Speaker 1: In the South, we're big fans of parables. There's something
Speaker 1: comforting and knowing how a story will be told, knowing
Speaker 1: the paths and the endings of all the characters. Family
Speaker 1: stories aren't all that different. With each telling, the beats
Speaker 1: of the story get etched into the family history. But
Speaker 1: what about when someone decides to buck tradition. What if
Speaker 1: someone wants to tell one of those stories differently.
Speaker 2: Dunstan was a blacksmith and he was in his blacksmith
Speaker 2: shop and write at closing time, an old man shows
Speaker 2: up at his shop and says, can you make me
Speaker 2: a chalice? So he starts pounding away at his anville,
Speaker 2: and as he's doing that, he sees this old man,
Speaker 2: out of the corner of his eyes, start to rapidly
Speaker 2: change form. And he's an old man. Now he's a
Speaker 2: young girl. Now he's an old man again. Now he's
Speaker 2: a beautiful woman. Now he's a young boy. And he
Speaker 2: knows instantly that that's the devil. And so he while
Speaker 2: he's hammering away, he just sort of without missing a beat,
Speaker 2: he puts his tongs into the furnace, and then when
Speaker 2: he sees them get red hot, he grabs them and
Speaker 2: then grabs the devil by the nose with the tongs,
Speaker 2: who then instantly changes back into an old man and
Speaker 2: runs out of the blacksmith shop, saying, the blacksmith just
Speaker 2: attack me.
Speaker 1: I'm hearing the story of Dunstan and the Devil from
Speaker 1: Noah Saderstrom. He's the artist whose paintings about his great
Speaker 1: grandfather were the focus of a major show at the
Speaker 1: Mississippi Museum of Art. It's a Saturday in April, the
Speaker 1: morning after the show's opening. He's energetic today as he
Speaker 1: walks me through his work, one hundred and eighty three
Speaker 1: canvases that tell the story of his great grandfather, doctor
Speaker 1: David L. Smith. We're talking about Dunstan because the parable
Speaker 1: also makes an appearance in one of these paintings. Right
Speaker 1: there in the center, there are two men in a tussle.
Speaker 1: One goes to the other's face with a red hot
Speaker 1: pair of tongs. And Noah's story of Dunstan. The saint
Speaker 1: tangles with the devil and the experience puts him at
Speaker 1: odds with his community. And that sounded like a story
Speaker 1: he was familiar with, that of doctor Smith, the one
Speaker 1: whose own perception of reality was so different from his
Speaker 1: communities that he had to be sent away to the
Speaker 1: Mississippi State Asylum.
Speaker 2: That story, next to the Doctor Smith's story, that seems
Speaker 2: like a problem that Dunstan was having it.
Speaker 1: I'd never heard of Saint Dunstan before Noah, but after
Speaker 1: the opening I started seeing references to him everywhere, including
Speaker 1: on the back of a bottle of whiskey that was
Speaker 1: fire spiced. Get it. But the story there and another
Speaker 1: is a little different. In those versions, doubt doesn't seem
Speaker 1: to play as big a role. The townspeople are glad
Speaker 1: he ran the devil out. That's the thing with stories.
Speaker 1: The takeaway is up for interpretation. At a certain point,
Speaker 1: the stories become more a product of the person telling
Speaker 1: them than the people in them. Of course, not everything
Speaker 1: that happens becomes a story. Sometimes a thing is too
Speaker 1: mundane to even remember, and sometimes it's so painful that
Speaker 1: generation after generation works to bury it. So what happens
Speaker 1: when one of those generations decides to unearth that story.
Speaker 1: I'm Larison Campbell and this is under Yazoo Clay A
Speaker 1: quick heads up. This episode contains mentions of sexual assault.
Speaker 1: Noah is the first person to admit if it were
Speaker 1: up to certain members of his face family, and not
Speaker 1: the curators of the Mississippi Museum of Art, the show
Speaker 1: would never have gone up. Noah's closest link to his
Speaker 1: great grandfather, that is, the only person he ever met
Speaker 1: who actually knew doctor Smith was his own grandmother, Margaret,
Speaker 1: who died in twenty fourteen. She was doctor Smith's oldest child.
Speaker 2: The grandmother that I knew would be absolutely horrified that
Speaker 2: we were even having this conversation.
Speaker 3: I think she'd be really torn. And she loved Noah
Speaker 3: so much. She surrounded her room in the assisted living
Speaker 3: facility with Noah's paintings on every wall, and yet the
Speaker 3: very idea that this whole story is public. I don't
Speaker 3: know if she could have studied. I'm Anna Sadistrom. I'm
Speaker 3: the mother of the artist and the granddaughter of the
Speaker 3: person of interest here, doctor Smith.
Speaker 1: Anna's mother, Margaret, was doctor Smith's daughter. He was sent
Speaker 1: to the asylum when Margaret was still a little girl.
Speaker 1: His insanity trial was a big deal. Newspapers covered it,
Speaker 1: but Anna knew none of this because her family decided
Speaker 1: to never speak of him again.
Speaker 3: I don't remember at what age I realized that I
Speaker 3: didn't know anything about my grandfather, because she would talk
Speaker 3: about her mother quite a bit. She would tell me about,
Speaker 3: you know, what she did, and how they went to
Speaker 3: movies together, and how she made her clothes and everything.
Speaker 3: She never mentioned her father. And when I asked about
Speaker 3: my grandfather, she said he lost his memory and went away,
Speaker 3: and so I thought, maybe somebody will direct him back
Speaker 3: home sometime.
Speaker 1: I don't know if lost his memory is an old
Speaker 1: euphemism for mental illness, Lord knows the South has lots
Speaker 1: of those. But there's a heartbreaking irony here. The family's
Speaker 1: explanation for doctor Smith's absence, for their silence, is that
Speaker 1: he's the one who doesn't remember them, which is all
Speaker 1: to say that there was something incredibly moving about this show,
Speaker 1: about seeing a man who'd been intentionally erased be given
Speaker 1: the floor, or rather the walls. Noah's show had taken
Speaker 1: over more than a third of the museum's square footage.
Speaker 1: There's the one hundred and twenty two linear feet of
Speaker 1: panoramic painting, yes, but there was also a giant hallway
Speaker 1: lined with artifacts from doctor Smith's life, photos, letters he'd
Speaker 1: exchanged with his wife Ethel, even the beat up leather
Speaker 1: satchel he'd used to carry his optometry supplies and a
Speaker 1: pair of his signature round wireframed spectacles, not unlike the
Speaker 1: ones Noah's got on off the hallway of Doctor Smith's artifacts.
Speaker 1: The museum was airing a short documentary about Noah's research
Speaker 1: and process, and over the course of a week, they
Speaker 1: hosted a series of panel discussions that went beyond Noah
Speaker 1: and Doctor Smith. Topics range from the Asylum Hill project
Speaker 1: to archival ethics to ideas about memory and generational trauma.
