This is an excerpt from A Place of Knowing by Emma Lou Thayne


When I was a little girl, my father took me to hear Helen Keller in
the Tabernacle (in the 1930’s). I must have been about eight or nine
and I’d read about Helen Keller in school, and my mother had told me
her story.

I remember sitting in the balcony at the back of that huge domed
building that was supposed to have the best acoustics in the world.
Helen—everybody called her that—walked in from behind a curtain under
the choir seats with her teacher, Annie Sullivan. Helen spoke at the
pulpit—without a microphone—but we could hear perfectly, her guttural,
slow, heavily pronounced speech. She spoke about her life and her
beliefs. Her eyes were closed and when it came time for questions from
the audience, she put her fingers on her teacher’s lips and then
repeated for us what the question had been. She answered questions
about being deaf and blind and learning to read and to type and, of
course, to talk. Hearing that voice making words was like hearing
words for the first time, as if language had only come into being—into
my being at least—that moment.
Someone asked her, “Do you feel colors?”


I’ll never forget her answer, the exact sound of it—“Some-times
. .. . I feel . . . blue.” Her voice went up slightly at the end, which
meant she was smiling. The audience didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.


After quite a lot of questions, she said, “I would . . .. like to ask
. . . a fa-vor of you.” Of course, the audience was all alert. “Is
your Mormon prophet here?” she asked. There was a flurry of getting up
from the front row, and President Grant walked up the stairs to the
stand. She reached out her hand and he took it. All I could think was,
“Oh, I wish I were taking pictures of that.”


“I .. . . would like . . . ,” she said, “to hear your organ . . . play
.. . your fa-mous song—about your pio-neers. I . . . would like . . .
to re-mem-ber hear-ing it here.” All the time she was speaking she was
holding his hand he had given her to shake. I liked them together,
very much.


I remember thinking, “I am only a little girl (probably others know)
but how in the world will she hear the organ?” But she turned toward
President Grant and he motioned to Alexander Schreiner, the Tabernacle
organist who was sitting near the loft. At the same time, President
Grant led her up a few steps to the back of the enormous organ—with
its five manuals and eight thousand pipes. We were all spellbound. He
placed her hand on the grained oak of the console, and she stood all
alone facing us in her long, black velvet dress with her right arm
extended, leaning slightly forward and touching the organ, with her
head bowed.


Brother Schreiner played “Come, Come, Ye Saints,” each verse a
different arrangement, the organ pealing and throbbing—the bass pedals
like foghorns—as only he could make happen. Helen Keller stood
there—hearing through her hand and sobbing.

'
Probably a lot more than just me—probably lots of us in the audience
were mouthing the words to ourselves—
“Gird up your loins; fresh courage take. / Our God will never us
forsake; / And soon we’ll have this tale to tell— / All is well! / All
is well!” I could see my great-grandparents, converts from England,
Wales, France, and Denmark, in that circle of their covered wagons,
singing over their fires in the cold nights crossing the plains. Three
of them had babies die; my great-grandmother was buried in Wyoming.
“And should we die before our journey’s through, / Happy day! / All is
well! / We then are free from toil and sorrow, too; / With the just we
shall dwell! / But if our lives are spared again / To see the Saints
their rest obtain, / Oh, how we’ll make this chorus swell— / All is
well! / All is well!”


So then—that tabernacle, that singing, my ancestors welling in me, my
father beside me, that magnificent woman, all combined with the organ
and the man who played it and the man who had led her to it—whatever
passed between the organ and her passed on to me.


I believed. I believed it all—the seeing without seeing, the hearing
without hearing, the going by feel toward something holy, something
that could make her cry, something that could move me, alter me,
something as unexplainable as a vision or a mystic connection,
something entering the pulse of a little girl, something that no
matter what would never go away —all I know to this day is that I
believe.