Under Yazoo ClayThe Mississippi State “Lunatic Asylum” opened its doors in 1855, right before the Civil War. That timing would shape the next 80 years of the old asylum’s life. Almost 30,000 patients would pass through its doors. We know some of their stories, but what about the old asylum’s? Episode 4 tells the history of Mississippi’s first state hospital, the promises that were made -- and why they were broken. And Dr. Jennifer Mack reveals that not everything that got buried in the Yazoo Clay stayed a secret.
Mississippi State Hospital Museum that.
We're standing in a hallway at the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield, 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.
It was the threat that your family always gave you.
If you act crazy, you'll go to Whitfield.
Oh yeah, people see you do that. You're going to Whitfield.
If you don't behave I'm going.
To take competer Whitfield.
What you out?
Whitfield.
That's the informal name for the Mississippi State Hospital. It's been Mississippi's primary mental health facility since nineteen thirty five, 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 But standing here in a marble room full of outdated therapy equipment, wod Field's not scary.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 noticed a black and white photo of a woman in what looks like a shower.
The lady in the shower.
They had to pencil in Panny and broad hard cuf it was pornography for nineteen thirty eight.
It's a quirky museum. There's a display of patient run newspapers and literary magazines, and then around the corner posters for movies were Whitfield makes a cameo, including the Sandra Bullet classic A Time to Kill.
The scene in the movie where she breaks into the psychiatrist's office was filmed in the building that you passed on the way to this one and.
The Beast within.
You watch a lot of it on YouTube, but you're going to recognize very little of the hospital. There's a lot of screaming and running and dark.
Part of the museum is housed in one of what Field's old hydrotherapy units. Hydrotherapy basically means using water as medical treatment for physical or mental health. If you ever taken a dip at a spa, you've had hydrotherapy.
Today you can go the spa.
They'll wrap you in mud, sand, alojl seaweed, coffee grounds, tea, leave.
Salt, sugar.
The most expensive one I've found is Pink Indie in sand in New Orleans, twelve hundred dollars forty five minutes.
Back in the day, it was on the bleeding edge of mental health care, Woodfield hydrotherapy, and it 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.
Kill for hydro therapy does.
Now, this is by far the treatment of choice. Just a long soak and a big old back, yeah big.
But other hydrotherapy practices were more brutal than relaxing.
Now, this is a needle spray shower or a Scotch shower. He's 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 on to the bars.
She would start spraying the formula. See the petals.
They're not here today, but at control of the intensity via water.
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 nineteen fifties, nearly one hundred 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.
This is a wet pag treatment.
When he came, he was very many, very fidgetive. They wanted to calm him down, so they wrapped him in sheets as tind as they could, much like a swaddled baby. Got him on the table, hot and cold water faucetsteads soaking.
Now, before we exit the hydrotherapy unit, Donna reads us.
Upon meditation and hydrotherapy, Theodore Rothkey 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.
I wish Theodore ret Key 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 listen, the more I hear irony, and 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's 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.
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 a much more complicated than that.
So how exactly did this promise break? I'm Larison Campbell in This is under Yazuklay. When word got out back in twenty twelve 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 three thousand students, and thousands of unmarked graves.
It hit that viral sweet spot.
A horror movie and 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 bald into one.
What ends up is the Southern Gothic, the terrain of terror.
That's Mab Secrest. Southern scholar and historical author. Mab spent more than fifteen years researching and studying Georgia's Millageville Asylum. Because this isn't just a Mississippi story. Any states had asylums in and out of the South. But the terrain of terror that mAbs describing, that's not the way things started out for our old asylum.
Starts off is a story about Enlightenment optimism, and it starts in Europe, and it comes to this country.
That enlightenment, she mentions, is the Enlightenment, that glowing moment of philosophy and reason in Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth 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.
Doctors start to believe that you can heal the troubled mind if you change the environment, and if you put them in a beautiful place. Then 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.
But you could cure people about changing structures, which is a very progressive idea, and you know, can really cure insanity with these different hospitals.
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 eighteen forties, a physician in Philadelphia came up with an.
Answer, Thomas Kirkbride, who was a psychiatrist who 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 air and to be taken care of, then you'll get better and you can return to life as a normal citizen.
That was Leida Gibson, coordinator of the Asylum Hill Project. Thomas Kirkbride would later formalize his plan into a magnum opus with a 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.
The kirkbry Plan.
The idea was that you had to have a certain amount of cubic feet of air space 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 haul 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.
It called 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. In the first Kirkbright Hospital in the Deep South. Just to ground you in the timeline real quick. The Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum opened its doors in eighteen fifty five. It had taken five years to complete at a cost of one hundred and seventy five thousand dollars. That's about seven 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 a quote less fortunate Mississippians does not buck the narrative you've come to know. Let's say it's the eighteen fifties. 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 all those Yankees crying about the immorality of slavery, a sort of see we're not all bad.
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.
