Not Where We Go

Summary

Under Yazoo Clay: Episode - "Not Where We Go"

Introduction

In the poignant episode titled "Not Where We Go," hosted by Larrison Campbell under the collaboration of iHeartPodcasts and the Mississippi Museum of Art, the narrative delves deep into the intricate web of family secrets surrounding Mississippi’s former "lunatic asylum." The episode explores the discovery of over 7,000 patient remains in 2012 and the subsequent quest of descendants to unearth buried histories. Central to this exploration is the story of Dr. David L. Smith, Noah Satterstrom’s great-grandfather, whose life and legacy have been shrouded in family silence and institutional erasure.

Family Background and Dr. Smith

The episode begins by introducing Noah Satterstrom, an artist whose extensive collection of 183 canvases serves as a visual biography of Dr. David L. Smith. Smith, a respected optometrist, was born in 1891 and later institutionalized in the Mississippi State Asylum in 1925. His prolonged confinement raised numerous questions about mental health stigmas and family dynamics in the early 20th-century South.

Noah Satterstrom [04:42]: "That story next to the Dr. Smith story, that seems like a problem that Dunstan was having."

Noah’s artwork intricately weaves parables, such as the tale of Saint Dunstan and the devil, symbolizing the broader struggles of individuals battling mental illness within a conservative community. The episode underscores how these personal and family narratives intertwine with larger societal issues.

Noah's Artistic Journey

Noah's journey to understand and represent his great-grandfather's life is both personal and therapeutic. His artistic endeavor serves as a bridge between past and present, allowing him to confront generational trauma and familial secrets.

Larison Campbell [02:16]: "Family stories aren't all that different. With each telling, the beats of the story get etched into the family history."

Noah reveals that his motivation to embark on this project was partly influenced by his own struggles with depersonalization disorder, a condition that blurred his sense of reality and identity.

Noah Satterstrom [10:28]: "All of my memories felt like they were implanted and fake and that I hadn't existed until that moment."

This personal revelation adds a layer of introspection to his exploration of Dr. Smith's life, highlighting the parallels between his mental health challenges and his great-grandfather's institutionalization.

Anna and Jessica's Perspectives

Noah's sister, Anna Satterstrom, and their other sister, Jessica Satterstrom, provide invaluable insights into the family's history and the lasting impact of Dr. Smith's absence.

Anna Satterstrom [07:01]: "I don't remember at what age I realized that I didn't know anything about my grandfather because she would talk about her mother quite a bit... But she never mentioned her father."

Their testimonies reveal a family dynamic fraught with silence and unspoken pain, painting a picture of how Dr. Smith's departure left deep emotional scars that persist through generations.

Jessica Satterstrom [28:43]: "I remember you telling me about it... I didn't know about it until the New York Times."

The sisters discuss the deliberate erasure of Dr. Smith from family narratives, a tactic likely employed to shield themselves from the associated shame and trauma.

Discovery of Medical Records

A pivotal moment in the episode occurs when Noah gains access to Dr. Smith's medical records, unearthing a wealth of information previously concealed.

Noah Satterstrom [53:14]: "Dr. David Smith Bondren, Mississippi Hospital for Restrained Patients... it gives a much better view of the man, the person behind the legend in our family."

These records include detailed accounts of Dr. Smith's alleged assault on a 15-year-old girl and his subsequent institutionalization. The newfound evidence forces Noah to grapple with reconciling his family's sanitized version of events with the more complex reality.

Dr. Elizabeth West's Research

The episode also features Dr. Elizabeth West, a professor of English and Africana Studies at Georgia State University, who investigates her own family's history intertwined with the old asylum. Her research uncovers the story of Hillman Systrunk, a relative who was similarly confined.

Dr. Elizabeth West [40:17]: "Once I got past my grandfather's father, I was like, wow, these people were enslaved... it's just amazing dynamic community of first-generation freed black people in a way that just doesn't get recorded."

Dr. West's exploration parallels Noah's, emphasizing how institutional histories often obscure personal and communal narratives, especially within African American families.

The Show at the Mississippi Museum of Art

Noah's extensive body of work culminates in a major exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art, featuring 183 canvases and a dedicated hall of artifacts from Dr. Smith's life. The exhibit not only showcases Noah's artistic mastery but also serves as a communal catharsis, allowing the families and visitors to confront and process suppressed histories.

Larison Campbell [52:45]: "It was two weeks before the show went up, just as Noah was shipping paintings... a picture of a man was taking shape in his head."

The museum's role becomes a sanctuary for truth-telling, fostering discussions through panel sessions that address topics like archival ethics and generational trauma.

Reflections and Conclusions

As the episode progresses, Noah expresses his ongoing struggle to define Dr. Smith's legacy accurately. The revelation of his great-grandfather's detailed personal accounts introduces ambiguity, challenging the binary perception of saints and sinners.

Noah Satterstrom [60:36]: "How am I going to represent him? Do I represent him as a lonely and pitiful figure? Or was he completely happy for 40 years in the asylum?"

The narrative concludes by acknowledging that the story remains unfinished, with Noah continuing to interpret and reinterpret his great-grandfather's life through his art.

Larison Campbell [65:32]: "Dig deeper and sometimes you only find more to question."

The episode underscores the complexity of unearthing family histories intertwined with mental health stigmas and institutional abuses, illustrating the enduring impact of silence and the challenging path toward reconciliation and understanding.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Noah Satterstrom [10:28]: "All of my memories felt like they were implanted and fake and that I hadn't existed until that moment."

• Anna Satterstrom [07:01]: "I don't remember at what age I realized that I didn't know anything about my grandfather because she would talk about her mother quite a bit... But she never mentioned her father."

• Noah Satterstrom [53:14]: "Dr. David Smith Bondren, Mississippi Hospital for Restrained Patients... it gives a much better view of the man, the person behind the legend in our family."

• Dr. Elizabeth West [40:17]: "Once I got past my grandfather's father, I was like, wow, these people were enslaved... it's just amazing dynamic community of first-generation freed black people in a way that just doesn't get recorded."

