Noah Satterstrom
Appearances
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
It starts with a shadow of an unknown figure, which may be me or it may be Dr. Smith himself or it could be Dr. Smith's father. It's on the other side of the wall of the room where Dr. Smith is being born. There's a vertical diptych kind of design motif sort of basically throughout.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
They'd check all the eyes for free, and then only if somebody needed glasses, he would be able to grind the lenses on the spot, fit the glasses and everything, which would have been, I mean, driving around rural Mississippi and that in the 1920s. Yeah. It's hard to imagine.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
According to one of the only stories that I knew growing up, Grandmother and them were living in Shreveport, destitute. Dr. Smith was not around at all, totally lost in psychosis. Ethel and the kids, there were four kids at this point, the youngest being an infant, were all sitting in poverty in a house with no food, no resources, nothing.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
Dunston was a blacksmith, and he was in his blacksmith shop. And right at closing time, an old man shows up at his shop and says, can you make me a chalice? So he starts pounding away at his anvil. And as he's doing that, he sees this old man out of the corner of his eyes start to rapidly change form.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
She was caught staring at his photograph on the mantle. And the next day, it was gone.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
Composure was of the absolute value, poise, elegance, and properness.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
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 while he's hammering away, he just sort of, without missing a beat, he puts his tongs into the furnace.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
Exactly what happened when I asked her that. I was like, tell me about him. What can you say about him? He was an optometrist. Immediately tears. Just filling up and then just kind of silence while she turned the page and started talking about something else. And that instant involuntary well of emotion after 90 years She was seven when he left, and she was in her 90s when this happened.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
And that being the only trigger that I had ever seen of that kind of emotion, completely instant and involuntary, was such a sign that there's so much there. Unprocessed. Unprocessed that she lived with for her whole life, yeah. And that she unwillingly, not meaning to, was teaching us, this is what we do,
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
The episode of depersonalization I had and not being able to know where I am in reality was so horrifying to me and nightmarish, and I could not... There was no way out of it, and no one else seemed to... To be able to tell.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
And then when he sees them get red hot, he grabs them and then grabs the devil by the nose with his tongs, who then instantly changes back into an old man and runs out of the blacksmith shop saying, the blacksmith just attacked me.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
I barely talked to them about it. I don't know that I really talked to everyone about it.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
I didn't know I was doing that to myself until I let Dr. Smith out of the genie bottle. And then the only way to do that was to, like, be totally open and honest. And all of a sudden, it's like, wait a minute. I've got this thing that's now out that I've been trying to keep. I didn't even know that I was doing that.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
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 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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
And 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
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
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 40 years of his life. And it took about seven years to find all that. But then just last week, his medical records emerged. That's going to give life to that whole rest of his life, which is more than half of his existence.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
He doesn't have to be a saintly character. I mean, I don't know. And so, you know, I'm not absolving him of all things. But you don't have to be absolved of all things. There can't be this requirement in life.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
That story next to the Dr. Smith story, that seems like a problem that Dunstan was having.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
And it just seems like all the slack has been let out and he's now in the asylum and he's just like, it's all just, he's writing letters to people and there's not any need to keep it buttoned in. He's writing letters like crazy that are just all over the place.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
Let me give him a stand. Come here, write some letters. One of these letters is written on letterhead that he made because he worked in the print department. So he worked at Letterpress. So he made letterhead. Dr. David Smith, Bondurant, Mississippi, Hospital for Restrained Patients.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
When anything I thought I understood, you know, I have to make sure that I'm not getting fixed on that. Because who's even real and who isn't? I've kept thinking about, like... Those like planaria worms that you can like, they're microscopic and you could chop them in half and each one will grow the rest of its body, you know?