And that's exactly what a nurse named Dorothea Dix was banking on. Probably heard her name before, because Dicks almost single handedly created the first generation of state asylums in the eighteen forties. Dorothea Dix turned Kirkbride's asylum plan into something of a road show, lobbying state legislatures in the North and the South to build these hospitals.
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 began her career as a teacher, but on March twenty eighth, eighteen forty one, the thirty five 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.
And Dorothea Dix is one of the heroines of the humane treatment of insane people and institutions, especially this Kirkbride model, which was supposed to kind of separate out and bring them in, and it's a whole architecture of sanity in that way.
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 fifty thousand dollars 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 one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars over that initial budget. But it was a beautiful neoclassical building with a thirty five 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 two hundred and fifty 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 kubolas. This was a place that would cure people. After all. This was the era of rapidly evolving medical treatment. In the nineteenth 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.
She in fact is very, i would say viryingly anti black racist. Dorothya Dix didn't link black people, and she thought that insane people were treated with some black people. So Southern legislators loved her.
And when black patients were admitted, their quality of care was substantially lower.
Sod they 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, 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 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. 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 at Expansive Lawn at the Mississippi Museum of Art are home to art installations in a variety of events for all ages. Plan your visit today at MS museumart dot org.
That's MS Museum art dot org.
This right here is very interesting.
It's a register for the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum.
While at the Woodfield Museum, my producer Rebecca and I came across a giant ledger easily five 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.
Oh, oh ill.
Health, menopause, Yes, PMS is in here somewhere, okay, agree, fright a couplet?
Religion, 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.
Yes, So the Kirkbright 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. And 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 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.
One of the cards Mississippi got dealt a disease called palagra. You heard about it from Wayne Lee the grave Delzer. It's that nutritional deficiency that killed his grandfather.
He wasn't crazy, he was just starving.
I mean, I had never even heard of palagra before. So palagor was a nutritional deficiency that just swept the Southeast.
Starting at about nineteen ten.
And it's characterized by what they call the four d's, dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, death in that order, people from all walks of life would come down with palagra. Of course, the dementia wasn't apparent until close to the end, so many many patients, especially those from the Delta, were admitted with polagra, and in the institutional reports they talk about, you know, by the time they get here, it's too late to do anything.
Palagora was not only an epidemic for decades, it remained a medical mystery with.
A geographic preference the Southeast.
By the late nineteen thirties, three million Americans total had contracted palagora, most of them Southerners. Mississippi was ground zero of the Palagora epidemic, which is why a doctor named Joseph Goldberger headed there to study it in nineteen fourteen. Doctor Goldberger was a physician with the US Hygienic Laboratory, the progenitor of today's National Institutes of Health.
So he did an experiment with prisoners the Rankin County Penitentiary. These were quote volunteers who were then fed a very specific diet, and they were able to understand that pelagra came from this niais and deficiency.
See Mississippi's old Asylum. Might have begun life in the wealthiest state in the country, but by the nineteen twenties, Mississippi had assumed a position. We're all familiar with the country's.
Poorest, because if you look 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. Instead, they stopped growing their own vegetables and raising hogs or raising cattle or anything like that, and they bought everything from the company's store. I think it's like fat back and molasses.
Southern doctors found Goldberger's evidence offensive. I mean, here is this Jewish doctor from New York City parachuting in just to embarrass a whole region by calling them poor. Goldberger had figured out that brewers yeast, the stuff you used to make beer, could send Pelagora packing, but his solution wouldn't be implemented at any scale until years later. During one of the greatest natural disasters in US history, the nineteen twenty seven 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 brewers yas to its food rations.
And that's why we have enriched foods. Now, that's what it means. The advent of enriched foods was from Polagora.
This understanding of Pelagora progression complicates the narrative we're inclined to jump to when it comes to the Old Asylum.
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 poleegra at the asylum and then ended up dying at polegra.
I think the story is much.
Different, counterintuitively, in terms of preventative medicine AKAA diet, the Old Asylum might have been one of the better places in the state.
Stay with me here.
The asylums thirteen hundred 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.
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.
You see the farm's bounty laid out and the superintendent's by annual reports to the legislature, which, to be fair, we're always trying to paint the asylum in the best possible light. Still, between June of nineteen eleven and July of nineteen thirteen, which was just a couple of years before doctor Goldberger was sent down to Mississippi, the vegetable garden alone spanned about sixty acres. All of this maintained, of course by the patients themselves, but many palagor patients arrived too far gone for diet to do much.
Good, and so the death rate for people with pelagora was just incredible. I think it's a condemnation of sort of the Mississippi society rather than the asylum itself.
The death rate for pollagora won is incredible. I mean, we've got it. It wiped out entire swaths of the South. And we've also got a handle on the four d's, the last two of which are dementia and death. Collagrapatients 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 patients days 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 Laida.
There were people who committed suicide, and there were people who were victims of violent patient on patient violence. I am absolutely positive there were patients who are victims of sexual violence of by 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.
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.
And I say thirty thousand patients approximately and about ten thousand died based on the institutional records, and then twenty five hundred patients were there when Whitfield opened, so that means that seventeen thousand, five hundred patients approximately.
