Remembering Dorothy One Year Later

An Epilogue to Wednesdays with Dorothy

"A Year to the Day"

There may not be a specific time needed to complete grief work, but we often think in terms of one year to come to terms with our loss.  Within that year, of course, there is an initial time of intense grief followed by the ebb and flow of varying degrees of emotion. There are periods of intentional remembering and then there are moments in which a memory may be evoked by an event, a place, a conversation, or a simple object such as a cup of coffee.  Sometimes it is a seemingly coincidental encounter.

Just this week I was in a meeting at the hospital where I work. One of the supervisors at the hospital approached me and asked, “Didn’t you have a friend that you visited on our unit in Palliative Care?”

“Yes,” I answered, and then told him a little bit about Dorothy.

“Now I remember,” he said to me, “I read her story when she was on the unit. I was so moved by what that dear lady had been through. I remember she had a lot of friends from her church who came to visit. How was it that you knew her?”

I recounted to him how I had been with the St. Andrew’s Foundation for 12 years before I moved into the nursing field, and how it was during those years that I came to know Dorothy. I went on to tell him of my regular meetings with Dorothy to record her life story. That conversation and that chance encounter took place on April 16, exactly one year after Dorothy’s death.

A Therapeutic Endeavor

When I first began “Wednesdays with Dorothy” my purpose was to share her story in her own words. I knew I would share a little bit each week. Beyond that, I had no plan as to how long the series would take. I would simply share a little each week for as long as it took to tell her whole story. I had no idea at the time that I would bring the series to a close right on the heels of the anniversary of her death.

It was like an inner prompting. I knew that it was time to start sharing her story on my blog and so it was that on August 15, 2012, “Wednesdays with Dorothy” was launched. Being able to wrap it all up exactly a year after her memorial service (April 18, 2012) is an added confirmation that it all fell into place just as it was supposed to.

A Witness to the Realities of Social Services

It has certainly been therapeutic for me to recount Dorothy’s life on these pages. I hope it has been meaningful to those who have followed along each week.  My first intention was to share the voice of one who had witnessed an important time in our history so that others could hear from a different perspective.  Dorothy’s testimony gives us a view of how our society has handled mental health treatment over the years.  There were the years in which the mentally ill and the handicapped were warehoused behind the closed doors of institutions. We were able to hear, for example, Dorothy’s eye-witness account of what life was like inside Partlow State School and Hospital. Her account was much different from the glowing reports that Dr. William Partlow gave in public during the very time that Dorothy was institutionalized.

Dorothy’s life also coincided with the move toward de-institutionalization brought about by the Wyatt vs. Stickney decision in the federal courts. We were able to hear what she thought of the process of moving from the institution to the community. We heard what she liked and what she did not like about that transition. Above all, we were left with no doubt about the fact that Dorothy herself longed to be free from institutional life and loved her experience of having her own apartment in the community.

There were times when “the system” failed her. First there was the institutional life that took advantage of her higher functioning abilities within that population and kept her confined without the opportunity to realize other possibilities. There was the brief jubilation of freedom from institutional life as the State Mental Health Department was forced to comply with the federal court order to move residents to greater levels of independence. There was also the reality, in some ways as harsh as institutional life, that there were simply not enough resources in the community to serve everyone with mental health needs.  If Dorothy had had to rely solely on mental health services where case workers are stretched with incredible case loads, her life in the community would not have been so successful. 

Dorothy managed to keep an informal support group of friends in the community and at her church who helped her as she patched together her own system of services. The latter part of her life further symbolized the shortages of social services offered.  She was moved out of the division of Mental Retardation/Developmental Disabilities with the State Mental Health Department when she “tested out” of the mental retardation classification. The good news was that she had some case management services that allowed her to continue to live in her apartment. The bad news was that when it looked as though she would need more services, it meant getting onto a waiting list at a time when she needed immediate help. Fortunately for Dorothy, she had her network of friends to see her through during her final days.  Any parent of an adult child with disabilities can tell you that waiting lists are long, and services offered are few. We have gone from neglecting the needs of patients warehoused in the institution to unfortunate shortages of services in the community.

