Dr. Jennifer Mack
Appearances
Under Yazoo Clay
Ever True to Thee
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Under Yazoo Clay
Ever True to Thee
sort of suggests that patients were involved in the work of doing the grave digging and burying the dead. Because if you're a patient in an asylum, you can't go to the cafeteria and say, hey, I'd like a cup and saucer to bury with my friend. I don't think that would go over well.
Under Yazoo Clay
Ever True to Thee
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 make-do solution when other materials aren't available. And we've got this tile. We have another piece of tile that was found in another grave.
Under Yazoo Clay
Ever True to Thee
there was a broken crockery vessel in another grave and then a large rusted can in another so that we found this pattern so far of objects that you could have pulled off of a discard pile looked very much like it had been placed there as it was it was being pulled up by the backhoe
Under Yazoo Clay
Ever True to Thee
Sometimes it is just an empty medicine bottle 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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Ever True to Thee
So these were, yeah, they were alongside the body. And my interpretation is that it was an item that was almost forgotten during the burial preparation. The body is already pinned up in the winding sheet, placed in the coffin, and oh, wait, We forgot to put the boots on the feet. Or, oh, these were his favorite boots, let's not forget these.
Under Yazoo Clay
Ever True to Thee
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. 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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Ever True to Thee
These rings are more like what we commonly find. We have found a lot, but rings are the most common personal artifact that we find.
Under Yazoo Clay
Ever True to Thee
This is... One of my favorite artifacts. It appears to be a solid gold wedding band, sorry, 18 karat gold wedding band, and inscribed inside it says, ever true to thee, which is very sweet. And even though it's a small ring, based on the width, we're thinking that it was on the hand of a male, but unfortunately, the skeletal remains were almost non-existent in this grave.
Under Yazoo Clay
Ever True to Thee
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 your ring, right? Or maybe you do.
Under Yazoo Clay
Ever True to Thee
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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Ever True to Thee
I'm going to try to tell the story. So that ring was found by my husband. Oh, I can't do it, hold on, sorry. Normally I'm not like this and I can tell everybody about my tattoo. So my husband, Dustin Clark, was the crew chief of this project. And he's the one that found the gold ring that said, ever true to thee. And he was very proud of it.
Under Yazoo Clay
Ever True to Thee
And he kept telling everyone that it was the best artifact. And everyone who thought they found something good said, no, no, it's not as good as the ring that I found. So unfortunately, he passed away in August. So I have a tattoo on my foot with two coffins, one for him, one for me, and a snake because he loved snakes. and a skull because that's what I do for a living.
Under Yazoo Clay
Ever True to Thee
And then we've got the ring on there, and then it says, ever true to thee, just like the ring that he found.