Speaker 1: You know when a little kid tries to keep a
Speaker 1: secret and finally they're allowed to blurt it out and
Speaker 1: the words just don't stop. It felt like that, like
Speaker 1: an easing of conscience for this whole community. So what
Speaker 1: compelled Noah to spend years telling the story of a
Speaker 1: man he was always told never to mention? To understand
Speaker 1: that we're going to have to skip twenty five years
Speaker 1: back and a whole continent away. Noah and I started
Speaker 1: talking about his show almost a year before it went up.
Speaker 1: We'd go back and forth, his telling me how the
Speaker 1: painting was going, my prying about any new findings he
Speaker 1: had about Doctor Smith. But in one of our talks
Speaker 1: he let me in on a part of his own story,
Speaker 1: one that changed everything. It's two thousand and one. Noah's
Speaker 1: in a high level graduate program at the Glasgow School
Speaker 1: of Art in Scotland. He was married and it wasn't
Speaker 1: going well. It's in this moment of intense stress that
Speaker 1: he wakes up one night in the pitch black to
Speaker 1: a horrible realization.
Speaker 2: All of my memories felt like they were planted and fake,
Speaker 2: and that I hadn't existed until that moment, and everyone
Speaker 2: else was convinced that my memories were real, that I
Speaker 2: was the only one who knew that they were not.
Speaker 2: I mean, it was deeply, deeply frightening, and it lasted
Speaker 2: for much longer than I would have wanted it to.
Speaker 1: For nearly six months. This was his everyday reality, a
Speaker 1: kind of mental break. He was experiencing. Has a diagnosis,
Speaker 1: the personalization disorder.
Speaker 2: It was NonStop. It wasn't like I'm having this weird
Speaker 2: feeling like oh, I just woke up into reality that
Speaker 2: I realized I'm not real and my memories aren't real.
Speaker 2: They've been They've been crafted and presented to my brain
Speaker 2: as real, but they're not.
Speaker 1: He took a leave from his painting program and went
Speaker 1: home to his parents. He started thumbing through old family
Speaker 1: photo albums, hoping they'd trigger a reconnection between his memories
Speaker 1: and reality. After a while, he started to paint the photos,
Speaker 1: repossessing them in a way. It was in the midst
Speaker 1: of all this when his great grandfather's absence really struck him.
Speaker 2: When I was having my breakdown in two thousand and one,
Speaker 2: if I had the full context of his experience, it's
Speaker 2: hard to say I would have been more afraid, because
Speaker 2: I don't think I could have been more afraid than
Speaker 2: I was. It would have been it would have given
Speaker 2: me something to kind of puld onto, you know, instead
Speaker 2: of like either your normal or there's the abyss. There's
Speaker 2: like normal people and then there's the abyss. Whereas following
Speaker 2: doctor Smith's life, he enters the Old Asylum in nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty five and he lives for forty years beyond that,
Speaker 2: and he wasn't.
Speaker 1: In the Abyss when he got started on this project,
Speaker 1: Noah didn't have much to go on. It's not easy
Speaker 1: to dig up a story that's meant to be forgotten,
Speaker 1: a story that more than one person has taken pains
Speaker 1: to bury. But some pieces had survived. His great grandmother,
Speaker 1: Ethel had saved a wooden box. Inside was nearly every
Speaker 1: letter she'd written during the early years of her marriage
Speaker 1: to doctor Smith.
Speaker 2: I know what she had for lunch every day that year.
Speaker 2: You know every movie she saw, every interaction she had
Speaker 2: with her parents. It's all very like young family.
Speaker 1: If doctor Smith and Ethel kept in touch after he
Speaker 1: went into the asside, she didn't save those letters. So
Speaker 1: Noah turned to a different repository of memory, the state Archives.
Speaker 2: I found a doctor Smith's name in the ledger book
Speaker 2: from the Old Asylum, which was this giant leatherbound book
Speaker 2: that said Mississippi and Saint Hospital B on the spine.
Speaker 1: Finally confirmation, but not much else. Fortunately that was about
Speaker 1: to change. At Noah's next stop, a downtown gallery, a
Speaker 1: man buying a painting overheard him telling his great grandfather's
Speaker 1: story and introduced himself. It was Stephen Parks, the state librarian. Okay,
Speaker 1: small cities have big perks, and so a couple.
Speaker 2: Of weeks later, I'm back in Nashville and I get
Speaker 2: a text from Stephen and saying start sending you stuff.
Speaker 1: And I was show advertisements for doctor Smith's optician practice, meeting,
Speaker 1: notes from the State Board of Opticians, where doctor Smith
Speaker 1: held a seat, newspaper articles about his engagement, his practice,
Speaker 1: and later his very public breakdown. With every document, Noah
Speaker 1: became more inspired. A picture of a man was taking
Speaker 1: shape in his head, and then on canvas. He began
Speaker 1: painting vignettes of what he read. But as much as
Speaker 1: this work has brought doctor Smith back to life, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure it's brought him back into the family. There's
Speaker 1: a formality in the way that Noah talks about him.
Speaker 1: Why do you refer to him as doctor Smith.
Speaker 2: Uh, that's a good question one that like, I started
Speaker 2: referring to him as doctor Smith because that's what all
Speaker 2: of his optometry advertisements referred to him as. But I
Speaker 2: didn't realize at the beginning that he referred to himself
Speaker 2: as doctor Smith. Smith is such a common name, and
Speaker 2: he'd just get lost in like doctor Smith, there's no
Speaker 2: first name, you know, it's just doctor and Smith. He
Speaker 2: became a kind of iconic figure in my imagination from
Speaker 2: his name.
Speaker 1: Doctor Smith's not a paupa or even grandfather. Familial names
Speaker 1: implied that their owner is just that a member of
Speaker 1: the family. Someone had pruned his branch from the family tree.
Speaker 3: That image of a blackboard, or you erase everything on
Speaker 3: the blackboard with the little bits of information left. I
Speaker 3: feel like that's what I got from my mother growing up.
Speaker 1: You remember Noah's mom, Anna. She'd learned early on that
Speaker 1: her own mother, Margaret, didn't like to talk about Anna's grandfather.
Speaker 3: I would just say a silence, absence, this is just
Speaker 3: not where we go. And then when I got older
Speaker 3: and added started ask in a little deeper questions, she
Speaker 3: would shut down right away. And if I got a
Speaker 3: little too insistent, she would get either snappish or she
Speaker 3: would tear up and say, I'm not gonna talk about it.
Speaker 1: Anna tried to figure things out anyway.
Speaker 3: My mother said that anytime she and her sister were
Speaker 3: together and their voices dropped, I'd show up. But if
Speaker 3: there was gonna be a good story, they were gonna
Speaker 3: lower their voices.
