OLD HAG

Sam Doyle’s Old Hag is both intriguing and chilling while immediately grabbing the viewer’s attention. Born in St. Helena, South Carolina, Sam Doyle (1906-1985) spent his life on the island and it is where he opened his “Out Door Art Gallery” in his yard in the late 1960s. His paintings depict people and folklore from within his Gullah community, as well as important political and social figures ranging from Ray Charles to President Abraham Lincoln. The present picture is a visualization of the folkloric hag character from the Gullah culture. A hag is a spirit which tries to suffocate its victim in their sleep. Historian Betty Kuyk and her husband Dutch met Doyle in South Carolina, where they shared in storytelling together and where Doyle told Kuyk about the hag in the present work. Old Hag is of a local woman whose spirit had been caught by her father in a bottle. Doyle depicts the hag atop her father trying to suffocate him in his bed. She is shown without her skin and in her blood red inner body form. To get her spirit back, as Doyle explained, she had to come to her father and ask for sugar or salt, “which gave her back her youth, healing her pain and restoring her spirit” (Betty M. Kuyk, African Voices in the African American Heritage (Bloomington, 2003), p. 115).