• Noah Satterstrom [60:36]: "How am I going to represent him? Do I represent him as a lonely and pitiful figure? Or was he completely happy for 40 years in the asylum?"

Conclusion

"Not Where We Go" masterfully navigates the delicate terrain of family secrets, mental health, and historical erasure. Through personal testimonies, artistic expression, and scholarly research, the episode sheds light on the enduring shadows cast by the Mississippi State Asylum and the families it profoundly affected. It serves as a compelling reminder of the importance of confronting and preserving difficult histories to foster healing and understanding across generations.

Transcript

[Larison Campbell]

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[Larison Campbell]

In the South. We're big fans of parables. There's something comforting in knowing how a story will be told, knowing the paths and the endings of all the characters. Family stories aren't all that different. With each telling, the beats of the story get etched into the family history. But what about when someone decides to buck tradition? What if someone wants to tell one of those stories differently?

[Noah Satterstrom]

Dunston was a blacksmith, and he was in his blacksmith shop. And right at closing time, an old man shows up at his shop and says, can you make me a chalice? So he starts pounding away at his anvil. And as he's doing that, he sees this old man out of the corner of his eyes start to rapidly change form and he's an old man. Now he's a young girl. Now he's an old man again. Now he's a beautiful woman. Now he's a young boy. And he knows instantly that that's the devil. And so he, While he's hammering away, he just sort of, without missing a beat, he puts his tongs into the furnace. And then when he sees them get red hot, he grabs them and then grabs the devil by the nose with these tongs, who then instantly changes back into an old man and runs out of the blacksmith shop saying, the blacksmith just attacked.

[Larison Campbell]

I'm hearing the story of Dunstan and the devil from Noah Satterstrom. He's the artist whose paintings about his great grandfather were the focus of a major show at the Mississippi Museum of Art. It's a Saturday in April, the morning after the show's opening. He's energetic today as he walks me through his work. 183 canvases that tell the story of his great grandfather, Dr. David L. Smith. We're talking about Dunstan because the parable also makes an appearance in one of these paintings. Right there in the center, there are two men in a tussle. One goes at the other's face with a red hot pair of tongs. In Noah's story of Dunstan, the saint tangles with the devil, and the experience puts him at odds with his community. And that sounded like a story he was familiar with, that of Dr. Smith, the one whose own perception of reality was so different from his communities that he had to be sent away to the Mississippi State Asylum.

[Noah Satterstrom]

That story next to the Dr. Smith story, that seems like a problem that Dunstan was having.

[Larison Campbell]

I'd never heard of Saint Dunstan before Noah, but after the opening, I started seeing references to him everywhere, including on the back of a bottle of whiskey that was fire spiced. Get it? But the story there and in other places is a little different. In those versions, doubt doesn't seem to play as big a role. The townspeople are glad he ran the devil out. That's the thing with stories. The takeaway is up for interpretation. At a certain point, the stories become more a product of the person telling them than the people in them. Of course, not everything that happens becomes a story. Sometimes a thing is too mundane to even remember, and sometimes it's so painful that generation after generation works to bury it. So what happens when one of those generations decides to unearth that story? I'm Larison Campbell, and this is under Yazoo Clay. A quick heads up. This episode contains mentions of sexual assault. Noah is the first person to admit. If it were up to certain members of his family and not the curators of the Mississippi Museum of Art, the show would never have gone up. Noah's closest link to his great grandfather, that is the only person he ever met who actually knew Dr. Smith was his own grandmother, Margaret, who died in 2014. She was Dr. Smith's oldest child.

[Noah Satterstrom]

The grandmother that I knew would be absolutely horrified that we were even having this conversation.

[Anna Satterstrom]

I think she'd be really torn. And she loved Noah so much. She surrounded her room in the assisted living facility with Noah's paintings on every wall. And yet the very idea that this whole story is public, I thought, I don't know if she could have stood it. I'm Anna Satterstrom. I'm the mother of the artist and the granddaughter of the person of interest here. Dr. Smith.

[Larison Campbell]

Anna's mother, Margaret, was Dr. Smith's daughter. He was sent to the asylum when Margaret was still a little girl. His insanity trial was a big deal. Newspapers covered it. But Anna knew none of this because her family decided to never speak of him.

[Anna Satterstrom]

I don't remember at what age I realized that I didn't know anything about my grandfather because she would talk about her mother quite a bit. She would tell me about, you know, what she did and how they went to movies together and how she made her clothes and everything. But she never mentioned her father. 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 sometime.

[Larison Campbell]

I don't know if lost his memory is an old euphemism for mental illness. Lord knows the south has lots of those. But there's a heartbreaking irony here. The family's explanation for Dr. Smith's absence for their silence, is that he's the one who doesn't remember them. Which is all to say that there was something incredibly moving about this show. About seeing a man who'd been intentionally erased be given the floor, or rather the walls. Noah's show had taken over more than a third of the museum's square footage. There's the 122 linear feet of panoramic painting, yes, but there was also a giant hallway lined with artifacts from Dr. Smith's life. Photos, letters he'd exchanged with his wife Ethel, even the beat up leather satchel he'd used to carry his optometry supplies and a pair of his signature round wire framed spectacles, not unlike the ones Noah's got on off the hallway of Dr. Smith's artifacts. The museum was airing a short documentary about Noah's research and process. And over the course of a week, they hosted a series of panel discussions that went Beyond Noah and Dr. Smith. Topics range from the Asylum Hill Project to archival ethics, to ideas about memory and generational trauma. You know when a little kid tries to keep a secret and finally they're allowed to blurt it out and the words just don't stop. It felt like that, like an easing of conscience for this whole community. So what compelled Noah to spend years telling the story of a man he was always told never to mention? To understand that, we're going to have to skip 25 years back and a whole continent away. Noah and I started talking about his show almost a year before it went up. We'd go back and forth, his telling me how the painting was going, my prying about any new findings he had about Dr. Smith. But in one of our talks, he let me in on a part of his own story. One that changed everything. It's 2001. Noah's in a high level graduate program at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. He was married and it wasn't going well. It's in this moment of intense stress that he wakes up one night in the pitch black to a horrible realization.