Speaker 1: And so for Noah, it's not just about understanding this man,
Speaker 1: but about understanding just why exactly his family worked so
Speaker 1: hard to erase him. There was shame about mental illness,
Speaker 1: but was that the whole story? That afternoon at the museum,
Speaker 1: one of the Southeast legendary spring thunderstorms rolled in as
Speaker 1: Noah walked me through his paintings. We'll start of the
Speaker 1: first in the first section of the panels.
Speaker 2: It starts with a shadow of an unknown figure, which
Speaker 2: may be me or maybe Doctor Smith himself, or it
Speaker 2: could be Doctor Smith's father is on the other side
Speaker 2: of the wall of the room where doctor Smith is
Speaker 2: being born. There's a vertical diptych kind of design. Motifs
Speaker 2: are basically throughout.
Speaker 1: In many ways, it's a visual biography of doctor Smith's
Speaker 1: life from birth to burial. Doctor Smith was raised in
Speaker 1: Louisiana by a single mother, and he put himself through
Speaker 1: optometry school. One of doctor Smith's earliest patients was a
Speaker 1: man named Gerard Brandon, a lawyer who loomed large in
Speaker 1: the Natchet social scene. More importantly, Gerard had a beautiful daughter, Ethel.
Speaker 2: He met Ethel Brandon, I believe because he was making
Speaker 2: glasses for her father, and they pretty quickly started dating
Speaker 2: and they were married the following year.
Speaker 1: The young couple moved up the river to Vicksburg. They
Speaker 1: were happy. These were the years when Ethel would write
Speaker 1: to her family about how she and her husband teased
Speaker 1: each other, but even in the rosy glow of young love.
Speaker 1: Noah's great grandfather may have had his own secrets that
Speaker 1: he kept from his wife.
Speaker 2: He referred to having audio hallucinations for his whole life
Speaker 2: and that they never bothered him, but they were always
Speaker 2: there and very rarely did they make him do something
Speaker 2: he didn't want to do. But he could have been
Speaker 2: a fully functioning professional optometrist while being schizophrenic at the
Speaker 2: same time.
Speaker 1: For years, being a fully functioning professional optometrist looked a
Speaker 1: little different. In the South of the nineteen twenties, there
Speaker 1: wasn't quite enough business for a brick and mortar shop,
Speaker 1: so doctor Smith took his services on the road.
Speaker 2: While all this is going on and he's actively having delusions,
Speaker 2: he starts to develop this very elaborate optical truck that,
Speaker 2: by all accounts was a very highly functioning invention. They
Speaker 2: check all the eyes for free, and then if only
Speaker 2: if somebody needed glasses, he would be able to grind
Speaker 2: the lenses on the spot. Do you know, fit the
Speaker 2: glasses and everything, which would have been i mean, driving
Speaker 2: around rural Mississippi in that in the nineteen twenties. You know,
Speaker 2: it's hard to imagine.
Speaker 1: It was cutting edge, the talk of the town wherever
Speaker 1: he went. He even got it patented. Doctor Smith and
Speaker 1: Ethel had four kids. He might have been away much
Speaker 1: of the time, but it was clear as kids loved
Speaker 1: him and he loved them. Noah's mother told us a
Speaker 1: story about how her own Margaret, kept a pair of
Speaker 1: glasses he'd made for her as a child. She didn't
Speaker 1: need them, she just liked them, and so he made
Speaker 1: them for her. Noah's work devotes a good bit of
Speaker 1: square footage to this period of doctor Smith's life, his
Speaker 1: optometry truck, rural Mississippi and Louisiana images of a growing family.
Speaker 1: In one part, he stands in a white shirt and vest,
Speaker 1: facing left towards his past, as the reflection of the
Speaker 1: sun makes his glasses opaque. In the distance behind him
Speaker 1: a small child, a carriage, and a loose, barely discernible
Speaker 1: sketch resembling a woman in the story of doctor Smith's life,
Speaker 1: As his madness takes up more and more of the foreground,
Speaker 1: something someone fades to the back his family, So.
Speaker 2: Then the timeline splits again, and then you've got Margaret,
Speaker 2: my grandmother, and Ethel back on the top. And then
Speaker 2: that's when he enters the old Asylum.
Speaker 1: At this point, a gaggle of museum goers had started
Speaker 1: trailing behind us, listening. Noah pointed to a square near
Speaker 1: the top. Everyone leaned in, hands behind their back, doing
Speaker 1: that polite museum squint. The image he pointed out as small. Well,
Speaker 1: in the context of this massive painting, just one two
Speaker 1: by two foot square. There's a neat white house.
Speaker 2: According to one of the only stories that I knew
Speaker 2: growing up, grandmother and them were living in Shreveport, destitute.
Speaker 2: Doctor Smith was not around at all, totally lost in psychosis.
Speaker 2: Ethel and the kids there were four kids at this point,
Speaker 2: the youngest being an infant. We're all sitting in poverty
Speaker 2: in a house with no food, no resources, nothing.
Speaker 1: After Noah's walked through, my producer and I tucked ourselves
Speaker 1: away in a museum office with Noah, his sister Jessica,
Speaker 1: and his mom Anna. Remember this project wasn't just academic.
Speaker 1: This was Noah's great grandfather, a man whose absence festered
Speaker 1: in the family he left behind, especially for Noah's grandmother.
Speaker 1: Anna's mother Margaret, and.
Speaker 3: She's the only one of their four children who had
Speaker 3: an active memory of her father. But my mother was
Speaker 3: seven when it happened, and she said she spent the
Speaker 3: next several years sitting on the brick wall out front,
Speaker 3: waiting for her father to come get her, because nobody
Speaker 3: told her that he wasn't going to come. And I
Speaker 3: think she carried the trauma of his loss throughout her life.
Speaker 1: After doctor Smith's breakdown, his wife and children didn't stay
Speaker 1: in that neat white house. His father in law, Gerard,
Speaker 1: arrived and wisked the family back home to Natchez. Gerard's
Speaker 1: home was a quiet one. That Victorian sensibility of children
Speaker 1: should be seen and not heard applied to everyone. A
Speaker 1: house of decorum was in some ways the perfect antidote
Speaker 1: to the chaotic last years with doctor Smith. But a
Speaker 1: house of decorum isn't a place where you could ask questions.
Speaker 1: For the first year after doctor Smith was gone, a
Speaker 1: photograph of him remained on the mantle at her grandparents.
Speaker 1: Margaret often stared at it. It was all she had
Speaker 1: of her dad.
Speaker 2: She was caught staring at his photograph on the mantle,
Speaker 2: and the next day it was gone.
Speaker 1: Margaret grew up had children of her own. Gerard Brandon's
Speaker 1: decorum no outbursts, no questions, no curiosity, found a place
Speaker 1: in her home with her children. Gerard took his place
Speaker 1: as a titan, and the family mythos. Here's Anna again,
Speaker 1: Noah's mother. I was very young.
