Under Yazoo ClayGrowing up, all Noah Saterstrom knew about his great grandfather was that he had been an optometrist. Those were the only words his grandmother could say about him before she’d start crying. Later, Noah discovers that the reason his family had erased this man was that he’d been sent to the state lunatic asylum. Noah decides to break the generations of silence with a show about his grandfather’s mental illness at the Mississippi Museum of Art titled “What Happened to Dr. Smith.”
In the South, we're big fans of parables. There's something comforting and 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.
Dunstan was a blacksmith and he was in his blacksmith shop and write 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 anville, 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 the tongs, who then instantly changes back into an old man and runs out of the blacksmith shop, saying, the blacksmith just attack me.
I'm hearing the story of Dunstan and the Devil from Noah Saderstrom. 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, one hundred and eighty three canvases that tell the story of his great grandfather, doctor 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 to the other's face with a red hot pair of tongs. And 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 doctor 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.
That story, next to the Doctor Smith's story, that seems like a problem that Dunstan was having it.
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 another 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 face 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 doctor Smith was his own grandmother, Margaret, who died in twenty fourteen. She was doctor Smith's oldest child.
The grandmother that I knew would be absolutely horrified that we were even having this conversation.
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 don't know if she could have studied. I'm Anna Sadistrom. I'm the mother of the artist and the granddaughter of the person of interest here, doctor Smith.
Anna's mother, Margaret, was doctor 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 again.
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. 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.
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 doctor 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 one hundred and twenty two linear feet of panoramic painting, yes, but there was also a giant hallway lined with artifacts from doctor 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 wireframed spectacles, not unlike the ones Noah's got on off the hallway of Doctor 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 Doctor 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 twenty five 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 Doctor Smith. But in one of our talks he let me in on a part of his own story, one that changed everything. It's two thousand and one. 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.
All of my memories felt like they were planted 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 I would have wanted it to.
For nearly six months. This was his everyday reality, a kind of mental break. He was experiencing. Has a diagnosis, the personalization disorder.
It was NonStop. It wasn't like I'm having this weird feeling like oh, I just woke up into reality that I realized I'm not real and my memories aren't real. They've been They've been crafted and presented to my brain as real, but they're not.
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.
When I was having my breakdown in two thousand and one, 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 puld onto, you know, instead of like either your normal or there's the abyss. There's like normal people and then there's the abyss. Whereas following doctor Smith's life, he enters the Old Asylum in nineteen twenty five and he lives for forty years beyond that, and he wasn't.
In the Abyss when 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 doctor Smith.
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.
If doctor Smith and Ethel kept in touch after he went into the asside, she didn't save those letters. So Noah turned to a different repository of memory, the state Archives.
I found a doctor Smith's name in the ledger book from the Old Asylum, which was this giant leatherbound book that said Mississippi and Saint Hospital B on the spine.
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 Stephen Parks, the state librarian. Okay, small cities have big perks, and so a couple.
Of weeks later, I'm back in Nashville and I get a text from Stephen and saying start sending you stuff.
And I was show advertisements for doctor Smith's optician practice, meeting, notes from the State Board of Opticians, where doctor 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 doctor 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 doctor Smith.
Uh, that's a good question one that like, I started referring to him as doctor 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 doctor Smith. Smith is such a common name, and he'd just get lost in like doctor Smith, there's no first name, you know, it's just doctor and Smith. He became a kind of iconic figure in my imagination from his name.
Doctor Smith's not a paupa or even grandfather. Familial names implied that their owner is just that a member of the family. Someone had pruned his branch from the family tree.
That image of a blackboard, or you erase everything on the blackboard with the little bits of information left. I feel like that's what I got from my mother growing up.
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.
I would just say a silence, absence, this is just not where we go. And then when I got older and added started ask in 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 gonna talk about it.
Anna tried to figure things out anyway.
My mother said that anytime she and her sister were together and their voices dropped, I'd show up. But if there was gonna be a good story, they were gonna lower their voices.