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
So it's like any of this could just be lopped off and then just paint a whole new, like his autobiography. He's like, this is what happened my entire childhood until I was in my mid twenties. I didn't have any of that information before.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
You know, it's like constantly growing and reinterpreting, you know, a sacred text of some kind. You know, you have to keep reinterpreting and interpreting, interpreting.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
So Dr. Smith had started to lose it and could not really keep himself together. And he had moved his family to Louisiana. But then to keep his business going, he was still traveling around, and he traveled to Mississippi to Port Gibson to check eyes.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
And a 15-year-old girl went to him to get her eyes checked and left his office saying that he had attacked her. He was set upon by a mob of her relatives who drug him out to Hermanville a couple of miles away and were in the process of lynching him when the Claiborne County Sheriff showed up and arrested him.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
And he maintained his innocence for the rest of his life and said, I never did anything. I never did anything to her.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
How I'm supposed to relate to Dr. Smith and all the characters in this story change depending on what information is available. You know, I mean, he sat there being kind of a silent monster figure for a century, And ever since the story started coming out, it's like, how much compassion should I have? Is he mentally ill? Is he a monster? Did he commit this crime? Was he forcefully committed?
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
The grandmother that I knew would be absolutely horrified that we were even having this conversation.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
Was he happy there? You know, was he healthy? Did he have friends? All that stuff is like these unknown qualities.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
And so it's like, it keeps me constantly moving. Well, how am I gonna represent him? Do I represent him as a lonely and pitiful figure? Or was he completely happy for 40 years in the asylum? I feel like I have to constantly shift my weight.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
All I knew at that point was that a 15-year-old girl had gone 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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
But I've clearly made it very hard. I have a very hard time trying to figure out how to make those two be together. I do not at all dismiss the idea that he could have done it. He totally could have done it.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
But that story next to the Dr. Smith story, it's like, that seems like a problem that Dunstan was having, 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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
I'm real cautious about like making a saint comparison with Dr. Smith, but it was just so much, it chimed so much.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
All of my memories felt like they were implanted and faked. 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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
It was nonstop. It wasn't like I'm having this weird feeling. It was like, oh, I just woke up into a reality that I realize I'm not real. And my memories aren't real. They've been crafted and presented to my brain as real, but they're not.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
When I was having my breakdown in 2001, If I had the full context of his experience, it's hard to say I would have been more afraid because I don't think I could have been more afraid than I was. It would have been, it would have given me something to kind of hold on to, you know, instead of like either you're normal or there's the abyss. There's like normal people and then there's the abyss.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
Whereas following Dr. Smith's life, he enters the old asylum in 1925. And he lives for 40 years beyond that. And he wasn't in the abyss.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
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.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
I found Dr. Smith's name in the... ledger book from the old asylum, which was this giant leather bound book that said Mississippi Insane Hospital on the spine.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
And so a couple of weeks later, I'm back in Nashville. And I get a text from Steven saying, can I start sending you stuff? And I was shocked.