Speaker 3: I sort of had him confused with God. You know,
Speaker 3: he was the sweet old man who had all the power.
Speaker 3: I never saw him angry. I never heard him say
Speaker 3: raise a voice or say anything unkind.
Speaker 1: But she never saw joy either, no outburst of any kind.
Speaker 1: In fact, her mother, Margaret, saw.
Speaker 2: To that composure was of absolute value. Poise, elegance, and properness.
Speaker 4: Grandmother was a quintessential Southern bell in my memory.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she had an elegance and a presence about her.
Speaker 3: She was a beautiful woman, and when she entered a room,
Speaker 3: everybody was aware of it. She was.
Speaker 5: A power source in.
Speaker 4: My life, and yet she wasn't. You didn't want to
Speaker 4: be judged by that, that power source.
Speaker 1: For a family interested less in the real world than
Speaker 1: in their own created reality, perhaps there was no better
Speaker 1: community than Natchez, Mississippi. This small town of a few
Speaker 1: thousand sits on a bluff overlooking the river. Before the
Speaker 1: Civil War, it was home to more millionaires per capita
Speaker 1: than any other in the United States, because it was
Speaker 1: also home to the country's second largest slave market. Many
Speaker 1: of those grand homes still stand, although the area is
Speaker 1: now among the poorest in the country. Regardless of present circumstances,
Speaker 1: this ideal of Confederate glory still shapes the way residents talk.
Speaker 1: The writer Richard Grant has this quote in Natches, you
Speaker 1: only use the word home if it's antebellum. If your
Speaker 1: house was built after the Civil War, it's trashy to
Speaker 1: call it a home. Still, even in Natches, people build
Speaker 1: new houses. They buck tradition. There were times Noah's grandmother
Speaker 1: let her tried and true composure slide, but it was
Speaker 1: so rare. Both he and his sister Jessica remember each one.
Speaker 4: I remember you telling me about it, do you.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I was in high school and it seemed like, wow,
Speaker 4: it was such a mystery in the family. I had
Speaker 4: no idea.
Speaker 5: And then not long after I asked grandmother about her father,
Speaker 5: and I said, some didn't like I don't tell me
Speaker 5: about your father.
Speaker 4: And grandmother looked surprised, and she said he was an optometrist,
Speaker 4: and then her eyes filled up with tears, and then
Speaker 4: everything shut down, and then it was just back to
Speaker 4: the silence.
Speaker 2: Exactly what happened when I asked her that they tell
Speaker 2: me about him? What can you say about him? He
Speaker 2: was an optometrist. Immediately tears just filling up, and then
Speaker 2: just kind of silence while she turned the page and
Speaker 2: started talking about something else. And that instant, involuntary well
Speaker 2: of emotion after ninety years, she was seven when he left,
Speaker 2: and she was in her nineties when this happened, and
Speaker 2: that being the only trigger that I had ever seen
Speaker 2: of that kind of emotion, completely instant and involuntary, was
Speaker 2: such a sign that there's so much there un processed,
Speaker 2: that she lived with for her whole life, and that
Speaker 2: she unwillingly not meaning to, was teaching us like, this
Speaker 2: is what we do, your.
Speaker 5: Places deep down inside you, and if you violate that,
Speaker 5: you're going to feel bad about yourself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's where the shame comes in. You just had
Speaker 2: an emotional outburst. I mean my suspicion there is. The
Speaker 2: silence is the response to the shame, and it's so
Speaker 2: much padding. You don't ever get the shame. The shame
Speaker 2: doesn't make it to the surface. We don't see the shame,
Speaker 2: but we see the effects of the shame, and it.
Speaker 5: Gets buried down so deep that any kind of scratch
Speaker 5: of the surface bubbles up this uncontrollable emotional response that.
Speaker 4: Then has to be tamped down quick.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then everybody just stopped talking about it because
Speaker 5: something got awkward.
Speaker 4: So back to the silence.
Speaker 1: You can hear even in how these three talk to
Speaker 1: one another. They've put in the work to build relationships
Speaker 1: founded on sincerity and honesty, not shame and silence. But
Speaker 1: anyone with a family nose, it's hard to break patterns,
Speaker 1: even when you want to. The thing is, it wasn't
Speaker 1: just Noah's breakdown that harkened back to his great grandfather's generation.
Speaker 1: It's how he talked about it, or how he didn't.
Speaker 1: Noah's breakdown was in two thousand and one, and his grandmother, Margaret,
Speaker 1: lived until twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2: The episode of depersonalization I had and not being able
Speaker 2: to know what the where I am in reality was
Speaker 2: so horrifying to me and night marish, and I could
Speaker 2: not There was no way out of it, and no
Speaker 2: one else seemed to be able to tell.
Speaker 1: How may I ask? How she responded?
Speaker 4: I'm sure we never took no.
Speaker 2: She never knew. She never knew that I barely talked
Speaker 2: to them about it. I don't know that I really
Speaker 2: talked to everything about.
Speaker 4: It, know about it until the New York Times, until
Speaker 4: I tell you, we have broken this pattern.
Speaker 1: For more than two decades now. His only sibling didn't know.
Speaker 1: He spent six months unsure if his life was even real.
Speaker 1: The tight lipt ethos ran so deep that Noah didn't
Speaker 1: even realize he was carrying it out.
Speaker 2: I didn't know I was doing that to myself until
Speaker 2: I let doctor Smith out of the Genie bottle. And
Speaker 2: then the only way to do that was to like
Speaker 2: be totally open and honest. And then all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: it's like, wait a minute, I've got this thing that's
Speaker 2: now out that I've been trying to keep to it.
Speaker 2: I didn't even know that I was doing that. Not
Speaker 2: that I wasn't talking about it because I was ashamed
Speaker 2: of it, but I was afraid that if I talked
Speaker 2: about it, I would call it back into my life
Speaker 2: like a specter, like a monster, which you know, is
Speaker 2: maybe more what grandmother was experiencing, not the shame, but
Speaker 2: the like if I say his name, the monster is
Speaker 2: going to come back to my life.
Speaker 3: I'm going to experience all that pain all over again.
Speaker 2: And when I still when that occurred to me and
Speaker 2: I started talking about it out loud and thinking about it,
Speaker 2: the amount of energy that it took to hold down
Speaker 2: stuff requires not just the energy of holding it down,
Speaker 2: but it requires this whole system of holding all these
Speaker 2: other things in place to make sure that you don't
Speaker 2: feel this or that or you know. And now everybody
Speaker 2: has to remain calm and not talk about anything because
Speaker 2: you don't know where if it's going to start to
Speaker 2: blow out, and then you're going to lose control of everything.
