The Irish Mom who gave her Son a Voice

Tragedy Leaves a Young Girl without a Family

“At the time many children were playing on the street as several women from the tenements sat on the pavement watching on. Yet within minutes the scene was one of screams and dust and rubble, seven people had been killed, dozens of people had been injured (eight seriously), and over a hundred people had been left homeless.” (James Curry, www.thejournal.ie, Sept. 2013)

Following the collapse of her home, eleven-year-old Bridget Fagan was alone. Not only was she orphaned, but she had lost her brothers and sisters as well. She was adopted by an uncle, and she lived with his family until her marriage, five years later. Orphaned at eleven, after suffering severe trauma and loss of loved ones, and married at sixteen, would not be considered the best preparation for managing a home nor for child rearing, yet Bridget Brown didn’t let this set limits for her. She began the process of bringing life into the world, again and again, year after year.

In another 14 years her 12^th child was born. He suffered from cerebral palsy. He would ultimately be one of over twenty children born to Patrick and Bridget Brown. The doctors’ prognoses were grim, but despite recommendations to put him in a home, she stubbornly chose to raise him herself. She was determined to treat him just like all the others.

He was carried throughout the home and propped up on pillows so he could be with the rest of the family, where he could observe all the household activities and share in with his siblings through family ordeals, their joys and sorrows, births of new children, and stories brought home from school. He was one of them. Mealtimes were especially spectacular.

In our house the great thing was food. To us children mealtime never came too soon. We’d all wait patiently till mother laid the table, then we’d make a bee-line for it. I [scrambled] between them on my bottom and usually [managed] to get there first by throwing myself across a chair to show it was engaged, till some of the bigger ones would lift me on to it. Then the fight began – to see which one of us would out-do the rest in eating… My mother or father would sit by me and feed me.

As was her custom with the other children, Bridget talked to him, she read to him, and she played with him. His brothers and sisters were instructed by their mother to do the same. They brought him with them as they went outside to play, pushing him along in a makeshift carriage. He loved that thing.

The old go-car was my chariot, and I went about in it like any royal king. It was an ugly, battered old thing that nobody ever treated well. It was always being kicked, knocked over, shoved about and trampled on. Everybody joked about it. But to me it was something lovable, almost human. It seemed to have some queer dignity of its own that nobody but I could appreciate. I called it Henry.

I had seen my first glimpse of out-door life sitting on its seat with the feathers sticking out of it. I can remember the wet wind on my face that day as they raced me along through busy streets. I can remember sitting in it as my brothers sat playing cards with their pals under a streetlamp on a dark winter night when the gutters on the road were running with water and the lamplight was reflected in them so that they looked like little rivers of gold in the dark.

Bridget continued to insist that her son was not an idiot. Then the first miracle happened. One day as the family was gathered around the fire and his older brother and sister were doing their homework, using chalk on slates, his uncontrollable body suddenly moved in a way that was to change his life.

“It was the chalk that attracted me so much. It was a long, slender stick of vivid yellow. I had never seen anything like it before, and it showed up so well against the black surface of the slate that I was fascinated by it as much as if it had been a stick of gold.

“Suddenly I wanted desperately to do what my sister was doing. Then – without thinking or knowing exactly what I was doing, I reached out and took the stick of chalk out of my sister’s hand – with my left foot.”

This ambitious five-year old had plunged, awkwardly, onto the road to reading.  His dedicated mother did not hesitate to join. This was the moment she had been waiting for. A sign. Seizing the opportunity, she got down on the floor next to Christy and drew the letter A, telling him to copy it. She held the slate still for him while he tried. With great difficulty he was able on the third try to draw one side of the letter, and half the other side. Even after the stick of chalk broke, he continued to struggle with the task, feeling his mother’s encouraging hand on his shoulder. And he succeeded in drawing a letter A with his left foot. In the days that followed Bridget continued to teach him to recognize, understand, and draw the other letters.

Christy’s handicaps were so severe, that he was never able to attend school. So, Bridget devoted every spare moment to teaching Christy how to read. An older sister helped when she was busy, and she used readers from the schools the others attended. When she wasn’t available, he would study his brother’s readers. One day he surprised his dear mother by writing something very special for her. He later recounted this as a second miracle. He spelled the word M-O-T-H-E-R on the slate. He was then seven years old.

Christy Brown later wrote about how he saw her at the age of five, in My Left Foot (1954). His ability to use words allowed him to communicate to others what it was like living in his body, from his very unique vantage point. His descriptions are seeable.

