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California Psychics
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Ryan Seacrest
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- [01:06]
California Psychics
At California Psychics, we know that sometimes you can wake up thinking.
- [01:11]
Larison Campbell
I don't know if I'm in the right career ew or the right relationship.
- [01:17]
California Psychics
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 call 1-800-PREDICT today and get 20 minutes for just $20 at Ameca.
- [01:37]
Ameca Insurance
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Larison Campbell
Welcome to the Mississippi State Hospital Museum, an exhibition of the history of this remarkable we're standing in a hallway at the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitefield, one of a handful of state run residential mental health facilities still operating here. It's my first time really seeing the hospital, but I've heard about it my whole life. Everyone in Mississippi has.
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Ameca Insurance
It was the threat that your family always gave you.
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Larison Campbell
If you act crazy, you'll go to Whitefield.
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Mab Sigrist
Oh yeah. People see you do that, you're going to Whitfield. If you don't behave, I'm going to.
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Donna Brown
Take you to take you to Whitfield.
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Lyda Gibson
I put you out.
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Larison Campbell
Whitefield. That's the informal name for the Mississippi State Hospital. It's been Mississippi's primary mental health facility since 1935, when the state shuttered the old asylum in Jackson and moved those patients out here. It's that place your mom says you'll go if you don't act right. The place your friend's neighbor got sent. It has mythic status in Mississippi, but standing here in a marble room full of outdated therapy equipment, Whitfield's not scary. It's quaint, at least in the museum. Hard to say how much of that is because of our tour guides, Donna Brown and Kathy Denton. These two have been here for decades and know everything about the place. Donna took the lead with Kathy chiming in. I notice a black and white photo of a woman in what looks like a shower.
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Donna Brown
The lady in the shower. They had to pencil in panties and bra on her because that was pornography. For 1938.
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Larison Campbell
It'S a quirky museum. There's a display of patient run newspapers and literary magazines and then around the corner, posters for movies where Whitfield makes a cameo, including the Sandra Bullock classic A Time to Kill. The scene in the movie where she.
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Mab Sigrist
Breaks into the psychiatrist's office was filmed.
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Larison Campbell
In the building that she passed on.
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Donna Brown
The way to this one and the beast Within. You can watch a lot of it.
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Larison Campbell
On YouTube, but you're gonna recognize very little of the hospital.
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Mab Sigrist
There's a lot of screaming and running and dark.
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Larison Campbell
Part of the museum is housed in one of Whitfield's old hydrotherapy units. Hydrotherapy basically means using water as medical treatment for physical or mental health. If you've ever taken a dip at a spa, well, you've had hydrotherapy today.
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Donna Brown
You can go to the spa. They'll wrap you in mud, sand, aloe gel, seaweed, coffee grounds, tea leaves, salt, sugar. The most expensive one I found is Pink Indian sand in New Orleans. $1,200 45 minutes.
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Larison Campbell
Back in the day, it was on the bleeding edge of mental health care. Whitefield's hydrotherapy unit consisted of several rooms of white marble from the floor all the way up to the ceiling. And the kind of porcelain sinks and claw footed tubs that an HGTV host would keep Kill for hydrotherapy does.
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Donna Brown
Now, this is by far the treatment of choice. Just a long soak in a big old bath.
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Larison Campbell
But other hydrotherapy practices were more brutal than relaxing.
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Donna Brown
This is a needle spray shower or a scotch shower. Each one of these nozzles control the jet of the water. Cold here, hot here, back and forth. The doctor would literally write a prescription. The patient would Come in. Go to the center. Hold onto the bars. She would start spraying the formula. See the petals? They're not here today. But that controlled the intensity of the water.
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Larison Campbell
If you've seen One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, it's easy to imagine a sadistic Nurse Ratchet gleefully blasting patients into submission. But the first antipsychotic drug wasn't introduced until the 1950s, nearly 100 years after Mississippi opened its original state asylum. Donna tells us that the doctors of that era really believed that this was an effective treatment. Donna waved us toward another room. This one was almost like a grotto with a big slab smack dab in the middle, like an altar. That's where the patients would be placed.
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Donna Brown
This is a wet pack treatment. When he came, he was very manic, very fidgety. They wanted to calm him down, so they wrapped him in sheets as tight as they could, much like a swaddled baby. Got him on the table, hot and cold water faucets. They'd soak him down.
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Larison Campbell
Before we exit the hydrotherapy unit, Donna reads us a poem.
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Donna Brown
Meditation and Hydrotherapy. Theodore Rothke. Six hours a day I lay me down within this tub that cannot drown. Within this primal element, the flesh is willing to repent. I do not laugh, I do not cry. I'm sweating out the will to die. My past is sliding down the drain. I soon will be myself again.