Speaker 1: Noah's grandmother, Margaret, spent that energy, kept that tight hold
Speaker 1: for better or worse, all her life. Her family thinks
Speaker 1: Noah's exhibit would have caused her a world of conflict.
Speaker 1: If she'd love to see it, maybe there's a way
Speaker 1: it could have offered solace for her too.
Speaker 4: And this is her shawl.
Speaker 3: I've brought it with me for the weekend to have
Speaker 3: her here in hopes that there's some healing for her
Speaker 3: in it somewhere, because I think it was a trauma
Speaker 3: she took she head through her whole life and I'm sorry,
Speaker 3: and I wish that she had had a different relationship
Speaker 3: with this story.
Speaker 1: Stephen King has this great quote, nothing is so frightening
Speaker 1: as what's behind the closed door. It reminds me of
Speaker 1: what Noah was saying about his breakdown, that maybe if
Speaker 1: he'd known more about his great grandfather, he would have
Speaker 1: been less afraid for himself. No one worries about monsters
Speaker 1: in a brightly lit room. And then two weeks before
Speaker 1: the show went up, just as Noah was shipping paintings
Speaker 1: from his Nashville studio down to the museum in Jackson,
Speaker 1: someone cut on the lights, so to speak.
Speaker 2: Probably like seven tenths of this painting exists of the
Speaker 2: details that were known until he entered state custody, and
Speaker 2: then it goes dark, which is another forty years of
Speaker 2: his life. And it took about seven years to find
Speaker 2: all that. But then just last week, as medical records emerge,
Speaker 2: that's going to give life to that whole rest of
Speaker 2: his life, which is more than half of his existence.
Speaker 2: He doesn't have to be a saintly character, you do.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know, and so you know, I'm
Speaker 2: not absolving him the whole things, but you don't have
Speaker 2: to be absolved the whole thing. You know, we can't
Speaker 2: be the requirement in life.
Speaker 1: That's next on under Yazuclay. The largest art museum in
Speaker 1: the state, the Mississippi Museum of Art connects Mississippi to
Speaker 1: the world and the power of art to the power
Speaker 1: of community. Located in downtown Jackson, the museum's permanent collection
Speaker 1: is free to the public. National and international exhibitions rotate
Speaker 1: throughout the year, allowing visitors to experience works from around
Speaker 1: the world. The gardens at Expansive Lawn at the Mississippi
Speaker 1: Museum of Art are home to art installations and a
Speaker 1: variety of events for all ages. Plan your visit today
Speaker 1: at MS Museum Art dot org. That's MS Museum Art
Speaker 1: dot org. Noah's family story is in many ways a
Speaker 1: classic Southern situation, a white, well to do family working
Speaker 1: overtime to hide their secrets. His transgression is against his
Speaker 1: family's unspoken agreement this.
Speaker 5: Is not where we go.
Speaker 1: But there's another side to the classic Southern coin, another
Speaker 1: implicit agreement to avoid the unspeakable. Doctor Elizabeth West is
Speaker 1: a professor of English and Africana Studies at Georgia State University.
Speaker 1: For her, the broken branch on the family tree was
Speaker 1: her own grandfather. In this case, he'd removed himself. He
Speaker 1: left the family when her mom was growing up. But
Speaker 1: the reason for this went even further back in the
Speaker 1: family history to her grandfather's uncle.
Speaker 6: Hillman Human revealed a history of my grandfather that I
Speaker 6: had I had no knowledge of. There was a very
Speaker 6: tense relationship between my grandfather and his ten children.
Speaker 1: The generations before that weren't much clearer. A few years ago,
Speaker 1: she took the ancestry records her aunt had mapped out
Speaker 1: by hand and began to digitize them, and the reason
Speaker 1: her family didn't talk about its history became clear.
Speaker 6: Once it got past my grandfather's father, I was like, Wow,
Speaker 6: these people were enslaved, and I just can't believe that.
Speaker 6: I didn't think about it ever until that point, you know.
Speaker 6: I mean, you talk about it in the abstract, But
Speaker 6: once you put a name on a piece of paper
Speaker 6: and you realize you're connected to that name and that
Speaker 6: name is connected to this history, then you just you know,
Speaker 6: then you're in.
Speaker 1: And she learned something else. Her great great uncle, Hillman
Speaker 1: Cistrunk died in a different kind of confinement the Mississippi
Speaker 1: State Asylum.
Speaker 6: Actually, I had no knowledge of him up until about
Speaker 6: I don't know, five years ago.
Speaker 1: Through careful interrogation of historical records, tax filings, census interviews,
Speaker 1: doctor West filled in the picture of Hillman's Cistrunks life.
Speaker 1: He was born in Georgia into slavery in the mid
Speaker 1: eighteen fifties. The man who'd enslaved Hillman moved the whole
Speaker 1: operation to Mississippi and that's where they stayed as the
Speaker 1: Civil War raged on. Once the word ended and the
Speaker 1: Emancipation Proclamation finally was put into effect, Hillman and his
Speaker 1: family were free, so they settled near where they'd been
Speaker 1: and what followed was an incredible tale of community resilience
Speaker 1: and grit.
Speaker 6: He and my direct ancestor, Shadrick, who was his brother,
Speaker 6: they the family farmed in the immediate aftermath of the war,
Speaker 6: and right at the close of reconstruction, they actually bought
Speaker 6: land and they worked that land for not quite twenty years,
Speaker 6: because I think it was around nineteen hundred or a
Speaker 6: little before when they paid off the mortgage on the
Speaker 6: land and owned it outright.
Speaker 1: These were two land owning black men in the post
Speaker 1: war South life was not easy.
Speaker 6: It was not typical blacks in the aftermath of the war.
Speaker 6: Most of them ended up in a system that was
Speaker 6: not very different from slavery. They ended up leasing their
Speaker 6: labor to white farmers. So Human and Shadwick were an
Speaker 6: anomaly in that sense.
Speaker 1: Holding onto their land wasn't easy either. Legitimate support systems
Speaker 1: were for white farmers.
Speaker 6: Hillman and his brother Shadwick had had dealings with this
Speaker 6: pretty wealthy person in the area. If he didn't have
Speaker 6: a brig building, he'd probably be called a loan shark.
Speaker 6: But you know, loan sharks with big buildings are called businessmen.
Speaker 6: And you look at the records and you see the
Speaker 6: possessions that they are essentially laying on the table to
Speaker 6: be able to make this loan for yet another year.
Speaker 6: You know, a cow named Bessie. It's comparable to howk
Speaker 6: in your car, And so it's just this grind year
Speaker 6: after year.
Speaker 1: There was the grind, but doctor West could clearly see
Speaker 1: for Hillman and his family his community, there was also
Speaker 1: the striving for more.
Speaker 6: The record showed this concerted commitment to people in the
Speaker 6: community to learn to read and write. And then you
Speaker 6: see the records of parents and then people like Hillmen
Speaker 6: who weren't parents, making sure that young black children were
Speaker 6: getting registered for school. What I began to see out
Speaker 6: of this is just this amazing dynamic community, first generation
Speaker 6: free black people in a way that just doesn't get recorded.
