Two became three a couple of weeks later, when Brown learned that the girls had a little brother. Two months after that, two more sisters, 8 and 9, moved into the Browns' six-bedroom farmhouse. "Whenever they said children needed a home, I said okay," she says. But those five kids were just the beginning. In the 53 years since, the supermom, who just celebrated her 90th birthday, brought a staggering 128 children into her home, a feat recently recognized with lifetime-achievement awards from both the United Negro College Fund and the Washington Child and Family Services office. "It's like love is being generated from her," says Emma Powers, a social worker in Washington. "You'd think she gave birth to all of them."
Brown gave even more than love. Working part-time jobs to supplement funds she received as a foster mother, she put quality clothes on their backs and self-respect in their hearts. She also put them to work—in the fields, around the house and on their schoolbooks. Many graduated from college; others pursued carpentry, nursing, accounting and enough other careers for a yellow-pages directory. "If I hadn't found Mary, I don't know where I would have ended up," says Betty Green, 60, who joined Brown at age 8. Brown gave Green her first guitar; Green's band Grandmother of Soul once appeared on Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee. "I taught my kids how to do everything," says Brown. "I saw to it that they had skills."
Brown, who grew up one of five children just down the road from where she now lives, learned selflessness from her own mother, Ida Pryor. During the Depression, Pryor, who cleaned houses, often gave food to poorer neighbors, though she and her husband, Charlie, a farmhand, had to struggle themselves. The neighbors would "come with buckets to take home potatoes and chickens," Brown says. "If they came for something she didn't have, she sent them to the store with money to buy it."
Brown was 18 and had only finished seventh grade when she married James (who died in 1987) and moved into his brick house on a 30-acre farm. While helping her husband raise chickens and cattle and grow vegetables, she also worked odd jobs as a hairdresser and seamstress, skills she would later put to good use. "Social services gave us only three dresses a year," Green recalls. "But Mary bought us new clothes and the best materials to make us dresses. She made us feel good." Says Brown: "People expect foster children to look like tramps, but mine looked good."
And stayed close. Rosemary Dent joined Brown at age 2. Now 42, she not only lives nearby and got married on Brown's birthday but recently became a foster mom herself. "If a stranger opened their house to you and loved you, you have to give it back," Dent says. Brown smiles with pride and says, "It made me happy that one of my girls realized how much those children really need somebody."
Russell Smith
Susan Gray in Pisgah
- Contributors:
- Susan Gray.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