“While my father was out at bricklaying earning our bread and butter for us, mother was slowly, patiently pulling down the wall, brick by brick, that seemed to thrust itself between me and the other children, slowly, patiently penetrating beyond the thick curtain that hung over my mind, separating it from theirs.

“It was hard, heart-breaking work, for often all she got from me in return was a vague smile and perhaps a faint gurgle. I could not speak or even mumble, nor could I sit up without support on my own, let alone take steps. But I wasn’t inert or motionless. I seemed indeed to be convulsed with movement, wild, stiff, snake-like movement that never left me, except in sleep. My fingers twisted and twitched continually, my arms twined backwards and would often shoot out suddenly this way and that, and my head lolled and sagged sideways. I was a queer, crooked little fellow.”

Bridget’s son began a journey through books which continued throughout his life. Reading was his preferred pastime. It was his exposure to the world beyond his neighborhood. As he learned to speak, though quite awkwardly, and difficult to understand, he was a great conversationalist, as though he had grown up in the most sophisticated of households. His knowledge and education, in areas that interested him, extended beyond the education he might have been given by the local schools. Bridget had provided a way out for him. He was liberated by reading and writing, and his skills expanded far from that humble beginning.

Using agility, which he had developed in his left foot and toes as he practiced the writing portion of his mother’s lessons, he began to paint. This skill was practiced and hone into a demonstration of artistic ability that began to match the abilities of recognized masters. His paintings were not ordinary. With the help of others, they began to be shown through outside exhibits. They were ultimately admired by viewers around the world. But that was not all.

Christy was given a typewriter, and he began to write. In 1954 he published his autobiography. This book inspired the screenplay for an award-winning movie by the same title, and some of his paintings were featured there. Paintings and books became his livelihood, and he was able to help provide for his mother and siblings after his father’s death.

Among his writings are many poems, and among the poems is one written in honor of his beloved mother, Bridget Brown. It was written to be read at her funeral – a literary masterpiece. An homage so well deserved by this amazing woman, whose love and energy catapulted her once helpless son into fame and a livelihood – the fulfillment of her goal for him. Independence.

For My Mother, by Christy Brown

Only in your dying, Lady, could I offer you a poem.  

 So uncommonly quiet you lay in our grieving midst

your flock of bereaved wild geese

pinioned by the pomp and paraphernalia of death

for once upon a rare time wordless

beyond the raw useless grief of your nine fine sons

The quiet weeping of your four mantled daughters

gathered in desperate amity around your calm requiem hour

and almost I saw you smile in happy disbelief

from the better side of the grave.

Only in your dying, Lady, could I offer you a poem.

Never in life could I capture that free live spirit of girl

in torn and tattered net of my words.

Your life was a bruised flower

burning on an ash-heap

strong and sure on the debris of your broken decades

unwilting under a hail of mind-twisted fate

under the blind-fisted blows of enraged love

turning ever toward the sun of a tomorrow

you alone perceived beyond present pain.

Only in your dying, Lady, could I offer you a poem.

You were a song inside my skin

a sudden sunburst of defiant laughter

spilling over the night-gloom of my half awakenings

a firefly of far splendid light

dancing in the dim catacombs of my brain.

Light of foot and quick of eye for pain

you printed patterns of much joy upon the bare walls of my life

with broad bold strokes of your Irish wit

flaming from the ruins of your towers.

Only in your dying, Lady, could I offer you a poem.  

 With gay uplifted finger you beckoned

and faltering I followed you down paths

I would not otherwise have known or dared

limping after you up that secret mountain

where you sang without need of voice or words.

I touched briefly the torch you held out

and bled pricked by a thorn from the black deep rose of your

courage.

From the gutter of my defeated dreams

you pulled me to heights almost your own.

Only in your dying, Lady, could I offer you a poem.

 I do not grieve for you

in your little square plot of indiscriminate clay

for now shall you truly dance.

O great heart

O best of all my songs

the dust be merciful upon your holy bones.

Coming next: Chapter Six —  The Mountain Girl 

from Dyslexic no More: Saved by the ABC’s

by Meg Rayborn Dawson (homeschooling mom of 9)

MS, Exceptional Student Education (Univ. of W. Florida) emphasis on Applied Behavior Analysis

MA, psychology (Grand Canyon University)

Bachelor of Arts (Northwest Nazarene University)

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