Larrison Campbell
Appearances
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
When Wayne tells us that he's one of the few who can do this, I'm a little skeptical. But Wayne is so sweet and earnest that it doesn't feel like he's trying to pull one over on us. I mean, he offered to demonstrate.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
He traipsed through the overgrown grass to a line of headstones. Then holding a bent metal rod in each hand, he bowed his head.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Oh. He steps over the graves, and the rods make an X. But it's not just the locations of graves.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
And in one of the more awe-inspiring feats, they can even lead Wayne to a specific person.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Skepticism aside, it's easy to see how the ability to not just locate but identify graves could be useful, especially when you have something like a state-owned site with 7,000 unmarked graves. In fact, Wayne has doused at the asylum cemetery, and he believes he's located his own grandfather's grave.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
As I said, the science here is iffy at best. And that's at odds with the very science-based identification approach of Asylum Hill and the University Medical Center.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Which is probably why when the medical center found out that we and Wayne and a bunch of audio equipment were heading out to the asylum cemetery to record Wayne dowsing for his grandfather's grave, they politely but firmly told us to leave.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Which is how we all wound up at the very marked graves of Greenwood Cemetery. But there is an upside to dowsing at a cemetery where graves are marked. There might be confirmation bias, but it's easy to see if it's working. So I asked if I could give it a shot.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
It's morning in late April. My producer Rebecca and I are in an old cemetery in downtown Jackson, Mississippi, with Wayne Lee. Wayne's grandfather was one of the 7,000 former patients buried on the grounds of the Mississippi State Asylum. But his grandfather's not buried here, or in this particular cemetery, for something else. Wayne's a taller guy, early 70s.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Actually, it turned out I was one of the people in that latter category. That's after the break.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Maybe this just meant I hadn't mastered the wrist tilt. I tried adjusting my hands. I don't think I have the skill.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
His full head of snow-white hair is a bit windswept as he heads towards us. Each time we meet him, he has on some variation of hiking pants cinched up around a plaid short-sleeved shirt. And there's one other thing we haven't told you about Wayne.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
The rods moved slightly toward each other. Over your hand or? You're kind of alive. According to those.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Maybe that was something. Or maybe it was just that they were sitting inside hollow PVC tubes. Alas, no dice. If this was some sort of gimmick that Wayne was pulling off, it was an impressive one. Rebecca, the producer, seemed to share my doubt, which may be why I handed her the rods next.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Inexplicably, the rod swung closed, then open, then around to point the way to Mary Louise McGeehy.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
No, you're like a natural. Audio as a medium has its limitations. So I'm just going to describe Rebecca's face at this moment. Her eyes are wide. She's blushing a little like someone who's been caught. Her expression is a mixture of awe and surprise and bewilderment with just a touch of horror. To be honest, neither of us knows what to make of gravedowsing.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Is it a warping of energies, a communing with something beyond ourselves? Is it the power of the subconscious or maybe a well-timed fluke? I can't say, but I'm not sure it matters because whether or not this is real, I do believe that there's something mystical about cemeteries. Energy changes places. And is there any type of land that has seen more emotion over the years than a cemetery?
