Sometimes Important Details Aren't Printed in the History Books

from Tell Your Heart to Beat Again:


In an asylum that dealt with severely mentally retarded and disturbed individuals was a girl called Little Annie. Totally unresponsive to the staff's many attempts to help her, she was finally confined to a cell in the basement of the asylum and given up as hopeless.

One of the workers, however, spent her lunch hours in front of Annie's cell, reading to her and praying that God would free her from her prison of silence. Day after day, this woman came to Little Annie's door, but the little girl made no response.

Then, many months later, the little girl began to speak and, amazingly, within two years she was told that she could leave the asylum and enjoy a normal life. But Little Annie chose not to leave, and instead stayed on to work with other patients.

Nearly half a century later, at a special ceremony to honor her life, Helen Keller was asked to what she would attribute her success at overcoming her handicaps. She replied, "If it hadn't been for Ann Sullivan, I wouldn't be here today."

Ann Sullivan, who tenaciously loved and believed in an incorrigible blind and deaf girl named Helen Keller, was Little Annie.