The Queen of Savannah

Tonight, we walk the streets of Savannah with royalty. Traffic does not part when she walks by. Her unwitting subjects, trudging along the sidewalks, do not pay her a genuflecting glance. When they see her, they do not even recognize her sacred station. But they smile just the same. For one cannot help but smile at royalty.

Her sovereign vestments are made of cotton and denim. Her robe, of spun atmosphere. Her jeweled crown, invisible to the human eye. But she is royal nonetheless.

Her name is Maddie. Or as we like to call her, “Your Majesty.”

Her Grace stops at a crosswalk to wait for a string of traffic to pass before crossing Habersham Street. She is smiling at each car that passes, for no reason at all. It is Sunday evening, and for no explainable reason, she is happy.

“Why are you so happy?” I ask Her Excellency as she monitors the traffic situation.

Maddie cannot hear me speak, of course. She is deaf. But she has trained herself to feel vocal vibrations and read lips. The random vibrations she senses, she associates with mental colors. The colors help her earmark all sounds and place them into categories. It is in this way that Her Highness can identify different noises. She can, for example, tell the difference between the deep-purple thrum of an A/C unit and the bright-red explosion of a dog barking.

She replies to my question after sensing the peach-colored vibrations from my voice and reading my lips with her one good eye.

That’s another thing. Her Highness’s left eye was removed because of glaucoma complications. Her right eye has glaucoma, but right now it works fine. The bad eye was giving her migraines.

Maddie spent her teens in a murky depression. Sometimes Maddie wouldn’t get out of bed for six days, paralyzed by the encroaching void. She was not ready to be blind and deaf. She was not ready to be locked in a dark and silent room for the rest of her life. But fate so often has other plans. Maddie is twenty-two.

“I tell my friends that I am three-quarters Helen Keller,” she says.

Her Eminence laughs as we cross the street in tandem. “Don’t get me wrong,” she adds. “I respect Helen Keller, and I admire her. But I don’t want to BE her.”

Helen Adams Keller spent her entire youth learning to speak. She passed her teenage years taking lessons, six days per week, fighting just to use her voice. All Helen ever wanted to do—her highest aspiration in this life—was to simply have a conversation.

Helen’s lifelong friends, Anne and Polly, initially discouraged her from learning to speak, saying it was a waste of her precious energy. But Helen had a mind of her own. In her career, Helen delivered speeches to millions, she was a regular on the vaudeville circuit, and she could carry on vocal conversations with groups of people. She, too, could hear vocal vibrations.

But even Helen could not compete with Her Illustrious Highness. Maddie is able to sense passing airplanes, approaching vehicles, babies crying, distant sirens, and she is able to understand people speaking who are standing behind her. All from the subtle tremors of air against her skin.

She is still in chronic pain from migraines, which have never entirely left her. And heavier than the pain is the constant quiet, a constant state of readiness she must live in—the heavy knowledge that any day, without warning, her right eye might finally fail her. She is a twenty-two-year-old girl who memorizes the faces of her friends, just in case tomorrow her world goes dark.

“I am in pain all the time,” she says, standing beneath the glow of a streetlight. “But I refuse to focus on pain anymore. You become what you think about. I am more than my pain.”

Maddie is a senior at Georgia Southern. She is on the dean’s list. She is working toward earning her master’s in creative writing. Maddie has almost finished her first novel.

She also directs and produces theater productions at Georgia Southern. In addition to this, Maddie works as a professional historic tour guide in Savannah, leading long tours for sighted and hearing people. And, not that anyone’s counting, Maddie also sings and performs in local productions.

“How do you SING when you can’t HEAR?” I ask Maddie, as she guides us through Colonial Park Cemetery.

Her Highness smiles at me. “Hard work.”

I’ve met a lot of people in my career as a writer. Some names you’d recognize. Most you wouldn’t. But I’ve never met anyone like Her Grace. I’ve never met anyone standing so close to the edge, whose mind and spirit remain so brimming with unquenchable joy.

“I have bad days,” she explains, “just like anyone else. There are some days that the pain is pretty bad, and things just suck. But I made a choice a long time ago, I said to myself, ‘This is MY life. There’s a lot I can do. I can choose to be sad, or I can get out there and live and make friends.’”

And make friends she does. Maddie cannot go anywhere without finding new friends. Maddie is the kind of person who goes out to eat and exchanges numbers with the entire wait staff before she leaves the restaurant.

She is the Queen of the Forest City, but her people knoweth her not. She walks among her people, hidden beneath the cloak of a common woman.

But her true identity cannot be hidden for long. For when she encounters strangers, a light comes into their eyes, and they recognize a latent power within this young woman. A unique and precious gift. The defiant power of happiness. This world has tried to take everything from her. But Maddie wins everyone over by refusing to frown.

“Happiness,” Maddie says. “That’s my only trick to life. I learned a long time ago, there are only three things I can’t do with my condition: I can’t be a doctor, I can’t be an astronaut, and I can’t be in the military. Other than that, I can do whatever I set my mind to. And I set my mind to be happy.”

Long live the Queen of Savannah.