Introducing: Under Yazoo Clay

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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M show what he else about. All 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,

(00:24):
most destructive soil I've ever dug in before. You never
get what you expect.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Now.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Over the years, Yazoo clay has held and destroyed a
lot of Mississippi's secrets. But in twenty twelve, a construction
crew uncovered a big one graves, thousands of them on
the site of the old State Asylum.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
And may have thought they're only found a thousand and
then once I realized, okay, well you had two thousand.
Wait a minute, seven thousand.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
And all this begs the question, just how do you
lose track of seven thousand graves? The Mississippi State Lunatic
Asylum closed its doors back in nineteen thirty five. It
didn't take long for the asylum cemetery to fade from memory.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
And all of a sudden I looked down and there
was a headstone, And all of a sudden, I walked
a bit further, and I started looking all around and
there were scores of headstones. I said, this is a
big cemetery.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
These graves hold real people, and their descendants are looking
for the real story because it's not just about me.
It's my family. This was my family's mystery.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
What happened to Grandma's in it? This is a story
about family.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
They put him in an insane soyl Our mom said
he wasn't crazy, he's just starving.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
It's a story about secrets.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
But if there's gonna be a good story, they've got
the voices. It gets burried.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Down so deep that any kind.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Of scratch of the surface has to be tamped down.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
Quick in a place where even the ground wants you
to forget. This soil technically shouldn't exist.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
It has character, it.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
Does its own it seems, but this is also a
story about how we reckon with the past.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
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 writing.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
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.

(03:16):
I'm Larison Campbell and this is under Yazoo Clay. Listen
wherever you get your podcasts.