Okay, I have to admit that until about five minutes ago I had never heard the song called “Don’t Trust Her” that has the lyric that provides the title to this post, although I’ve seen references to it in a variety of places on the web. It seems a little odd, that lyric, since Helen Keller is probably one of the last people you’d associate with the half-naked gyrations of dancers in a video, but those guys seem a little weird anyway.
This is the REAL Helen Keller (along with her beloved teacher, Annie Sullivan) in a rarely-seen film clip from 1930 where Annie explains how she was able to teach Helen to vocalize by placing Helen’s hands on her face to let her feel the mouth and tongue movements and vocal chord vibrations. The clip culminates with Helen “looking” at the camera and speaking an entire phrase: “I am not dumb,” which she emphasizes very strongly with a shake of her head. The clip was posted over at BoingBoing this morning, and it caught my attention because I had never seen any footage of Helen Keller speaking.
Keller and Sullivan toured the lecture circuit extensively when Helen was a young woman. The story of her breakthrough with hand signs was a well-known and oft-repeated tale long before the dramatic reinterpretation of “The Miracle Worker”. Though they appeared in the more respectable venues of lyceums and lecture halls, the appeal of seeing Helen Keller in person was not far removed from vaudeville and freak shows as far as the prurient interest of the public went. They wanted to see the amazing blind-deaf girl, and her performance even included recitations and assorted “tricks” she would do, to the amazement of the crowd. Eventually, though, Anne Sullivan came to appreciate the realization that Helen was being exploited, and they ceased touring. As you can see and hear in the clip, Helen’s speech was very primitive and was generally not the way she communicated with people; close friends learned the hand sign language she used, and Sullivan would “translate” when they met new acquaintances.
