I closed my eyes and took a few steps toward Helen Keller's pump last week.

You know the one. It's the pump, at Keller's Ivy Green birthplace in Tuscumbia, where Anne Sullivan poured water into the hand of 7-year-old Helen, spelling the word WATER on her palm. It was a breakthrough, the moment when Helen, deaf and blind since she was a toddler, learned to remember, and to imagine a future beyond her veil.

"Somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me," Keller would later write. "I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!"

It is a moment of hope and clarity and courage.

I closed my eyes because I wanted, just for a second, to put myself there, to fathom what it must have been like for this little girl in her dark and silent world. I couldn't do it. I'd already seen and heard too much. I knew the way.

Or thought I did.

Ivy Green

This place - Ivy Green - is remarkable on its own. It awakened Keller's soul, and she in turn awakened the world to possibility.

Ivy Green tells that story. It tells it well. But I couldn't help think - as the Alabama Legislature makes an issue of preserving monuments so that we may all learn from history - that it tells only part of it.

The tour guide tells of how Helen's grandfather, a Confederate brigadier general, built Ivy Green before the War. It sat on 600 acres, and was entirely self-sufficient, the story goes. Even the nails in the floorboards were forged out back. The family worked hard. For everything.

Which is ... blind. And deaf.

Because the family owned slaves before the war and used former slaves as labor when Helen was born. That they do not get as much as a mention now is - well it's only part of the story. Leave it out and you see only what you wish to see. You never get beyond your veil.

The story of Helen itself is only half told. There's much said about her childhood and the pump, about how she rebelled like a brat before Sullivan - with help from Alexander Graham Bell - arrived at Ivy Green.

It tells of the pump, and talks of her prolific writing. The guide points out the photograph of an aging Keller reading a Braille Bible. But she does not say much of Keller's life's work.

The tour - inexplicably -- tells little of Keller's effort to give women the right to vote. It says nothing of the way she spoke against war and those who made fortunes from it. It said nothing about her becoming a Socialist, nothing about her helping to found the ACLU, nothing about her pacifism or liberalism or concern for how workers were treated.

Helen Keller was blind. And deaf. And that's the story we tell.

Helen Keller was a fighter for humanity. And that we sweep under the rug.

The story of a 7-year-old at a pump is safe. So we call it history and act as if it is complete. Just like the Civil War, and statues of Robert E. Lee that stand, for much of the population, as monuments to bravery.

That stand, to others, as reminders of slavery.

I'm told, often these days, that if we don't learn from our history we are doomed repeat it.

If we don't open our minds to a complete history - if we don't let it awaken our souls and set them free, as Helen Keller's water did - we surely will.

Blindly.

John Archibald's column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.