Speaker 1: Imagine for a moment that it's fifty million years ago.
Speaker 1: The earth is incredibly hot, about twenty five degrees hotter
Speaker 1: on average. There are gators in Canada. The Gulf of
Speaker 1: Mexico is the stuff of present day nightmares. It swallows
Speaker 1: the bottom halves of Mississippi and Alabama and the whole
Speaker 1: state of Florida. The Mississippi River is not yet an
Speaker 1: old man, but it's flowing. It's at the mouth of
Speaker 1: this river that the trouble begins, because as the river flows,
Speaker 1: a fine layer of blue black silt begins to settle
Speaker 1: around the delta. And this isn't just any silt, it's
Speaker 1: mineral heavy, the decay of everything the river has held
Speaker 1: over the millennia. The river will get faster and change course.
Speaker 1: This layer of silt will move with it, fanning out
Speaker 1: along the shallow waters of this ancient sea. After another
Speaker 1: twenty million years or so, it'll become a layer of
Speaker 1: clay four hundred feet deep in some parts. And it's
Speaker 1: right on top of the thickest part of the clay
Speaker 1: that one day Mississippi will decide to build its capital city.
Speaker 1: This is, to put it mildly, a terrible decision because
Speaker 1: this clay is a burnt orange monster. It's made of
Speaker 1: a mineral called smectite, so absorbent it can swell to
Speaker 1: two hundred times its size when wet and shrink just
Speaker 1: that much when it's dry. Over the next two hundred years,
Speaker 1: follow roads and send homes tumbling into creeks, cracked pipes
Speaker 1: and concrete foundations and even bones. It's called Yazoo clay,
Speaker 1: and it's where our story begins. I'm Larison Campbell, and
Speaker 1: this is under Yazoo clay as it happens. I am
Speaker 1: intimately familiar with this clay because Jackson, Mississippi, that poorly
Speaker 1: placed capital city, is where I used to live. This shifting,
Speaker 1: swelling soil has completely shaped the character of the place
Speaker 1: and everyone who lives there. Residents are used to broken
Speaker 1: water mains and boil water notices and seeing trees and
Speaker 1: utility poles in their neighbor's yards. But there's an upside
Speaker 1: to this chaos. In a place as fractured as Mississippi,
Speaker 1: complaining about Yazoo clay is kind of the one thing
Speaker 1: everyone can agree on. It's like traffic in Los Angeles
Speaker 1: or the weather in New England. So when my producer
Speaker 1: and I found ourselves at a fancy Jackson art opening
Speaker 1: talking about dirt, I wasn't too surprised. It is the strangest,
Speaker 1: most destructive soil I've ever dug in before. Still, I
Speaker 1: never heard it talked about quite like this.
Speaker 2: It has character, It is a mind of its own.
Speaker 1: It seems this is Gabby and Stasia. They've got a
Speaker 1: very different relationship with the clay because they spend all
Speaker 1: day in it. These two are archaeological field texts.
Speaker 3: Destructive like to the to stuff in the ground, or
Speaker 3: like to tools.
Speaker 1: All of the above. What Gabby and Stasia are digging for, well,
Speaker 1: that's kind of the whole reason we're in Jackson. But first,
Speaker 1: the art opening. It's foreign artist named Noah Saderstrom, who
Speaker 1: is also a Mississippi native. Noah's tall and thin with
Speaker 1: a bushy beard. He's thrown a blazer on over a
Speaker 1: button up, but his most noticeable accessory is a pair
Speaker 1: of wire framed glasses spectacles. Really, on this particular evening,
Speaker 1: Noah's tough to pin down. From the moment he arrived
Speaker 1: until he headed out. He was in the midst of
Speaker 1: a crowd of wine sipping Jacksonians and florals and sport coats.
Speaker 1: They were all there to ask what happened to doctor Smith,
Speaker 1: because that's the title of Noah's show, The hell of It,
Speaker 1: The hell of a thing incredible. I mean, you'd sent
Speaker 1: me photos of.
Speaker 4: What you were doing, but I didn't tell well.
Speaker 1: This is amazing. I couldn't picture it. You know what
Speaker 1: he couldn't picture a panorama that's six feet tall and
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty two feet long. In football terms,
Speaker 1: that's the forty yard line. The museum had constructed a
Speaker 1: room within a room, a circular olive green arena to
Speaker 1: hold the length of Noah's painting, and when you see
Speaker 1: it up close, you understand why Noah needed all that space.
