No joke.

So I was hanging out in a local coffee shop the other night when I overheard some young folks telling Helen Keller jokes. You know me. I felt impelled to deliver a political lecture. But before I delivered the lecture, I needed to check my facts. So I looked up Helen Keller on Wikipedia.

It didn't surprise me to learn that Keller was the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor's degree. And I thought I already knew that "Keller was well traveled and was outspoken in her opposition to war. She campaigned for women's suffrage, workers' rights, and socialism, as well as many other progressive causes." That was exactly the piece of information that I was looking for.

But then I read further. We've all heard the story about how Anne Sullivan taught Keller to understand the concept of language. But before there was Anne Sullivan, there was Martha Washington (and we're not talking about the first First Lady) :

Helen Keller was not born blind and deaf; it was not until she was nineteen months old that she contracted an illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain," which could possibly have been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left her deaf and blind. At that time, her only communication partner was Martha Washington, the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who was able to create a sign language with her; by the age of seven, she had over sixty home signs to communicate with her family. According to Soviet blind-deaf psychologist A. Meshcheryakov, Martha's friendship and teaching was crucial for Helen's later developments.

By Keller's own account, she was downright mean to the companion to whom she owed so much:

In those days a little coloured girl, Martha Washington, the child of our cook, and Belle, an old setter, and a great hunter in her day, were my constant companions. Martha Washington understood my signs, and I seldom had any difficulty in makingher do just as I wished. It pleased me to domineer over her, and she generally submitted to my tyranny rather than risk a hand-to-hand encounter. I was strong, active, indifferent to consequences. I knew my own mind well enough and always had my own way, even if I had to fight tooth and nail for it.

I did some web searching to find out more about little Martha Washington, and didn't find much beyond Keller's description and the mention in Wikipedia. I did, however, find a long essay about Keller in the Journal of Southern History. In this essay, Kim E. Neilson explores "The Southern Ties of Helen Keller." What emerges is a complicated and interesting portrait of a Keller's position as a disabled southern white woman from a powerful Confederate family who often challenged "southern gender and racial traditions."

Neilson notes that as a child, "Keller maintained her tyranny (over Martha Washington) with the threat of personal violence, but that aggression was simply a part of and enabled by the much larger racial realities of post-Redemption Alabama." Her northern tutor Anne Sullivan exposed Helen Keller to ideals of racial equality. Keller's education at Radcliffe College further radicalized her. Sometimes she took bold stands against racism. Sometimes, giving way to family pressure, she backed away from those bold stands.

In her brilliance, in her struggle to live as a whole person in a world that wanted to patronize and control her as a disabled person and a woman, in her bravery as a human rights activist, and yes, in her failures to live up to her own ideals, I find the real complicated Helen Keller more inspired than the cardboard heroine and butt of stupid jokes that is sometimes presented to us. Helen Keller gives me hope that I myself, sometimes brave, sometimes brilliant, sometimes failing to live up to my own ideals, can also contribute to creating a free and equal world