How He Did It

It may be remiss of me, now that I’ve brought you up past the point of high school graduation in Samuel W. Bean’s story, to neglect explaining just how Sam managed to turn his life around. After all, not only is it challenging to learn how to communicate, once having lost both the ability to see and hear, but it is also difficult to overcome that sense of anger and bitterness over what had happened to an otherwise healthy young person in such a formative stage of life.

Think about it for a minute. Sam’s twin challenges could have been stumbling blocks for many people. At the very start, it would be difficult to apply teaching techniques aimed at either the newly-blind or the newly-deaf, because the skills necessary to acquire one would be negated by the recent loss in the other. Sign language, after all, is a language made to be seen.

Apparently, Sam floundered in his progress at the first. This may have been due partly to his own response—and can you blame him?—to what had befallen him. But it also had to do with the fact that no educator seemed to know how to handle his case. While Helen Keller’s story comes immediately to mind—for us, removed by decades from the famous saga of Anne Sullivan’s intervention—at the time of Sam’s injury, these were not training techniques widespread in the West.

Sam’s Annie Sullivan turned out to be a young blind instructor, herself, by the name of Mary White Eastman. Born in Michigan in 1870 to a father with family roots in Maine, Mary was a resident of San Francisco when she graduated from the Berkeley school in 1892. Not possessing any academic credentials other than a strong sense of determination and a native ability to teach, Mary White Eastman devoted many years of service to the blind, both at the California School for the Deaf and Blind, and in other capacities.

So, how did she do it?

An article—once again in the Oakland Tribune, this time on May 5, 1918—explained Miss Eastman’s technique.

            Months of patient application…succeeded in teaching the boy a system of “talking,” which combined the deaf alphabet with a code made up of Morse telegraphic tappings communicated from the hand of the teacher to that of the pupil. In this way Sammy Bean now talks to a half dozen or more people, while others communicate with him by tracing the outlines of ordinary letters of the alphabet on the palms of his hand.

Before that moment in which Sam found his way out of his own personal prison, he was trapped without any way to communicate with others, no matter how much they might have cared for him.

            It was Miss Eastman who gave Sammy his first communication with the world after the latter suffered the accident which robbed him of two of his faculties. For two years the boy, then a child of 13, had no intercourse of any kind with the world. Although surrounded by loving relatives and friends, they found no way to penetrate his deafness and his blindness.

Approaching the date of his graduation from the California School for the Deaf and Blind, Sam wrote a poem which he dedicated to his teacher. He called it “Light in the Darkness.” The Tribune article which reprinted the poem remarked on his teacher’s “untiring efforts” which had “lifted him from the depths of despair to the heights of a happiness and contentment which he had never hoped to attain.”

Hyperbole? Perhaps. In Sam’s case, though, the despair may have indeed seemed never-ending—paving the way for such a boundless joy.

Beyond such dynamics, though, it appears there was more to the story than just the innovation of a communication technique that blended Morse code and finger spelling. Mary White Eastman brought much more to the education of this one Samuel Bean than just the ability to communicate once again.

Photograph above: Mary White Eastman with Samuel W. Bean; from Samuel Bean's booklet of poetry, "Light in Darkness," self-published in 1920; in the public domain.