# The Backward-Walking Chicken That Got Top Billing
Before the famous stories, before the peafowl, before anyone knew Mary Flannery O’Connor as one of Georgia’s sharpest observers, there was a chicken in Savannah doing the wrong thing very well. It walked backward, which is a strange way for a bird to become a star, but apparently it worked.
Mary Flannery O’Connor spent her early childhood at 207 East Charlton Street, the house on Lafayette Square now preserved as the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home. When she was about six, she was still a little girl in that coastal city, not yet the writer of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” or “Wise Blood.” If she had a role that day, she later made it sound wonderfully simple: she was there to help the chicken.
The visitor was a Pathé News crew, and the subject was not a mayor, a parade, or some grand civic occasion. It was a bird with a peculiar gift.
The newsreel was called “Do You Reverse?” and the title alone feels as if it arrived with one eyebrow raised. You can almost picture the setup: the camera ready, the people watching, and the chicken, utterly unaware of show business, stepping backward as if it had misplaced something behind it.
O’Connor was in the film too, but she never let anyone forget who the real headliner was.
Years later, when she opened her essay “King of the Birds,” she remembered it with perfect comic modesty: “When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in the chicken’s life. Mine too probably.”
That sentence gives the chicken its due. It gives the child her place beside it. And it lets the grown writer smile at the whole business without puffing it up.
There’s a special kind of fame in being filmed beside a bird with unusual footwork. Plenty of children might have taken the attention as their own. O’Connor, at least in the version she chose to keep, stepped aside and handed the spotlight to the chicken. The bird had the trick. The child had the sense to notice.
Long before readers knew O’Connor for her fierce eye and strange, vivid stories, she was already standing near the odd thing, watching carefully. Noticing the creature nobody could quite explain. Seeing the comedy in it. Letting it be itself.
The chicken’s moment was brief, the way newsreel wonders usually are: a title, a few moving images, a child beside a bird, and then the reel moved on. But O’Connor kept the memory, polished by humor rather than vanity.
Later, at Andalusia, her family farm near Milledgeville, she kept peafowl by the dozens. They were louder, grander birds than that Savannah chicken, with feathers built for ceremony and personalities that did not seem shy. But the first co-star was humbler: a chicken going backward, making its small, ridiculous progress into public notice.
The child who stood beside the backward-walking bird grew into a writer famous for finding odd grace in ordinary creatures, and for knowing that the strangest detail in the room is often the one worth keeping.
The chicken got top billing, and Mary Flannery O’Connor didn’t seem to mind at all.