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Larison Campbell
I wish Theodore Rechtke were still around, because I'd love to ask him about that last line. Is it sarcastic, or did he really feel like an ice bath restored his sanity? Was he just hoping that it would? The more I've listened, the more I hear irony in I soon will be myself again. But maybe that's because of the place asylums have come to occupy in my, or really in the American imagination. It's a place of broken promises. You're supposed to get better. But in most stories I've read, most movies I've seen, the opposite happens. Maybe that's why they're such a popular setting for horror films. That may be the narrative we have today, but it's not the one the asylum started with. The promise of the old asylum was that it was a place for healing. But over one third of the patients who passed through the old asylum's doors died within them.
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Lyda Gibson
The popular narrative is that it was great when it started out, and then it just went downhill. The true narrative, I think, is just much more complicated than that.
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Larison Campbell
So how exactly did this promise break? I'm Larison Campbell, and this is under Yazoo Clay. When word got out back in 2012 that thousands of bodies had been found at the site of Mississippi's old asylum, the news spread fast. This is the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Its campus is home to six health science schools, more than 3,000 students, and thousands of unmarked grapes. It hit that viral sweet spot, a horror movie in one headline, not just confirming our dark expectations, but exceeding them. It's death and drama in the old south and a lunatic asylum all balled into one.
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Mab Sigrist
What ends up is the Southern gothic, the terrain of terror.
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Larison Campbell
That's Mab Sigrist, Southern scholar and historical author. Mab spent more than 15 years researching and studying George's Milledgeville Asylum. Because this isn't just a Mississippi story. Many states had asylums in and out of the South. But the terrain of terror that Mab's describing, that's not the way things started out. For our old asylum starts off is.
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Mab Sigrist
A story about enlightenment optimism, and it starts in Europe and it comes to this country.
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Larison Campbell
That enlightenment she mentions is the Enlightenment, that glowing moment of philosophy and reason in Europe between the 17th and 19th centuries. Eventually, these ideals made their way across the pond. Until people were enlightened, society's primary solution for dealing with severe mental illness was simple isolation or restraint, sometimes both. That could mean the family home behind a locked door, in a back room, or if you're a first wife of Victorian literature, in the attic. For those whose families couldn't care for them, there were public almshouses and the county jail. How far we've come. Physical restraints were common. Sanitation standards, non existent dungeons were a real thing. The goal here separate the ill person from the non ill community. But as Enlightenment ideas called on, as medicine and science became more robust, doctors began to argue that mental illness was a problem society could actually solve.
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Mab Sigrist
Doctors start to believe that you can heal the troubled mind if you change the environment. If you put them in a beautiful place and you give them doctors who pay attention and listen to them, you give them good nutrition, you give them a beautiful setting and you give them some occupational therapy, then they'll get better. It's called the moral therapy. That you could cure people by changing structures, which is a very progressive idea. And you know, like we can really cure insanity with these different hospitals.
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Larison Campbell
It was a revolutionary idea. Change a person's outside environment and they'll change internally. But in practical terms, what does the infrastructure of calm quietude look like? In the 1840s, a physician in Philadelphia came up with an answer.
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Lyda Gibson
Thomas Kirkbride, who was a psychiatrist, was very devoted to taking care of people with mental health issues. And, you know, it's this whole idea that if you just get away from the normal pressures of life and have a little time to breathe and to enjoy the fresh, share and to be taken care of, then you'll get better and you can return to life as a normal citizen.
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Larison Campbell
That was Lyda Gibson, coordinator of the Asylum Hill project. Thomas Kirkbride would later formalize his plan into a magnum opus with a magnum title on the construction, organization and general arrangements of hospitals for the insane, with some remarks on insanity and its treatment. He was specific. The plan included exact staff numbers, roles, and even salaries. He drew up measurements for rooms and windows and the space between windows down to the inch.
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Lyda Gibson
The Kirkbride plan, the idea was that you had to have a certain amount of cubic feet of airspace in order to get well. These were rooms with really tall ceilings. They had huge windows. The patients could open the windows. And you'll notice from the plan, there's a hall down the middle, and then every room on every side has a window. People had their own rooms. When it first started, I mean, this would be like a luxurious dorm room.
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Larison Campbell
It caught on. The first was in Trenton, New Jersey. Other states followed. The Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum was one of the first dozen in the country and the first Kirkbride hospital in the deep South. Just to ground you in the timeline real quick, the. The Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum opened its doors in 1855. It had taken five years to complete at a cost of $175,000. That's about 7 million in today's money. If this level of benevolence and generosity for Mississippians with mental illness seems out of character for a state government whose focus was keeping slavery legal, don't worry. The decision to build this asylum to look after, quote, less fortunate Mississippians does not buck the narrative you've come to know. Let's say it's the 1850s. You're a Mississippi lawmaker trying to put a shine on an image badly tarnished by, I don't know, your refusal to stop treating humans like chattel. Maybe investing in this monument to those enlightenment ideals of individual liberty, natural rights in the social contract starts to seem like a good way to thumb your nose at all those Yankees crying about the immorality of slavery. A sort of, see, we're not all bad.