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? That afternoon at the museum, one of the Southeast legendary spring thunderstorms rolled in as Noah walked me through his paintings. We'll start of the first in the first section of the panels.
It starts with a shadow of an unknown figure, which may be me or maybe Doctor Smith himself, or it could be Doctor Smith's father is on the other side of the wall of the room where doctor Smith is being born. There's a vertical diptych kind of design. Motifs are basically throughout.
In many ways, it's a visual biography of doctor Smith's life from birth to burial. Doctor Smith was raised in Louisiana by a single mother, and he put himself through optometry school. One of doctor Smith's earliest patients was a man named Gerard Brandon, a lawyer who loomed large in the Natchet social scene. More importantly, Gerard had a beautiful daughter, Ethel.
He met Ethel Brandon, I believe because he was making glasses for her father, and they pretty quickly started dating and they were married 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 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.
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.
For years, being a fully functioning professional optometrist looked a little different. In the South of the nineteen twenties, there wasn't quite enough business for a brick and mortar shop, so doctor Smith took his services on the road.
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 a 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 in that in the nineteen twenties. You know, it's hard to imagine.
It was cutting edge, the talk of the town wherever he went. He even got it patented. Doctor Smith and Ethel had four kids. He might have been away much of the time, but it was clear as kids loved him and he loved them. Noah's mother told us a story about how her own 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 doctor 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 doctor Smith's life, As his madness takes up more and more of the foreground, something someone fades to the back his family, 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.
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 as small. Well, in the context of this massive painting, just one two by two foot square. There's a neat white house.
According to one of the only stories that I knew growing up, grandmother and them were living in Shreveport, destitute. Doctor 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. We're all sitting in poverty in a house with no food, no resources, nothing.
After Noah's walked through, 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, 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.
After doctor Smith's breakdown, his wife and children didn't stay in that neat white house. His father in law, Gerard, arrived and wisked 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 doctor Smith. But a house of decorum isn't a place where you could ask questions. For the first year after doctor Smith was gone, a photograph of him remained on the mantle at her grandparents. Margaret often stared at it. It was all she had of her dad.
She was caught staring at his photograph on the mantle, and the next day it was gone.
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, and the family mythos. Here's Anna again, Noah's mother. 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.
But she never saw joy either, no outburst of any kind. In fact, her mother, Margaret, saw.
To that composure was of absolute value. Poise, elegance, and properness.
Grandmother was a quintessential Southern bell in my memory.
Yeah, she had an elegance and a presence about her. 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.
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 is now among the poorest in the country. Regardless of present circumstances, this ideal of Confederate glory still shapes the way residents talk. The writer Richard Grant has this quote in Natches, 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 Natches, people build new houses. They buck 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.
I remember you telling me about it, do you.
Yeah.
I was in high school and it seemed like, wow, it was such a mystery in the family. I had no idea.
And then not long after I asked grandmother about her father, and I said, some didn't 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.
Exactly what happened when I asked her that they 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 ninety years, she was seven when he left, and she was in her nineties 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 un processed, that she lived with for her whole life, and that she unwillingly not meaning to, was teaching us like, this is what we do, your.
Places deep down inside you, and if you violate that, you're going to feel bad about yourself.
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 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.
Yeah, and then everybody just stopped talking about it because something got awkward.
So back to the silence.
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 nose, it's hard to break patterns, even when you want to. The thing is, it wasn't just Noah's breakdown that harkened back to his great grandfather's generation. It's how he talked about it, or how he didn't. Noah's breakdown was in two thousand and one, and his grandmother, Margaret, lived until twenty fourteen.
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 night marish, and I could not There was no way out of it, and no one else seemed to be able to tell.
How may I ask? How she responded?
I'm sure we never took no.
She never knew. She never knew that I barely talked to them about it. I don't know that I really talked to everything about.
It, know about it until the New York Times, until I tell you, we have broken this pattern.