[Noah Satterstrom]

All of my memories felt like they were implanted and fake and that I hadn't existed until that moment. And everyone else was convinced that my memories were real, that I was the only one who knew that they were not. I mean, it was deeply, deeply frightening. And it lasted for much longer than.

[Larison Campbell]

I would have wanted it to, for nearly six months. This was his everyday reality. The kind of mental break he was experiencing has a diagnosis, depersonalization disorder.

[Noah Satterstrom]

It was non stop. It wasn't like, I'm having this weird feeling. It was like, oh, I just woke up into a reality that I realized I'm not real and my memories aren't real. They've been crafted and presented to my brain as real, but they're not.

[Larison Campbell]

He took a leave from his painting program and went home to his parents. He started thumbing through old family photo albums, hoping they'd trigger a reconnection between his memories and reality. After a while, he started to paint the photos, repossessing them. In a way, it was in the midst of all this when his great grandfather's absence really struck him.

[Noah Satterstrom]

When I was having my breakdown in 2001, if I had the full context of his experience, it's hard to say I would have been more afraid Because I don't think I could have been more afraid than I was. It would have been. It would have given me something to kind of hold on to, you know, instead of like, either you're normal or there's the abyss. There's like normal people and then there's the abyss. Whereas following Dr. Smith's life, he enters the old asylum in 1925 and he lives for 40 years beyond that. And he wasn't in the abyss when.

[Larison Campbell]

He got started on this project. Noah didn't have much to go on. It's not easy to dig up a story that's meant to be forgotten, a story that more than one person has taken pains to bury. But some pieces had survived. His great grandmother Ethel had saved a wooden box. Inside was nearly every letter she'd written during the early years of her marriage to Dr. Smith.

[Noah Satterstrom]

I know what she had for lunch every day that year. You know, every movie she saw, every interaction she had with her parents. It's all very like young family.

[Larison Campbell]

If Dr. Smith and Ethel kept in touch after he went into the asylum, she didn't save those letters. So Noah turned to a different repository of memory, the state archives.

[Noah Satterstrom]

I found Dr. Smith's name in the ledger book from the old asylum, which was this giant leather bound book that said Mississippi Insane Hospital on the spine.

[Larison Campbell]

Finally, confirmation, but not much else. Fortunately, that was about to change. At Noah's next stop, a downtown gallery, a man buying a painting overheard him telling his great grandfather's story and introduced himself. It was Steven Parks, the state librarian. Hey, small cities have big perks.

[Noah Satterstrom]

And so a couple weeks later, I'm back in Nashville and I get a text from Stephen saying, kind of start sending you stuff. And I was, I was shocked.

[Larison Campbell]

Advertisements for Dr. Smith's optician practice, meeting notes from the state board of Opticians where Dr. Smith held a seat, Newspaper articles about his engagement, his practice, and later his very public breakdown. With every document, Noah became more inspired. A picture of a man was taking shape in his head, and then on canvas, he began painting vignettes of what he read. But as much as this work has brought Dr. Smith back to life, I'm not sure it's brought him back into the family. There's a formality in the way that Noah talks about him. Why do you refer to him as Dr. Smith?

[Noah Satterstrom]

That's a good question. One that, like, I started referring to him as Dr. Smith because that's what all of his optometry advertisements referred to him as. But I didn't realize at the beginning that he referred to himself as Dr. Smith. Smith is such a common name. And he'd just get lost in the, like, Dr. Smith. There's no first name, you know, it's just Dr. And Smith. He became a kind of iconic figure in my imagination from his name.

[Larison Campbell]

Dr. Smith's not a pawpaw or even grandfather. Familial names imply that their owner is just that, a member of the family. Someone had pruned his branch from the family tree.

[Anna Satterstrom]

That image of a blackboard where you erase everything on the blackboard but the little bits of information left, I feel like that's what I got from my mother growing up.

[Larison Campbell]

You remember Noah's mom, Anna? She'd learned early on that her own mother, Margaret, didn't like to talk about Anna's grandfather.

[Anna Satterstrom]

I would just say, silence, absence. This is just not where we go. And then when I got older and added started asking a little deeper questions, she would shut down right away. And if I got a little too insistent, she would get either snappish or she would tear up and say, I'm not going to talk about it.

[Larison Campbell]

Anna tried to figure things out anyway.

[Anna Satterstrom]

My mother said that anytime she and her sister were together and their voices dropped, I'd show up. No, but if there was going to be a good story, they were going to lower their voices.

[Larison Campbell]

And so for Noah, it's not just about understanding this man, but about understanding just why exactly his family worked so hard to erase him. There was shame about mental illness, but was that the whole story?

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[Anna Satterstrom]

Don'T know if I'm in the right.

[Larison Campbell]

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[Larison Campbell]

That afternoon at the museum, one of the Southeast's legendary springs. Thunderstorms rolled in as Noah walked me through his painting. I guess we'll start at the first. In the first section of the panels.

[Noah Satterstrom]

It starts with a shadow of an unknown figure, which may be me, or maybe Dr. Smith himself. Or it could be Dr. Smith's father, who's on the other side of the wall of the room where Dr. Smith is being born. There's a vertical diptych kind of design motif, sort of basically throughout.

[Larison Campbell]

In many ways, it's a visual biography of Dr. Smith's life from birth to burial. Dr. Smith was raised in Louisiana by a single mother and he put himself through optometry school. One of Dr. Smith's earliest patients was a man named Gerard Brandon, a lawyer who loomed large in the Natchez social scene. More importantly, Gerard had a beautiful daughter, Ethel.

[Noah Satterstrom]

He met Ethel Brandon, I believe, because he was making glasses for her father. And they pretty quickly started dating and they were married.

[Larison Campbell]

The following year, the young couple moved up the river to Vicksburg. They were happy. These were the years when Ethel would write to her family about how she and her husband and teased each other. But even in the rosy glow of young love, Noah's great grandfather may have had his own secrets that he kept from his wife.