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Lyda Gibson
Perhaps it's not so pointed in the institutional records, but you read between the lines and you say, you know, look at what we do for those unfortunates among us. They did not use the words that would be. That would be acceptable today, but. And this became something that they could point to. This was the most impressive structure in the state that remained after the Civil War. This was sort of a monument to the goodness of Mississippi leaders.
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Larison Campbell
And that's exactly what a nurse named Dorothea Dix was banking on. You've probably heard her name before because Dix almost single handedly created the first generation of state asylums. In the 1840s, Dorothea Dix turned Kirkbride's asylum plan into something of a roadshow, lobbying state legislatures in the north and the south to build these hospitals.
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Mab Sigrist
Reading about Dorothea Dix was very instructive to me on the relationships of mental hospitals in the south versus the North. In an environment of growing abolition, she.
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Larison Campbell
Began her career as a teacher. But on March 28, 1841, the 35 year old went to teach a Sunday school class at East Cambridge House of Corrections in Massachusetts. There she found groups of women experiencing psychiatric conditions. They were chained in dirty, unheated cells. Many had never committed a crime, but were locked up with violent felons. They'd been starved, tortured and sexually assaulted. From that day forward, she became a tireless advocate for better treatment for people with mental illness.
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Mab Sigrist
And Dorothea Dix is one of the heroines of the humane treatment of insane people in institutions, especially this Kirkbride model, which was supposed to kind of separate out and bring them in. It's a whole architecture of sanity in that way.
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Larison Campbell
In Mississippi. She presented the state legislature with the findings from a study she'd done. She told them how Mississippians with mental illness were living in poverty and all alone, often, quote, chained in closets and attics, in jails or dungeons. Mississippi lawmakers were blown away. They appropriated the full amount, requested $50,000 for the construction of a new state asylum. And then they made their first mistake. Because they picked a site right at the thickest part of that Yazoo clay. The foundation was laid and then relayed. More building delays, more structural problems. The Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum finally opened its doors. More than $125,000 over that initial budget. But it was a beautiful neoclassical building with a 35 foot tall portico supported by six Doric columns visible all the way down to Fortification street about a mile away. It had a capacity for 250 patients. Remember that number. The grandiosity of the architecture speaks to the grand plans Mississippi had for the place. This wasn't a warehouse for the community's problems. Warehouses don't get columns and cupolas. This was a place that would cure people. After all, this was the era of rapidly evolving medical treatment. In the 19th century, doctors began to link dirt and filth with disease. Cities began installing sewage and sanitation systems. Germs themselves still hadn't been discovered, but concepts of germ theory were there. A smallpox vaccine, cholera's connection to contaminated water. Science was beginning to conquer physical maladies. Why should disease of the mind be any different? There's something else we haven't told you about Dorothea Dix, Something that probably helped her connect with lawmakers in the antebellum South.
- [19:48]
Mab Sigrist
She, in fact, was very, I would say, virulently anti black racist. Dorothea Dix didn't like black people, and she thought that insane people were treated worse than black people. So southern legislators loved her.
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Larison Campbell
And when black patients were admitted, their quality of care was substantially lower.
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Lyda Gibson
So there were initially a separate wing for the black patients. And then very quickly, they built annexes off the back that were three stories as well. But, you know, obviously they weren't as big and spacious as the initial structure.
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Larison Campbell
Meaning these facilities for the black patients. They never even tried to adhere to the Kirkbride plan, which was the whole reason the asylum was built in the first place. In order for the, quote, curative properties of the Kirkbride model to work, the patients need physical space, big private rooms, fresh air, careful attention from doctors and nurses. And if patients aren't recovering enough to be released, it creates a backlog, crowding. And then even the patients who could have been helped by the Kirkbride plan are no longer getting better. Part of the reason for the overcrowding, many of the people living and dying at the old asylum weren't mentally ill. That's after the break.
- [21:25]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [21:53]
California Psychics
At California Psychics, we know that sometimes you can wake up thinking.
- [21:59]
Larison Campbell
I don't.
- [21:59]
Mab Sigrist
Know if I'm in the right career.
- [22:02]
Larison Campbell
Ew or the right relationship.
- [22:05]
California Psychics
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 call 1-800-PREDICT today and get 20 minutes for just $20.
- [22:24]
Ameca Insurance
At Ameca Insurance, we know it's more than just a house. It's your home. The place that's filled with memories. The early days of figuring it out to the later years of still figuring.
- [22:41]
Larison Campbell
It out.
- [22:45]
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- [22:53]
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- [23:50]
Larison Campbell
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 today@msmuseumart.org that's msmuseumart.org.
- [24:28]
Donna Brown
This right here is very interesting. It's a register for the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum.