A Personal Milestone

My remembrances of Dorothy have also given me opportunity to recall my own life-changing encounters. When I began my work at the St. Andrew’s Foundation, it was a definite turning point in my life. My work in the group homes was a time to re-focus and to see things from an entirely different perspective. It enabled me to get off of a dissonant vocational track and to spend some time at a slower pace. I was able to learn some important lessons about life from people who live with disabilities.

I have told people that my job as Program Director at the St. Andrew’s Foundation was the best job I ever had – it was the best job in the world as far as I was concerned. I was in the middle of the life of St. Andrew’s parish, I was involved in meaningful social ministry, and I was working with people with whom there is no “putting on airs” – you have to be totally real and down-to-earth.  I grieved when the time came for me to move on with a nursing career, but I knew at the time that I needed to make the move into another field in healthcare.  Times change and the job that I saw as the best in the world does not even exist today since the the supervision of the group homes has been passed to the ARC of Jefferson County.   The St. Andrew’s Foundation served its purpose in its time, and I am proud to have been a part of it.

With my continuing friendship with Dorothy, I was able to stay in touch with that life that I had learned at the St. Andrew’s Foundation.  Dorothy and I shared that memory of life at the group homes, and we shared an on-going friendship.

"All Things Must Pass"

I don’t like the term “closure.” I’m not sure we do ourselves any good with the notion that we can close one chapter or event in our lives and keep it in some kind of box while we move on. I believe we widen our circle as we go along, dispensing with nothing, affirming everything that has occurred.  At the same time, I realize that everything changes. There is an impermanence to things that we must learn to accept. By telling the story of Dorothy Faye Burdette in “Wednesdays with Dorothy,” I have been able to let some other people know about her life and the things she endured as a person with disabilities. I have been able to celebrate the ministry of the St. Andrew’s Foundation. I have also been able to affirm a period in my own life that saw a restructuring in my personal philosophy of living. I will not close the lid on any of that, I will just acknowledge the passing of an era and look forward to what lies ahead. Though a life has come to an end, the ministry of St. Andrew's Foundation has passed the baton to others, a personal career has long since gone and new experiences have come into the field; I will try to hold the memories dear while I continue to widen the circle.  

____________

For Further Reading:

• Wednesdays with Dorothy: A Blog Series
• An Ordinary Life
• Form and Substance: How a Sonnet Changed My Life
• An Interview with Francis Walter

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Wednesdays with Dorothy: Freedom to Shop

(This is part of a series. For Table of Contents go here)

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One of the buildings at Partlow State School (photo by Naaman Fletcher)

Finding Appropriate Care

At the time of the Wyatt v. Stickney case, there were “over 3,000 residents living in overcrowded and inhumane conditions who had no legal alternative.”(1) Many of those residents were rather high functioning mildly retarded people who were even used by the mental health system to help run the institution. As Dorothy has recounted, they were called upon to help with the care of many of the severely handicapped residents and were enlisted to do the washing, cleaning, and cooking alongside employees and always without pay. Those at the "Boy's Colony" did the agricultural work that brought in income to the institution.(2)  It was these residents who surely knew that they were being denied options in life that they wanted to take part in.

On the other hand there were the severely handicapped residents who were warehoused and abused at the hands of poorly trained employees supervising the “high-grade” residents who participated in the care of the “low-grade” residents. In those days, parents of severely handicapped children were routinely advised by medical professionals that institutional care was the best option for their children, not realizing the detrimental warehousing conditions of those very institutions.

When I was Program Director at the St. Andrew’s Foundation, part of my duties included gathering information about new residents coming into our group homes. I will never forget the conversations I had with parents, almost always mothers, about their adult children with developmental disabilities. On one occasion, a mother described how she had been assured by the doctor that Partlow was the right place for her eight-year-old son, and how she watched as a staff person took her son’s hand and lead him away on the day he was admitted. My own daughter was around five years old at the time. I thought of how I could not bear to think of placing her, with her normal coping skills in some institution away from home, yet so many who lacked those very skills, were routinely institutionalized “for their own good.” We cannot minimize the hardships faced by parents of children with developmental disabilities. As a society we must offer resources to help. We must not, however, resort to insufficient means of caring for those children and their families.

