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Describe Helen Keller’s early life before the advent of her teacher Miss Sullivan.

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Helen Keller was born on a plantation in Tuscumbia, Alabama on June 27, 1880 to Captain Arthur Keller. Her father was a former officer of the Confederate Army. Helen was the first baby in the family. The happy days didn’t last long. In the month of February came the illness that closed her eyes and ears. Except for some fleeting memories, all seemed like a nightmare. But during the first nineteen months of her life she had caught faint glimpses of green fields, sky, trees and flowers. The darkness that followed could not wholly blot them out. Her hands started feeling every object and observed every motion. She started making crude signs to communicate with others. A shake of head meant ‘‘No’’ and a nod, meant ‘‘Yes’’. A push meant ‘‘Go’’ and a pull meant ‘‘Come’’. At five, she learned and understood a good deal of what was going on about her. She could fold her clothes and wear them. She began to realise that she was different from other people. Her mother and friends didn’t use signs as she did but talked with their mouths. In those days, a little coloured girl, Martha, the daughter of her cook understood her signs. They spent a great deal of time kneading dough balls and feeding the hens and turkeys. Belle, her dog was her other companion. The family consisted of her father and mother, two older half-brothers, and afterwards, a little sister, Mildred. For a long time she regarded her sister an intruder as she had ceased to be her mother’s only darling.

Helen’s desire to express herself grew. Her failures to make herself understood was followed by outbursts of passion. Her mother’s only ray of hope came from Dickens’s ‘‘American Notes’’. She had read an account of Laura Bridgman who had been educated instead of being deaf and blind. At the age of six, Dr. Alexander Graham Bell advised her father to contact Mr. Anagnos, the director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston. Within a few weeks Mr. Anagnos gave a comforting assurance that a teacher, Miss Sullivan had been found to teach Helen. Naturally, the most important day in all her life was the one on which her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan came. It was the third of March, 1887. And ‘the light of love shone’ on her in that very hour.

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