[Noah Satterstrom]

He referred to having audio hallucinations for his whole life and that they never bothered him, but they were always there. And very rarely did they make him do something he didn't want to do. But he could have been a fully functioning professional optometrist while being schizophrenic at the same time.

[Larison Campbell]

For years, being a fully functioning professional optometrist looked a little different. In the rural south of the 1920s. There wasn't quite enough business for a brick and mortar shop, so Dr. Smith took his services on the road.

[Noah Satterstrom]

While all this is going on and he's actively having delusions, he starts to develop this very elaborate optical truck that by all accounts was of very highly functioning invention. They check all the eyes for free, and then if only if somebody needed glasses, he would be able to grind the lenses on the spot. Do, you know, fit the glasses and everything, which would have been, I mean, driving around rural Mississippi and that in the 1920s, you know, it's hard to imagine.

[Larison Campbell]

It was cutting edge, the talk of the town wherever he went. He even got it patented. Dr. Smith and Ethel had four kids. He might have been away much of the time, but it was clear his kids loved him and he loved them. Noah's mother told us a story about how her own mother, Margaret, kept a pair of glasses he'd made for her as a child. She didn't need them, she just liked them, and so he made them for her. Noah's work devotes a good bit of square footage to this period of Dr. Smith's life. His optometry truck. Rural Mississippi and Louisiana. Images of a growing family. In one part, he stands in a white shirt and vest, facing left towards his past as the reflection of the sun makes his glasses opaque. In the distance behind him, a small child, a carriage, and a loose, barely discernible sketch resembling a woman in the story of Dr. Smith's life. As his madness takes up more and more of the foreground, something, someone, fades to the back. His family.

[Noah Satterstrom]

So then the timeline splits again. And then you've got Margaret, my grandmother, and Ethel back on the top. And then that's when he enters the old asylum.

[Larison Campbell]

At this point, a gaggle of museum goers had started trailing behind us, listening. Noah pointed to a square near the top. Everyone leaned in, hands behind their back, doing that polite museum squint. The image he pointed out is small. Well, in the context of this massive painting, just 12 by 2 foot square, there's a neat white house.

[Noah Satterstrom]

According to one of the only stories that I knew growing up, Grandmother and them were living in shreveport d destitute. Dr. Smith was not around at all, totally lost in psychosis. Ethel and the kids, there were four kids at this point. The youngest being an infant, were all sitting in poverty in a house with no food, no resources, nothing.

[Larison Campbell]

After Noah's walkthrough, my producer and I tucked ourselves away in a museum office with Noah, his sister Jessica and his mom Anna. Remember, this project wasn't just academic. This was Noah's great grandfather, a man whose absence festered in the family he left behind, especially for Noah's grandmother, Anna's mother, Margaret.

[Anna Satterstrom]

And she's the only one of their four children who had an active memory of her father. But my mother was seven when it happened and she said she spent the next several years sitting on the brick wall out front waiting for her father to come get her because nobody told her that he wasn't going to come. And I think she carried the trauma of his loss throughout her life.

[Larison Campbell]

After Dr. Smith's breakdown, his wife and children didn't stay in that neat white house. His father in law, Gerard, arrived and whisked the family back home to Natchez. Gerard's home was a quiet one. That Victorian sensibility of children should be seen and not heard applied to everyone. A house of decorum was in some ways the perfect antidote to the chaotic last years with Dr. Smith. But a house of decorum isn't a place where you could ask questions. For the first year after Dr. Smith was gone, a photograph of him remained on the mantel at her grandparents, Margaret often stared at was all she had of her dad.

[Noah Satterstrom]

She was caught staring at his photograph on the mantel and the next day it was gone.

[Larison Campbell]

Margaret grew up, had children of her own. Gerard Brandon's decorum, no outbursts, no questions, no curiosity, found a place in her home with her children. Gerard took his place as a titan in the family mythos. Here's Anna again, Noah's mother.

[Anna Satterstrom]

When I was very young, I sort of had him confused with God, you know, he was the sweet old man who had all the power. I never saw him angry. I never heard him say, raise a voice or say anything unkind.

[Larison Campbell]

But she never saw joy either, no outburst of any kind. In fact, her mother, Margaret, saw to that.

[Noah Satterstrom]

Composure was of the absolute value, poise, elegance and properness.

[Jessica Satterstrom]

Grandmother was the quintessential Southern belle in my memory.

[Noah Satterstrom]

Yeah.

[Anna Satterstrom]

She had an elegance and a presence of. She was a beautiful woman. And when she entered a room, everybody was aware of it. She was a power source in my life, and yet she wasn't. You didn't want to be judged by that, that power source.

[Larison Campbell]

For a family interested less in the real world than in their own created reality, perhaps there was no better community than Natchez, Mississippi. This small town of a few thousand sits on a bluff overlooking the river. Before the Civil War, it was home to more millionaires per capita than any other in the United States because it was also home to the country's second largest slave market. Many of those grand homes still stand, although the area's now among the poorest in the country. Country. Regardless of present circumstances, this ideal of Confederate glory still shapes the way residents talk. The writer Richard Grant has this quote. In Natchez, you only use the word home if it's antebellum. If your house was built after the Civil War, it's trashy to call it a home. Still, even in Natchez, people build new houses. They bucked tradition. There were times Noah's grandmother let her tried and true composure slide, but it was so rare. Both he and his sister Jessica remember each one.

[Jessica Satterstrom]

I remember you telling me about it.

[Anna Satterstrom]

Do you?

[Jessica Satterstrom]

Yeah. I was in high school, and it seemed like, wow, such a mystery in the family. I had no idea. And then not long after, I asked grandmother about her father, and I said something like, I don't. Tell me about your father. And grandmother looked surprised, and she said, he was an optometrist. And then her eyes filled up with tears, and then everything shut down. And then it was just back to the silence.