Adventures in Shopping

Dorothy Burdette loved to shop, perhaps more than any other activity. When talking about her experiences at Partlow State School in juxtaposition to her life outside the institution, shopping was often the big comparison in her mind. At Partlow there was no freedom to leave the campus, no freedom to make decisions, no freedom to shop. Here are some of Dorothy’s adventures in shopping when she was finally able to leave the institution.

Dorothy Burdette

“Robbie worked at the group home. He made me mad one time. He said, ‘You owe me a cup of coffee, and I gave you a ten dollar bill.’ I said, ‘I didn’t ask for no money from you Robbie and furthermore, I don’t owe you no coffee! You owe me some!’ And later on he did get me a cup of coffee.

“What happened was, he took me to get something for my birthday, and he wouldn’t let me get it. It made me mad with him.  It turned out I didn’t have enough money – I was ten dollars short. We ended up going to Woolworth’s and getting some coffee.”

 “[When I needed to go shopping] I used to go downtown by myself half the time. I remember one time I went with Jim when he worked there. I got some of them week day panties and some of those soup labels – they used to make them like what came on Campbell’s Soup cans- and I got some of them. Cathy said they were for little bitty young ‘uns and I didn’t have any sense getting things that were not big enough for me. She told me I didn’t know how to buy the right size. It made me mad, and I told her, she didn’t know what I didn’t have, and I’d get what I wanted to and it wasn’t none of her business.”

 “I liked to make my own decisions about what I bought. When I was at Partlow, we couldn’t go out shopping, and we couldn’t make decisions about the clothes we wore or the things we bought. For our clothes, they would order cloth for the sewing room, then they would sew it into clothes and give ‘em to us. They had different staff that would come in and sew.”

 “Once I was at the group home, I went several times to shop and Cathy would always get mad. She’d say, ‘You always go off and leave us – you don’t wait for us.’ I’d get my cart and away I’d go. She said, ‘Can’t nobody keep up with you, you don’t wait on nobody.’ Usually they would take about two or three of us at a time when we went out shopping. I always went with who I wanted to. I didn’t much care for Cathy, she had a hot temper.”

“I liked the food better [at the group home] that at Partlow, and I liked that I could go with the group home staff to do the grocery shopping.”

“I remember my first Christmas in Birmingham. In the group home, we would go out to do Christmas shopping and to look at all the Christmas lights.”

_________

References cited:

1. The Legacy of Wyatt , http://www.mncdd.org/parallels2/one/video/wyatt.html
2. Penley, Gary, Della Raye: A Girl Who Grew Up in Hell and Emerged Whole (2002). Pelican Publishing, p. 71.

Photographs:

• The photo from Partlow State School was taken by Naaman Fletcher years after the institution was closed down. Naaman's photos are featured on his blog What's Left of Birmingham at http://leftbirmingham.blogspot.com/2011_12_01_archive.html .
• The photo of Dorothy was taken about the time she left Partlow. It was one she kept on her dresser in her apartment.

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Wednesdays with Dorothy: Moving into the Community

(This is part of a series. For Table of Contents go here)

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Dorothy Burdette
Photo taken near
the time she left Partlow

“I really enjoyed getting out of that place [Partlow] and coming down here. They were going to send me to Eufaula, but I’m glad they didn’t – I’m glad I come down here [to Birmingham].

We had to take Personal Hygiene when I was in Thomasville, and I mean it was something else. You had to get up, take a shower and wash your hair – then you had to pick out a nice dress and iron it before you put it on. You had to brush your teeth and they’d check your fingernails. I mean they really checked you out! Then we went to Home Ec. And that’s how I learned to cook when I was in Thomasville. They taught us how to keep house. They didn’t teach none of that at Partlow, they wouldn’t even show us how to use a can opener.

