if she was mute, why was Helen able to say 'wa'?

She wasn't mute, she was merely deaf and blind.


I have made enough faces.

Helen was a year and a half when she lost her sight and hearing. That is an extremely language-acquisitive age. She had understood what others said to her and had a small spoken vocabulary besides sign language -- she was already using signs for things before she had her illness! Annie reported that before she began working with Helen, she had over sixty signs and actually helped with simple housework. Laura Bridgman had a lot of words too and continued to vocalize LOUDLY all her life.

The one spoken word she retained after her illness was "wah" for water. She kept right on saying it until she learned the signs for it as you see in the play. Helen wrote about the "miracle" at the pump, but didn't say that she actually said "wah" there. Annie would have put it in her report to the Perkins School if she had. That is probably how she made the connection however -- the idea that the spelled signs -were- the object they named. She didn't stop having fits, like any kid, but at least she had a way to communicate, to let people know her thoughts and what she wanted, so she calmed down a lot.

She always had a great desire to speak and constantly put her hand over people's mouths -- one of her biggest frustrations. When she was ten, someone told her about a deaf-blind girl who had learned to speak "with her mouth", and she insisted on being taught to do so. There's a cute newsreel where Annie and Helen laughingly show how deaf-blind lipreading works and how she learned her first spoken words. I had a feeling they were both trying not to giggle.

Unfortunately this personal choice of Helen's aided and abetted the oralists who were trying to stamp out ASL or Sign for deaf education. There are books about that controversy, look up Gallaudet and a novel called In This Sign.

My paternal grandmother was born hearing but contracted scarlet fever when she was six and went deaf. Of course she had learned to talk by then, and remembered the sound of her voice. She was able to talk fairly intelligibly until the last couple of years of her life--that is, her speech was intelligible enough to family members who were used to the way she sounded.

Deaf people learn to talk by memorizing what their lips, tongue and throat feel like when they pronounce certain words. The real Helen would put her hand on the face of her companion (she had three in all, Annie Sullivan and two others after Annie died) and know what the companion was saying by feeling her facial muscles.