Speaker 1: When Hellman's in his sixties, his wife passes away, he remarries,
Speaker 1: and then Hellman gets.
Speaker 6: Sick, and then there's a white physician who comes in
Speaker 6: and signs off, and he's admitted to the asylum from
Speaker 6: what I can tell, in that January of nineteen twenty,
Speaker 6: and he dies in March of that year.
Speaker 1: Hillman's cause of death was listed as nephritis or kidney inflammation,
Speaker 1: one of the last symptoms once the disease is most
Speaker 1: severe dementia, a mental manifestation of the physical malady. After
Speaker 1: Hillman's death, land disputes kickoff. The family is split into factions.
Speaker 1: This is the era doctor West's grandfather grew up in.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twenty, the year of Hillman's death, Doctor West's
Speaker 1: grandfather leaves everything behind his family, the land he's helped work,
Speaker 1: his home.
Speaker 6: Human revealed a history of my grandfather that I had
Speaker 6: had no knowledge of, and so as a teenager, a
Speaker 6: young boy up through his teens, these had been the
Speaker 6: men who had shaped him, and they were land owning men.
Speaker 6: And in his teenage years, these were the years that
Speaker 6: Human and Chadrick both essentially got stripped of their land
Speaker 6: and died. And after understanding the life his life, I
Speaker 6: understand a lot better the kind of bitterness and disappointment
Speaker 6: he lived with to go from the kind of childhood
Speaker 6: he had remembered. I mean, they were a struggling farm family,
Speaker 6: but they owned what they owned, they owned.
Speaker 3: What they worked.
Speaker 6: And he witnessed, you know, real time, this family being
Speaker 6: stripped of everything. And as an eighteen twenty year old kid,
Speaker 6: we might call him a man, but you know, he's
Speaker 6: a kid. And he goes to Jasper, tries to find
Speaker 6: work in a factory and Mary's, and ends up raising
Speaker 6: his family as a sharecropper.
Speaker 1: Exactly what Hellman and Shadwick didn't want for their family.
Speaker 6: And sometime in the nineteen forties, I'm told, you know,
Speaker 6: he tried to convince my grandmother that they should leave,
Speaker 6: and she didn't want to leave, and he left.
Speaker 1: Doctor West could never wrap her head around why her
Speaker 1: grandfather would leave his wife and ten children behind. She'd
Speaker 1: heard that he provided made sure his family got fed,
Speaker 1: but that was when he was there. Learning the story
Speaker 1: of the loss and trauma he weathered at his teenage years,
Speaker 1: that all made sense. So she took these stories back
Speaker 1: to her family.
Speaker 6: After I was introduced to this history, I started asking
Speaker 6: older members of my family if they knew anything about
Speaker 6: these people. And it was just like a Eureka moment.
Speaker 6: I remember one of the older members in my family,
Speaker 6: very casually, she said, oh, yeah, I remember that story.
Speaker 6: For many of us, you know, we are told to
Speaker 6: just look forward. There's no point in, you know, in
Speaker 6: looking back. I think when I share these stories, there's
Speaker 6: there's just a lot of silence, you know, cause what
Speaker 6: can you say. It's a lot to take in.
Speaker 1: Doctor West was introduced to Hellman at the end of
Speaker 1: his life, a particularly painful episode in a life with
Speaker 1: plenty of them.
Speaker 6: For me, finding Himan at at the asylum was the beginning.
Speaker 6: And you know, I have this sense of sadness when
Speaker 6: I think that there was seven decades that he lived
Speaker 6: and did these fantastic things, and that in three months
Speaker 6: this was the end. But I also feel that finding
Speaker 6: him wherever I found him, was more important than the place.
Speaker 6: The story I discovered that I was able to build
Speaker 6: out from meeting him at the asylum far out weighs
Speaker 6: even the pain I think about that, you know, he
Speaker 6: very likely suffered in the last three months of his life.
Speaker 1: And now with all the context, all the insight, how
Speaker 1: does she feel towards Hillman?
Speaker 6: To put it just, I guess, in a simple word,
Speaker 6: just a lot of love, you know. I mean, he
Speaker 6: could have been very selfish, and from what I see
Speaker 6: of him in the record, he was anything but that.
Speaker 6: When you look at what in particular blacks in the
Speaker 6: South were experiencing during that era. Yeah, yeah, you know,
Speaker 6: I mean seventy six and quite frankly, for many black
Speaker 6: people even in the twenty first century, is quite an
Speaker 6: age to live to. So, you know, when I think
Speaker 6: about it, it's just, you know, it's mind boggling to
Speaker 6: think all of this front end of his life gets
Speaker 6: capped by you know, three months in the asylum and
Speaker 6: almost into obscurity.
Speaker 1: Almost into obscurity. The end of Hillman's life stands out,
Speaker 1: but the work that doctor West did ensures that it
Speaker 1: doesn't define the man. It allowed her to paint a
Speaker 1: fuller picture. It's not all that different for Noah. For decades,
Speaker 1: all he knew about Doctor Smith was a headlinesworth. He
Speaker 1: was sent to the State Asylum. But Noah's careful not
Speaker 1: to let this part of doctor Smith's life become Doctor
Speaker 1: Smith's life. The first time I walked into the room
Speaker 1: that held Noah's paintings, I tried to just stand back
Speaker 1: and take it all in at once. That was a mistake.
Speaker 1: As soon as you start to break it down with
Speaker 1: your eyes, you realize you can't. Noah deliberately refused to
Speaker 1: set boundaries. Scenes flow into each other, like the flow
Speaker 1: to life. The courtroom where doctor Smith had his insanity
Speaker 1: hearing bleeds into our first view of the old asylum.
Speaker 1: Hold the last canvas up to the first one, and
Speaker 1: now it's one painting the brick from the house where
Speaker 1: doctor Smith was born in eighteen ninety one matches the
Speaker 1: brick at the State Hospital cemetery where he's buried. There's
Speaker 1: a loose impressionistic feel to many of the paintings. One
Speaker 1: person is painted in careful detail, while the figure two
Speaker 1: canvas is over is a blur. In a way, It's
Speaker 1: a peak behind the curtain. I'll look at how the
Speaker 1: artist understands each part of the story, and the craziest part.
Speaker 1: Noah says, this one hundred and eighty three canvas painting,
Speaker 1: a work that inspired the creation of an entire room
Speaker 1: in a museum, dozens of panel discussions, and even a
Speaker 1: New York Times article, isn't finished. I mean it is
Speaker 1: in the sense that it's ready to show, but not
Speaker 1: in the sense that he'll never lay a paintbrush on
Speaker 1: it again.
Speaker 2: When it comes to like deciphering what's real and what
Speaker 2: isn't about not only his accounts but people's accounts of him,
Speaker 2: it's like very it's very shifting all the time.
Speaker 1: Two weeks before we sat down, it shifted dramatically this one.
Speaker 1: Noah finally got his great grandfather's medical records, including a
Speaker 1: remarkably thorough intake interview in which, over several pages, doctor
Speaker 1: Smith tells his whole life story.
Speaker 2: And it just seems like all the slack has been
Speaker 2: let out and he is now in the asylum, and
Speaker 2: he's just like it's all just he's writing letters to
Speaker 2: people and there's not any need to keep it buttoned in.
Speaker 2: He's writing letters like crazy that they're.
Speaker 1: Just all over the place, and somebody's given him stamps, Let.
Speaker 2: Me give him letters.
Speaker 5: He did.
Speaker 2: One of these letters is written on letterhead that he
Speaker 2: made because he worked in the print department, so he
Speaker 2: worked the letter press, so he made letterhead David Doctor
Speaker 2: David Smith, Bondar, Insissippi Hospital for his strained patient.
Speaker 5: I feel like it gives me a much better view
Speaker 5: of the man, the person behind the.
Speaker 4: Legend in our family.
Speaker 5: You know, he's been this figure of mystery, but hearing
Speaker 5: these kind of personal details, it sounds like he was
Speaker 5: a gentle person.
Speaker 3: He seems very pleasant. I mean, maybe that explains why
Speaker 3: Mama was so hurt by his loss. She loved him,
Speaker 3: and he loved her enough to make her those classes
Speaker 3: because she wanted some. And it must have been a
Speaker 3: good feeling relationship, or she wouldn't have been so traumatized
Speaker 3: by it. If he had been an ogre or dangerous
Speaker 3: or hateful, or had done harmful things to her mother,
Speaker 3: she wouldn't have suffered his loss the way she did.
Speaker 1: But there's of course a caveat. Noah can't be sure
Speaker 1: if parts of doctor Smith's autobiography are based on delusions
Speaker 1: and anything.
Speaker 2: And I thought I understood, you know, I have to
Speaker 2: make sure that I'm not getting fixed on that, because
Speaker 2: who's even real and who isn't. I've kept thinking about
Speaker 2: like those like plenario worms. You can like their microscopic
Speaker 2: and you could chop them in half and each one
Speaker 2: will grow the rest of its body, you know. So
Speaker 2: it's like any of this could just be locked off
Speaker 2: and then just paint a whole new Like his autobiography,
Speaker 2: He's like, this is what happened my entire childhood. Until
Speaker 2: I was in my mid twenties, I didn't have any
Speaker 2: of that information before.
Speaker 1: But having this information means that Noah may eventually replace
Speaker 1: some of these canvases or repaint details. So it's likely
Speaker 1: this is the only time this version of Noah's work
Speaker 1: will be shown. You know.
Speaker 2: It's like constantly growing and reinterpreting, you know, the sacred
Speaker 2: text of some kind. You know, you have to keep
Speaker 2: reinterpreting and interpreting, interpreting.
Speaker 1: By the time the show opened, Noah and I have
Speaker 1: been talking about his work for almost a year. Probably
Speaker 1: another reason it was so overwhelming. There's always that cognitive
Speaker 1: dissonance when you finally see something you've spent forever imagining.
Speaker 1: But there was one part that threw me. It's right
Speaker 1: in the middle, canvas number ninety two, in fact, out
Speaker 1: of one hundred and eighty three. I turned to Noah,
Speaker 1: It's funny. When I look at it, I feel like
Speaker 1: the part that my eye tends to go to the
Speaker 1: most is that right there. It's two men in dress
Speaker 1: shirts and trousers. One also wears an apron, and it
Speaker 1: appears he's grabbing the other man's nose with pliers. This
Speaker 1: is how Noah came to tell me the story of
Speaker 1: Saint Dunstan.
Speaker 2: And he knows instantly that that's the devil.
Speaker 1: As Noah explained, this is the moment of his great
Speaker 1: grandfather's unraveling, the moment that the community decides his reality
Speaker 1: didn't match theirs. Doctor Smith wasn't sent away just because
Speaker 1: he'd been having delusions. He was sent away because he
Speaker 1: was accused of a crime.
Speaker 2: So Doctor Smith had started to lose it and could
Speaker 2: not really keep himself together, and he had moved his
Speaker 2: family to Louisiana. But then to keep his business going,
Speaker 2: he was still traveling around, and he traveled to Mississippi
Speaker 2: to Port Gibson to check eyes.
Speaker 1: This was using the mobile optometry truck he'd patented. Doctor
Speaker 1: Smith would place a notice in a newspaper and a
Speaker 1: few days later he'd show up in that small town
Speaker 1: with his truck. People would come to his truck. He'd
Speaker 1: take them inside, perform eye exams, grind spectacles.
Speaker 2: And a fifteen year old girl went to him to
Speaker 2: get her eyes checked and left his office saying that
Speaker 2: he had attacked her. He was set upon by a
Speaker 2: mob of her relative who drug him out to Hermanville,
Speaker 2: a couple of miles away, and were in the process
Speaker 2: of lynching him when the Clayburne County sheriff showed up
Speaker 2: and arrested him.
Speaker 1: Instead of being lynched, doctor Smith was taken to jail.
Speaker 1: It was a move that probably saved his life.
Speaker 2: And he maintained his innocence for the rest of his
Speaker 2: life and said, I never did anything. I never did
Speaker 2: anything to her.
Speaker 1: Doctor Smith avoided a criminal trial. It sounds like his
Speaker 1: father in law, Gerard Brandon, that godlike figure pulled some strings.
Speaker 1: What he got instead was in insanity hearing. We know
Speaker 1: how that turned out.
Speaker 2: More than half of his existence was in state custody.
Speaker 1: And for Noah. This is another important reason to see
Speaker 1: this work as largely unfinished because this pivotal moment in
Speaker 1: his grandfather's life, this act that meant that his daughter
Speaker 1: Margaret never saw him again, and that he would spend
Speaker 1: the second half of his life in state custody, that
Speaker 1: got him so carefully erased from his family that his
Speaker 1: great grandson had to spend the better part of a
Speaker 1: decade figuring out who he was. Noah's still wrestling with it.
Speaker 2: In the interviews with him, it seems as if he's
Speaker 2: wanting to say that it's not that nothing happened, but
Speaker 2: I did not force myself on her. That's more the
Speaker 2: phrasing that seems to come out.
Speaker 1: Of course, Noah knows that there's no such thing as
Speaker 1: consensual sex with a fifteen year old, and he knows
Speaker 1: that doctor Smith's mental illness is wrapped up in this
Speaker 1: alleged attack. In those same records, doctor Smith tells the
Speaker 1: asylum's doctors he's part of a breeding program run by
Speaker 1: the Secret Service. With this painting, Noah intentionally broke his
Speaker 1: family tradition of keeping people in the dark. But what
Speaker 1: happens when you turn on the light and you still
Speaker 1: don't know what you're looking at?
