Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
And the patients would come out on the front lawn.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
But as the city moved that way, they had to
bar the poor chests because they became a buggy problem.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Well, they would get out and show out on the
lawn and people would stop riding around.
Speaker 4 (00:25):
Oh no, no horse than Puggy.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Over the course of the Old Asylum's life, it grew,
Jackson grew around it, its story unspooled threads, joining the
tapestry of ever expanding daily life in central Mississippi. Back
at the State Hospital Museum, Donna Brown and Kathy Denton
showed us around a room full of photos and memorabilia
from the Old Asylum.
Speaker 5 (00:53):
There are a lot of stories too.
Speaker 6 (00:54):
If you look closely at the picture, you can see
there's a road that turned here in circles up close
to the building Sunday afternoons and Jackson, it was a
common fun thing to do to go picnic on the
grounds and watch the crazy people.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
After the Old Asylum shuddered its doors when its buildings
were torn down in the fifties, the stories died down
for a bit too, But with the rediscovery of the
Asylum Hills Cemetery, the lore is also coming back to
Life Asylum Hills. Lady Gibson even has her own well.
Speaker 7 (01:37):
The first time I heard about the Old Asylum was
from my mother. My mother is still with us, she
is ninety five years old, but she remembers as a
child driving through the gravel driveway in front of the
asylum on Sunday afternoons and waving at the patients. We've
(02:02):
had lots of people who've come from the community and said, yeah,
oh yeah, that was like the place to go.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
For the most part, the stories that survive are the
ones that lean into the Southern Gothic of it all.
Here's Billy Wayne's cousin.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
I knew that the Old Asylum was there because I've
talked to friends that are a little older than I
am that remember the asylum. I remember one of my
friends I never will forget. He would walk past it
some times at night and hear those poor souls. I
(02:45):
remember that's expression he used. I could hear those poor
souls wailing in the asylum.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
The final years of the Asylum did not leave a
great impression on Jackson. That shifting Yazoo Clay had done
a number on the Foundation, which was then doing a
number on the walls and ceilings. Plaster was literally crumbling
onto the patient buds, but repairs were out of the question.
Any state funds flowed to the new state hospital being built,
(03:18):
the one out in Whitfield.
Speaker 7 (03:20):
Whitfield was funded by the legislature in nineteen twenty six.
Then the depression happened. Then there were shortages of everything,
you know, and so the building of Whitfield and the
opening of Whitfield was delayed until nineteen thirty five. So
you had from nineteen twenty six to nineteen thirty five
when they were trying not to put any more money
(03:41):
into this building that was literally condemned by the time
the patients moved out.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
When the new State Hospital Whitfield opened its stores, the
old asylum shut its own and there wasn't a lick
of overlap between the two.
Speaker 8 (03:56):
The old asylum closed, Field opened, completely new staff, completely
new department of the Mississippi government. It was not like
it was a legacy institution. The last twenty five hundred
patients from here went to Whitfield, but that's the only
(04:18):
transfer that happened. It was a brand new operation. We
had this huge institution that operated for eighty years and
then it remained derelict for twenty and then the University
Medical Center comes on and there's no transfer of institutional memory.
The buildings were torn down, the cemetery remained derelict up
(04:42):
on the hill, unattended, forgotten, unused, unneeded.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Whitfield was about as blank of a slate as you
could find. If there were a way for the state
to sanction forgetting, this was it.
Speaker 8 (04:54):
Many of us, most of us in medicine, have sufficient egos,
and we all believe that history starts with our arrival.
So the medical school opened and it was churning from
the very beginning, patient care and research and education, and
(05:17):
no time to look back. And we're building this brand new,
modern medical center and we're looking forward. We have no
interest in preserving old, crumbling history.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Well except the old crumbling history is right there, a
cemetery taking up twelve acres of this town. So the
real question is what kind of space will Jackson make
for the people interred there. I'm Larison Campbell and this
is under Yazoo Clay. When we sat down with Leta
(06:03):
for one of our mini chats, her phone rang mid interview.
