When human remains are found at the site of Mississippi’s biggest hospital, it unlocks generations of family mysteries. From the Mississippi Museum of Art comes a podcast about mental illness, secrets and a forgotten history.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is Yazoo clay and why is it significant?
Dig below the surface in central Mississippi, and odds are good you'll find a burnt orange color looking back up at you. It's called Yazoo clay, and there's one thing it's known for, wreaking havoc on anything buried in it.
It is the strangest, most destructive soil I've ever dug in before. You never get what you expect. No.
Over the years, Yazoo clay has held and destroyed a lot of Mississippi's secrets. But in 2012, a construction crew uncovered a big one. Graves. Thousands of them. On the site of the old state asylum.
Chapter 2: How were thousands of graves discovered in Mississippi?
They may have thought they only found 1,000. And then once they realized, okay, 2,000, wait a minute, 7,000.
And all this begs the question, just how do you lose track of 7,000 graves? The Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum closed its doors back in 1935. It didn't take long for the asylum cemetery to fade from memory.
Chapter 3: Why did the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum cemetery fade from memory?
And all of a sudden I looked down and there was a headstone. And all of a sudden I walked a little bit further and I started looking all around and there were scores of headstones. I said, this is a big cemetery.
Today, the cemetery... It's just a sprawling green island in the middle of what's now the biggest medical center in the state. But the graves might not be there much longer.
Chapter 4: What challenges does the cemetery face today?
When I hear them say, you know, we've done all we can do for the dead. It's time to do something for the living. We need that land. We just forgot they were buried out there. They didn't just forget it.
These graves hold real people, and their descendants are looking for the real story.
Chapter 5: Who is searching for the real story behind these graves?
It's not just about me, it's my family. This was my family's mystery. You know what I'm saying? What happened to Grandma Zinni? This is a story about family.
They put him in an insane asylum. Our mom said he wasn't crazy, he was just starving.
It's a story about secrets.
But if there was going to be a good story, they were going to go over their voices. It gets buried down so deep that any kind of scratch of the surface has to be tamped down quick.
In a place where even the ground wants you to forget.
This soil technically shouldn't exist. It has character. It does. A mind of its own, it seems.
But this is also a story about how we reckon with the past. We don't see the shame, but we see the effects of the shame.
If you have any standing in the state of Mississippi, part of your work is righting wrongs.
In Mississippi, keeping secrets is as old as the soil itself. So can the truth ever really be uncovered? The story is much more complicated and nuanced than that. I'm Larison Campbell, and this is Under Yazoo Clay. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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