors constitute, one is overwhelmed by its potential influence. Not only will its energizing sparks fly through our entire civilian life in this country, they will also travel beyond our frontiers until they encircle the earth. Multiplied as an international flame, they will be as persuasive as the sun's warmth, ultimately burning up the stale traditions and ignorance that keep people exposed to disease and their handicapped mostly a social rubbish heap. Then indeed shall the Gospel of the Beloved Physician ripen in fulfillment, "Be thou whole."