- [24:34]
Larison Campbell
While at the Whitfield Museum, my producer Rebecca and I came across a giant ledger, easily 5 inches thick, with hundreds of pages. Each page was a list of names, then census details like gender, age, race, written in neat cursive, along with the reason each patient was admitted. So, oh yeah. Tuberculosis. Oh, ill health. Menopause.
- [25:00]
Donna Brown
Yes. PMS is in here somewhere.
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Lyda Gibson
I can actually see that happen.
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Larison Campbell
Okay.
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Dr. Jennifer Mack
Grief and fright are a couple options.
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Donna Brown
Religion is one.
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Larison Campbell
Yeah, grief, fright, PMS religion. These were some of the causes for institutionalization noted during patient intakes. With so many possible reasons for admission, maybe it's no surprise that the place got overcrowded.
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Lyda Gibson
Yes. So the Kirkbride plan in general, and certainly the institution in Mississippi was established for those people who could be cured. It was never meant as a place to where people would live out their lives, but there were no other options. So what do you do with somebody who is having epileptic seizures all day long? What do you do with people who are never going to get better? And, you know, this idea that people who had been dethroned of reason were the only people that this institution could serve was just not realistic from the beginning. Then I think that's the popular narrative that they just said, you know, okay, we're going to just become everything to all these people who need different things. They simply were reacting to the situation at the time. And, you know, in a couple of the reports, people say, what are we supposed to do when people show up at the door? Are we supposed to just leave them out on the streets? And so there were a lot of people who were accepted in the asylum and there was a. An acknowledgement that they weren't going to get better. So the philosophy never really changed. It was simply that they had to deal with the cards they were dealt.
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Larison Campbell
One of the cards Mississippi got dealt, a disease called pellagra. You heard about it from Wayne Lee, the Grave Douser. It's that nutritional deficiency that killed his grandfather. He wasn't crazy, he was just starving.
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Lyda Gibson
I mean, I had never even heard of pellagra before. So pellagra was a nutritional deficiency that just swept the Southeast starting at about 1910. And it's characterized by the. What they call the four Ds, dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, death, in that order. People from all walks of life would come down with pellagra. Of course, the dementia wasn't apparent until close to the end. So many, many patients, especially those from the Delta, were admitted with pellagra. And in the institutional reports, they talk about, you know, by the time they get here, it's too late to do anything.
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Larison Campbell
Pellagra was not only an epidemic. For decades, it remained a medical mystery with a geographic the Southeast. By the late 1930s, 3 million Americans total had contracted pellagra, most of them Southerners. Mississippi was ground zero of the pellagra epidemic, which is why a doctor named Joseph Goldberger headed there to study it in 1914. Dr. Goldberger was a physician with the U.S. hygienic Laboratory, the progenitor of today's National Institutes of Health.
- [28:26]
Lyda Gibson
So he did an experiment with prisoners from the Rankin County Penitentiary. These were, quote, volunteers who were then fed a very specific diet. And they were able to understand that pellagra came from this niacin deficiency.
- [28:48]
Larison Campbell
See, Mississippi's old asylum might have begun life in the wealthiest state in the country, but by the 1920s, Mississippi had assumed a position we're all familiar with. The country's poorest, because if you look.
- [29:02]
Lyda Gibson
At the old pictures of the, you know, of sharecroppers on the farms in the Delta, that cotton is planted right up to the shacks because they wanted to use every inch of land for cotton. And so they stopped growing their own vegetables and raising hogs or raising cattle or anything like that. And they bought everything from the company store. I think it's like fatback and molasses.
- [29:27]
Larison Campbell
Southern doctors found Goldberger's evidence offensive. I mean, here was this Jewish doctor from New York City parachuting in just to embarrass a whole region by calling them poor. Goldberger had figured out that brewer's yeast, the stuff you use to make beer, could send pellagra packing. But a solution wouldn't be implemented at any scale until years later. During one of the greatest natural disasters in US history, the 1927 Mississippi river floods, Hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes. Tent cities sprung up along levees from Memphis all the way down to Louisiana. And off of Goldberger's advice, the Red Cross began adding brewer's yeast to its food rations.
- [30:17]
Lyda Gibson
And that's why we have enriched foods now. That's what it means. The advent of enriched foods was from pellagra.
- [30:28]
Larison Campbell
This understanding of pellagra's progression complicates the narrative we're inclined to jump to when it comes to the old asylum.
- [30:35]
Lyda Gibson
I know that a lot of the work that's been done on asylums in the south in general assumes that patients came to the asylums and were not fed well and got pellagra at the asylum and then ended up dying at pellagra. I think the story is much different.
- [30:50]
Larison Campbell
Counterintuitively, in terms of preventative medicine, AKA diet, the old asylum might have been one of the better places in the state. Stay with me here. The asylum's 1300 acres included a farm. And it wasn't just any old thing. It was an award winner, one that people came from all around just to see.