I was at Thomasville about a year to learn how to do things at home like iron and do laundry. They had a washer and dryer in the home where we were. I was 44 years old when I came to Birmingham to live at the group home at St. Andrew’s Foundation on April the 8^th, 1975.”

*    *    * 

  

I would like to digress briefly from Dorothy’s story to share some of my personal knowledge of the St. Andrew’s Foundation. It was a happy surprise when I came to St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in 1984 and subsequently discovered the St. Andrew’s Foundation group homes. When I started working there, my first job was as a live-in home coordinator. During that time I experienced a shift in my understanding of life and a change in the way I viewed the world around me. Everything from politics to spirituality was affected by my experience of sharing life with people with intellectual disabilities. I would later learn that the renowned Catholic priest and writer, Henri Nouwen, experienced a similar path during the last ten years of his life.

Philosophical Beginnings

After coming on board at the St. Andrew’s Foundation, I began to learn more of its origins in my conversations with Rev. Francis Walter, executive director and founder. Francis talked about how he had been involved with the civil rights struggle in the 1960s. As his work in that field was winding down, some nuns told him about a different avenue for civil rights that they were learning about in the L’Arche Community founded by Jean Vanier.  It was at the very time that the federal courts had ordered Partlow State School to deinstitutionalize residents who were capable of more independent living and the State Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation was soliciting help in providing community based group homes for institutional residents to move to.  

What Francis Walter may have seen in the L’Arche community is probably best described by their own stated philosophy: “At the heart of L’Arche communities are relationships between people with and without intellectual disabilities. A respectful relationship between people who treat each other as of equal value provides security, allowing for growth, personal development and freedom to become more fully the people we want to be. Most importantly, mutual relationships foster the acceptance of each person as a unique and valuable individual, whatever his or her abilities or disabilities.” (1)

The upshot was that the nuns went to Mobile, Alabama to form a L’Arche community and  Francis Walter was inspired to create a place where the mentally handicapped could come and learn to live a more normal life, based on some of the principles exemplified by Jean Vanier.  Homes were acquired in the neighborhood near St. Andrew’s Church, and a charter was organized for the establishment of the St. Andrew’s Foundation.

Harry Hamilton Remembers the Early Days

Harry Hamilton was Francis Walter’s right-hand man for years at St. Andrew’s Foundation. He was the first Program Director and eleven years later became Executive Director when Francis resigned to become rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. Harry recalls that “Francis made the decision to speak to the Department of Mental Health about operating group homes after hearing a public service announcement on the radio while on the road between Montgomery and Tuscaloosa in late 1973. His work with the Freedom Quilting Bee had come to an end, and he was familiar with Wyatt House in Tuscaloosa (Alabama's first group home). He was also aware that the Episcopal Diocese owned some old Victorian homes within walking distance of St. Andrew's Parish, so he spoke with the Rector, Maurice Branscomb, and the Bishop and then spoke with Department of Mental Health in Montgomery. All agreed to the arrangement and he signed his first contract with DMH in February of 1974.”

Harry began as Program Director at the St. Andrew’s Foundation in May of that year. He tells of how they began screening residents from Partlow and that the first ones moved in to the new group homes in the Fall of 1974. “From the beginning,” according to Harry, “Francis Walter’s intent was to take advantage of the fact that the homes were in walking distance of the church so that it could become the hub of a community for folks who would need considerable support in adjusting to life outside an institution. And that is exactly how things worked out. The church, also the location of our administrative offices, was an easy walk from the homes, as were grocery stores, pharmacies, the bank, and the bus stop. It was not without obstacles, but for many years this little community worked just as intended and thrived on Birmingham's Southside.”