Most days that would be a pretty big bummer, but
not this time. The person on the other end of
the line was Kimberly Jackson, a descendant.
Speaker 7 (06:16):
Hey, Kimberly, I am fine. So I was calling you
because I have found some information about SINNI and I'm
going to send you the forms that you need to
fill out to get it. It's some patient records and anyway,
(06:38):
it's pretty self explanatory. But I also wanted to ask you.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Kim is a lot of things to a lot of people.
She's a school counselor right now pre k.
Speaker 9 (06:50):
Through second grade. They thank you a superstar. Every day
you is like walking on a red carpet every day.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
She's a caregiver for her mother, for her aunt, and
for her uncle. Chem is dedicated to doing it all.
That was clear even when we were trying to pin
her down for an interview.
Speaker 9 (07:08):
Time there's a yes, there is actually a count on
the third floor, but.
Speaker 5 (07:16):
I mean it's oh really That might be.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
The day we met her, she'd driven a little over
an hour from her home in Carthage, Mississippi. She was
in Jackson to bring her aunt and uncle to their
doctor's appointments, and so that's where we did the interview
on a couch outside the doctor's office, right next to
the vending machines and the elevator bank. So if you
hear a clank or a ding, no, you know this
is good. And that might be the fourth floor up there,
(07:40):
in which case it doesn't look like they have as
much area as we do. So perfect, okay, So thank
you for making this drive.
Speaker 9 (07:48):
Yeah, welcome out.
Speaker 5 (07:48):
Like I said, my aunt and uncle and they're on
the third floor. Yeah, they're right in there. Oh that's perfect. Okay, great, and.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
My aunt's she swooped in for a hug.
Speaker 8 (07:56):
Hello.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
I clocked her light pink long sleeve shirt with the
logan love yourself. It's abundantly clear that to Kim, family
is everything. Almost straight from the moment we arrived, she
wax poetic about a whole slew of relatives from her
grandmother's dating history.
Speaker 9 (08:15):
One gentleman from the community said, I'm going to walk
you home, but let me run out here to get
a lamp.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
You know, to her great uncle's fashion choices.
Speaker 9 (08:27):
You wore these nickobaccas and thought that he was looking
real shop with these Nicobocca pants, you know. So they
would laugh and they jogan, But you think you something,
But these Nicobaca's on you know what.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
The cloth of her life is made up of these
memories of these people. But like all the descendants we
spoke to, there was that familiar blank spot, a rent
in the fabric. So if you would, yeah, I mean,
tell tell us about your it's your great.
Speaker 5 (09:00):
Grandmother, right, So do you know about her? Uh? Bits
and pieces?
Speaker 9 (09:07):
So uh, since all of this has occurred, I found
out a little bit more. Uh so I always we
were always told her name was Zenny. She married my grandfather,
Monroe g and they.
Speaker 5 (09:22):
Had four children.
Speaker 9 (09:24):
They had three boys and then a girl, which was
my grandmother Marie. So they lived in Conway, and my
great grandmother was born and raised in another community in
Leek County called Pilgrim Rest. And so all of a
(09:48):
lot of her you know, family members uh are buried
in the Pilgrim Rest Church cemetery.
Speaker 5 (09:57):
Except for her, But I'll get to that.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Pilgrim Rest was a small community not too far away.
Zenny's whole family was nearby. But then things went south
for Zenny. Her mom died. It shook everyone in the family,
but no one more than Zenny, a young mother herself.
Speaker 9 (10:20):
And as the story goes, when her mother passed away,
she became, I guess, so despondent with grief that she
slowly started to her mental health started to decline. My
grandmother always said that she had a nervous breakdown.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Kim's grandmother was Jenny's youngest child, not even ten years
old yet.
Speaker 9 (10:49):
One cousin said that she would leave home. She would
put my grandma on a hip and take off walking,
and you know, people be like, know where is it?
You know, looking for where is it? And she would
hit a ride going to Pilgrim Rest. She would just
take off, woo, did a ride, go to Pilgrim Rest,
(11:09):
you know, hitch ragg get on, you know, and come back.
They said she'd always come back, She'd always come back.