[Noah Satterstrom]

Exactly what happened When I asked her that, like, tell me about him. What can you say about him? He was an optometrist immediately, tears just filling up, and then just kind of silence while she turned the page and started talking about something else. And that instant, involuntary well of emotion after 90 years. She was seven when he left, and she was in her 90s when this happened. And that being the only trigger that I had ever seen of that kind of emotion. Completely instant and involuntary was such a sign that there's so much there, unprocessed that she lived with for her whole life. Yeah. And that she unwillingly and not meaning to, was teaching us, like, this is what we do.

[Jessica Satterstrom]

You place it deep down inside you.

[Anna Satterstrom]

And if you violate that, you're going to feel bad about yourself.

[Noah Satterstrom]

Yeah. That's where the shame Comes in, you just had an emotional outburst. I mean, my suspicion there is the silence is the response to the shame. And it's so much padding, you don't ever get the shame. The shame doesn't make it to the surface. We don't see the shame, but we see the effects of the shame and.

[Jessica Satterstrom]

It gets buried down so deep that any kind of scratch of the surface bubbles up. This uncontrollable emotional response that then has to be tamped down quick. And then everybody just stopped talking about it because something got awkward. So back to the silence.

[Larison Campbell]

You can hear even in how these three talk to one another. They've put in the work to build relationships founded on sincerity and honesty, not shame and silence. But anyone with a family knows it's hard to break patterns even when you want to. The thing is, it wasn't just Noah's breakdown that hearkened back to his great grandfather's generation. It's how he talked about it or how he didn't. Noah's breakdown was in 2001 and his grandmother Margaret lived until 2014.

[Noah Satterstrom]

The episode of depersonalization I had and not being able to know what the. Where I am in reality was so horrifying to me and nightmarish. And I could not. There was no way out of it. And no one else seemed to be able to tell how.

[Larison Campbell]

May I ask how she responded?

[Anna Satterstrom]

I'm sure we never talked.

[Noah Satterstrom]

No, she did. She never knew. She never knew that she never knew it happened. I barely talked to them about it. I don't know that I really talked to everyone about it.

[Jessica Satterstrom]

I didn't know about it until the New York Times.

[Anna Satterstrom]

We have broken this pattern.

[Larison Campbell]

For more than two decades. Noah's only sibling didn't know. He spent six months unsure if his life was even real. The tight lipped ethos ran so deep that Noah didn't even realize he was carrying it out.

[Noah Satterstrom]

I didn't know I was doing that to myself until I let Dr. Smith out of the genie bottle. And then the only way to do that was to, like, be totally open and honest. And all of a sudden it's like, wait a minute, I've got this thing that's now out that I've been trying to keep. I didn't even know that I was doing that. Not that I wasn't talking about it because I was ashamed of it, but I was afraid that if I talked about it, I would call it back into my life like a specter, like a monster, which, you know, is maybe more what grandmother was experiencing, not the shame, but the like. If I say his name, the monster is going to come back to my life.

[Anna Satterstrom]

I'm going to experience all that pain all over again.

[Noah Satterstrom]

And when I. When. When that occurred to me and I started talking about it out loud and thinking about it, the amount of energy that it took to hold down stuff requires not just the energy of holding it down, but it requires this whole system of holding all these other things in place to make sure that you don't feel this or that or, you know, and now everybody has to remain calm and not talk about anything because you don't know where, if it's going to start to blow out, and then you're going to lose control of everything.

[Larison Campbell]

Noah's grandmother Margaret, spent that energy, kept that tight hold, for better or worse, all her life. Her family thinks Noah's exhibit would have caused her a world of conflict if she'd lived to see it. Maybe there's a way it could have offered solace for her, too.

[Anna Satterstrom]

And this is her shawl. I've brought it with me for the weekend to have her here in hopes that there's some healing for her in it somewhere, because I think it was a trauma she had through her whole life, and I'm sorry, and I wish that she had had a different relationship with this story.

[Larison Campbell]

Stephen King has this great quote. Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door. It reminds me of what Noah was saying about his breakdown, that maybe if he'd known more about his great grandfather, he would have been less afraid for himself. No one worries about monsters in a brightly lit room. And then two weeks before the show went up, just as Noah was shipping paintings from his Nashville studio down to the museum in Jackson, someone cut on the lights, so to speak.

[Noah Satterstrom]

Probably like 7/10 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. And it took about seven years to find all that. But then just last week, his medical records emerged. That's gonna give life to that whole rest of his life, which is more than half of his existence. He doesn't have to be a saintly character. I mean, I don't know. And so, you know, I'm not absolving him of all things, but that's. You don't have to be absolved of all things. You know, that can't be the requirement in life.

[Larison Campbell]

That's next on Under Yazoo Clay.

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At California Psychics, we know some people can't read the career warning signs. Like your boss. Still not knowing your name.

[Larison Campbell]

You, Tina, Lisa, Sheila, whatever. Get that report to me by lunch, okay? It's Carrie, ma' am. Just get it done, Terry.

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[Jevon]

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

[Larison Campbell]

Oh, wow, a real person. Yep.

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Well, I've got a complicated project.

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I didn't realize you did that.

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[Ryan Seacrest]

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I mean, I always thought I needed a designer to come to my home, but scheduling is always a nightmare.

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

[Dr. Elizabeth West]

Hmm.

[Larison Campbell]

I just might have to do more.

[Jevon]

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

[Larison Campbell]

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. 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 institute and a variety of events for all ages. Plan your Visit [e-mail] that's msmuseumart.org Noah's family story is in many ways a classic southern situation. A white, well to do family working overtime to hide their secrets. His transgression is against his family's unspoken agreement. This is not where we go. But there's another side to the classic Southern coin, another implicit agreement to avoid the unspeakable. Dr. Elizabeth west is a professor of English and Africana studies at Georgia State University. For her, the broken branch on the family tree was her own grandfather. In this case, he'd removed himself. He left the family when her mom was growing up. But the reason for this went even further back in the family history to her grandfather's uncle Hillman.

[Dr. Elizabeth West]

Hillman revealed a history of my grandfather that I had no knowledge of. There was a very tense relationship between my grandfather and his 10 children.

