Harry Calloway was a hugger, and he came at me suddenly while I was trying to take notes on a summer day in 2005. He wrapped his big arms around me outside Saint Benedict’s Church on Wilkens Avenue, and I could feel his earnestness, his gratitude, his elation that strangers were trying to show him the way out of wickedness.
“I was deep into the wickedness,” Harry used to say when he spoke of his life as a Baltimore drug dealer.
He was a savvy guy who employed numerous people to sell heroin and cocaine. His wicked life had been richly rewarding until the night a rival shot him as he stepped out of a downtown nightclub. Harry showed me the scars where nine bullets had entered his body.
To say the least, he was lucky to be alive.
The drug life cost him dearly — not just in bullet wounds but in the addiction that followed to relieve his pain. “I became my own best customer,” he said.
By the time I met him, Harry had been through a lot. He was 33 years old, a graduate of Baltimore City College who had attended Morgan State University and played tuba in the marching band. The years of wickedness followed.
Then, in 2005, Harry had a road-to-Damascus moment. He wanted to find a livelihood that did not involve heroin and guns. He did not want to go back to prison.
He read one of my columns about the obstacles former inmates faced in finding jobs that paid enough to keep them from returning to criminality. Encouraged by a mentor, Harry enrolled in a culinary training program offered in Saint Benedict’s parish hall by Moveable Feast, the nonprofit that had been preparing and delivering meals to the homebound since the AIDS epidemic.
Harry loved to cook, and he was profoundly grateful for the free formal training. That’s why the hugs.
Vince Williams, who ran the culinary program, thought Harry was one of his best students. In fact, Harry was named valedictorian of his class. The CBS Evening News featured Harry in a report about efforts to help ex-offenders.
“No more excuses,” Harry said. “My plan is to be a better man and help others. It’s time for all of us to stand the hell up and be men.”
Of all the former inmates I met back in those days, when I was deep into reporting on the people we now call “returning citizens,” Harry stood out. He really had a powerful earnestness about him, blunt honesty and a large, happy-to-be-here personality. I wanted to see him succeed. A lot of people did. Sun readers took an active interest — with letters and phone calls — in Harry’s story.
After his graduation from the Moveable Feast program, I lost touch with him. I later learned that he had married and moved with his wife, Chezia, to Charles County, and eventually to Virginia. He held various jobs over the years, and at one point established his own recovery business — restoring damaged rims from luxury automobiles.
Several years after he left Baltimore, I looked Harry up and found no evidence that he had returned to his old ways. I figured all was well — no news is good news — and held out hope that Harry’s life would be long and happy.
But recovery from drug addiction is profoundly difficult, an exhausting roller-coaster ride for many — days of solid sobriety and peak determination, days of relapse and despair. It’s heartbreaking for those with addictions and those who love them.
I received word a few weeks ago that Harry Calloway had died in Baltimore at the age of 51, the apparent victim of a fentanyl overdose. His sister, Ericka Law-Sutton, let me know.
Harry’s wife said he had been depressed after relapsing again. The pain he felt came not only from the old bullet wounds, but from a series of hip surgeries that left him disabled and from lingering emotional struggles related to his youth in Baltimore.
Harry was blessed with such a generous spirit — “a heart of gold,” said his sister — that he helped others more than he was willing to help himself.
“He helped a lot of people get into recovery,” Chezia Calloway told me. “But he still had a lot of demons. … He participated in [Narcotics Anonymous] and felt strongly about the 12 Steps, but when it came to actual clinical counseling therapy, that wasn’t something that he really fully believed in. So that made it really difficult for [Harry] to be transparent about some of his challenges. When you don’t really share the struggles that you have — that’s one of the things that we talked about all the time, that I wish he would have really done a little differently.”
Said his sister: “He’d overcome so much, and to lose him like this … Although I prepared myself for it over the years, it was still really hard.”
I only knew Harry for a few months. All his struggles, all his time in prison, his moments in the dark corners of Baltimore, his sadness and depression — I wasn’t there for most of that.
What I will remember is his big hug. I will remember his earnestness and his determination, however fleeting or disrupted, to get to a better place. I wish we could have bottled his powerful, positive spirit and saved it for when he needed it.
Rest in peace, Harry.