Harry also recalls his first meeting with Dorothy Burdette: “After about a year of taking residents only from Partlow, we began screening people who had been moved from Partlow to Thomasville Adult Adjustment Center (an old Cold War radar site in our front line defense against a Cuban missile strike). Dorothy was among the first people screened from there. When Edsel Massey and I went down to pick her up we arrived late in the day and spent the night at the Jefferson Davis Motel, where Dorothy happened to be in vocational training at the time. So we had a chance to ask her supervisor a bit about her before actually meeting her the following day. Dorothy often talked about that first meeting and took pride in the fact that her supervisor hated to see her go. She also liked to tell the story of how she misunderstood Edsel's name as "Ediker" and she laughed with each retelling as if it was the first time.” (2)

The Concept of Normalization

Harry Hamilton may not have been present on the day of creation, but he arrived very soon on the scene and was instrumental in the formation of the unique training and habilitation community that characterized St. Andrew’s Foundation. Under Harry’s guidance, the training programs were put into place that would seek to create a normal community life for people who had endured institutional life for years. The underlying principle for the work at St. Andrew’s Foundation was normalization as set forth by seminal thinker and advocate, Wolf Wolfensberger. 

Wolfensberger was Director of the Training Institute for Human Service Planning, Leadership and Change Agentry at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York until his death in 2011 at the age of 76. He was a strong academic who greatly influenced the field of mental retardation and social services through such writings as The Principle of Normalization. Normalization has been described as “the acceptance of people with disabilities, with their disabilities, offering them the same conditions as are offered to other citizens. It involves an awareness of the normal rhythm of life – including the normal rhythm of a day, a week, a year, and the life-cycle itself. It involves the normal conditions of life – housing, schooling, employment, exercise, recreation and freedom of choice. This includes ‘the dignity of risk’, rather than an emphasis on ‘protection’.”(3)  Part of the dynamic of Wolf Wolfensberger’s work and achievement was that he drew inspiration from Jean Vanier and was involved in establishing the L’Arche community in Syracuse.

So it was a convergence of civil rights, a court order, and the spiritual/ philosophical insights of Jean Vanier that brought about the experiment that was the St. Andrew’s Foundation on Birmingham’s Southside. Next time we will hear more from Dorothy about her experiences there. As her story unfolds, we will also hear from Father Francis Walter about the beginnings of the St. Andrew's Foundation.

_____________

References cited:

1.  From the L’Arche Community website at 

    http://www.larche.org/a-l-arche-community-is-who-we-are.en-gb.21.0.news.htm

2. Harry Hamilton, personal communication, 11/25/2012.

3. Quote from “Misconceptions on the principle of normalisation,” Bank-Mikkelsen, Address to  

    IASSMD Conference, Washington, D.C., 1976, referenced in Wikipedia article on Normalization at  

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalisation_(people_with_disabilities)

Other internet references:

Henri Nowen and L’Arche: http://www.henrinouwen.org/Links/L_Arche/L_Arche.aspx

Jean Vanier: http://www.jean-vanier.org/en/home

                   http://www.larche.org/jean-vanier-founder-of-l-arche.en-gb.23.13.content.htm

Normalization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalisation_(people_with_disabilities)

Wolf Wolfensberger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Wolfensberger

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Wednesdays with Dorothy: Preparations for Leaving the Institution

(This is part of a series. For Table of Contents go here)

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Photo by Naaman Fletcher

In talking with Dorothy about life at Partlow State School, It sounded as though there were attempts in later years to enrich the lives of the residents through volunteer efforts.  It was the federal court, however, that mandated changes in the institution and insisted that residents be equipped for greater independence outside the institution. In the Wyatt v. Stickney case, United States District Judge Frank M. Johnson ruled that residents at Partlow State School were being denied their constitutional right to treatment. There was some stark and shocking eye-witness testimony entered in those court proceedings back in 1971. Here are a couple of examples:

“I think if you walk through Partlow, you can see. . . the effect – the people who begin to become involved in eccentric mannerisms, the rocking back and forth, peculiar behavior mechanisms, the people who sit in a semi-stupor in a place, without any activity, the people who slowly deteriorate and turn to the simple elements of human behavior .... We have ample documentation in this country that individuals who come to institutions and can walk stop walking, who come to institutions and can talk will stop talking, who come to institutions and can feed themselves will stop feeding themselves; in other words, in many other ways, a steady process of deterioration.”