Speaker 2: How I'm suppose to relate to doctor Smith, and all
Speaker 2: the characters in this story change depending on what information
Speaker 2: is available. You know, I mean he sat there being
Speaker 2: kind of a silent monster figure for a century, and
Speaker 2: ever since the story started coming out, it's like, how
Speaker 2: much compassion should I have? Is he mentally ill? Is
Speaker 2: he a monster? Did he commit this crime? He was
Speaker 2: he forcefully committed? Was he happy there? You know?
Speaker 1: Was he healthy?
Speaker 2: Did he have friends? All that stuff is like these
Speaker 2: unknown qualities right now.
Speaker 1: Noah represents doctor Smith in this Unknown Girl with Dunstan
Speaker 1: and the Devil a metaphor about belief, but he's not
Speaker 1: sure it will stay that way, and so.
Speaker 2: It's like it keeps me constantly moving. Well, how am
Speaker 2: I going to represent him? Do I represent him as
Speaker 2: a lonely and pitifoil figure or was he completely happy
Speaker 2: for forty years in the asylum? I feel like I
Speaker 2: have to constantly shift my weight.
Speaker 1: He suspects his family did too. There was shame, yes,
Speaker 1: about mental illness and about his alleged assault, but maybe
Speaker 1: it was mixed with uncertainty about how to feel about
Speaker 1: this man they'd all loved so much. The way Noah
Speaker 1: wrestles with this is clearly painful. He's so deeply conflicted.
Speaker 1: Maybe sometimes it's just easier to start your story at
Speaker 1: a point that's pasted all that uncertainty and pain.
Speaker 6: Our story starts with the first generation, like Freeborn. I
Speaker 6: don't think it's necessarily always intentional, but I think it's
Speaker 6: the way we are inculturated in America. Who wants to
Speaker 6: build a history of themselves as rooted in slavery, and then,
Speaker 6: especially when that slavery is also tied to an insane asylum,
Speaker 6: which is also another kind of taboo, And so you
Speaker 6: start your history at the point that is less painful
Speaker 6: and more pleasing.
Speaker 1: The night before we left town, we met up with
Speaker 1: Noah for a drink at the Hotel bar across from
Speaker 1: the Mississippi Museum of Art. As we were saying our goodbyes,
Speaker 1: he mentioned offhand that he'd sold a few paintings to
Speaker 1: the hotel. He painted them years ago, just as he
Speaker 1: was starting to conceptualize his show, and they were hanging
Speaker 1: right down the hall, so we walked over to see them.
Speaker 1: The paintings were self portraits, and one Noah was working.
Speaker 1: His daughter, who often watches him paint, sits on a
Speaker 1: ledge nearby. Kind of reminded me how Margaret watched her
Speaker 1: own dad, doctor Smith, making glasses. And then, to my surprise,
Speaker 1: there in that same painting was Doctor Smith. He's gray,
Speaker 1: somewhat faceless, but he's there across from a silhouetted teenaged girl.
Speaker 1: Noah was just as surprised. He'd forgotten that was there.
Speaker 4: I learned.
Speaker 2: All I knew at that point was that if fifteen
Speaker 2: year old girl had gone to to have him check
Speaker 2: her eyes, and she left saying that he had assaulted her.
Speaker 2: So I was trying to figure out how I would
Speaker 2: paint those two together.
Speaker 1: This painting was big, over five feet tall, much bigger
Speaker 1: than any one canvas from the show. But it was
Speaker 1: also a one off, a good way to explore ideas.
Speaker 1: But I stopped.
Speaker 2: You know, it's unformed because I stopped painting it because
Speaker 2: I'm sure I hit the same wall, like, I don't
Speaker 2: know how to I can't portray this, you know, I
Speaker 2: don't know what I'm portraying.
Speaker 1: But then the museum gave him this platform to tell
Speaker 1: Doctor Smith's story. He had to choose which one to tell.
Speaker 2: But I've clearly made it very hard. I have a
Speaker 2: very hard time trying to figure out how to make
Speaker 2: that those two be together. You know, I do not
Speaker 2: at all dismiss the idea that he could have done it.
Speaker 2: You totally could have done it.
Speaker 1: You can hear Noah wrestling with this idea and with
Speaker 1: his own new role in the family myth making. So
Speaker 1: when it came to the show that would present this
Speaker 1: man to the world, Noah opted to let the answer
Speaker 1: shape shift mold to the eye of the beholder. He
Speaker 1: put it to Saint Dunstan.
Speaker 2: But that story, next to the doctor Smith story, it's like,
Speaker 2: that seems like a problem that Dunstan was having it,
Speaker 2: you know, was he imagining what was going on? Did
Speaker 2: he attack an old man? Nobody saw him change except Dunstan.
Speaker 2: An old man went in, and then an old man
Speaker 2: went out saying that Blacksmith attacked him. I'm real cautious
Speaker 2: about like making a saint comparison with doctor Smith, But
Speaker 2: it was just so which it's so chimed so much.
Speaker 1: Saints and sinners, truth and lies. These binaries are the
Speaker 1: underpinning for countless parables, myths, and family legends. But the
Speaker 1: real stories, the ones underneath those, they're always more complicated
Speaker 1: than that. That's true of doctor Smith's story, and it's
Speaker 1: certainly true for the state institution where he spent the
Speaker 1: last part of his life.
Speaker 4: What ends up is the Southern Gothic, the terrain of
Speaker 4: terror and a couple of the reports. People say, what
Speaker 4: are we supposed to do when people show up at
Speaker 4: the door?
Speaker 2: Are we supposed to just leave them out on the streets?
Speaker 4: Oh, everyone who.
Speaker 3: Worked in the asylum was evil and they would have
Speaker 3: stolen anything valuable that the patients had.
Speaker 1: Obviously that's not the case. Dig deeper, and sometimes you
Speaker 1: only find more to question. That's next on Under Yazoo Clay.
Speaker 1: Under Yazoo Clay is executive produced by the Mississippi Museum
Speaker 1: of Art in partnership with pod People. It's hosted by
Speaker 1: me Larison Campbell and written and produced by Rebecca Schasson
Speaker 1: and myself with help from Angela Yee and Amy Machado,
Speaker 1: with editing and sound design by Morgan Fuz and Erica
Speaker 1: Wong and thanks to Blue Dot Sessions for music. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to Betsy Bradley at the Mississippi Museum of Art,
Speaker 1: as well as Leida Gibson at the Center for Bioethics
Speaker 1: and Medical Humanities at the University of Mississippi Medical Center
Speaker 1: visit Jackson, and Jay and Deny Stein