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Posted by The on July 14, 2008, 9:56 pm
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`A graceful angel' at 112 years old
Sunday, July 13, 2008
LISA OSBURN
News staff writer
Living quietly in a state geriatric mental hospital, 112-year-old
Frank Calloway still spends most of his days drawing memories of his
earlier years.
Using markers and crayons, he creates vivid renderings of rural
Alabama during the 1920s and 1930s, capturing farm life with horses,
buggies, tractors and large houses. A notebook often sits beside him,
pages full of numbers that make little sense at first glance, but
after careful study, show the workings of an intriguing mind.
In the past, Calloway's work has been displayed in the Montgomery
Museum of Fine Arts and in the state Capitol in Montgomery. But soon,
a national audience will get a chance to view the folk art of one of
the country's oldest residents, a man who has lived in state mental
institutions for 60 years.
In October, the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore will
display 18 of Calloway's scroll pieces along with one of his notebooks
full of numbers, said Rebecca Hoffberger, founder and director of the
museum. Hoffberger goes around the world searching for artists who do
not follow other people's traditions, but invent their own, she said.
After hearing about Calloway's work, Hoffberger visited him in the
Alice M. Kidd Nursing Facility on the historic Bryce Hospital campus
in Tuscaloosa, where he now resides.
She was more than impressed by the man, his work and the peaceful aura
surrounding him, she said.
"I see everything, all around the world all the time, and let me say
we are very thrilled to have the honor of showing his work, to show a
little bit of his essence," Hoffberger said. "The man radiates a grace
and strength. He is like a graceful angel on this Earth."
And she believes he might be somewhat of a math genius.
`Genius intuition':
Hoffberger, a self-described math nerd, decided to take a closer look
at Calloway's notebook of numbers during her visit. Although the
columns - some as long as the page - are not traditional methods of
multiplication and addition, they compute, she said.
"He has a very amazing, genius intuition about math," Hoffberger
said.
She said she hopes Calloway, who looks far younger than his 112 years
and appears to be in good health, will be able to attend the opening
of his exhibit in Baltimore.
If that happens, a man who dresses in overalls and prefers horses and
buggies to any kind of motor vehicle will get his first ride in an
airplane.
Meanwhile, his caregivers and legal guardians have stopped selling his
artwork, which once went for $50 a drawing if Calloway did not give it
away first. They have been told by art experts that some pieces could
be worth thousands of dollars, said Zondra Taylor Hutto, a Tuscaloosa
lawyer appointed as his legal guardian.
Born in 1896:
Much of Calloway's life remains a mystery. Hutto said she knows very
little about Calloway before he was committed to a state mental
institution at age 55. The diagnosis listed at the time was
schizophrenia, and he was sent to live at Searcy Hospital in Mount
Vernon, at the time an all-black institution.
Medical records document his birthday as July 2, 1896, but a birth
certificate has not been found.
As with many Alabama mental patients during the 1950s and 1960s,
Calloway worked on a farm crew and performed other manual labor jobs
for the state. He often talks about working for the "boss man" and
didn't want to retire when he reached his 70s, said John Ziegler, a
spokesman for the state Department of Mental Health and Mental
Retardation. Caregivers made Calloway stop working.
"He would still walk to the bus stop every day," Ziegler said.
Alabama mental institutions during those times have been compared to
concentration camps, and conditions were dismal at best. By the time a
federal lawsuit was filed in the 1970s, Bryce housed as many as 5,000
patients and employed only three psychiatrists. Searcy was said to be
worse, and that is where Calloway lived before being transferred to
Bryce.
The scars of what had to be a hard life are not apparent today.
Calloway does not complain about his life before or after being
committed. The only regret he voices is his lack of education.
A Bible sits on his work desk, but he can't read it.
"I didn't went to school. I wanted to," Calloway said. "They kept me
in hard work. My daddy slapped me on that mule when I was little boy.
I get scared. But I stayed on that mule."
He suffers now from dementia, and time seems lost to Calloway.
Nedra Moncraif-Craig, facility director, said she has asked him if he
knows about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X. He doesn't.
"The television can be on all day," Moncraif-Craig said, pointing to a
TV just to the left of Calloway's workplace. "But he never watches
it."
Hutto said Calloway has a hard time comprehending that Moncraif-Craig,
a black woman, is in charge of the facility. He laughs and views
visiting white men as the "boss man."
"I never worked for a colored boss, always white," Calloway said. When
he makes a statement, he often backs it up with, "That's what my daddy
and white people told me."
`I'm an old man':
Calloway talks about growing up in Montgomery County, watching his
mother make quilts and admiring his father for his knowledge and his
travels "up north." He said his parents' names were Estell and Sam
Calloway, and his father died "before I was grown."
His descriptions of Montgomery are from a different era. "All you
could hear were wagons," he said about going to town. He talks often
about the labor jobs he worked all over the state and at least once in
Georgia, the only evidence that he ever left Alabama.
When asked how old he is, Calloway says, "I'm a old man, 115. I have
been blessed. My granddaddy lived to be 125. He said people way back
lived longer in the older days. He's black Creek Indian. His hair hung
way down around his waist, coal-black hair."
There are no documents to confirm Calloway's story.
His life in state care today is a far cry from what it once was in the
days of segregation and poor care for the mentally ill. The staff of
his nursing facility caters to him, bringing him markers, crayons,
notebooks, rolls of butcher paper and anything else he wants.
Hoffberger, who worked in the mental health field and whose mother was
in a mental health facility for 10 years, said Calloway's care was at
a level she had never seen.
"I'm very high on Alabama right now for the way they care for Mr.
Calloway," she said.
Fascinated by the ocean, saying that it is so wide people can't see
the other side and that the fish are big enough to eat a person,
Calloway got to see the Gulf of Mexico for the first time last year
during a trip Moncraif-Craig arranged. He said he had been asking
people his entire life to tell him how wide it was.
Now when he is asked about possibly visiting Baltimore in October, he
just smiles.
"That is probably beyond his understanding," Moncraif-Craig said. "We
really don't have any knowledge that he has been outside of this
state."
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