- [31:13]
Lyda Gibson
They raised cattle, they had an award winning hog operation, award winning poultry operation. And my feeling is that patients may have been better fed at the asylum than they were at their homes.
- [31:30]
Larison Campbell
You see the farm's bounty laid out in the superintendent's biannual reports to the legislature, which, to be fair, were always trying to paint the asylum in the best possible light. Still, between June of 1911 and July of 1913, which was just a couple of years before Dr. Goldberger was sent down to Mississippi, the vegetable garden alone spanned about 60 acres. All of this maintained, of course, by the patients themselves. But many pellagra patients arrived too far gone for diet to do much good.
- [32:04]
Lyda Gibson
And so the death rate for people with pellagra was just incredible. I think it's a condemnation of sort of the Mississippi society rather than the asylum.
- [32:28]
Larison Campbell
The death rate for pellagra was incredible. I mean, we've got it. It wiped out entire swaths of the South. And we've also got a handle on the 4Ds, the last two of which are dementia and death. Pellagra patients who were sent to the asylum were already on death's door when they arrived. Now overlay this information with the asylum's high death rates with patient stays of just a few months before those patients passed. To be clear, I'm not saying that the old asylum was a rose tinged haven, altruistic to its core. Neither is Lyda.
- [33:07]
Lyda Gibson
There were people who committed suicide and there were people who, you know, were victims of violent patient on patient violence. I am absolutely positive there were patients who were victims of sexual violence by, you know, the caregivers. I'm not saying that didn't happen. I'm saying if we only focus on that, we miss a lot of the story.
- [33:31]
Larison Campbell
This context really complicated my understanding of the old asylum in a lot of ways. Intentionally or not, the asylum was more like a hospice for many of its patients. You can't just draw a straight line from the high death rates to mistreatment, poor medical care, poor treatment. Those things happened. But there's zigzags along the way.
- [33:53]
Lyda Gibson
30, and I say 30,000 patients approximately, and about 10,000 died based on the institutional records. And then 2,500 patients were there when Whitfield opened. So that means that 17,500 patients approximately, were treated and released. We never hear those stories. So, I mean, I mean, I've run across maybe a couple of stories about, oh yeah, my great uncle went there, was at the old asylum for a little while, and then he came home and he was fine. You know, I mean, we just don't get those stories.
- [34:28]
Larison Campbell
There's no way for Us to know why those stories didn't get passed down. Could be its shame, or could be it's just too mundane to enter the family lore. I mean, I can't imagine sitting my kids down to tell them about their great uncle's time and physical therapy. And maybe those success stories are what helped family members at the time make peace with the choice to send their loved ones to the old asylum. Because, remember, patients were rarely the ones admitting themselves. Somewhere along the line, someone made the decision that they were better off in the asylum. Maybe it was law enforcement, the judicial system, or maybe it was family members grasping at straws.
- [35:14]
Lyda Gibson
I hear that a lot. Often people were admitted to the asylum because they were a danger to themselves or others. There's several stories about people setting fire to the house. And, you know, you think about it, people go, well, why was fire such a big deal? I'm like, well, because that was the way houses were heated and that was the way that was the way people cooked. The danger of sort of being alone in a household when there's something going on with your mind was a lot worse then probably than it is now. I do think it comes down to, can I handle this? Is this in the best interest of my loved one to keep this person at home or in the community? Is it simply a way to marginalize the people that we don't want to look at in our community? Possibly. I mean, all of these things, I think, are at play. I do hate the word marginalized, though, and I'll tell you why. Yes, people were sent to the asylum. We are looking at that from our perspective, though. Again, they came to the asylum, at least initially. It was a place where there were resources. There was food, there was even entertainment. There were sidewalks and landscaping and plants. The patients there, their lives didn't end. You know, they simply entered into a new community.
- [36:48]
Larison Campbell
Regardless of why patients ended up in the asylum, their lives didn't end when they walked through those doors. They just changed. To find those examples, you just have to dig below the surface. That's coming up on Under Yazoo Clay.
- [37:16]
Ryan Seacrest
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California Psychics
At California Psychics, we know some people can't read the career warning signs like your boss. Still not knowing your name.
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Lyda Gibson
You, Tina, Lisa, Sheila, whatever. Get that report to me by lunch, okay?
- [37:58]
Larison Campbell
It's Carrie, ma' am.
- [38:00]
Lyda Gibson
Just get it done, Terry.
- [38:01]
California Psychics
So talk to California Psychics and receive the career guidance you need. We only connect you with the very best, so guarantee if your reading isn't life changing, it's free. California psychics. Visit CaliforniaPsychics. Visit CaliforniaPsychics.com today for limited time offers.
- [38:18]
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Larison Campbell
Thank you for calling Amica Insurance.
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Lyda Gibson
Hey, I was just in an accident. Don't worry.
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Larison Campbell
We'll get you taken care of.