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
If you, like me, grew up on reruns of Gilligan's Island... Mr. Howell, what do you think of my new divining rod? ...then you might have a vague idea of what dowsing is. It's an ancient tradition where practitioners use a forked branch or metal rods to find things hidden underground. Most commonly water or underground wells, but people dows for all sorts of things.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
All this premised on the absolute belief that his God won't lead him astray. That the rods point and cross. True.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
There's something about a physical site, a place, where you can imagine your loved one is present. But finding this place wasn't the end of Wayne's search. That brings us back to Cousin Bill's condo, the same one where we saw that headstone.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
We sat on two overstuffed plaid chairs in Bill's living room, looking out over a marina full of pontoon boats. Wayne so believes in everything that he's doing, not just his dowsing, but understanding his grandfather's story. And he wanted to get it right for us. He laid out a whole spread of newspaper clippings, photos, and articles on Bill's white tile counter, most of them in sheet protectors.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Perched on a bar stool, he bounced his knee as he talked.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
We started out talking about Wayne's grandfather. The little Wayne had been told about him. The family's narrative had always been somewhat simple. Wayne's grandfather wasn't crazy. He was starving. To the modern ear, maybe that sounds like denial. But a century ago in rural Mississippi, it was real. Historically, there were lots of reasons people were called insane.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
And the causes of what we consider mental illness weren't all the same as they are now. One of the biggest drivers of patients to the state hospital wasn't even what we'd now consider mental illness. It was malnutrition.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Minerals, oil, gemstones, and graves. ... which is where Wayne comes in. Wayne is a grave dowser. This means he believes he's able to find and identify unmarked graves. He takes his direction from two long, thin pieces of metal called divining rods. We'll come back to those later. See, the Asylum Cemetery and its thousands of unmarked graves was a big story.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
And that was it. The end of his grandfather's life stayed shrouded in mystery. But in the 1970s, Wayne's brother decided his family needed answers.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
At this point, 75 years had passed and they had nothing to go off of but their mother's teenage memories. Wayne knew the answers about his grandfather existed. They lay in those medical records his brother had tried to get back in the 70s.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Knowing the answers were there, only to have someone say, you can't have him? It ate at Wayne. But getting them would require wading into an ethical and bureaucratic mess only the Deep South can cook up. This wasn't just some clerk being difficult. To understand why Wayne couldn't get those records, we have to talk about how the state views the bodies laid to rest at Asylum Hill.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
For starters, they don't call them bodies. Here's Dr. Ralph Didlake, the mind behind the Asylum Hill Project.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
This perspective, though, complicates things because the medical center can't share patient records without patient consent, which presents a problem in this case because the patients have all passed on.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
I reported on Mississippi politics for years, so I'm used to state institutions hiding information behind arcane laws and statutes. And I can imagine why they'd want to keep these records hidden. In many cases, they won't paint a rosy picture of life in the state asylum.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
So I was pretty surprised to find out that the push to unveil these medical records came from a state-sponsored institution, the Asylum Hill Project. But if you want to release records, first you've got to find someone to release them to. That means finding next of kin. How exactly do you do that when all the graves are unmarked and the last one was dug more than 80 years ago?
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
That's when we come back. 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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
The gardens and expansive lawn at the Mississippi Museum of Art are home to art installations and a variety of events for all ages. Plan your visit today at msmuseumart.org. That's msmuseumart.org.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
But the issue of unmarked graves and forgotten cemeteries isn't a new one in the South. The landscape is peppered with the graves of soldiers from both sides of the Civil War hastily buried at the sites of major battles.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
And of course, there were millions of people in slavery on plantations, buried by enslavers who weren't eager to spend money on something as permanent or respectful as a granite headstone. But time is the biggest enemy of all gravesites, even the marked ones. People move away. Rain, humidity, and sun wipe out the landscape's memory.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Kudzu and blackberry vines topple and bury any markers that are left.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Wayne had driven about 12 hours straight from Durham, North Carolina to Jackson, Mississippi, just to speak with us. He wanted to make sure his grandfather's story got told. But then Wayne told us his.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
It's like Dr. Didlake said in our first episode. Honoring the dead is baked into the Southern ethos. So Wayne, he keeps busy. And he doesn't discriminate. He answers the call of Civil War buffs.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Wayne and his first wife had children together, two boys. When those boys were 13 and 9 years old, Wayne got full custody. It was the end of a rough, brutal divorce.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Things settled down for a while after that. But once Wayne's youngest hit his late teenage years, things took a turn.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
When his son got out, he emerged with a diagnosis, paranoid schizophrenia. Wayne learned that his son had been hearing voices since his 20s.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
The time Wayne's son spent in prison did nothing to help his mental illness.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Wayne's son went in and out of prison. Off prison. then back onto the street. This went on for more than a decade. At the end of it, Wayne's son was killed by another man near his age, also suffering from mental illness.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
He works with the descendants of people enslaved by plantation owners in the Confederacy.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
That's the past. The past that can be left in the ground or brought back to life. That can bring pain or bring comfort. Or a mix of both. Wayne's closure doesn't just lie in the diagnosis and how that connects to present and future generations of Wayne's family.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
It lies in those brief moments and notes the nurses outlined, in knowing that the asylum staff, even with their limited resources, had tried to help his grandfather. It showed that this man hadn't been locked away and forgotten. I mean, what does it mean to have, like, for somebody who has died, what does it mean for them to have a memorial?