Under Yazoo Clay
Not Where We Go
That's a good question. One that, like, I started referring to him as Dr. Smith because that's what all of his optometry advertisements referred to him as. But I didn't realize at the beginning that he referred to himself as Dr. Smith. Smith is such a common name, and he'd just get lost in the, like, Dr. Smith, there's no first name. You know, it's just Dr. and Smith.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
Maybe it doesn't matter if my memories are real. What difference does it make? If I'm real or not, maybe that's the case for everyone. And I just kind of wake up the next day and keep pretending that my memories are real. And then I just did that for years and tried to not think about it. But in trying to not think about it, I also never spoke about it. I didn't even think about it to myself.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
Not because I was ashamed of it, but because I was afraid of it. And then I think about the letters that Mary Jane wrote to Whitefield. Increasingly, it feels like all of Dr. Smith's family wasn't... It's not that they were ashamed he was in there, but they were afraid. They were afraid of what... would happen if they made contact with them.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
They were afraid for him and for them, and they were afraid that they had it, whatever it was, they were afraid of all of it. And when I was, I had finally kind of cleared the dangerous part of the dissociative episode, the only way I could move on in life was to pretend that it hadn't happened. and pretend that my memories were real, pretend that I had an identity, pretend that my life existed.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
And so I did. That's what I did. Years after that is when I was staying at my folks' place and they had all of our family photograph albums. And that's when I started painting from the family snapshots. of my own childhood. Now, as I'm looking and thinking and painting and looking and thinking and painting the photographs from my own childhood, I could feel the heat of the seatbelt clicking.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
I could feel and smell the magnolias or whatever, like it was a sensory thing. And in that way, my memories started to fill back out. within myself. And I started to not only remember things, but know that those memories were rooted in actual lived experience. And so I painted hundreds of those and that pulled me out of it. I mean, that was me pulling a rope to get back out of that pit.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
You know, there I'm my own suffering, my experience of suffering, and I'm painting Dr. Smith's suffering and my family's and letting it all out, you know, instead of trying to keep it all suppressed and in myself. And you find that maybe it's not really suffering, it's just how, you know, complex it is to be alive. I mean, everybody's complicated, you know,
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
And I wound up with a lot more compassion for Dr. Smith and for his doctors and for Ethel and her children and her parents and myself.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
Yeah. So my grandmother, Margaret, never spoke of him. She was the oldest. And then she had two younger sisters and the youngest brother. It's said that the youngest brother had gone to him as he was being shipped off to World War II and sat down with him and was told not to come back and that he wanted everybody to
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
to consider him dead, and that he told Ethel, his wife, that no one should come see him. That was in the 40s, and there was no contact beyond that. Yet, here's a letter from my grandmother's younger sister, Mary Jane, who I loved. She died in the 80s, I think. But she was a good, like, sitting at the table smoking cigarettes and gossiping sort of
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
uh you know great aunt and so she is writing here to the director of uh social services at whitfield in like 1967. uh dear miss juice here's the the uh social services woman can you help me 42 years ago my father dr david lawson smith was committed to the asylum Through the years when I would wonder about him, my family said it would be upsetting to him and to me to try to see him.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
When I married, my husband said the same thing. But I have reached the age when I must know whether or not he is still alive. If he is no longer living, is it possible to find out where he would be? If he is still living, is there anything I could do to make life more comfortable for him? I know nothing of the type or degree of insanity that my father has.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
I don't know whether it could be inherited. In fact, I know nothing of my father except that he is there and that my mother loved him. But I have been filled with many questions for many years. I would very much appreciate it if you can help me with some of the answers. Sincerely yours, Mary Jane Hornsby.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
Yeah, it tells you so much. You know, she had no information. She didn't know why he was there. People only said it would be upsetting for him and you if you tried to figure this out. And so that's what I inherited. So the director of social services wrote her immediately back. And so this is in 1967 that they were writing. Dear Mrs. Hornsby,
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
Mr. David L. Smith was admitted to this hospital on January 28, 1925, and lived here until he died on March 7, 1965. So he had died just two years before that letter was sent. His correspondent was given as Mrs. Minnie Jane Smith, Vicksburg, Mississippi. And when he died, we tried to contact her, that was his mother, and were told that she was in a nursing home in New Orleans.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
Since we were unable to contact any relative, no one was notified of his death, and he was buried here at the hospital. For many years, he lived on Cottage 5, which we called the re-educational building. He got along fine there and worked in the OT print shop regularly, and according to his record, did excellent work and was in excellent physical condition.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
I'm sure that one does wonder about one's parents, and it is difficult to know what to do. In instances like this, many attitudes have changed, but I think your family's attitude is certainly one that is true in most families at the time in which your father was here. If I can be of any further help to you at any time, please let me hear from you.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
But that's how it is. It was. It was very reassuring. And so...