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Ameca Insurance
At Ameca, we understand that looking out for each other isn't new or groundbreaking. It's human. Ameca, empathy is our best policy.
- [38:48]
Lowe's
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Larison Campbell
Oh, wow. A real person. Yep.
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Lowe's
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Larison Campbell
Well, I've got a complicated project.
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Lowe's
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Larison Campbell
I didn't realize you did that.
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Lowe's
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Larison Campbell
Wow. I mean, I always thought I needed a designer to come to my home, but scheduling is always a nightmare.
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Lowe's
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- [39:21]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
Hmm.
- [39:22]
Larison Campbell
I just might have to do more.
- [39:24]
Lowe's
Whatever you need. How about you tell me what you had in mind?
- [39:27]
Larison Campbell
Okay, then. So the first room we're looking at is for guests coming over, and I'm thinking of something.
- [39:33]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
Blinds.com has covered over 25 million windows.
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Larison Campbell
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Lyda Gibson
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- [39:42]
Larison Campbell
Site wide rules and restrictions may apply. So this is the. The soil that is getting sucked in.
- [39:54]
J
Yes, the famous clay.
- [39:56]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
Oh, yes, yes.
- [39:58]
Donna Brown
It's terrible.
- [40:01]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
It's terrible, terrible dirt.
- [40:03]
Larison Campbell
But we're in a building on the medical center's campus that feels more like a warehouse. It's at least 15 degrees colder than Jackson's April weather outside. And there's burnt orange yazoo clay all over the cement floor. And burnt orange yazoo clay all over everything.
- [40:20]
Lyda Gibson
Oh, wow.
- [40:21]
Larison Campbell
Oh, this was not what I was expecting. At all.
- [40:23]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
No, because. So, for one thing, it's very dirty because it's an active archaeological field lab, but it was originally the laundry building for the hospital, and that's why all the big pipes and the giant boilers in the corner.
- [40:38]
Larison Campbell
We're here to meet Dr. Jennifer Mack. You heard from her briefly in the first episode. She's the lead bioarchaeologist of the Asylum Hill project, Just in case you, like me, are fuzzy on what that means.
- [40:50]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
Bioarchaeology is the study specifically of human remains from archaeological contexts. This is specifically the study of burials, essentially.
- [41:02]
Larison Campbell
Dr. Mack is small and wiry. She has long, dark hair and, despite the gravity of her job, a light, goofy sense of humor. We spoke inside, but it's easy to picture her out in the field. Since 2017, she's been elbow deep in yazoo clay, Working to map out the cemetery and piece together the story of the asylum it belonged to.
- [41:25]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
It's easier for people to identify when there are a few artifacts, to tell a little bit about a person's personality and really be like, oh, yeah, I could totally. I know that chicken.
- [41:36]
Larison Campbell
She walked us over to a series of folding tables covered with brown paper. It looked like the setup for a crawfish boil, but she'd used the paper to protect artifacts she'd pulled for us.
- [41:47]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
I cover everything because the air conditioning and heat blows so hard, and then it blows dust over everything.
- [41:55]
Larison Campbell
The covering was totally a practical choice on Dr. Mac's part. It's the only way to keep. Keep that yazoo clay dust from taking over again. But the effect made for a delightful reveal. With each new object we came to, she picked up a tiny bit of gold.
- [42:12]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
Oh, look, there's a gold nugget. Why would there be such a tiny gold nugget? Oh, it's a filling. But the filling survived without the tooth around it.
- [42:18]
Larison Campbell
As they peel back each layer of clay, Dr. Mac and her team are exposing new insights into the people that were laid to rest in these graves and the people who interred them into life at the asylum.
- [42:31]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
I'd love to tell you about one particular pattern that delights me, though it's not about the patients. Individuals were wrapped in a winding sheet that was pinned. And so we usually find 2, 3, 4 safety pins in a burial. There's a set of graves with what I. In my head, I call her, like, the compulsive nurse. Someone who, for a short time was preparing bodies for burial, was very finicky about the binding sheets. So instead of three or four pins, there are as many as 18 safety pins. And you Could. That is a personality. That's not a policy change, obviously, it's personality. There are five graves in a row that have way too many pins. And then there are a few nearby. There's a total of 10 that I presume were prepared by the same individual. And then it stops, and we've gone pretty far out. We have not found any more. So either that person was no longer asked to prepare bodies for burial, or someone said, hey, quit wasting all the pins. You know, I'm not sure, but we have this little. This little glimpse of one personality, of a person who either worked at the assumption, or it could have been a fellow patient.
- [43:53]
Larison Campbell
The only part of the old asylum that's left on Asylum Hill is this cemetery. And there's little to no documentation of or about these burials. So the story of the cemetery is being plucked from the clay, grave by grave and piece by piece.
