LEARNING TO READ BRAILLE

I learned to read and write Braille when I was ten years old. I learned by correspondence from Doris Goetz, the CNIB Home Teacher, who visited me exactly three times, brining a new book each time she came. It took me five months to learn the alphabet and all the contractions. It wouldn’t have taken so long had it not been for the fact that Doris wouldn’t give me the next book in the Braille Series until she came to visit. Nobody in my family learned. None of my teachers learned. Teachers’ assistants hadn’t yet been invented. Learning Braille was one of the easiest things I have ever done.

According to all the current wisdom, it shouldn’t have been easy. It ought to have been nearly impossible for me to learn to punch out the dots with a slate and stylus because you have to write each letter backwards. Blind children today are not expected to learn it. It should have been difficult for me to learn a couple of hundred confusing and inconsistent contractions. People have been arguing for decades about whether the contractions make it too difficult for blind children to learn Braille. When you follow that line of logic, you can only conclude that I must be brilliant. Nice thought, but there is absolutely no other evidence to support that theory. My grades were not the grades that win the scholarships.

So you might then conjecture that I must be very good with my hands. But if that were the case, you would think that I would be able to knit, or crochet, or sew neat hem stitches the way many blind women do. So let me set the record straight. My husband bought a crochet hook, and a crochet book with the idea of teaching me to crochet after he learned the basics. He made several lovely doilies before he conceded that my time could probably be better spent reading. And I take up knitting every fifteen years or so, just to see if time has somehow endowed me with coordination I was unable to demonstrate to Miss Darwood, the junior high dorm supervisor who moved on to easier projects after trying to teach me to knit. And as for neat hem stitches—well—if you use a bandage to secure your skirt hem, and you don’t wash that skirt very often, the bandage will stay in place for the life of the skirt. I probably would know this if I could stitch a decent hem.

So if we rule out brilliance, and we rule out good-with-the-hands, how can we explain such a phenomenon as learning Braille in five months by correspondence at age ten with no supportive adult presence? High motivation maybe? Well, maybe. But if we had kept all my old report cards from elementary school, I know you would read on one of them a grade D Minus in a category named Industriousness. The teacher who assigned that grade would have given me A in Lazy had the format offered her the chance.

It’s a bit of a mystery, why Braille was so easy to learn. I chalk it all up to genetics, to the reading gene in my family, passed on from Great Granddad Renshaw, to Granny Cookson, to Dad and down to me. Of course I don’t actually know if there is a reading gene, being more favorably disposed to psychology than to physiology. But I think there must be such a gene, activated into full and unstoppable motion when environmental conditions fall into place.

My reading gene had already been asserting itself for many years. I was actually literate before I learned Braille. That is to say I knew the words, and could type them on a typewriter. But my eyes would not follow the printed line and I was never able to read my own writing. I was, in fact, an explosive device without a fuse, a literate carrier of the reading gene lacking only a system that would enable me to read. The moment I was presented with the means—sentences to decipher, stories beckoning me toward their endings—braille rushed in to fill a vast emptiness, the way air overtakes a vacuum.

Perhaps this was also true for the young Louis Braille, the inventor of the code that bears his name. He lived in a society that did not expect him to read, did not even have a practical code that would enable him to read, but still he had this longing, this vacuum waiting for the air. So he invented a code, though he died young, and did not live to see it widely used, nor to savour the suspense in Braille books that he himself had not personally transcribed.

Like Louis, I did not notice a huge change at the moment when I finally knew how to read Braille. There were no Braille books in my school, or in my province, and the CNIB Library in Toronto had only a few ten-year-old-girl books to mail to an Alberta farm child. Nobody in my world could read the Braille I wrote. But—like Louis—I was pretty much thrilled to be able to read my own writing, and I did believe there would soon be books for me to savour.

This said, I will admit that things moved faster for me than they had for Louis. It wasn’t long before I got my hands on my all-time favourite book, Harper Lee’s To kill A Mockingbird. Every so often I would go to a restaurant and was presented with a braille menu. I met a man who learned to write braille so that he could write to me. Like Louis, I get to wishing that braille was easier to find, and easier to teach, and easier for some people to accept. But I think I can safely say it saved me a lot of time—just needing to learn the code without having to invent it.