The Story of My Life: Chapter 1  Summary & Analysis

“With a kind of fear,” Helen Keller begins telling the story of her life. She has hesitated to “lift the veil” which has been lain over the story of her childhood, finding it difficult to communicate her earliest memories and impressions. As a grown woman, she finds herself rendering her childhood through the lens of her own present perceptions and ideas, and moreover finds that many of the emotions and memories from her younger years have lost their potency and poignancy. Having communicated all this to her readers, Helen vows to present only the “most interesting and important” episodes from her life over the span of her autobiography.

Helen writes that she was born on June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, a small town in northern Alabama. On her father’s side, she is descended from Swiss immigrants, and she notes that one of her Swiss ancestors was the very first teacher of the deaf in Zurich, Switzerland, and wrote a book on educating deaf children. Helen notes that though this seems like a coincidence, “there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.”

Helen writes that she is distantly related to Robert E. Lee on her father’s side, and that her father, Arthur H. Keller, was a captain in the Confederate Army. Her mother, Kate Adams, is her father’s second wife, and is many years younger than him. Her mother’s family hails from Massachusetts, but later moved to Arkansas, and her mother’s family, too, fought for the Confederacy during the war.

Up until the time of the illness which robbed Helen of her sight and her hearing, she lived in a “tiny house” on her father’s family’s homestead in Tuscumbia. The house was covered with vines, roses, and honeysuckle, and hummingbirds and bees buzzed around the façade all day long. The larger house on the property was called “Ivy Green,” and as a very young child Helen used to visit its gardens to calm herself in moments of sadness or temper.

The beginning of her life, Helen writes, was “much like every other little life.” She was an intrepid child and she had an “eager, self-asserting disposition.” She spoke at a very early age, impressing her parents and their friends, but after her illness, she retained the memory of only one word: water.

The “happy days” of Helen’s early childhood did not last long—they were dashed when one dreary February, Helen was struck by “acute congestion of the stomach and brain.” The doctor attending to her told her parents she would not live, but one morning, Helen’s fever broke. Her family rejoiced, unaware that their daughter would never see or hear again.

Helen believes that she still has memories of her illness. She recalls her mother trying to soothe her tenderly; she remembers tossing and turning in agony, and a hot, dry, feeling behind her eyes. All of these memories, though, are fleeting, and she wonders often if they are unreal or constructed. After her illness, Helen grew used to the silence and darkness which enveloped her, and even forgot that things had ever been different—until her teacher came, and “set [her] spirit free.” Despite the darkness in which Helen now found herself, she had caught glimpses of nature during her first nineteen months of life, and because she had seen fields, trees, and flowers even just briefly, she would not forget them.