- [44:14]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
As far as we know, we haven't had any sort of documents, but of course, it's early days in research. We haven't had any oral histories about families being able to attend the burial but not able to claim the body. So my interpretation has been more that patients and staff preparing the bodies or doing the work of the actual burial are the ones who had these expressions of affection.
- [44:48]
Larison Campbell
Each item that Dr. Mack reveals beneath the butcher paper is something she and her team have found while conducting the dig of the cemetery. That means that each item was intentionally left with someone in their final resting place.
- [45:02]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
See, it's got the ribs on the back. And this was found in Burial 157, right above where the coffin lid had decayed.
- [45:13]
Larison Campbell
She's showing us a piece of broken tile more than a foot long.
- [45:17]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
We're pretty sure we know where the tile came from. In the 1923 Superintendent's Report, there's a description of having remodeled all of the bathrooms in the asylum and replaced all the tile. So what's it doing in the burial? Well, I had a thought.
- [45:38]
Larison Campbell
She brought that thought to the descendant, Dr. Elizabeth West. Dr. West also has an impressive CV. She's a member of the Asylum Hill Research Consortium and also the director of academics for Georgia State University's center for Studies on Africa and its Diaspora.
- [45:55]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
And so I spoke with Elizabeth west, and it was her opinion that she thought it could indeed be like an adaptive expression of the African American mortuary tradition of placing ceramic or glass domestic items in the coffin or on top of the coffin at burial. And the reason this is so interesting is that the nature of this being a big piece of broken Tile, instead of like a lovely cup and saucer, sort of suggests that patients were involved in the work of doing the grave digging and burying the dead. Because if you're a patient in an asylum, you can't go to the cafeteria and say, hey, I'd like a cup and saucer to bury with my friend. I don't think that would go over well. But you can take what you can find. Just like enslaved people made use of what they could, and you use that to express the same thing. So it's a make do solution when other materials aren't available. And we've got this tile. We have another piece of tile that was found in another grave. There was a broken crockery vessel in another grave and then a large rusted can in another. So that we found this pattern so far of objects that you could have pulled off of a discard pile looked very much like it had been placed there. As it was, it was being pulled up by the backhoe.
- [47:26]
Larison Campbell
I love this. It's what Dr. Didlake has been talking about, that Southern ethos, that reverence for the grave has been with the cemetery from the beginning.
- [47:37]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
Sometimes it is just an empty medicine bottle and a spoon. You know, it doesn't have to be something elaborate, but I would think that if it was family coming from outside, it wouldn't be a broken piece of building material from the asylum.
- [47:51]
Larison Campbell
Dr. Mack leads us over to a pair of brown shoes that look almost like they've been sculpted from dirt.
- [47:59]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
So these were. Yeah, they were alongside the body. And my interpretation is that it was an item that was almost forgotten during the burial preparation. The body is already pinned up in the winding sheet, placed in the coffin. And oh, wait, we forgot to put the boots on the feet or. Oh, these were his favorite boots. Let's not forget these. So they were placed in the coffin because it was important to the people who were doing the burial to do that proper thing, but then couldn't access the feet anymore. At least that's my theory.
- [48:36]
Larison Campbell
She said she's also found dentures tucked inside the same way.
- [48:40]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
You can't reopen grandma's mouth, but you can make sure she doesn't go to heaven without her dentures.
- [48:50]
Larison Campbell
But sometimes the value of the objects doesn't require so much guesswork.
- [48:55]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
These rings are more like what we commonly find. And we do. We have found a lot.
- [49:01]
Larison Campbell
I.
- [49:02]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
But rings are the most common personal artifact that we find.
- [49:07]
Larison Campbell
She holds up a gold ring. I lean in and notice there's an inscription.
- [49:12]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
This is one of my favorite Artifacts. It appears to be a solid gold wedding band. Sorry, 18 karat gold wedding band. And inscribed inside it says, ever true to thee, which is very sweet. And even though it's a small ring, based on the width of thinking that it was on the hand of a male, but unfortunately, the skeletal remains were almost non existent in this grave. And I really like this artifact, not just because to me, I feel like it's a symbol of a truly loving marriage, because if you just happen to marry somebody, you don't get that engraved in a ring. Right. Or maybe you do, but also because it combats the assumption that people make that, oh, everyone who worked in the asylum was evil and they would have stolen anything valuable that the patients had. Obviously, that's not the case because this is a very valuable ring that got interred with this person.
- [50:13]
Larison Campbell
It's one of those objects that doesn't just point to the life that patients lived inside the asylum, but the life they had lived on the outside. I could tell from the way Dr. Mack looked at this ring, the way she held it, that it was unique. It seemed personal. And then I remembered something I'd noticed when we walked in that day. A tattoo on Dr. Mack's foot. May I ask about your tattoo? Because it says ever true.
- [50:41]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
It does. It does. Ever true to thee. Just like that ring.
- [50:46]
Larison Campbell
Yes.