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
As Southerners, we're predisposed to make meaning from our histories, probably more than we should. Our region's unwillingness to move on, our tendency to continually valorize the past, is often our Achilles' heel. But on a small scale, like one cemetery and its keepers, maybe holding the past close can help you move on.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Wherever you believe people go when they're gone, whatever you believe should be done with their remains, what better memorial than to tell their stories, to remember their lives?
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
And sometimes the story they tell, it's not the one you thought you were going to hear. That's next on Under Yazoo Clay.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
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 Chasson and myself, with help from Angela Yee and Amy Machado, with editing and sound design by Morgan Foose and Erica Wong. And thanks to Blue Dot Sessions for music.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Respect. Wayne's own grandfather was a patient at the state asylum, which means that his body lies right now in an unmarked grave. His burial nearly a hundred years ago might sound like distant past, but for Wayne, that lack of resolution in his grandfather's story remains an open wound. And he's looking for a sense of closure.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Special thanks to Betsy Bradley at the Mississippi Museum of Art, as well as Lyda Gibson at the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Visit Jackson and Jay and Dini Stein.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
I'm Larison Campbell, and this is Under Yazoo Clay. The site of the old asylum, the site that's now the medical center for the University of Mississippi, holds 7,000 unmarked graves. That's 7,000 lives lived and tens of thousands more lives connected to those. So how did this cemetery get forgotten? The first bodies were buried at that site in the middle of the 1800s.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
And for the next half century plus, the story of this graveyard proceeded in a straight line. Patients were interred, markers were laid, some stone, mostly wood. And the cemetery grew, often tended to and maintained by people in the asylum. So when the asylum closed in 1935 and the state transferred those patients to the new hospital outside of Jackson, the trajectory shifted.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Now, the cemetery didn't belong to the hospital. There was no hospital there. It became part of the fabric of Jackson. The best glimpse I've gotten of the asylum in those years was from the writer Eudora Welty, who was also a great photographer. In the foreground of her photo is waist-high grass. Behind that, a thick jumble of tall trees.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
And right in the center, peeking through a gap in the branches, looms the decaying turret of the old asylum. Isolated, haunting, beautiful. The state tore down what remained of the building in the 1950s. By then, the cemetery had been swallowed by the woods from Welty's photograph. And Jackson residents began to find other uses for it.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
For those of you who've never been to a sock hop, that's 60 speak for a makeout session in a car. And that wasn't the only thing people got up to in the woods.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
The woods were home to plenty of G-rated activities, too. Kids would explore, adults would take long walks under the trees. One of those is Bill Lee. He's a cousin of Wayne's, the descendant and grave dowser. Bill's lived in the Jackson area for over 60 years, and he's a history buff the way that a lot of older Southern men are.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Bill lives in a lakeside condo outside of Jackson. We'd gone to his place to meet up with Wayne, who'd driven down from North Carolina. But it turned out that Bill also had something relevant to this story. It sits by his front steps, right where other condo owners would place a stone pelican or hang an anchor. A headstone.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
White marble, maybe 18 inches high, a foot or so across, an inch thick, propped up right by the front door. The story for how he got it starts more than half a century ago, on a walk through those woods with his young son.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Now, these stone markers weren't on every grave. Most patients were buried with painted wooden markers. Families with means could pay extra for stone.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Being a history buff, the image of the cemetery stayed with Bill. It felt wrong that in the space of just over 30 years, all these graves in the center of his city could just be forgotten. Especially after he heard that the state had plans to remove the remaining stone markers. By the way, I haven't been able to find any record of this plan in the state archives or newspapers.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