[Larison Campbell]

The generations before that weren't much clearer. A few years ago, she took the ancestry records her aunt had mapped out by hand and began to digitize them. And the reason her family didn't talk about its history became clear.

[Dr. Elizabeth West]

Once I got past my grandfather's father, I was like, wow, these people were enslaved. And I just can't believe that I didn't think about it ever until that point. You know, I mean, you talk about it in the abstract, but once you put a name on a piece of paper and you realize you're connected to that name and that name is connected to this history, then you just, you know, then you're in.

[Larison Campbell]

And she learned something else. Her great, great uncle, Hillman Systrunk, died in a different kind of confinement, the Mississippi State Asylum.

[Dr. Elizabeth West]

Actually, I had no knowledge of him up until about, I don't know, five years ago.

[Larison Campbell]

Through careful interrogation of historical records, tax filings, census interviews, Dr. West filled in the picture of Hillman Systrunk's life. He was born in Georgia into slavery. In the mid-1850s, the man who'd enslaved Hillman moved the whole operation to Mississippi. And that's where they stayed as the Civil War raged on. Once the war had ended and the Emancipation Proclamation finally was put into effect, Hillman and his family were free. So they settled near where they'd been. And what followed was an incredible tale of community resilience and grit.

[Dr. Elizabeth West]

He and My direct ancestor Shadrach, who was his brother, they. The family farmed in the immediate aftermath of the war and right at the close of Reconstruction, they actually bought land. And they worked that land for not quite 20 years because I think it was around 1900 or a little before when they paid off the mortgage on the land and owned.

[Larison Campbell]

These were two landowning black men in the post war south. Life was not easy.

[Dr. Elizabeth West]

It was not typical blacks in the aftermath of the war, most of them ended up in a system that was not very different from slavery. They ended up leasing their labor to white farmers. So Hillman and Shadwick were an anomaly in that sense.

[Larison Campbell]

Holding onto their land wasn't easy either. Legitimate support systems were for white farmers.

[Dr. Elizabeth West]

Hillman and his brother Shadrick had had dealings with this pretty wealthy person in the area. If he didn't have a brick building, he'd probably be called a loan shark. But you know, loan sharks would. Brick buildings are called businessmen. And you look at the records and you see the possessions that they are essentially laying on the table to be able to make this loan for yet another year. You know, a cow named Bessie is comparable to hocking your car. And so it's just this grind year after year.

[Larison Campbell]

There was the grind, but Dr. West could clearly see for Hillman and his family, his community, there was also the striving for more.

[Dr. Elizabeth West]

The records show this concerted commitment to people in the community to learn to read and write. And then you see the records of parents and then people like Hillman who weren't parents, maybe making sure that young black children were getting registered for school. What I began to see out of this is just this amazing dynamic community of first generation freed black people in a way that just doesn't get recorded.

[Larison Campbell]

When Hillman's in his 60s, his wife passes away, he remarries, and then Hillman gets sick.

[Dr. Elizabeth West]

And then there's a white physician who comes in and signs off and he's admitted to the asylum. From what I can tell, in that January of 1920, and he dies in March of that year.

[Larison Campbell]

Hillman's cause of death was listed as nephritis, or kidney inflammation. One of the last symptoms once the disease is most severe, dementia, a mental manifestation of the physical malady. After Hillman's death, land disputes kick off. The family is split into factions. This is the era Dr. West's grandfather grew up in. In 1920, the year of Hillman's death, Dr. West's grandfather leaves everything behind. His family, the land he's helped work his home.

[Dr. Elizabeth West]

Hillman revealed a history of my grandfather that I had had no knowledge of. And so as a teenager, young boy up through his teens, these had been the men who had shaped him and they were land owning men. And in his teenage years, these were the years that Hillman and Shadrick both essentially got stripped of their land and died. And after understanding the life, his life, I understand a lot better the kind of bitterness and disappointment he lived with to go from the kind of childhood he had remembered. I mean, they were a struggling farm family, but they owned what they owned, they owned what they worked. And he witnessed, you know, real time his family being stripped of everything. And as an 18, 20 year old kid, we might call him a man, but you know, he's a kid and he goes to Jasper, tries to find work in a factory and marries and ends up raising his family as a sharecropper.

[Larison Campbell]

Exactly what Hillman and Shadrick didn't want for their family.

[Dr. Elizabeth West]

And sometime in the 1940s, I'm told, he tried to convince my grandmother that they should leave and she didn't want to leave and he left.

[Larison Campbell]

Dr. West could never wrap her head around why her grandfather would leave his wife and 10 children behind. She'd heard that he provided, made sure his family got fed, but that was when he was there, learning the story of the loss and trauma he weathered in his teenage years, it all made sense. So she took these stories back to her family.

[Dr. Elizabeth West]

After I was introduced to this history, I started asking older members of my family if they knew anything about these people. And it was just like a eureka moment. I remember one of the older members in my family, very casually, she said, oh yeah, I remember that story. For many of us, you know, we are told to just look forward. There's no point in, you know, in looking back. I think when I share these stories, there's, there's just a lot of silence, you know. Cause what can you say? It's a lot to take in.

[Larison Campbell]

Dr. West was introduced to Hillman at the end of his life. A particularly painful episode in a life with plenty of them.

[Dr. Elizabeth West]

For me, finding Hillman at the asylum was the beginning. And you know, I have this sense of sadness when I think that there was seven decades that he lived and did these fantastic things and that in three months this was the end. But I also feel that finding him, wherever I found him, was more important than the place. The story I discovered that I was able to build out from meeting him at the asylum far outweighs even the pain. I think about that, you know, he very likely suffered in the last three months of his life.

[Larison Campbell]

And now with all the context, all the insight, how does she feel towards Hillman?