Were treated and released. We never hear those stories.
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.
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 or 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 its straws.
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, 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 with a lot worse than probably than it is now. I do think it comes down to can I handle this, It's 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.
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.
So this is the soil that is getting sucked.
In, Yes, the famous clay.
Oh yes, yes, it's terrible.
It's terrible, terrible dirt.
But we're in a building on the Medical Center's campus that feels more like a warehouse. It's at least fifteen degrees colder than Jackson's April weather outside, and there's burnt orange yazoo clay all over the cement floor, burnt orange yazoo clay all over everything.
Oh wow, Oh, this is not what I was expecting at all.
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.
We're here to meet doctor 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.
Bioarchaeology is the study specifically of human remains from archaeological contexts this is specifically the study of bear.
Essentially, doctor 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 twenty seventeen, she's been elbowed deep and yazoo clay, working to map out the cemetery and piece together the story of the asylum it belonged to.
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 got totally.
I know that chick.
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 use the paper to protect artifacts she'd pulled for us.
I cover everything because the air conditioning a heat blows so hard and then blows dust over everything.
The covering was totally a practical choice on Doctor Max's part. It's the only to keep that yazoo clay dust from taking over again, but the effect paid for a delightful reveal. With each new object we came to, she picked up.
A tiny bit of gold.
Oh look, there's a gold nugget. Why would there be such a tiny gold with the filling survived without the truth around it.
As they peel back each layer of clay, doctor Mack and her team are exposing new insights into the people that were laid to rest in these graves and the people who entered them into life at the asylum.
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 two, three, four safety pins in a burial. There's a set of graves with why 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 winding sheets. So instead of three or four pins, there as many as eighteen safety pins, and you could that is a personality. That's not a policy change, obviously, it's a 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 ten that I presume were prepared by this same individual and then it stops, and we've gone pretty far out we have not found anymore.
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 glimpse of one personality of a person who either worked at the asylum or could have been a fellow patient.
The only part of the old asylum that's left on Asylum Hill is the 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 peace by piece.
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 prepairing the bodies or doing the work of the actual burial are the ones who had these expressions of affection.
Because we do have each item that doctor 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.
See it's got the ribs on the back. And this was found in Burial one fifty seven, right above where the kaffer had had decayed.
She's showing us a piece of broken tile more than a foot long.
We're pretty sure we know where the tile came from in the nineteen twenty three superintendent's report that 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.
She brought that thought to the descendant, doctor Elizabeth West. Doctor 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.
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 and 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 use that to express the same thing. So it's a maked solution. When other materials aren't available and we've got this tile, we have an another piece of tile that was found in another grave. There was a broken crockery vessel in another grave, and then a large rested 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 back.
Ho h.
I love this.
It's what doctor Didlake has been talking about that Southern ethos that reverence for the grave has been with the cemetery from the beginning.
Sometimes it is just an empty medicine bodel and a spoon. 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.
Doctor mack leads us over to a pair of brown shoes that look almost like they've been sculpted from dirt.
So these were ye, there 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. 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, because.
She said she's also found dentures tucked inside the same way.
You can't reopen grandma's mouth, but you can make sure she doesn't go to heaven without her dentures.
But sometimes the value of the objects doesn't require so much guesswork.
These rings are more like what we commonly find, and we have found a lot of thought, but rings are the most common personal artifact that we find.
She holds up a gold ring. I lean in and notice there's an inscription.
This is one of my favorite artifacts. It appears to be a solid gold wedding bands our eighteen carrot gold wedding band, and inscribed inside it says ever true to the 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're just having 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.
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 doctor 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 doctor Mack's foot. May I ask about your tattoo because it says ever true it does it does, ever true to THEE, just like that ring.
Yes, I'm going to try to tell the story. So that ring was found by my hust 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, he 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 speakes, 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.
And so doctor Matt 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 through Loan 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.
When I first started this project, and I think the goals of the CONSORTI members, the scholars who are involved from the beginning, certainly Doctor 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 create a picture of what life was like at the Assida 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.
Yeah, and if there's one thing we know about Laida and the rest of the Asylum Hill Project, they're going to err on the side of respect for doctor 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.
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 path. 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 mind.
Boggling, thousands more stories all waiting to be uncovered and waiting to be found. What does it mean to find someone? Once they've been found, what done? Will they fade back into the rusted orange of the Yazoo Clay Well, Jackson makes space for them.
That's next on Under Yazoo Clay Well.
As soon as Jessica and I walked down the hallway and saw the sign, I just burst into tears. I really didn't expect to do that. I mean, it was just a side. So her brother said, when are you even bringing that out?
And he said, I don't know.
Every time I go, she gets further and further away from me.
And then yeah, and then like I was saying, you can make the end sort of come to about this point.
Perfect that it'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 Laris and Campbell and written and produced by Rebecca Shassan and myself with help from Angela Yee and Amy Mash, with editing and sound design by Morgan Fuse 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 Leida Gibson at the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of Mississippi. Medical Center, visit Jackson and Jay and Deny Stein