But other people have told me they heard about it, too. And the headstones have been gone for decades. So Bill and a friend staged a rescue.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
That evidence has followed Bill to every house he's lived in since. When we paid Bill a visit at his condo, it was the first thing Wayne pointed out.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
To Bill, this was a rescue mission to protect his state's history, even if the state itself might not see it that way. it's unclear why the headstones would be moved. Institutional memory on this is surprisingly short in a state that still celebrates Confederate History Month. I did hear some markers had been broken and there were concerns about vandalism.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Regardless of the reason, the result's the same. The headstones are gone. The wooden markers went the way of the Yazoo clay. And the memories were buried with them. The morning after we saw the headstone at Bill Lee's condo, we headed over to Greenwood Cemetery to meet up with Wayne for a dowsing demonstration.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
The cemetery sits in the middle of downtown Jackson, a small sea of tall waving grass and old shade trees in view of the state capitol. We waited for Wayne under a live oak. The sun was dappled, the birds were loud, the mowers were in full swing. So you may hear one or two of those. Once Wayne pulled up in his bright blue Prius, it was down to business.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
Wayne's dowsing materials consist of two thin steel rods bent into an L shape. The short end's got a piece of PVC pipe around it. That's the part he's holding. The PVC means he's not touching the metal, that it can move free and clear.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
When he locates a grave, the two rods swing toward his chest and cross over each other. When he steps off the grave, the rods swing back out. It's a dynamic, X marks the spot kind of operation. If you're wondering just what the hell kind of metal can do this, the answer is any.
Under Yazoo Clay
Like They’re Reaching Out to Me
The rods may not need to be endowed with specific qualities, but the dowser does. Wayne calls this a gift granted by his creator. It's one he said became apparent the first time he picked up divining rods, which surprised even him. Real dowsers, he explains, are rare.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
That last voice was Dr. Ralph Didlake. You'll hear more from him and Lyda later, but for now, here's the rub. The hospital is responsible for the cemetery and the former patients buried in it, but it's also responsible for its current and future patients. So is this Yazoo clay for building or for burial? There's also another layer, so to speak.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
Graves are just part of what remains when a person dies. They also leave behind friends and family. And the friends and family of those buried in this cemetery? They've been waiting a long, long time to get answers about what became of their loved ones. And it's not just Noah.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
There's this old adage in the South. We don't lock our crazy away. We put it on the front porch and give it a cocktail. But it's not entirely true. In just this one state, 30,000 people were sent away. And as many as 7,000 of them were buried under this Yazoo clay. Why did their stories get buried with them? What seeped down through the years in spite of it?
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
Imagine for a moment that it's 50 million years ago. The Earth is incredibly hot, about 25 degrees hotter on average. There are gators in Canada. The Gulf of Mexico is the stuff of present-day nightmares. It swallows the bottom halves of Mississippi and Alabama and the whole state of Florida. The Mississippi River is not yet an old man, but it's flowing.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
In this country, genealogy is a billion-dollar industry. We are obsessed with understanding our family histories and stories. But what if your relative's story doesn't have an ending? What if the last decades of the lives they lived were just washed off the canvas? What do you get out of a story with no end?
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
Tell us about your, it's your great grandmother, right? What do you know about her?
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
It's at the mouth of this river that the trouble begins. Because as the river flows, a fine layer of blue-black silt begins to settle around the delta. And this isn't just any silt. It's mineral heavy, the decay of everything the river has held. Over the millennia, the river will get faster and change course.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
Each of the descendants we spoke to was dogged in their research, tireless in their efforts to find answers about their loved ones and about their own past. Because they had to be. This is a story that was buried again and again. Here's the thing. Coming across human remains at the medical center wasn't a new problem.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
Finding bodies there got to be such a common occurrence that in the 1970s, the state legislature passed a bill allowing them to basically do whatever needed to be done.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
So the medical center finds 7,000 graves. They've got the legal standing and paperwork in place to do what they need to do to solve their space issue. So what isn't a terrible idea? That's after the break.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
This layer of silt will move with it, fanning out along the shallow waters of this ancient sea. After another 20 million years or so, it'll become a layer of clay, 400 feet deep in some parts. And it's right on top of this thickest part of the clay that one day Mississippi will decide to build its capital city.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
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.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
The gardens and expansive lawn at the Mississippi Museum of Art are home to art installations and a variety of events for all ages. Plan your visit today at msmuseumart.org. That's msmuseumart.org.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
The Asylum Hill Project. That's the arm of the university organized to reconcile the needs of the living with the needs of the dead. And that reconciliation has to be weighted towards the living. The medical center needs the land to expand to provide more vital services. So the question isn't if the cemetery will move, it's how.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
This is, to put it mildly, a terrible decision because this clay is a burnt orange monster. It's made of a mineral called smectite, so absorbent it can swell to 200 times its size when wet and shrink just that much when it's dry. Over the next 200 years, it'll swallow roads and send homes tumbling into creeks, cracked pipes and concrete foundations, and even bones. It's called Yazoo Clay.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
Southerners take funerals very seriously. The same goes for what comes after, the burial. And cemeteries hold a very special place in the Southern imagination. But in the Southern reality, quality, specialized health care is sparse, difficult to access, and sorely needed. What importance is there in doing right by the dead when there's such dire need for the living?
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
Scarce resources mean that this question of what to do with this land and how and when is a zero-sum game. Rush the excavation and you violate the southern reverence for the grave. But take your time, and how many patients will go to their graves sooner than they should? Zero-sum or not, as Faulkner says, there's no fear in death, but there is a fear of being forgotten.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
We'll be right back. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
As it happens, I am intimately familiar with this clay because Jackson, Mississippi, that poorly placed capital city, is where I used to live. This shifting, swelling soil has completely shaped the character of the place and everyone who lives there. Residents are used to broken water mains and boil water notices and seeing trees and utility poles toppled over in their neighbors' yards.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
But there's an upside to this chaos. In a place as fractured as Mississippi, complaining about Yazoo clay is kind of the one thing everyone can agree on. It's like traffic in Los Angeles or the weather in New England. So when my producer and I found ourselves at a fancy Jackson art opening talking about dirt, I wasn't too surprised.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
This is Gabby and Stacia. They've got a very different relationship with the clay because they spend all day in it. These two are archaeological field techs.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
What Gabby and Stacia are digging for? Well, that's kind of the whole reason we're in Jackson. But first, the art opening. It's for an artist named Noah Satterstrom, who is also a Mississippi native. Noah's tall and thin, with a bushy beard. He's thrown a blazer on over a button-up, but his most noticeable accessory is a pair of wire-framed glasses. Spectacles, really.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
On this particular evening, Noah's tough to pin down. From the moment he arrived until he headed out, he was in the midst of a crowd of wine-sipping Jacksonians in florals and sport coats. They were all there to ask, what happened to Dr. Smith? Because that's the title of Noah's show.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
What he couldn't picture? A panorama that's six feet tall and 122 feet long. In football terms, that's the 40-yard line. The museum had constructed a room within a room, a circular olive green arena to hold the length of Noah's painting. And when you see it up close, you understand why Noah needed all that space.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
The panorama tells a very complicated family story about a very complicated man, Noah's great-grandfather, Dr. D.L. Smith. But it wasn't an easy story to uncover. Noah says the man was intentionally erased from his family history.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
And then Noah painted that story in exquisite and obsessive detail across the 183 canvases that make up his panorama. But what is that story? Well, Dr. Smith was an eye doctor, married, a father of four.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
The story went dark because in 1925, Noah's great-grandfather entered the Mississippi State Insane Asylum, as it was called then. Any records of what happened next, the rest of Dr. Smith's life, were sealed. And this is where Noah the artist intersects with Gabby and Stacia, the field techs. The site they're working on is the site of the asylum where he was sent.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
Mississippi's first mental health hospital opened its doors in 1855. In the course of its 80 years, the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, as it was officially called back then, treated over 30,000 people. nearly a quarter of them would be buried on its grounds. It would also get rebranded a few times. First, the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, then the Mississippi State Insane Asylum.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
I'll just be calling it the Old Asylum. I met Noah about a year before the opening. I'd heard there was a Mississippi artist working on a show about his family connection to the Old State Asylum. I think I emailed him the next day. Because as much as Southerners love their family stories... There are certain ones you're just not supposed to tell.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
By the way, that was a real live vocalist at the art opening. It was a big night with wine and cheese and those really delicious little donuts. And that's because this tumbling spool of yarn, it's bigger than the story of Noah's great-grandfather.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
The asylum closed in 1935, and for the next 75 years or so, it felt like everything from state lawmakers to local society to that damn Yazoo Clay was trying to erase the story of Mississippi's old state asylum. But for the last decade, that hasn't been the case.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
And that change started someplace you wouldn't expect, with construction of a parking garage at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, or UMMC. It's become a bit of Jackson folklore. Even people at the museum that night were talking about it.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
skulls, human skulls, right in the middle of the biggest medical center in the state. And this is the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Oh, so perhaps an old asylum. Perhaps an old asylum. Tucked back in the, it goes way far back to the highway there. I think it's back in the back corner. The University of Mississippi Medical Center sits on a hill in the center of Jackson.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
It's impossible to miss. A sprawling yellow brick complex right at the intersection of two of the busiest streets in town. It's maybe the most important place in the state. Those 30-odd buildings hold Mississippi's only medical school, its children's hospital, and organ transplant center.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
It's also Mississippi's only safety net hospital, which means it's not allowed to turn away patients who can't pay. And in Mississippi, that's a lot of people.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
It's hard to talk about anything in Mississippi without taking a moment to acknowledge that it's a very poor, very sick state. Those of us from here joke that we're ranked last in every category you want to be first in, and first in every category you want to be last.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
During COVID, demand for beds at the University Medical Center was so out of control, they ended up turning two parking garages into field hospitals. Which is all to say, there's a lot of pressure on this place. So back in 2012, the university began clearing a field on campus to make space for a parking garage. But it never got built, because it turns out, the ground was already occupied.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
That's Jerry Mitchell. He was a reporter with the Jackson-Clarion Ledger when he broke the story back in 2014.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
The press conference was about the new visitor center the parking garage would be a part of. They were very much not talking about bodies. But Jerry didn't let that get in his way. After the press conference, he took the vice chancellor, Jimmy Keaton, aside.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
I want to pause here. We're talking thousands of bodies. And by the way, 2,000 also turned out to be an underestimate. The university would bring in experts, archaeologists, and ground-penetrating radar, and they'd eventually discover there were as many as 7,000 people buried right in the middle of town. And almost nobody knew about them.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
There are a lot of superstitions about cemeteries. It's bad luck to walk on a grave or even just to trip anywhere in a cemetery. If you whistle in a graveyard, you'll summon the devil. And of course, never ever, under any circumstances, take anything from a grave. So if you, like me, are highly superstitious, you might just decide to pack up and find a new spot.
Under Yazoo Clay
A Southern Ethos
But remember, the state's main medical center has no other spot. The campus is in the heart of the city. So there's no room to expand outward. They have to work with what they've got. And what they've got is 12 wide-open acres with thousands of graves.