[Dr. Elizabeth West]

To put it just, I guess in a simple word, just a lot of love, you know, I mean, he could have been very selfish. And from what I see of him in the record, he was anything but that. When you look at what in particular blacks in the south were experiencing during that era. Yeah, you know, I mean, 76 and quite frankly, for many black people, even in the 21st century is quite an age to live to. So, you know, when I think about it, it's just, you know, it's mind boggling to think all of this front end of his life gets capped by, by, you know, three months in the asylum and almost into obscurity.

[Larison Campbell]

Almost into obscurity. The end of Hillman's life stands out. But the work that Dr. West did ensures that it doesn't define the man. It allowed her to paint a fuller picture. It's not all that different for Noah. For decades, all he knew about Dr. Smith was a headline's worth. He was sent to the state asylum. But Noah's careful not to let this part of Dr. Smith's life become Dr. Smith's life. The first time I walked into the room that held Noah's paintings, I tried to just stand back and take it all in at once. That was a mistake. As soon as you start to break it down with your eyes, you realize you can't. Noah deliberately refused to set boundaries. Scenes flow into each other like the flow to life. The courtroom where Dr. Smith had his insanity hearing bleeds into our first view of the old asylum. Hold the last canvas up to the first one, and now it's one painting. The brick from the house where Dr. Smith was born in 1891 matches the brick at the state hospital cemetery where he's buried. There's a loose, impressionistic feel to many of the paintings. One person is painted in careful detail while the figure or two canvases over is a blur. In a way, it's a peek behind the curtain, a look at how the artist understands each part of the story. And the craziest part, Noah says this 183 canvas painting, a work that inspired the creation of an entire room in a museum, dozens of panel discussions and even a New York Times article, isn't finished. I mean, it is in the sense that it's ready to show, but not in the sense that he'll never lay a paintbrush on it again.

[Noah Satterstrom]

When it comes to like, deciphering what's real and what isn't, about not only his accounts, but people's accounts of him. It's like very. It's very shifting all the time.

[Larison Campbell]

Two weeks before we sat down, it shifted dramatically. This is when Noah finally got his great grandfather's medical records, including a remarkably thorough intake interview in which, over several pages, Dr. Smith tells his whole life story.

[Noah Satterstrom]

And it just seems like all the slack has been let out and he's now in the asylum and he's just like. It's all just. He's writing letters to people, and there's not any need to keep it buttoned in. He's writing letters like crazy that are just all over the place.

[Anna Satterstrom]

And somebody's giving him stamps.

[Noah Satterstrom]

Somebody's giving him stamps. Write some letters. One of these letters is written on letterhead that he made because he worked in the print department, so he worked at Letterpress, so he made letterhead. Dr. David Smith Bondren, Mississippi Hospital for Restrained Patients I feel like it gives.

[Jessica Satterstrom]

Me a much better view of the man, the person behind the legend in our family. You know, he's been this figure of mystery, but hearing these kind of personal details, it sounds like he was a gentle person.

[Anna Satterstrom]

He seems very pleasant. I mean, maybe that explains why Mama was so hurt by. She loved him, and he loved her enough to make her those glasses because she wanted some. And it must have been a good feeling relationship or she wouldn't have been so traumatized by it. If he had been an ogre or dangerous or hateful or had done harmful things to her mother, she wouldn't have suffered his loss the way she did.

[Larison Campbell]

But there's, of course, a caveat. Noah can't be sure if parts of Dr. Smith's autobiography are based on delusions.

[Noah Satterstrom]

When anything I thought I understood, you know, I have to make sure that I'm not getting fixed on that, because who's even real and who isn't? I've kept thinking about, like, those, like, planaria worms that you can. Like they're microscopic and you can chop them in half and each one will grow the rest of its body, you know, so it's like any of this could just be lopped off and then just paint a whole new. Like his autobiography. He's like, this is what happened my entire childhood until I was in my mid-20s. I didn't have any of that information before.

[Larison Campbell]

But having this information means that Noah may eventually replace some of these canvases or repaint details. So it's likely this is the Only time this version of Noah's work will be shown.

[Noah Satterstrom]

You know, it's like constantly growing and reinterpreting, you know, a sacred text of some kind. You know, you have to keep reinterpreting and interpreting, interpreting.

[Larison Campbell]

By the time the show opened, Noah and I had been talking about his work for almost a year. Probably another reason it was so overwhelming. There's always that cognitive dissonance when you finally see something you've spent forever imagining. But there was one part that threw me. It's right in the middle. Canvas number 92 in fact, out of 183, I turned to Noah. It's funny, when I look at it, I feel like the part that my eye tends to go to the most is that right there. It's two men in dress shirts and trousers. One also wears an apron. And it appears he's grabbing the other man's nose with pliers. This is how Noah came to tell me the story of Saint Dunstan.

[Noah Satterstrom]

And he knows instantly that that's the devil.

[Larison Campbell]

As Noah explained, this is the moment of his great grandfather's unraveling. The moment that the community decides his reality didn't match theirs. Dr. Smith wasn't sent away just because he'd been having delusions. He was sent away because he was accused of a crime.

[Noah Satterstrom]

So Dr. Smith had started to lose it and could not really keep himself together. And he had moved his family to Louisiana. But then, to keep his business going, he was still traveling around and he traveled to Mississippi, to Port Gibson to check eyes.

[Larison Campbell]

This was using the mobile optometry truck he'd patented. Dr. Smith would place a notice in a newspaper and a few days later he'd show up in that small town with his truck. People would come to his truck, he'd take them inside, perform eye exams, grind spectacles.

[Noah Satterstrom]

And a 15 year old girl went to him to get her eyes checked and left his office saying that he had attacked her. He was set upon by a mob of her relatives who drug him out to Hermanville, a couple of miles away and were in the process of lynching him when the Claiborne county sheriff showed up and arrested him.

[Larison Campbell]

Instead of being lynched, Dr. Smith was taken to jail. It was a move that probably saved.

[Noah Satterstrom]

His life and he maintained his innocence for the rest of his life and said, I never did anything. I never did anything to her.

[Larison Campbell]

Dr. Smith avoided a criminal trial. It sounds like his father in law, Gerard Brandon, that godlike figure pulled some strings. What he got instead was an insanity hearing. We know how that turned out.