Speaker 1: The panorama tells a very complicated family story about a
Speaker 1: very complicated man, Noah's great grandfather, doctor dil Smith. But
Speaker 1: it wasn't an easy story to uncover, Noah says, the
Speaker 1: man was intentionally erased from his family history.
Speaker 4: Doctor Smith disappeared in nineteen twenty five. I spent the
Speaker 4: last seven years researching in public and private archives to
Speaker 4: figure out his.
Speaker 1: Story, and then Noah painted that story an exquisite and
Speaker 1: obsessive detail across the one hundred and eighty three canvases
Speaker 1: that make up his panorama. But what is that story? Well,
Speaker 1: doctor Smith was an eye doctor, married a father of four.
Speaker 4: It's probably like seven tenths of this painting exists of
Speaker 4: the details that were known until he entered state custody,
Speaker 4: and then it goes dark, which is another forty years
Speaker 4: of his life.
Speaker 1: The story went dark because in nineteen twenty five, Noah's
Speaker 1: great grandfather entered the Mississippi State Insane Asylum as it
Speaker 1: was called. Then, any records of what happened next the
Speaker 1: rest of doctor Smith's life were sealed, and this is
Speaker 1: where Noah the artist intersects with Gabby and Stasia the
Speaker 1: field techs. The site they're working on is the side
Speaker 1: of the asylum where he was sent. Mississippi's first mental
Speaker 1: health hospital opened its doors in eighteen fifty five. In
Speaker 1: the course of its eighty years, the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum,
Speaker 1: as it was officially called back then, treated over thirty
Speaker 1: thousand people, nearly a quarter of them would be buried
Speaker 1: on its grounds. It would also get rebranded a few times,
Speaker 1: first the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, then the Mississippi State
Speaker 1: Insane Asylum. I'll just be calling it the Old Asylum.
Speaker 1: I met Noah about a year before the opening. I'd
Speaker 1: heard there was a Mississippi artist working on a show
Speaker 1: about his family connection to the Old State Asylum. I
Speaker 1: think I emailed him the next day. Because as much
Speaker 1: as Southerners love their family stories, there are certain ones
Speaker 1: you're just not supposed to tell. But sometimes those are
Speaker 1: the ones that can't help coming out, you.
Speaker 2: Know how like.
Speaker 4: If you're pulling on some sort of spool, it starts
Speaker 4: to tumble, and then kind of tumble faster, and then
Speaker 4: the yarn just kind of like falls off onto the
Speaker 4: floor in big piles. It kind of feels like that.
Speaker 1: By the way, that was a real live vocalist at
Speaker 1: the art opening. It was a big night with wine
Speaker 1: and cheese and those really delicious little doughnuts. And that's
Speaker 1: because this tumbling spool of yarn, it's bigger than the
Speaker 1: story of Noah's great grandfather. The asylum closed in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty five, and for the next seventy five years or so,
Speaker 1: it felt like everything from state lawmakers to local society
Speaker 1: did that. Damn Yazoo Clay was trying to erase the
Speaker 1: story of Mississippi's old state asylum. But for the last
Speaker 1: decade that hasn't been the case, and that change started
Speaker 1: someplace you wouldn't expect, with construction of a parking garage
Speaker 1: at the University of Mississippi Medical Center or UMMC. It's
Speaker 1: become a bit of Jackson folklore. Even people at the
Speaker 1: museum that night were talking about it.
Speaker 5: They were doing some digging at UMMC and dug up grays.
Speaker 6: You've heard about it in the paper or even was
Speaker 6: talking about it.
Speaker 5: No, it was just phone calls coming in because their
Speaker 5: husband was working there and they were excavating, clearing the
Speaker 5: ground for future projects.
Speaker 1: Fan skulls, skulls, human skulls right in the middle of
Speaker 1: the biggest medical center in the state.
Speaker 2: And this is the.
Speaker 1: University of Mississippi Medical Center.
Speaker 5: Oh so, perhaps an old asylum.
Speaker 1: Perhaps an old asylum tucked back in the It goes
Speaker 1: way far back to the highway there. I think it's
Speaker 1: back in the back corner. The University of Mississippi Medical
Speaker 1: Center sits on a hill in the center of Jackson.
Speaker 1: It's impossible to miss sprawling yellow complex right at the
Speaker 1: intersection of two of the busiest streets in town. It's
Speaker 1: maybe the most important place in the state. Those thirty
Speaker 1: odd buildings hold Mississippi's only medical school, it's children's hospital,
Speaker 1: and Oregon Transplant Center. It's also Mississippi's only safety net hospital,
Speaker 1: which means it's not allowed to turn away patients who
Speaker 1: can't pay, and in Mississippi, that's a lot of people.
Speaker 2: Ummc's place in Mississippi is incredibly important. Many people have
Speaker 2: no other options for healthcare except UMMC.
Speaker 1: This is Leida Gibson. She works with the medical Center.
Speaker 2: And it's needed for people who maybe come to Jackson
Speaker 2: for a day and have to get everything taken care
Speaker 2: of because they live one hundred miles away.
Speaker 1: It's hard to talk about anything in Mississippi without taking
Speaker 1: a moment to acknowledge that it's a very poor, very
Speaker 1: six state. Those of us from here joke that were
Speaker 1: ranked last and every category you want to be first in,
Speaker 1: and first in every category you want to be last.
Speaker 1: During COVID, demand for beds at the University Medical Center
Speaker 1: was so out of control they ended up turning two
Speaker 1: parking garages into field hospitals, Which is all to say
Speaker 1: there's a lot of pressure on this place. So back
Speaker 1: in twenty twelve, the university began clearing a field on
Speaker 1: campus to make space for a parking garage, but it
Speaker 1: never got built because it turns out the ground was
Speaker 1: already occupied.
Speaker 7: Certainly, whatever plans they had envisioned had to be overwhelmed
Speaker 7: by the number of bodies that they found.
Speaker 1: That's Jerry Mitchell. He was a reporter with the Jackson
Speaker 1: Clarion Ledger when he broke the story back in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 7: I got a tip that they were going to build
Speaker 7: like an underground parking garage at University Missipi Medical Center.
Speaker 7: When they started to do that, they discovered they're like
Speaker 7: a thousand bodies, and so as they would have it,
Speaker 7: they had this big press conference. Everybody else came and I,
Speaker 7: you know, I just pretended like I was there covering
Speaker 7: this like everybody else.
Speaker 1: The press conference was about the new visitor center the
Speaker 1: parking garage would be a part of. They were very
Speaker 1: much not talking about bodies. But Jerry didn't let that
Speaker 1: get in his way. After the press conference, he took
Speaker 1: the vice chancellor Jimmy Keaton aside.
Speaker 7: I said, I hear you guys may not be able
Speaker 7: to build that parking garage because you found a thousand bodies,
Speaker 7: And doctor Keaton's like, uh, I think it may be
Speaker 7: two thousands.
Speaker 8: So.
Speaker 1: I want to pause here. We're talking thousands of bodies.
Speaker 1: And by the way, two thousand also turned out to
Speaker 1: be an underestimate. The university would bring an experts, archaeologists
Speaker 1: and ground penetrating radar, and they'd eventually discover there were
Speaker 1: as many as seven thousand people buried right in the
Speaker 1: middle of town, and almost nobody knew about them.
Speaker 7: All these other press people are walking around, they have
Speaker 7: no idea what we're talking about. I think we're talking
Speaker 7: about this thing there from the press conference were I
Speaker 7: have no idea. You know, all these bodies being found
Speaker 7: on the campus of the hospital, and of course they were.
Speaker 7: The bodies were a part of, as you know, as
Speaker 7: was explained to me, a part of what was called
Speaker 7: the asylum there, which was actually built before the Civil War,
Speaker 7: and so it was the mental institution, basically the main
Speaker 7: one in Mississippi.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of superstitions about cemeteries. It's bad
Speaker 1: luck to walk on a grave or even just a
Speaker 1: trip anywhere in a cemetery. If you whistle in a graveyard,
Speaker 1: you'll summon the devil, and of course, never ever, under
Speaker 1: any circumstances, take anything from a grave. So if you,
Speaker 1: like me, are highly superstitious, you might just decide to
Speaker 1: pack up and find a new spot. But remember, the
Speaker 1: state's main medical center has no other spot. The campus
Speaker 1: is in the heart of the city, so there's no
Speaker 1: room to expand outward. They have to work with what
Speaker 1: they've got, and what they've got is twelve wide open
Speaker 1: acres with thousands of graves.
Speaker 2: I don't believe anybody in the community, anybody certainly at
Speaker 2: the medical center, are now really understood that there could
Speaker 2: possibly be that many burials on campus. One of my
Speaker 2: first questions when I came on was why can't we
Speaker 2: just leave it? You know, why don't we just leave
Speaker 2: it alone? And why don't we let these people rest?
Speaker 6: The space pressures for using the last undeveloped land on
Speaker 6: the campus were increasing, and the Medical Health Center was
Speaker 6: doing long term planning twenty five and fifty year planning,
Speaker 6: so these this was part of the discussion.
Speaker 1: That last voice was doctor Ralph Didlake. You'll hear more
Speaker 1: from him in lighta later, but for now, here's the
Speaker 1: rub the hospital is responsible for the cemetery and the
Speaker 1: former patients buried in it, but it's also responsible for
Speaker 1: its current and future patients. So is this yazoo clay
Speaker 1: for building or for burial? There's also another layer, so
Speaker 1: to speak. Graves are just part of what remains when
Speaker 1: a person eyes. They also leave behind friends and family,
Speaker 1: and the friends and family of those buried in the
Speaker 1: cemetery they've been waiting a long long time to get
Speaker 1: answers about what became of their loved ones. And it's
Speaker 1: not just Noah.
Speaker 3: I'm Anna Sadist from my connection to the first I'm
Speaker 3: the mother of the artist and the granddaughter of the
Speaker 3: person of interest here, doctor Smith. I don't remember what age.
Speaker 9: I realized that I didn't know anything about my grandfather
Speaker 9: because she would talk about her mother quite a bit,
Speaker 9: and when I asked about my grandfather, she said he
Speaker 9: lost his memory and went away, And so I thought,
Speaker 9: maybe somebody will direct him back home sometime.
Speaker 1: There's this old adage in the South, we don't lock
Speaker 1: our crazy way, We put it on the front porch
Speaker 1: and give it a cocktail. But it's not entirely true.
Speaker 1: In just this one state, thirty thousand people were sent away,
Speaker 1: and as many as seven thousand of them were buried
Speaker 1: under this yazoo clay. Why did their stories get buried
Speaker 1: with them? What's he down through the years in spite
Speaker 1: of it?
Speaker 9: I would just say silence, absence. This is just not
Speaker 9: where we go.
Speaker 4: My suspicion. There is the silence is the response to
Speaker 4: the shame.
Speaker 10: When I share these stories, there's there's just a lot
Speaker 10: of silence, you know, because what can you say? It's
Speaker 10: you know, it's a lot to take in. I am
Speaker 10: Elizabeth West, my ancestor family member. His name was Hillman,
Speaker 10: sisterm and actually I had had no knowledge of him
Speaker 10: up until about, I don't know, five years ago. The
Speaker 10: people who were omitted were the people who had the
Speaker 10: direct line to a history that we have mixed feelings about.
Speaker 10: You know, many people black and white don't want to
Speaker 10: remember the country's period of slavery, even when they want
Speaker 10: to remember it, they just don't want to remember the
Speaker 10: slavery part. And for many of us, you know, we
Speaker 10: are told to just look forward, there's no point in
Speaker 10: looking back. But well, I don't think we've gotten to
Speaker 10: the point where we sit down and really talk about
Speaker 10: it because there's just no words. You just take it
Speaker 10: in and you start seeing how these things in the
Speaker 10: past us have this direct line to where you are
Speaker 10: in this moment, and it's a lot. It's a lot
Speaker 10: to think about.
Speaker 1: In this country, genealogy is a billion dollar industry. We
Speaker 1: are obsessed with understanding our family histories and stories. But
Speaker 1: what if your relative story doesn't have an ending? What
Speaker 1: if the last decades of the lives they lived were
Speaker 1: just washed off the canvas. What do you get out
Speaker 1: of a story with no end.
Speaker 11: My name is Kimberly Jackson.
Speaker 1: Tell us about your It's your great grandmother, right, so
Speaker 1: you know about her.
Speaker 11: So we were always told their name was Zenny. It
Speaker 11: was just such a mystery, such a mystery as to
Speaker 11: what happened to her, well just about everybody else, you know.
Speaker 11: You know, there was a beginning to the store, and
Speaker 11: there's an end to the and they had they have
Speaker 11: the whole middle. That wasn't that with her, That was
Speaker 11: not that with her. There was always obituaries and always,
Speaker 11: of course, like I said, story is to be told,
Speaker 11: but hers was always that sense of unknown and with that,
Speaker 11: like I said, a little twinge of sadness but it
Speaker 11: was a lot of love, but little twinge of sadness
Speaker 11: and it just felt like, you know, it was just
Speaker 11: a puzzle missing.
Speaker 12: My name is Wayne Lee My Hairstyles. Grew up in
Speaker 12: Kentucky live in Durham, North Carolina. See, I grew up
Speaker 12: with a little bit of the stigma of they thought
Speaker 12: your grandfather was crazy. They put him in an insane sylum,
Speaker 12: you know, was he was?
Speaker 6: He not?
Speaker 12: Our mom said, he wasn't crazy, he was just starving.
Speaker 1: Each of the descendants we spoke to was dogged in
Speaker 1: their research, tireless in their efforts to find out answers
Speaker 1: about their loved ones and about their own past, because
Speaker 1: they had to be This is a story that was
Speaker 1: buried again and again. Here's the thing. Coming across human
Speaker 1: remains at the medical center wasn't a new problem.
Speaker 2: They were extending a road and they went, oh, there's.
Speaker 1: Some people there.
Speaker 6: Some bones had been discovered several years before when an
Speaker 6: old laundry building was being built, and at that point
Speaker 6: the institution was reminded that there's a cemetery. So fast
Speaker 6: forward to the twenty eleven time frame. A new road
Speaker 6: construction project was started and almost immediately they ran into burials,
Speaker 6: and at that time the original sixty six burials were
Speaker 6: exhumed for the road project.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety, when a building was being constructed in
Speaker 2: that area, the construction workers came across some burials as well,
Speaker 2: and at that time the leadership went to the city
Speaker 2: and got all the sort of legal documents in place
Speaker 2: so that they could exhume these remains and relocate them
Speaker 2: to the UMMC cemetery.
Speaker 1: Finding bodies there got to be such a common occurrence
Speaker 1: that in the nineteen seventies the state legislature passed a
Speaker 1: bill allowing them to basically do whatever needed to be done.
Speaker 6: The nineteen seventies legislation is pretty broad, and then there
Speaker 6: was a certain amendment of that that's worded to disinter rearrange,
Speaker 6: So we could probably have shoehorned almost anything into that language,
Speaker 6: but it would have been a terrible idea.
Speaker 1: So the medical Center finds seven thousand graves, they've got
Speaker 1: the legal standing and paperwork in place to do what
Speaker 1: they need to do to solve their space issue. So
Speaker 1: what isn't a terrible idea? That's after the break The
Speaker 1: largest art museum in the state, the Mississippi Museum of
Speaker 1: Art connects Mississippi to the world and the power of
Speaker 1: art to the power of community. Located in downtown Jackson,
Speaker 1: the museum's permanent collection is free to the public. National
Speaker 1: and international exhibitions rotate throughout the year, allowing visitors to
Speaker 1: experience works from around the world. The gardens at Expansive
Speaker 1: Lawn at the Mississippi Museum of Art are home to
Speaker 1: art installations and a variety of events for all ages.
Speaker 1: Plan your visit today at MS Museumart dot org. That's
Speaker 1: MS Museum Art dot org.
Speaker 2: I'm Lida Gibson. I am the coordinator of the Asylum
Speaker 2: Hill Project.
Speaker 6: I'm raftedlike. I am director of the Center for Bioethics
Speaker 6: and Medical Humanities at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
Speaker 6: I was a surgeon for twenty five years and then
Speaker 6: went into administrative positions.
Speaker 1: The Asylum Hill Project, that's the arm of the university
Speaker 1: organized to reconcile the needs of the living with the
Speaker 1: needs of the dead, and that reconciliation has to be
Speaker 1: weighted towards the living. The medical center needs the land
Speaker 1: to expand to provide more vital services. So the question
Speaker 1: isn't if the cemetery will move, it's how So it was.
Speaker 2: The vision of doctor Ralph Didlake to handle this challenge
Speaker 2: of having a cemetery on the last remaining part of
Speaker 2: the campus. It was his vision to kind of deal
Speaker 2: with this in a way that was ethical, that embraced
Speaker 2: the community.
Speaker 6: I was very interested in the problem. I found it
Speaker 6: to be a challenging nut to crack, both from an
Speaker 6: administrative efficiency standpoint and from a bioethics standpoint. So, yes,
Speaker 6: did I seek it out. I'm not sure I overtly
Speaker 6: sought it out, but I didn't run away from it.
Speaker 6: And at that time I was director of the Bioethics Center,
Speaker 6: and I kept hearing various plans brought forward, and I
Speaker 6: felt very strongly that whatever plan was selected, whatever was
Speaker 6: done with the land or the remains, had to be ethical.
Speaker 6: It had to be not just respectful and ethical, but
Speaker 6: it needed to fit well into a Southern community. It
Speaker 6: had to have a Southern ethos about it. And I
Speaker 6: remembered a line from William Faulkner's The Readers where he
Speaker 6: paraphrasing he said, Southerners don't fear death, but they take
Speaker 6: fear funerals very seriously.
Speaker 1: Southerners take funerals very seriously. The same goes for what
Speaker 1: comes after the burial, and cemeteries hold a very special
Speaker 1: place in the Southern imagination, but in the Southern reality
Speaker 1: quality specialized healthcare is sparse, difficult to access, and sorely needed.
Speaker 1: What importance is there in doing right by the dead
Speaker 1: when there's such dire need for the living scarce resources?
Speaker 1: Mean that this question of what to do with this
Speaker 1: land and how and when is a zero sum game.
Speaker 1: Rush the excavation and you violate the Southern reverence for
Speaker 1: the grave. But take your time and how many patients
Speaker 1: will go to their graves sooner than they should? Zero
Speaker 1: sum or not. As Faulkner says, there's no fear in death,
Speaker 1: that there is a fear of being forgotten. Maybe that's
Speaker 1: where all those superstitions come from.
Speaker 11: Oh yeah, because see my grandma was being on visiting cemeteries,
Speaker 11: so yeah, we would oh yeah, big, Oh it was.
Speaker 11: It was a whole thing for the churches to get
Speaker 11: together and clean the cemetery, you know, mowed the lawn
Speaker 11: of the cemetery, changed out the flowers. That was the
Speaker 11: whole thing. That was a day set aside to do
Speaker 11: that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Once upon a time, the Old Asylum Cemetery received that
Speaker 1: level of Karen attention. What might the grounds in the
Speaker 1: asylum have looked like then? It was eighteen fifty five
Speaker 1: when the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum opened its doors, surrounded
Speaker 1: by its one hundred and sixty acre campus, and it
Speaker 1: would keep growing. By the time it closed its doors,
Speaker 1: the Old Asylum covered about thirteen hundred acres. It was picturesque,
Speaker 1: sprawling green with a main building designed with classical architecture
Speaker 1: in mind akupola, Greek columns, the works.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 2: I will say too that when the asylum was established
Speaker 2: it was state of the art.
Speaker 8: I mean.
Speaker 2: Mississippi, of course was one of the richest states, if
Speaker 2: not the rich estate, because it's easy to get rich
Speaker 2: when you're exploiting other people and enslaving other people. But
Speaker 2: this was sort of a monument to the goodness of
Speaker 2: Mississippi leaders as well as just to take care of
Speaker 2: those who are less fortunate than we are.
Speaker 1: The goodness of Mississippi leaders tough to believe that. They
Speaker 1: thought providing mental health care would help the state's image
Speaker 1: more than ending slavery. That was their calculus. All seven
Speaker 1: thousand of these graves are unmarked, but that isn't how
Speaker 1: they started.
Speaker 8: I don't know if La mentioned to y'all, but the
Speaker 8: original originally the graves, every single grave was marked with
Speaker 8: a wooden marker, and it was painted with the name
Speaker 8: of the deceased, the date of death, and the county
Speaker 8: the person was from.
Speaker 1: That's doctor Jennifer Mack who's heading up the excavation of
Speaker 1: the Asylum cemetery. And what happened to those wooden markers.
Speaker 1: Remember the yazoo clay, that burnt orange stuff I told
Speaker 1: you about at the top of the episode. Oh, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: it's terrible.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's terrible, terrible dirt.
Speaker 1: The soils are also a challenge Herezukla character. How can
Speaker 1: soil just eat metal?
Speaker 6: It's just it's amazing, yes, what it can do.
Speaker 1: Today the old Asylum Cemetery is an unmarked field of
Speaker 1: green grass, dappled with the occasional tree, surrounded by chain
Speaker 1: link fence lined with black mesh. There are hents of
Speaker 1: burnt orange poking through the grass, but not a grave marker.
Speaker 1: When we first got down South, we thought it the
Speaker 1: Asylum was the story. We touched down in New Orleans
Speaker 1: and drove up by fifty five, secure in the belief
Speaker 1: that we were on our way to tell the tale
Speaker 1: of an old asylum falling into disrepair, the mystery of
Speaker 1: what happened within those walls. We were wrong.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that was an email.
Speaker 9: Thought that was an email.
Speaker 1: I felt guilty of reading the email. I felt guilty.
Speaker 1: By the time I got to the second sentence, I was.
Speaker 3: Like Yeah, I was like, oh no, this is reckless
Speaker 3: more an email.
Speaker 1: On the one hand, bummer, because like, it would have
Speaker 1: been nice to interview them. One of the people we'd
Speaker 1: hoped to talk to was Patrick Hopkins, a philosopher and
Speaker 1: ethicist who works with the Center for Bioethics Medical Humanities
Speaker 1: at UMMC. Patrick and one of his colleagues recently received
Speaker 1: a grant for something that piqued my interest. They were
Speaker 1: going to be reading through volumes like boxes and boxes
Speaker 1: of the old asylum's patient files. Finally, this was our
Speaker 1: entry into this world that had been intentionally locked away.
Speaker 1: But Patrick, the guy who had the key, wasn't interested
Speaker 1: in opening that door. To attempt to talk authoritatively about
Speaker 1: patient experiences at the asylum at this point would be
Speaker 1: scholarly malpractice and would lend itself to bringing attention to
Speaker 1: whatever random bit of information we have recently come across,
Speaker 1: rather than waiting for the big picture. As an analogy,
Speaker 1: if I were writing a biography of someone, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: want to interview me about that person's life when I
Speaker 1: had only gotten up to their third birthday in my research.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a great point with respect to the
Speaker 1: process of research, But these are also real people and
Speaker 1: their very real families have waited decades to learn anything
Speaker 1: about their lives. Is saying keep waiting really doing right
Speaker 1: by them? Or are we doing right by the living?
Speaker 1: Short change the debt? And ultimately that's what this whole
Speaker 1: thing is about. How can Asylum Hill make room for
Speaker 1: the present, for the future while honoring the past. How
Speaker 1: can these descendants reconcile the desire to know their ancestors'
Speaker 1: stories with the pain that that may inevitably bring. Yazoo
Speaker 1: clay is a tricky soil. It doesn't fall neatly into
Speaker 1: any one category. It's the nemesis of contractors statewide, wrecking
Speaker 1: home foundations, road work, and generally causing chaos. But a
Speaker 1: ride down the highways outside Jackson and the lushness of
Speaker 1: the green will take your breath away. Yazoo Clay forms
Speaker 1: a foundation for the wreckage secrecy can bring, but the
Speaker 1: breakdown of what came before can make for fertile ground.
Speaker 1: In the case of the clay on Asylum Hill, it's
Speaker 1: managed to do a bit of both. That's coming up
Speaker 1: on Under Yazoo Clay.
Speaker 12: I'm Wayne Lee, I'm a Dawser. I'm at the Greenwood
Speaker 12: Cemetery in Jackson, Mississippi, and I'm gonna do a little
Speaker 12: demonstration with the divining Arts.
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 Laris and Campbell and written and produced by Rebecca
Speaker 1: Chassan and myself with help from Angela Yee and Amy Machado,
Speaker 1: with editing and sound design by Morgan Fous 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,