- [50:47]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
I'm going to try to tell the story. So that ring was found by my husband. Oh, I can't do it. Hold on. Sorry. Normally I'm not like this and I can tell everybody about my tattoo. So my husband, Dustin Clark, was the crew chief of this project, and he's the one that found the gold ring that said ever true to thee. And he was very proud of it. And he kept telling everyone that it was the best artifact. And everyone who thought they found something good said, no, no, it's not as good as the ring that I found. So, unfortunately, he passed away in August. So I have a tattoo on my foot with two coffins, one for him, one for me, and a snake, because he loved snakes. And a skull, because that's what I do for a living. And then we've got the ring on there. And then it says, ever true to thee, just like the ring that he found.
- [51:46]
Larison Campbell
And so Dr. Mack continues working on the Asylum Hill site, uncovering new artifacts and new stories of the last people who touched them. There's a forward motion through the grief that seemed to be a through line for each of the descendants we spoke with as well. Even if what you learn isn't positive there's catharsis in discovery. All this born out of a place we associate with shadows, shame and secrecy. And still, this is a place that defies definition, and it should.
- [52:30]
Lyda Gibson
When I first started this project, and I think the goals of the consortium members, the scholars who were involved from the beginning, certainly Dr. Didlake, was to sort of paint a portrait of what life was like at the asylum. And unfortunately, I think that's very, very difficult to do. And when we try to sort of paint a portrait of what life was like or, you know, create a picture of what life was like at the ASYL number one, it was different from one year to the next, one decade to the next. It was different depending on your condition. I'm not naive enough to think that the black patients were treated as well as the white patients, but I also think sort of dismissing the superintendents and the people who work there because they were clearly entrenched in systemic racism, basically. I think we. If we simply ignore the stories because of that, we miss a lot of the story. So I've tried to have an open mind about possibly, I mean, were there. Was there anything positive about the fact that, you know, black patients were admitted there and treated there? And I think. I think in some ways, trying to paint these really broad strokes is less respectful to the patients than we should be.
- [54:01]
Larison Campbell
And if there's one thing we know about Lyda and the rest of the Asylum Hill project, they're going to err on the side of respect. For Dr. West, going beyond those broad brushstrokes is key. Brushing the dirt off her great uncle Hillman's story finally gave her insight to her own grandfather.
- [54:21]
J
I understand and appreciate myself and my family in ways that I had not before. The pain of finding an ancestor not too far back in the past. This was a person who my grandfather farmed with. This was a person who helped shape my grandfather, who then shaped my mother, who then shaped me. So it's not like, you know, it's not like some obscure figure. The place itself, the asylum itself, and the taboo of mental health, how we look at that in this country, all of that is, I'm sure, like, devastating to think about. But I'm not overly disturbed by that because, you know, health issues are health issues, whether they're mental or physical. And, you know, just because, you know, people suffer from mental health does not mean their lives are not important and phenomenal. And when I think about encountering this person through the asylum and then understanding there that there are thousands of more stories like that here, it's just, you know, it's, it's mindboggling.
- [55:47]
Larison Campbell
Thousands more stories, all waiting to be uncovered and waiting to be found. And what does it mean to find someone? And once they've been found, what then? Will they fade back into the rusted orange of the Yazoo Clay? Will Jackson make space for them? That's next on Under Yazoo Clay.
- [56:13]
Mab Sigrist
Well, as soon as Jessica and I walked down the hallway and saw the sign, I just burst into tears. And I really didn't expect to do that.
- [56:22]
Larison Campbell
I mean, it was just a sign. So her brother said, when are you bringing Zanny home?
- [56:28]
J
And he said, I don't know. Every time I go, she gets further and further away from me.
- [56:35]
Lyda Gibson
And then. Yep.
- [56:36]
Larison Campbell
And then, like I was saying, you can make the end sort of come to about this point. Perfect. That'll be fine. 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 Yeet and Amy Machado, with editing and sound design by Morgan Foose and Erica Wong. And thanks to Blue Dot Sessions for music. 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.
- [57:25]
Lowe's
Foreign.
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Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway this spring. Take care of your entire home, including the air you breathe. And save $5 when you buy $25 worth of participating products in store or online. Shop for items like Glade Plugins, Airwick Plugins, Glade Auto Sprays, Airwick diffusers, and Glade refills. And save $5 when you spend $25 on participating products. Offer ends May 20th. Restrictions apply. Promotions may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [57:57]
California Psychics
At California Psychics, we know that sometimes you can wake up thinking, oh, I.
- [58:03]
Larison Campbell
Don'T know if I'm in the right career ew or the right relationship.
- [58:09]
California Psychics
But whatever. Your life dilemma at California Psychics will 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. Call 1-800-PREDICT today and get 20 minutes for just $20.
- [58:27]
Dr. Jennifer Mack
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Ryan Seacrest
Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, and every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn more@discover.com credit card Based on the February 2024 Nielsen report, you're listening to an iHeart podcast.