“The food was slopped out unceremoniously by the working residents. There was a kind of a cake ... as part of the meal, and it was handed out by the working residents using their hands and dropping it on the trays. There were no knives or forks. Many of the residents ate with their hands ....”

                                           (The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 84: 1338, 1975 footnote, p 1350)

So it was that the landmark case in federal court would set the wheels in motion for Dorothy and many others like her to find a fuller life outside the institution. This is how Dorothy describes those transitional times:

Sponsors

At Partlow we couldn’t even go off the premises. It was that way for years and years until the Shriners – I think that’s what you call it – they started getting it together where we could go out and have more privileges than we did. Sometimes we didn’t have much privileges.  I had a case manager who used to take me up to the canteen and take me out for coffee and everything.

Partlow columns

I remember the first time I went out with somebody. I went out with another girl’s sponsor. We went to some place in town. We had lunch at this restaurant and the plates would be sent out on a conveyer belt. It went so fast you’d have to get you plate off or it would run off on the other end. I well remember that. Then after I come down here she wrote to me.

Sponsors wrote to you and got your packages out on Christmas or Thanksgiving; Easter or Valentines. They’d take you out sometime or sometime they would just send you cards.

Getting Us Ready to Leave Partlow

Partlow staircase

I went for a little while to rehab and that was how I got out. The day they said I could leave, I was so glad I didn’t know what to do. They sent me down to Thomasville to that Thomasville Resource Center.  I think I was down there a year and a half. 

It was alright, I lived in a house and then they moved me to another house with three more people. I stayed down there a long time.  I was there two or three months. They put me to live with an older couple. I didn’t want to stay with them and I ran away. In a day or so, they came and took me back to Thomasville. I had a job at a little old motor court. I had to change beds, and mop and sweep. They paid me about $10. That was the first time I got paid for doing work.

I went to a cooking class when I was in Thomasville, and I had to learn how to use a coin operated laundry when I first came to live in the group home [at St. Andrew’s Foundation in Birmingham].  Then I got to interview with Jim and Harry and I got to come to Birmingham.  The house I was supposed to move into caught fire, and that delayed me, then I had to wait another long time.

We had to get on a school bus when we went shopping. We would go about 12 miles to ride to the Delchamps grocery store. There was a restaurant called Delmars. We couldn’t go there unless somebody took us. I think I’ve really really been down the grist mill.

Inside an empty room at what was Partlow State School

_______

Work cited:

“The Wyatt Case: Implementation of a Judicial Decree Ordering Institutional Change,” The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 84: 1338, 1975.

About the Photographs:

The pictures above were taken by Naaman Fletcher on the premises of Partlow State School years after the institution was closed down. They are featured on his blog What's Left of Birmingham at http://leftbirmingham.blogspot.com/2011_12_01_archive.html .



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Wednesdays with Dorothy: A Brief Reprieve in the Outside World

(This is part of a series. For Table of Contents go here)

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Picture post card of downtown Sylacauga, Alabama, circa 1940s

By Dorothy’s recollection, she was given an opportunity to leave Partlow State School in 1950. She would have been nineteen or twenty years old and by that time would have spent half her life in the institution. By her description, this seems to have been a trial run at living in the community to see how she might handle life outside the institution. She describes going back to Sylacauga to live with her legal guardians, the ones who and been responsible for her care for a short time after her mother had died and her father went to prison.  Here is how Dorothy told the story:

Then I got out in 1950. My legal guardians got me out. I wasn’t too used to them. Somehow, he walked in and I was fixin’ to get ready to go to bed. I said something and I run him out of the room or something – I don’t remember how it was – and I heard my legal guardian say to him, “I don’t know what we are going to do with Dorothy.” And he said to her “You watch how you speak to her, she’ll get mad some night and set this house afire.” I was listening at ‘em talkin’ but I didn’t say nothin’.”

