Speaker 1: M show what he else about. All dig below the
Speaker 1: surface in central Mississippi, and odds are good you'll find
Speaker 1: a burnt orange color looking back up at you. It's
Speaker 1: called Yazoo clay, and there's one thing. It's known for
Speaker 1: wreaking havoc on anything buried in it. It is the strangest,
Speaker 1: most destructive soil I've ever dug in before. You never
Speaker 1: get what you expect.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Over the years, Yazoo clay has held and destroyed a
Speaker 1: lot of Mississippi's secrets. But in twenty twelve, a construction
Speaker 1: crew uncovered a big one graves, thousands of them on
Speaker 1: the site of the old State Asylum.
Speaker 2: And may have thought they're only found a thousand and
Speaker 2: then once I realized, okay, well you had two thousand.
Speaker 2: Wait a minute, seven thousand.
Speaker 1: And all this begs the question, just how do you
Speaker 1: lose track of seven thousand graves? The Mississippi State Lunatic
Speaker 1: Asylum closed its doors back in nineteen thirty five. It
Speaker 1: didn't take long for the asylum cemetery to fade from memory.
Speaker 2: And all of a sudden I looked down and there
Speaker 2: was a headstone, And all of a sudden, I walked
Speaker 2: a bit further, and I started looking all around and
Speaker 2: there were scores of headstones. I said, this is a
Speaker 2: big cemetery.
Speaker 1: Today, the cemetery, it's just a sprawling green island in
Speaker 1: the middle of what's now the biggest medical center in
Speaker 1: the state. But the graves might not be there much longer.
Speaker 2: When I hear them say, you know, we've done all
Speaker 2: we can do for the dead. It's time to do
Speaker 2: something for the living. We need that land. We just
Speaker 2: forgot they were buried out there. They didn't just forget.
Speaker 1: These graves hold real people, and their descendants are looking
Speaker 1: for the real story because it's not just about me.
Speaker 1: It's my family. This was my family's mystery.
Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: What happened to Grandma's in it? This is a story
Speaker 1: about family.
Speaker 2: They put him in an insane soyl Our mom said
Speaker 2: he wasn't crazy, he's just starving.
Speaker 1: It's a story about secrets.
Speaker 2: But if there's gonna be a good story, they've got
Speaker 2: the voices. It gets burried.
Speaker 1: Down so deep that any kind.
Speaker 2: Of scratch of the surface has to be tamped down.
Speaker 1: Quick in a place where even the ground wants you
Speaker 1: to forget. This soil technically shouldn't exist.
Speaker 2: It has character, it.
Speaker 1: Does its own it seems, but this is also a
Speaker 1: story about how we reckon with the past.
Speaker 2: We don't see the shame, but we see the effects
Speaker 2: of the shame. If you have any standing in the
Speaker 2: state of Mississippi, part of your work is writing.
Speaker 1: Wrongs in Mississippi. Keeping secrets is as old as the
Speaker 1: soil itself, So can the truth ever really be uncovered?
Speaker 1: The story is much more complicated and nuanced than that.
Speaker 1: I'm Larison Campbell and this is under Yazoo Clay. Listen
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts.