A Southern Ethos

Summary

Under Yazoo Clay: Episode Summary - "A Southern Ethos"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Under Yazoo Clay
• Host/Author: iHeartPodcasts and Mississippi Museum of Art
• Episode: A Southern Ethos
• Release Date: March 6, 2025
• Description: Under Yazoo Clay delves into the hidden histories surrounding Mississippi’s former lunatic asylum. Discovered in 2012 during construction in Jackson, Mississippi, over 7,000 patient remains were unearthed, revealing a forgotten chapter of the state's history. Reporter Larrison Campbell explores the impact on descendant families and investigates how this dark legacy was obscured over time.

Introduction: The Enigmatic Yazoo Clay

The episode opens with Larrison Campbell setting the geological and historical context of Yazoo Clay in Jackson, Mississippi. Yazoo Clay, a highly absorbent mineral soil, poses significant challenges for construction and infrastructure, swelling dramatically when wet and shrinking when dry. This peculiar soil not only disrupts daily life with broken water mains and damaged foundations but also plays a metaphorical role in the concealment of history.

[02:06] Narrator: "Yazoo Clay forms a foundation for the wreckage secrecy can bring. But the breakdown of what came before can make for fertile ground."

The Forgotten Asylum: Discovery and Implications

In 2012, construction at the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) unearthed human remains, later identified as belonging to over 7,000 former patients of the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, operational from 1855 to 1935. This grim discovery brought to light the extensive practice of burying patients on asylum grounds, a practice shrouded in secrecy for decades.

[02:06] Narrator: "The old asylum cemetery received that level of care and attention. What might the grounds in the asylum have looked like then?"

Family Histories and Artistic Representation

The narrative intertwines personal stories of descendants seeking to uncover their ancestors' fates. Noah Satterstrom, a Mississippi native artist, created a panoramic painting titled "Dr. Smith," depicting his great-grandfather’s life and mysterious disappearance into the asylum in 1925. The painting serves as both an artistic endeavor and a quest for historical truth.

[06:53] Noah Satterstrom: "Dr. Smith disappeared in 1925. I spent the last seven years researching and public and private archives to figure out his story."

Excavations and Legalities: Unveiling the Past

The discovery of the remains was not an isolated incident. Previous construction efforts had already unearthed bodies, leading to legislative actions in the 1970s that permitted the relocation of remains to accommodate ongoing development. Despite these measures, the full extent of the burials—approximately 7,000 individuals—remained largely unknown to the public until recent excavations.

[13:54] Narrator: "The medical center finds 7,000 graves. They've got the legal standing and paperwork in place to do what they need to do to solve their space issue."

The Asylum Hill Project: Bridging Past and Present

Lyda Gibson, coordinator of the Asylum Hill Project, and Dr. Ralph Didlake, director of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at UMMC, spearhead efforts to address the dual needs of expanding medical facilities while honoring the buried patients. Their approach emphasizes ethical considerations and community involvement, striving to respect Southern cultural values surrounding death and remembrance.

[32:03] Lyda Gibson: "It was the vision of Dr. Ralph Didlake to handle this challenge of having a cemetery on the last remaining part of the campus... it needed to fit well into a Southern community."

Community Impact and Ethical Dilemmas

The episode delves into the emotional and ethical struggles faced by descendants seeking closure and truth about their ancestors. The silence surrounding the asylum’s history is attributed to societal shame and the stigma of mental illness. Efforts to excavate and preserve the site must balance respect for the deceased with the urgent healthcare needs of the living community.

[19:30] Lyda Gibson: "My suspicion there is the silence is the response to the shame."

Family members like Kimberly Jackson and Wayne Lee share their personal quests for answers, highlighting the generational pain and the importance of memory in Southern culture.

[24:16] Narrator: "Genealogy is a billion dollar industry... What if the last decades of the lives they lived were just washed off the canvas?"

Conclusion: Reconciling History with Progress

Under Yazoo Clay's final reflections encapsulate the ongoing struggle to honor the past while addressing present and future community needs. The soil that conceals so much also becomes a symbol of the secrets and resilience embedded in Mississippi’s history. The episode concludes by questioning how the community can move forward without erasing the memories of those who suffered in silence.

[37:59] Lyda Gibson: "I felt guilty reading the email... Would doing right by the living shortchange the debt?"

[43:33] Ryan Seacrest: "That’s coming up on Under Yazoo Clay."

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Larrison Campbell [02:06]: "Yazoo Clay forms a foundation for the wreckage secrecy can bring. But the breakdown of what came before can make for fertile ground."

• Noah Satterstrom [06:53]: "Dr. Smith disappeared in 1925. I spent the last seven years researching and public and private archives to figure out his story."

• Lyda Gibson [19:30]: "My suspicion there is the silence is the response to the shame."

• Kimberly Jackson [24:16]: "Genealogy is a billion dollar industry... What if the last decades of the lives they lived were just washed off the canvas?"

• Lyda Gibson [32:03]: "It was the vision of Dr. Ralph Didlake to handle this challenge of having a cemetery on the last remaining part of the campus... it needed to fit well into a Southern community."

Reflections

"A Southern Ethos" masterfully intertwines geological challenges, historical injustices, and personal narratives to shed light on a neglected aspect of Mississippi’s history. Through meticulous storytelling and compelling interviews, the episode underscores the enduring impact of past actions on present communities and the vital need for transparency and reconciliation.

For listeners unfamiliar with Under Yazoo Clay, this episode offers a poignant exploration of how soil can both hide and reveal the truths buried beneath, urging a deeper understanding and acknowledgment of forgotten histories.

Transcript

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[Narrator]

Imagine for a moment that it's 50 million years ago. The Earth is incredibly hot, about 25 degrees hotter on average. There are gators in Canada. The Gulf of Mexico is the stuff of present day nightmares. It swallows the bottom halves of Mississippi and Alabama and the whole state of Florida. The Mississippi river is not yet an old man, but it's flowing. It's at the mouth of this river that the trouble begins. Because as the river flows, a fine layer of blue black silt begins to settle around the delta. And this isn't just any silt. It's mineral, heavy. The decay of everything the river has held over the millennia. The river will get faster and change course. This layer of silt will Move with it, fanning out along the shallow waters of this ancient sea. After another 20 million years or so, it'll become a layer of clay 400ft deep in some parts. And it's right on top of this thickest part of the clay that one day Mississippi will decide to build its capital city. This is, to put it mildly, a terrible decision, because this clay is a burnt orange monster. It's made of a mineral called smectite, so absorbent it can swell to 200 times its size when wet and shrink just that much when it's dry. Over the next 200 years, it'll swallow roads and send homes tumbling into creeks, cracked pipes and concrete foundations, and even bones. It's called Yazoo clay, and it's where our story begins. I'm Larison Campbell, and this is under Yazoo clay. As it happens, I am intimately familiar with this clay because Jackson, Mississippi, that poorly placed capital city, is where I used to live. This shifting, swelling soil has completely shaped the character of the place and everyone who lives there. Residents are used to broken water mains and boil water notices and seeing trees and utility poles toppled over in their neighbors yards. But there's an upside to this chaos. In a place as fractured as Mississippi, complaining about Yazoo clay is kind of the one thing everyone can agree on. It's like traffic in Los Angeles or the weather in New England. So when my producer and I found ourselves at a fancy Jackson art opening talking about dirt, I wasn't too surprised. It is the strangest, most destructive soil I've ever dug in before. Still, I never heard it talked about quite like this.

[Lyda Gibson]

It has character, it does a mind.

[Narrator]

Of its own, it seems. This is Gabby and Stacia. They've got a very different relationship with the clay because they spend all day in it. These two are archaeological field techs, very destructive. Like to stuff in the ground or like to tools. You're using all of of the above. Everything what Gabby and Stacia are digging for, well, that's kind of the whole reason we're in Jackson. But first, the art opening. It's for an artist named Noah Satterstrom, who is also a Mississippi native. Noah's tall and thin with a bushy beard. He's thrown a blazer on over a button up. But his most noticeable accessory is a pair of wire framed glasses. Spectacles really. On this particular evening, Noah's tough to pin down. From the moment he arrived until he headed out, he was in the midst of a crowd of wine sipping Jacksonians in florals and sport coats. They were all there to ask what happened to Dr. Smith? Because that's the title of Noah's show.

[Lyda Gibson]

A hell of a thing.

[Narrator]

This is incredible. I mean, you'd sent me photos of like, what you were doing, but it was. I didn't until I walked, I couldn't picture it. You know what he couldn't picture? A panorama that's 6ft tall and 122ft long. In football terms, that's the 40 yard line. The museum had constructed a room within a room, a circular olive green arena to hold the length of Noah's painting. And when you see it up close, you understand why Noah needed all that space. The panorama tells a very complicated family story about a very complicated man, Noah's great grandfather, Dr. D.L. smith. But it wasn't an easy story to uncover. Noah says the man was intentionally erased from his family history.

[Lyda Gibson]

Dr. Smith disappeared in 1925. I spent the last seven years researching and public and private archives to figure out his story.

[Narrator]

And then Noah painted that story in exquisite and obsessive detail across the 183 canvases that make up his panorama. But what is that story? Well, Dr. Smith was an eye doctor, married a father of four.

[Lyda Gibson]

It's probably like seven tenths of this painting exist of the details that were known until he entered state custody. And then it goes dark, which is another 40 years of his life.

[Narrator]

The story went dark because in 1925, Noah's great grandfather entered the Mississippi State Insane Asylum, as it was called then. Any records of what happened next, the rest of Dr. Smith's life were sealed. And this is where Noah, the artist, intersects with Gabby and Stacia, the field techs. The site they're working on is the site of the asylum where he was sent. Mississippi's first mental health hospital opened its doors in 1855. In the course of its 80 years, the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, as it was officially called back then, treated over 30,000 people. Nearly a quarter of them would be buried on its grounds. It would also get rebranded a few times. First the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, then the Mississippi State Insane Asylum. I'll just be calling it the Old Asylum. I met Noah about a year before the opening. I'd heard there was a Mississippi artist working on a show about his family connection to the old state asylum. I think I emailed him the next day because as much as Southerners love their family stories, there are certain ones you're just not supposed to tell. But sometimes those are the ones that can't help coming out you know how.

[Lyda Gibson]

Like if you're pulling on some sort of spool, it like starts to tumble and then kind of tumble faster and then the yarn just kind of like falls off onto the floor in big piles. It kind of feels like that.

[Narrator]

By the way, that was a real live vocalist at the art opening. It was a big night with wine and cheese and those really delicious little donuts. And that's because this tumbling spool of yarn, it's bigger than the story of Noah's great grandfather. The asylum closed in 1935, and for the next 75 years or so, it felt like everything from state lawmakers to local society to that damn yazoo clay was trying to erase the story of Mississippi's old state asylum. But for the last decade, that hasn't been the case. And that change started someplace you wouldn't expect with construction of a parking garage at the University of Mississippi Medical center, or ummc. It's become a bit of Jackson folklore. Even people at the museum that night were talking about it.

[Lyda Gibson]

They were doing some digging at UMMC and dug up graves. You heard about it in the paper.

[Narrator]

Or people was talking about it?

[Lyda Gibson]

No, it was just phone calls coming.

[Narrator]

In because their husband was working there and they were excavating, clearing the ground for future projects. They found the fan skulls, skulls, human skulls, right in the middle of the biggest medical center in the state. And this is the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

[Lyda Gibson]

Oh, so perhaps old asylum.

[Narrator]

Perhaps an old asylum tucked back in the. It goes way far back to the highway there. I think it's back in the back corner. The University of Mississippi Medical center sits on a hill in the center of Jackson. It's impossible to miss this sprawling yellow brick complex right at the intersection of two of the busiest streets in town. It's maybe the most important place in the state. Those 30 odd buildings hold Mississippi's only medical school. It's children's hospital and organ transplant center. It's also Mississippi's only safety net hospital, which means it's not allowed to turn away patients who can't pay. And in Mississippi, that's a lot of people.

[Lyda Gibson]

UMMC's place in Mississippi is incredibly important. Many people have no other options for healthcare except ummc.

[Narrator]

This is Lyda Gibson. She works with the medical center.

[Lyda Gibson]

And it's needed for people who maybe come to Jackson for a day and have to get everything taken care of because they live 100 miles away.

[Narrator]

It's hard to talk about anything in Mississippi without taking a moment to acknowledge that it's a very Poor, very sick state. Those of us from here joke that we're ranked last in every category you want to be first in, and first in every category you want to be last. During COVID demand for beds at the university medical center was so out of control, they ended up turning two parking garages into field hospitals. Which is all to say, there's a lot of pressure on this place. So back in 2012, the university began clearing a field on campus to make space for a parking garage. But it never got built. Cause it turns out the ground was already occupied.

[Lyda Gibson]

Certainly whatever plans they had envisioned had to be overwhelmed by the number of bodies that they found.

[Narrator]

That's Jerry Mitchell. He was a reporter with the Jackson Clarion Ledger. When he broke the story Back in.

[Lyda Gibson]

2014, I got a tip that they were going to build, like, an underground parking garage at University of Mississippi medical Center. When they started to do that, they discovered there were, like, a thousand bodies. And so, as fate would have it, they had this big press conference. Everybody else came, and I, you know, I just pretended like I was there covering this like everybody else.

[Narrator]

The press conference was about the new visitor center the parking garage would be a part of. They were very much not talking about bodies. But Jerry didn't let that get in his way. After the press conference, he took the vice chancellor, Jimmy Keaton, aside.

[Lyda Gibson]

I said, I hear you guys may not be able to build that parking garage because you found a thousand bodies. And Dr. Keaton's like, I think it may be 2000.

[Narrator]

So anyway, I want to pause here. We're talking thousands of bodies. And by the way, 2000 also turned out to be an underestimate. The university would bring in experts, archaeologists, and ground penetrating radar, and they'd eventually discover there were as many as 7,000 people buried right in the middle of town. And almost nobody knew about them.

[Lyda Gibson]

All these other press people are walking around. They have no idea what we're talking about. I think we're talking about this thing they're from the press conference for. Have no idea, you know, all these bodies being found on the campus of the hospital. And of course they were. The bodies were a part of, as you know, as was explained to me, part of what was called the asylum there, which was actually built before the civil War. And so it was the mental institution, basically, the main one in Mississippi.

[Narrator]

There are a lot of superstitions about cemeteries. It's bad luck to walk on a grave or even just a trip anywhere a cemetery. If you whistle in a graveyard, you'll summon the devil. And of course, never, ever, under any circumstances, take anything from a grave. So if you, like me, are highly superstitious, you might just decide to pack up and find a new spot. But remember, the state's main medical center has no other spot. The campus is in the heart of the city. So there's no room to expand outward. They have to work with what they've got. And what they've got is 12 wide open acres with thousands of graves.

[Lyda Gibson]

I don't believe anybody in the community, anybody certainly at the medical center now, really understood that there could possibly be that many burials on campus. One of my first questions when I came on was why can't we just leave it? You know, why don't we just leave it alone and why don't we let these people rest?

[Jevon]

The space pressures for using the last undeveloped land on the campus were increasing. And the medical center was doing long term planning, 25 and 50 year planning. So these, this was part of this discussion.

[Narrator]

That Last voice was Dr. Ralph Didlake. You'll hear more from him and Lyda later. But for now, here's the rub. The hospital is responsible for the cemetery and the former patients buried in it. But it's also responsible for its current and future patients. So is this yazoo clay for building or for burial? There's also another layer, so to speak. Graves are just part of what remains. When a person dies, they also leave behind friends and family. And the friends and family of those buried in this cemetery, they've been waiting a long, long time to get answers about what became of their loved ones. And it's not just Noah. I'm Anna Satterstrom. My connection to the story. First on the mother of the artist and the granddaughter of the person of interest here, Dr. Smith. I don't remember at what age. I realized that I didn't know anything about my grandfather because she would talk.

[Lyda Gibson]

About her mother quite a bit.

[Narrator]

And when I asked about my grandfather, she said he lost his memory and went away. And so I thought maybe somebody will direct him back home. Sometimes there's this old adage in the south, we don't lock our crazy away. We put it on the front porch and give it a cocktail. But it's not entirely true. In just this one state, 30,000 people were sent away and as many as 7,000 of them were buried under this yazoo clay. Why did their stories get buried with them? What seeped down through the years in spite of it? I would just say silence, absence. This is just not where we go.

[Lyda Gibson]

My suspicion there is the silence is the response to the shame.

[Kimberly Jackson]

When I share these stories, there's, there's just a lot of silence, you know. Cause what can, what can you say? It's a, you know, it's a lot to take in. I am Elizabeth west, my ancestor, family member. His name was Hillman Systron. And actually I had no knowledge of him up until about, I don't know, five years ago. The people who were omitted were the people who had the direct line to a history that we have mixed feelings about. You know, many people, black and white, don't want to remember the country's period of slavery. Even when they want to remember it, they just don't want to remember the slavery part. And for many of us, you know, we are told to just look forward. There's no point in looking back. But I don't think we've gotten to the point where we sit down and really talk about it because there's just no words. You just take it in and you start seeing how these things in the past have this direct line to where you are in this moment. It's a lot, it's a lot to think about.

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[Lyda Gibson]

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[Lyda Gibson]

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[Narrator]

In this country. Genealogy is a billion dollar industry. We are obsessed with understanding our family histories and stories. But what if your relative's story doesn't have an ending? What if the last decades of the lives they lived were just washed off the canvas? What do you get out of a story with no end?

[Kimberly Jackson]

My name is Kimberly Jackson.

[Narrator]

Tell us about your. It's your great grandmother, right?

[Kimberly Jackson]

Mm.

[Narrator]

What do you know about her?

[Kimberly Jackson]

So we were always told her name was Zinni. It was just such a mystery. Such a mystery as to what happened to her with just about everybody else. You know. You know, there was a beginning to the story and there was an end to the story. And they have the whole middle. There wasn't that with her. There was not that with her. There was always obituaries and always, of course, like I said, stories to be told. But hers was always that sense of unknown. And with that Like I said, a little twinge of sadness, but with a lot of love. A little twinge of sadness. And it just felt like, you know, it was just a puzzle missing.

[Narrator]

My name is Wayne Lee.

[Jevon]

I'm a hairstylist. Grew up in Kentucky, live in Durham, North Carolina. See, I grew up with a little bit of the stigma of, they thought your grandfather was crazy. They put him in an insane asylum. You know, was he.

[Narrator]

Was he not?

[Jevon]

Our mom said he wasn't crazy. He was just starving.

[Narrator]

Each of the descendants we spoke to was dogged in their research, tireless in their efforts to find answers about their loved ones and about their own past, because they had to be. This is a story that was buried again and again. Here's the thing. Coming across human remains at the medical center wasn't a new problem.

[Lyda Gibson]

They were extending a road, and they.

[Narrator]

Went, oh, whoops, there's a person there.

[Jevon]

Some bones had been discovered several years before when an old laundry building was being built. And at that point, the institution was reminded that there's a cemetery. So fast forward to the 2011 time frame. A new road construction project was started. And almost immediately, they ran into burials. And at that time, the original 66 burials were exhumed for the road project.

[Lyda Gibson]

In 1990, when a building was being constructed in that area, the construction workers came across some burials as well. And at that time, the leadership went to the city and got all the sort of legal documents in place so that they could exhume these remains and relocate them to the UMMC cemetery.

[Narrator]

Finding bodies there got to be such a common occurrence that in the 1970s, the state legislature passed a bill allowing them to basically do whatever needed to be done.

[Jevon]

The 1970s legislation is pretty broad. And then there was an amendment of that that's worded to disinter. Rearrange. So we could probably have shoehorned almost anything into that language, but it would have been a terrible idea.

[Narrator]

So the medical center finds 7,000 graves. They've got the legal standing and paperwork in place to do what they need to do to solve their space issue. So what isn't a terrible idea? That's after the break.

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[Announcer]

At California Psychics, we know that sometimes you can wake up thinking.

[Narrator]

I don't know if I'm in the right career.

[Lyda Gibson]

Ew or the right relationship.

[Announcer]

But whatever your life dilemma, at California Psychics, we'll give you the guidance you need to feel certain about your life choices. And because we only connect you with the very best, we guarantee if your reading isn't life changing, it's free. California psychics. Visit CaliforniaPsychics. Visit CaliforniaPsychics.com today for limited time offers.

[Jevon]

Hi, this is Jevon, your blinds.com design consultant.

[Lyda Gibson]

Oh, wow, a real person.

[Narrator]

Yep.

[Jevon]

I'm here to help with everything from selecting the perfect window treatments to.

[Lyda Gibson]

Well, I've got a complicated project.

[Jevon]

No problem. We make the complex simple. I can even help schedule a professional measuring install.

[Lyda Gibson]

I didn't realize you did that.

[Jevon]

We can also send you samples fast and free.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Wow.

[Lyda Gibson]

I mean, I always thought I needed a designer to come to my home.

[Narrator]

But scheduling is always a nightmare.

[Jevon]

Notwithblinds.com, we're on your schedule. And there's no haggling pressure or hidden fees either.

[Lyda Gibson]

Hmm. I just might have to do more.

[Jevon]

Whatever you need. How about you tell me what you had in mind?

[Lyda Gibson]

Okay, then. So the first room we're looking at is for guests coming over. And I'm thinking of something. Blinds.com has covered over 25 million windows, all backed by a 100% satisfaction guarantee. Shopblinds.com now and save up to 40%. Site wide rules and restrictions may apply.

[Jevon]

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[Narrator]

The largest art museum in the state, the Mississippi Museum of Art connects Mississippi to the world and the power of art to the power of community. Located in downtown Jackson, the museum's permanent collection is free to the public. National and international exhibitions rotate throughout the year, allowing visitors to experience works from around the world. The gardens and expansive lawn at the Mississippi Museum of Art are home to art installations and a variety of events for all ages. Plan your Visit [e-mail] that's msmuseumart.org.

[Lyda Gibson]

I'm Lyda Gibson. I am the coordinator of the Asylum Hill Project.

[Jevon]

I'm Ralph Didleich. I am director of the center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. I was a surgeon for 25 years and then went into administrative positions.

[Narrator]

The Asylum Hill Project, that's the arm of the university, organized to reconcile the needs of the living with the needs of the dead. And that reconciliation has to be weighted towards the living. The medical center needs the land to expand, to provide more vital services. So the question isn't if the cemetery will move, it's how.

[Lyda Gibson]

So it was the vision of Dr. Ralph Didlake to handle this challenge of having a cemetery on the last remaining part of the campus. It was his vision to kind of deal with this in a way that was ethical, that embraced the community.

[Jevon]

I was very interested in the problem. I found it to be a challenging nut to crack, both from an administrative efficiency standpoint and from a bioethics standpoint. So, yes, did I seek it out? I'm not sure I overtly sought it out, but I didn't run away from it. And at that time, I was director of the bioethics center, and. And I kept hearing various plans brought forward. And I felt very strongly that whatever plan was selected, whatever was done with the land or the remains, had to be ethical. It had to be not just respectful and ethical, but it needed to fit well into a Southern community. It had to have a Southern ethos about it. And I remembered a line from William Faulkner's the Reavers, where he, paraphrasing, he said, southerners don't fear death, but they take funerals very seriously.

[Narrator]

Southerners take funerals very seriously. The same goes for what comes after the burial. Cemeteries hold a very special place in the Southern imagination. But in the Southern reality, quality specialized healthcare is sparse, difficult to access, and sorely needed. What importance is there in doing right by the dead when there's such dire need for the living? Scarce resources mean that this question of what to do with this land and how and when is a zero sum game. Rush the excavation and you violate the Southern reverence for the grave. But take your time. And how many patients will go to their graves sooner than they should? 0. Somernaught. As Faulkner says, there's no fear in death, but there is a fear of being forgotten. Maybe that's where all those superstitions come from.

[Kimberly Jackson]

Oh, yeah. Cause she. My grandma was big on visiting cemeteries, so, yeah, we were. Oh, yeah, big. It was a whole thing for the churches to get together and clean the cemetery, you know, mow the lawn of the Cemetery, change out the flowers. That was the whole thing. That was a day set aside to do that kind of thing.

[Narrator]

Once upon a time, the old asylum cemetery received that level of care and attention. What might the grounds in the asylum have looked like then? It was 1855 when the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum opened its doors, surrounded by its 160 acre campus. And it would keep growing. By the time it closed its doors, the old asylum covered about 1300 acres. It was picturesque, sprawling, green, with a main building design with classical architectural in mind. A cupola, Greek columns, the works.

[Lyda Gibson]

You know, I will say too, that when the asylum was established, it was state of the art. I mean, Mississippi, of course, was one of the richest states, if not the richest state, because it's easy to get rich when you're exploiting other people and enslaving other people. But this was sort of a monument to the goodness of Mississippi leaders, as well as just to take care of those who are less fortunate than we are.

[Narrator]

The goodness of Mississippi leaders. Tough to believe that they thought providing mental health care would help the state's image more than ending slavery, but that was their calculus. All 7,000 of these graves are unmarked, but that isn't how they started.

[Lyda Gibson]

I don't know if Lyda mentioned to y' all, but the original, originally the graves, every single grave was marked with a wooden marker, and it was painted with the name of the deceased, the date of death, and the county the person was from.

[Narrator]

That's Dr. Jennifer Mack, who's heading up the excavation of the asylum cemetery. And what happened to those wooden markers? Remember the Yazoo clay, that burnt orange stuff I told you about at the top of the episode?

[Lyda Gibson]

Oh, yes, yes. It's terrible. It's terrible, terrible dirt. The soils are also a challenge here.

[Narrator]

Yazoo clay character. How can soil just eat metal? It just. It's amazing what it can do. Today, the old asylum cemetery is an unmarked field of green grass, dappled with the occasional tree, surrounded by chain link fence lined with black mesh. There are hints of burnt orange poking through the grass, but not a grave marker in sight. When we first got down south, we thought it the asylum was the story. We touched down in New Orleans and drove up I55, secure in the belief that we were on our way to tell the tale of an old asylum falling into disrepair. The mystery of what happened within those walls. We were wrong.

[Lyda Gibson]

Yeah.

[Narrator]

That was an email, though. That was an email.

[Lyda Gibson]

I felt guilty reading the email.

[Narrator]

I know I felt guilty. By the time I got to the second sentence. I was like. I was like, oh no, this is reckless. It's a bummer of an email. On the one hand, bummer because, like, it would have been nice to interview them. One of the people we'd hoped to talk to was Patrick Hopkins, a philosopher and ethicist who works with the center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at ummc. Patrick and one of his colleagues recently received a grant for something that piqued my interest. They were going to be reading through volumes like boxes and boxes of the old asylum's patient files. Finally, this was our entry into this world that had been intentionally locked away. But Patrick, the guy who had the key, wasn't interested in opening that door. To attempt to talk authoritatively about patient experiences at the asylum at this point would be scholarly malpractice and would lend itself to bringing attention to whatever random bit of information we have recently come across, rather than waiting for the big picture. As an analogy, if I were writing a biography of someone, you wouldn't want to interview me about that person's life when I had only gotten up to their third birthday in my research. I mean, it's a great point with respect to the process of research, but these are also real people, and their very real families have waited decades to learn anything about their lives. Is saying keep waiting really doing right by them? Or would doing right by the living shortchange the debt? And ultimately, that's what this whole thing is about. How can Asylum Hill make room for the present, for the future, while honoring the past? How can these descendants reconcile the desire to know their ancestors stories with the pain that that may inevitably bring? Yazoo Clay is a tricky soil. It doesn't fall neatly into any one category. It's the nemesis of contractors statewide, wrecking home foundations, road work, and generally causing chaos. But take a ride down the highways outside Jackson and the lushness of the green will take your breath away. Yazoo Clay forms a foundation for the wreckage secrecy can bring. But the breakdown of what came before can make for fertile ground. In the case of the clay on Asylum Hill, it's managed to do a bit of both. That's coming up on Under Yazoo Clay. I'm Wayne Lee, I'm a douser.

[Jevon]

I'm at the Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson, Mississippi, and I'm going to do a little demonstration.

[Narrator]

With the divining rods under. Yazoo Clay is executive produced by the Mississippi Museum of Art in partnership with Pod People. It's hosted by me, Larison Campbell, and written and produced by Rebecca Chassan. And myself with help from Angela Yee and Amy Machado, with editing and sound design by Morgan Foose and Erica Wong. And thanks to Blue Dot Sessions for music. Special special thanks to Betsy Bradley at the Mississippi Museum of Art as well as Lyda Gibson at the center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Visit Jackson and Jay and Denie Stein.

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[Lyda Gibson]

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[Lyda Gibson]

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