Outhouses were not uncommon
 in rural Alabama in the 1950s
(photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

One morning I got up and made me some coffee. She didn’t like me to get up before she did. They didn’t have an inside bathroom. To go to the bathroom you had to go out through an old porch then got on through the yard to an old outhouse. So I went out there and stayed, then I came on back [to the house]. She asked me what did I go out there for, and I said, “What do you always go for?” She told me not to get smart with her, and I told her I wasn’t trying to get smart with her.

They had one of these homemade toilet seats and it had three holes cut out in it. Back then we didn’t have toilet paper, not very much, and we had to use old brown paper sacks and old newspaper. There was a girl I knew [at Partlow] – I used to love to write her letters for her – she had a song that she used to play on the record player, back when they first got them little records. The song was “Don’t tear that little brown building down.” She played that over and over. It was about an old country toilet. I didn’t know it and I’d make her play it over and over.   About newspapers on the wall, “Oh don’t tear that little brown building down; It’s the best in the country, in the town.” That girl said, “Dorothy Faye, if you knew what that song was about, you wouldn’t ask me to play it.” I said, “Oh it’s about an old brown building” – I come to find out it was about an old country toilet.

I was supposed to be out on probation for about 6 months and then go back to stay, but I didn’t do it. I stayed there for about three weeks [then went back to Partlow]. Many years after that they sent me to Thomasville. The way I got to Thomasville was I had to work my way through rehab.

*    *    *

“Many years after that they sent me to Thomasville.” In Thomasville, Alabama there was a rehabilitation center, the Thomasville Resource Center, where many residents from Partlow received training in independent living. It would be a little over twenty years, in fact, before Dorothy would have the opportunity to leave Partlow State School. That opportunity would come as a result of a court order in the Wyatt vs. Stickney case that brought about the de-institutionalization of many residents at Partlow and elsewhere across the country. It would be an attempt to provide more appropriate treatment for people who had been locked away in institutions, hidden from society. Next time we will hear from Dorothy what that transition was like as Partlow State School prepared her to exit the institution.

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Wednesdays with Dorothy: "My Escape Attempt"

(This is part of a series. For Table of Contents go here)

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Maybe it wasn't an actual escape attempt so much as it was a desire to get away from the confines of the institution for a while. Dorothy's recollections reveal how frustrating that confinement was for many of the residents. As she would tell incidents like the ones related here, she couldn't help laughing about it, though you could hear some of the resentment she still felt even after all the years that had passed.

Photo by Naaman Fletcher

“They wouldn’t let you go nowhere you wanted to. Every night they would get us in the ward and make us stand by our beds. Then they would count us to see if any of us was missing. One time they was a bunch of ‘em got out the ward window. They was fixin’ to run away, and they did run. It was 3 or 4 of them. One of the ­­staff was sittin’ there on the hospital porch countin’ ‘em as they went out. His name was Clarence Smitherman, the superintendant of the Boys’ Building. They didn’t get very far – every one of them got caught.”

“They wouldn’t let us go anywhere except to the dining room and the school, sometimes to the place where we cleaned vegetables or to the okra patch. They wouldn’t let us leave the premises. I tried to run away one time – me and two or three others. I reckon I was about 15 or 16.  We broke a hole in the hedge and got through. We didn’t know where we would go except we just wanted to go anywhere we could. Me and another girl ran around the building, the other two just stood there. One of them got to acting silly and she got us caught. She said, ‘Ya’ll two idiots, come back here!’ I said, ‘Well, ya’ll was in to it to, ya’ll was a bigger idiot than we were – you didn’t run like we did, ya’ll just stood there.’  She was too scared to move, and she got us caught. They punished us” (she laughed as she spoke) “for running around the building.  They took us over to the lower-type building. They punished us by takin' us to a lower grade building and said we had to stay two weeks. We had to bath the lower-type people that didn’t know to bathe theirself. We had to feed ‘em and dress ‘em and put ‘em to bed. I thought to myself, ‘Well, if we are helping them we’re helping Jesus.’  I got tired of it, though, and I went on back to my building before they even told me to.”