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
we've always wondered like how my mother didn't know they didn't know that he had died until two years after he had died so it's not that they just got a letter from the asylum saying that he had just died or from whitfield saying that he died they got a letter in response to mary jane's and there was also another letter that i can actually just paraphrase but their younger sister helen
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
also wrote to Whitfield to the medical records office. But her letter was completely different and said, I know that my father was there. I don't have his birth or his death date. And I want to join the Revolutionary Dames Club or something. And they require proof of his birth and death. Can you just provide that for me? And that was the only time she ever reached out.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
As far as I know, grandmother never reached out, but I could be wrong about that, you know.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
Yeah, I mean, it comes up, I wouldn't say regularly, but when it comes up, it's like the door is open. It's been so strange. You know, this story, it started so apparently suddenly and eclipsed everything for me. You know, like the year before I finished this project, I had already been working on the project for eight years or something.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
And I still didn't think that it was about me in any kind of a way. It didn't occur to me that my experience of mental disorder could be funding this entire obsession with the mental illness of my great-grandfather. which seems like a very dense kind of blind spot in retrospect.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
But, you know, it's amazing what the brain can do to guard ourselves against ourselves if we feel like we have to, I guess. So at the very beginning, I was living in Glasgow in like 2000, 2001. I was in a marriage that was falling apart. I was pregnant. broke living in literally one room, a basement flat with bars on the window in Glasgow. Pretty depressing.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
And I was painting for like 12 hours a day. And I thought in my, you know, I was in grad school and I thought I was just being very focused. But when life started to kind of crumble around me and I was painting 12 hours a day and not taking care of myself, It was a very short step from painting all day to just walking around Glasgow all day.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
And I found myself just completely lost and walking around smoking cigarettes up alleys, down streets all day long. I was walking down an alley in Glasgow and it was late one night. And I remember there being an open door and hearing a bunch of voices inside and me just walking into this place. And it turned out to be like a Pentecostal congregation in there.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
And I just went in and sat down and they were doing some sort of like vocal chanting where it was just like, it was like their voices were just like flowing down like this waterfall of of voices. And then I remember leaving and going back to my flat and going to sleep and then waking up a couple hours later, in the midst of of what I now know to be a depersonalization. I woke up into it.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
And it was a nightmare. I felt like it was revealed to me the truth was, that I didn't exist and that all of my memories, even though I remembered them, they weren't grounded in any reality. It was just like Wild West movie set storefronts, you know, like I could keep up with conversations about things that had happened, but they weren't actually connected to real life events.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
It didn't matter that that didn't make sense. My version of it, what my brain was telling me was absolute truth. And it was just a matter of time, in my view, until other people realized it and I would be institutionalized. And that was the only way through that I could come up with. I didn't feel suicidal. There was no way to end it.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
If I had known when I started to have symptoms of delusions, the sudden onset of dissociation, depersonalization can be like a hallmark of schizophrenia. And I was exactly the right age for onset of schizophrenia. I was like 24, 26 or whatever. And certainly if I had known that history, there would have been a lot more testing done to make sure that it wasn't, that's not what we're looking at.
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
But my fear of institutionalization was really great and has always been. uh though i guess not really anymore you know this whole process has kind of like lifted all that it was just a very bizarre a very bizarre time it was a time out of time and it's not like it just ended you know it didn't it never ended it just that was maybe the time of the most concentrated dissociative episode
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
I didn't know how I was supposed to walk. I didn't know what the cadence of my voice was supposed to be. I hardly recognized myself in the mirror. There was nowhere for my thoughts to go because nothing that I thought of were trustworthy to me and my memories weren't trustworthy. It's like you wake up from a nightmare and somebody's like, well, what's it about? And you're like,
Under Yazoo Clay
Bonus: Family by Mud
there was this rug, and it doesn't sound frightening, but it was just deeply terrifying. Depersonalization is a really strange thing because there are no real outward manifestations of it. I still had the person that I presented to the world, but on the inside, there was nothing, which is just, it's chilling. There was nothing at all. I kind of decided that