For more than two decades now. His only sibling didn't know. He spent six months unsure if his life was even real. The tight lipt ethos ran so deep that Noah didn't even realize he was carrying it out.
I didn't know I was doing that to myself until I let doctor Smith out of the Genie bottle. And then the only way to do that was to like be totally open and honest. And then 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 to it. 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.
I'm going to experience all that pain all over again.
And when I still 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.
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 love to see it, maybe there's a way it could have offered solace for her too.
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 took she head through her whole life and I'm sorry, and I wish that she had had a different relationship with this story.
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.
Probably like seven tenths of this painting exists of the details that were known until he entered state custody, and then it goes dark, which is another forty years of his life. And it took about seven years to find all that. But then just last week, as medical records emerge, that's going to 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, you do. I mean, I don't know, and so you know, I'm not absolving him the whole things, but you don't have to be absolved the whole thing. You know, we can't be the requirement in life.
That's next on under Yazuclay. 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 and a variety of events for all ages. Plan your visit today at MS Museum Art dot org. That's MS Museum Art dot 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. Doctor 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 Human revealed a history of my grandfather that I had I had no knowledge of. There was a very tense relationship between my grandfather and his ten children.
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.
Once it 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.
And she learned something else. Her great great uncle, Hillman Cistrunk died in a different kind of confinement the Mississippi State Asylum.
Actually, I had no knowledge of him up until about I don't know, five years ago.
Through careful interrogation of historical records, tax filings, census interviews, doctor West filled in the picture of Hillman's Cistrunks life. He was born in Georgia into slavery in the mid eighteen fifties. 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 word 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.
He and my direct ancestor, Shadrick, 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 twenty years, because I think it was around nineteen hundred or a little before when they paid off the mortgage on the land and owned it outright.
These were two land owning black men in the post war South life was not easy.
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 Human and Shadwick were an anomaly in that sense.
Holding onto their land wasn't easy either. Legitimate support systems were for white farmers.
Hillman and his brother Shadwick had had dealings with this pretty wealthy person in the area. If he didn't have a brig building, he'd probably be called a loan shark. But you know, loan sharks with big 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. It's comparable to howk in your car, And so it's just this grind year after year.
There was the grind, but doctor West could clearly see for Hillman and his family his community, there was also the striving for more.
The record showed 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 Hillmen who weren't parents, 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, first generation free black people in a way that just doesn't get recorded.
When Hellman's in his sixties, his wife passes away, he remarries, and then Hellman gets.
Sick, 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 nineteen twenty, and he dies in March of that year.
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 kickoff. The family is split into factions. This is the era doctor West's grandfather grew up in. In nineteen twenty, the year of Hillman's death, Doctor West's grandfather leaves everything behind his family, the land he's helped work, his home.
Human revealed a history of my grandfather that I had had no knowledge of, and so as a teenager, a 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 Human and Chadrick 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, this family being stripped of everything. And as an eighteen twenty 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 Mary's, and ends up raising his family as a sharecropper.
Exactly what Hellman and Shadwick didn't want for their family.
And sometime in the nineteen forties, I'm told, you know, he tried to convince my grandmother that they should leave, and she didn't want to leave, and he left.
Doctor West could never wrap her head around why her grandfather would leave his wife and ten 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 at his teenage years, that all made sense. So she took these stories back to her family.
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.
Doctor West was introduced to Hellman at the end of his life, a particularly painful episode in a life with plenty of them.
For me, finding Himan at 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 out weighs even the pain I think about that, you know, he very likely suffered in the last three months of his life.
And now with all the context, all the insight, how does she feel towards Hillman?
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, yeah, you know, I mean seventy six and quite frankly, for many black people even in the twenty first 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 you know, three months in the asylum and almost into obscurity.