“The lower grade building was where people didn’t know how to bath themselves or dress themselves, and they didn’t really know to go to the bathroom. They had extra staff over there to watch them. They asked me why I left from over there and went back to my building before they said I could go. I told them I didn’t want to stay over there because they were so mean to the ones that couldn’t take care of themselves. They used to tie them to the benches. Some of them were a lot older and bigger than I was. I never was mean to them as far as I remember.  For some of them I used to wash and roll their hair. They never would pay us, but sometimes they would give us fruit and things like that – the ones that I did for. They would get it from the canteen and sometimes they would give me part of it.”

Partlow Gate  by Naaman Fletcher

“I really didn’t like it at Partlow, and they told a lie in order to get me there. I thought we could come and go as we pleased, but when I got there, I found out different. They told us where we had to be all the time, and when they would get us inside, then they would lock the door. I spent 35 years of my life there.”

“There was one girl that got out and they wrote a book about her. The name of it was Della from Hell*.  She spent nearly all her life there, from the time she was three years old until she was grown. I heard talk about the book but I never did see it or read it. I well remember that girl because she used to sing in the choir the same time I did.  She used to do people’s hair. She was a beautiful thing. She lived in the same building I lived in. Her mother’s name was Ruby Rogers, and her name was Della Raye Rogers.  She worked in the main dining room and she waited on the tables where the handicapped were. Later on she started working at the beauty parlor.”

Photo by Naaman Fletcher

Next time we will learn about Dorothy’s brief reprieve outside of the institution.

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* I was curious about the book Dorothy mentioned, which she said someone had told her about. I did some research and discovered that the book she was referring to is actually titled: Della Raye: A Girl Who Grew Up in Hell and Emerged Whole, by Gary Penley (Pelican Publishing, January 31, 2002).

About the Photographs: The pictures above were taken by Naaman Fletcher on the premises of Partlow State School years after the institution was closed down. They are featured on his blog What's Left of Birmingham at http://leftbirmingham.blogspot.com/2011_12_01_archive.html .

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Wednesdays with Dorothy: Visits from Dignitaries and News from the Outside

(This is part of a series. For Table of Contents go here)

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During my visits with Dorothy, I knew that since she had been at Partlow State School from 1941 to 1975 many significant events had occurred during her institutionalization. I wondered how much she had been aware of, and how she had experienced those events while living in an institution. I was able to get her to talk a little bit about World War II. In the course of our discussions she also mentioned one change that demonstrated how the  Civil Rights movement had impacted life Partlow.  As she had described the layout of the Partlow campus, Dorothy  told me about the "C Building" which was where all of the "colored" residents were placed. She also mentioned  that later on, the "C Building" was done away with and everyone, black and white, was housed within the same buildings, indicating that that was quite a change for everyone involved. Here are some of her verbatim recollections:

"I remember George Wallace and Lurleen Wallace coming out, and I met them for the first time. I was down on Ward 1 and 2 then. I had been there quite a good while when I met them."

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"I was at Partlow when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. I remember it was Sunday, December 7, 1941. We heard about it on the radio. Back then we used to lay in our beds and talk at night and we didn’t even realize there was any danger. We didn’t know about planes that could fly over and drop bombs. Later on, I grew up and then I knew what danger was. Back during WWII I kept thinking, “We’ll win the war, they won’t outwit us.” Some of them said, how do you know, I said, “I just know we will.” Finally we went on and on and we did win. I remember when we heard the war was over, we were all in the sitting room and we were all jumping up and down and cheering. They said, “The war is over, the Japs and Germans have surrendered.”  I remember President Roosevelt sent a big ol’ cake to Partlow after we learned the war was over."

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"I had to have somebody to teach me about danger. I learned, it took me a long time to learn, but I had a teacher who would tell me. I really learned more about danger when I moved out from Partlow."

As we would talk during future visits, Dorothy would share some of her experiences living on her own in the community that were probably some of the events in which she "learned more about danger." Those stories will be shared later, all in good time, as we hear more from Dorothy about how her life unfolds after institutionalization. 

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