[Noah Satterstrom]

More than half of his existence was in state custody.

[Larison Campbell]

And for Noah, this is another important reason to see this work as largely unfinished. Because this pivotal moment in his grandfather's life, this act that meant that his daughter Margaret never saw him again and that he would spend the second half of his life in state custody, that got him so carefully erased from his family that his great grandson had to spend the better part of a decade figuring out who he was. Noah's still wrestling with it.

[Noah Satterstrom]

In the interviews with him, it seems as if he's wanting to say that it's not that nothing happened, but I did not force myself on her. That's more the phrasing that seems to come out.

[Larison Campbell]

Of course, Noah knows that there's no such thing as consensual sex with a 15 year old. And he knows that Dr. Smith's mental illness is wrapped up in this alleged attack. In those same records, Dr. Smith tells the asylum's doctors he's part of a breeding program run by the Secret Service. With this painting, Noah intentionally broke his family tradition of keeping people in the dark. But what happens when you turn on the light and you still don't know what you're looking at?

[Noah Satterstrom]

How I'm supposed to relate to Dr. Smith and all the characters in this story change depending on what information is available. You know, I mean, he sat there being kind of a silent monster figure for a century, and ever since the story started coming out, it's like, how much compassion should I have? Is he mentally ill? Is he a monster? Did he commit this crime? Did he. Was he forcefully committed? Was he happy there? You know, was he healthy? Did he have friends? All that stuff is like these unknown qualities.

[Larison Campbell]

Right Now, Noah represents Dr. Smith and this unknown girl with Dunston and the Devil. A metaphor about belief, but he's not sure it will stay that way.

[Noah Satterstrom]

And so it's like it keeps me constantly moving. Well, how am I going to represent him? Do I represent him as a lonely and pitiful figure? Or was he completely happy for 40 years in the asylum? I feel like I have to constantly shift my weight.

[Larison Campbell]

He suspects his family did, too. There was shame, yes, about mental illness and about his alleged assault. But maybe it was mixed with uncertainty about how to feel about this man they'd all loved so much. The way Noah wrestles with this is clearly painful. He's so deeply conflicted. Maybe sometimes it's just easier to start your story at a point that's past all that uncertainty and pain.

[Dr. Elizabeth West]

Our story starts with the first generation, like Freeborn I don't think it's necessarily always intentional, but I think it's the way we are enculturated in America. Who wants to build a history of themselves that's rooted in slavery and then, and especially when that slavery is also tied to an insane asylum, which is also another kind of taboo. And so you start your history at the point that is less painful and more pleasing.

[Larison Campbell]

The night before we left town, we met up with Noah for a drink at the hotel bar across from the Mississippi Museum of Art. As we were saying our goodbyes, he mentioned offhand that he'd sold a few paintings to the hotel. He'd painted them years ago just as he was starting to conceptualize his show. And they were hanging right down the hall. So we walked over to see them. The paintings were self portraits. In one, Noah was working. His daughter, who often watches him paint, sits on a ledge nearby. Kind of reminded me how Margaret watched her own dad, Dr. Smith, making glasses. And then to my surprise, there in that same painting was Dr. Smith. He's gray, somewhat faceless, but he's there sitting across from a silhouetted teenaged girl. Noah was just as surprised. He'd forgotten that was there.

[Noah Satterstrom]

I had learned. All I knew at that point was that a 15 year old girl had come on to have him check her eyes and she left saying that he had assaulted her. So I was trying to figure out how I would paint those two together.

[Larison Campbell]

This painting was big, over five feet tall, much bigger than any one canvas from the show. But it was also a one off, a good way to explore ideas.

[Noah Satterstrom]

But I stopped, you know, it's unformed because I stopped painting it because I'm sure I hit the same wall. Like I don't know how to. I can't portray this. I don't know what I'm portraying.

[Larison Campbell]

But then the museum gave him this platform to tell Dr. Smith's story. He had to choose which one to tell.

[Noah Satterstrom]

But I've clearly made it very hard, have a very hard time trying to figure out how to make those two be together. You know, I do not at all dismiss the idea that he could have done it. You totally could have done time.

[Larison Campbell]

You can hear Noah wrestling with this idea and with his own new role in the family myth making. So when it came to the show that would present this man to the world, Noah opted to let the answer shape shift, mold to the eye of the beholder. He put it to Saint Dunstan.

[Noah Satterstrom]

But that story next to the Dr. Smith story, it's like that seems like a problem that Dunston was having, you know, was he imagining what was going on? Did he attack an old man? Nobody saw him change except Dunston. An old man went in and then an old man went out saying the blacksmith attacked him. I'm real cautious about, like, making a Saint comparison with Dr. Smith, but it was just so much it, so it chimed so much.

[Larison Campbell]

Saints and sinners, truth and lies. These binaries are the underpinning for countless parables, myths and family legends. But the real stories, the ones underneath those, they're always more complicated than that. That's true of Dr. Smith's story, and it's certainly true for the state institution where he spent the last part of his life.

[Anna Satterstrom]

What ends up is the Southern Gothic, the terrain of terror.

[Noah Satterstrom]

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?

[Dr. Elizabeth West]

Oh, everyone who worked in the asylum.

[Larison Campbell]

Was evil and they would have stolen anything valuable that the patients had. Obviously, that's not the case. Dig deeper and sometimes you only find more to question. That's next on Under Yazoo. 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 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 Mississippi Medical Center. Visit Jackson and Jay and Denie Stein.

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At California Psychics, we know some people can't read the career warning signs like your boss still not knowing your name.

[Larison Campbell]

You, Tina, Lisa, Sheila, whatever. Get that report to me by lunch, okay? It's Carrie, ma' am. Just get it done, Terry.

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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 call 1-800-PREDICT today and get 20 minutes for just $20.

[Larison Campbell]

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[Larison Campbell]

Discover is accepted at 99% of places.

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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 [e-mail] credit card Based on the February 2024 Nielsen report, you're listening to an iHeart podcast.