Almost into obscurity. The end of Hillman's life stands out, but the work that doctor 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 Doctor Smith was a headlinesworth. He was sent to the State Asylum. But Noah's careful not to let this part of doctor Smith's life become Doctor 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 doctor 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 doctor Smith was born in eighteen ninety one 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 two canvas is over is a blur. In a way, It's a peak behind the curtain. I'll look at how the artist understands each part of the story, and the craziest part. Noah says, this one hundred and eighty three 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.
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.
Two weeks before we sat down, it shifted dramatically this one. Noah finally got his great grandfather's medical records, including a remarkably thorough intake interview in which, over several pages, doctor Smith tells his whole life story.
And it just seems like all the slack has been let out and he is 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 they're.
Just all over the place, and somebody's given him stamps, Let.
Me give him letters.
He did.
One of these letters is written on letterhead that he made because he worked in the print department, so he worked the letter press, so he made letterhead David Doctor David Smith, Bondar, Insissippi Hospital for his strained patient.
I feel like it gives 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.
He seems very pleasant. I mean, maybe that explains why Mama was so hurt by his loss. She loved him, and he loved her enough to make her those classes 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.
But there's of course a caveat. Noah can't be sure if parts of doctor Smith's autobiography are based on delusions and anything.
And 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 plenario worms. You can like their microscopic and you could 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 locked 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 twenties, I didn't have any of that information before.
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. You know.
It's like constantly growing and reinterpreting, you know, the sacred text of some kind. You know, you have to keep reinterpreting and interpreting, interpreting.
By the time the show opened, Noah and I have 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 ninety two, in fact, out of one hundred and eighty three. 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.
And he knows instantly that that's the devil.
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. Doctor Smith wasn't sent away just because he'd been having delusions. He was sent away because he was accused of a crime.
So Doctor 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.
This was using the mobile optometry truck he'd patented. Doctor 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.
And a fifteen 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 relative who drug him out to Hermanville, a couple of miles away, and were in the process of lynching him when the Clayburne County sheriff showed up and arrested him.
Instead of being lynched, doctor Smith was taken to jail. It was a move that probably saved 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.
Doctor 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 in insanity hearing. We know how that turned out.
More than half of his existence was in state custody.
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.
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.
Of course, Noah knows that there's no such thing as consensual sex with a fifteen year old, and he knows that doctor Smith's mental illness is wrapped up in this alleged attack. In those same records, doctor 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?
How I'm suppose to relate to doctor 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? 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 right now.
Noah represents doctor Smith in this Unknown Girl with Dunstan and the Devil a metaphor about belief, but he's not sure it will stay that way, 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 pitifoil figure or was he completely happy for forty years in the asylum? I feel like I have to constantly shift my weight.
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 pasted all that uncertainty and pain.
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 inculturated in America. Who wants to build a history of themselves as rooted in slavery, and then, 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.
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 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, and 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, doctor Smith, making glasses. And then, to my surprise, there in that same painting was Doctor Smith. He's gray, somewhat faceless, but he's there across from a silhouetted teenaged girl. Noah was just as surprised. He'd forgotten that was there.
I learned.
All I knew at that point was that if fifteen year old girl had gone to 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.
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. 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, you know, I don't know what I'm portraying.
But then the museum gave him this platform to tell Doctor Smith's story. He had to choose which one to tell.
But I've clearly made it very hard. I have a very hard time trying to figure out how to make that 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 it.
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.
But that story, next to the doctor Smith story, it's like, that seems like a problem that Dunstan was having it, you know, was he imagining what was going on? Did he attack an old man? Nobody saw him change except Dunstan. An old man went in, and then an old man went out saying that Blacksmith attacked him. I'm real cautious about like making a saint comparison with doctor Smith, But it was just so which it's so chimed so much.
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 doctor Smith's story, and it's certainly true for the state institution where he spent the last part of his life.
What ends up is the Southern Gothic, the terrain of terror and 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?
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. Dig deeper, and sometimes you only find more to question. That's next on Under Yazoo Clay. 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 Schasson and myself with help from Angela Yee and Amy Machado, with editing and sound design by Morgan Fuz 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