My great grandfather was able to get her admitted to
Asylum Hill.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
But Kem's great grandfathers and his husband, Monroe, remained devoted.
His wife was his wife in sickness or in health.
Speaker 9 (11:37):
According to my cousins, my great grandfather would to visit
her at least three times.
Speaker 5 (11:44):
And that must have been a hard track.
Speaker 9 (11:47):
Exactly that Now that touched me because when I think
about now, this is Mississippi in the nineteen late night
the late teens, you know, him traveling either by wagon
or a very.
Speaker 5 (12:03):
A model TA kind of a car.
Speaker 9 (12:05):
Who knows, you know, to think about him getting back
and forth three times.
Speaker 5 (12:10):
Or he loved her. You can't tell me you didn't
love her.
Speaker 9 (12:14):
He was if he was determined to visit her three times.
Speaker 5 (12:19):
Yeah, he meant to bring her home.
Speaker 9 (12:22):
Until he for some reason, thought that he couldn't. He
and her family were thinking, of course, that this was
going to be a short term stay, you know. And
so her brother said to my great grandfather, said, when.
Speaker 5 (12:39):
Are you bringing this inning home? And he said, I
don't know.
Speaker 9 (12:44):
Every time I go, she gets further and further away
from me. While she was at asylum, hell, she passed away.
So as far as I know, it was through a telegram.
Is how he found out that she passed. As far
(13:04):
as I know, he was not able to see her
before she was buried. You know, they thinking she's going
somewhere for a little while, and she never comes back.
You know, I my heart, my heart has gone out
to them, and I can tear her up now thinking
about that that. You know, you're thinking she you know
she'll be back. You know she's gonna get some help
(13:24):
and she'll be back. And so my grandmother wasn't even
she wasn't ten, and the last memory she had of
her mother was her making her a birthday cake.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
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That's MS Museum art dot org. The Southern ethos, the
reverence for the grave ran deep in Kim's family. Cemeteries
(14:38):
have been part of her life since childhood.
Speaker 5 (14:41):
My grandma was being on visiting cemeteries. It was it
was a whole thing for.
Speaker 9 (14:45):
Them to have the churches to get together and clean
the cemetery. You know, mowld the lawn of the cemetery
changed out the flowers.
Speaker 5 (14:52):
That was the whole thing. That was a day set
aside to do that kind of thing.
Speaker 9 (14:57):
Look, I'm we going, I went to I'm a little kid,
I'm at all the funerals. It felt like, you know,
you know, there was there was always obituaries and always,
of course, like I said, stories to be told, and
but hers was always that sense of unknown.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Kim's grandmother had no grave to point to, just one memory,
one story of her mother she could pass down to
her own children.
Speaker 9 (15:23):
It was a happy memory, but there was only one
memory of her baking this cake for her birthday. And
to then go from that to news of her, of
her passing, it's just just a lot of gaps and
a sense of a little bit sense of longing.
Speaker 5 (15:44):
Now.
Speaker 9 (15:44):
She would never really dwell on it too long, Like
if she mentioned her, she would say a little something
and that was it. So she wasn't she didn't ever
shy away from it. But there was just always this
sense of that's all there is, you know, that like
there was this is the end of the store, there's
nothing else but love.
Speaker 5 (16:01):
But what Twain's are saying.
Speaker 10 (16:03):
I mean, that's really interesting because I feel like we've
talked to so many there, you know, a fair number
of people at this point who had relatives who were
in there, And it's kind of the reactions I've heard
have been a little bit different in that I think
there's a lot of shame associated.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
But they never had it. They never tried to keep
it a secret.
Speaker 9 (16:22):
It wasn't a secret that she went to Whitfield, as
they called it.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
It was never they never did.
Speaker 9 (16:28):
Never did they, And I will say that, yeah, it
wasn't something they tried to had.
Speaker 5 (16:33):
They were always very upfront about it.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Her family never tried to hide her. But Zenny got
lost anyhow. Part of the confusion was bureaucratic. In Mississippi
these days, when people say asylum, they mean Whitfield, the
current state hospital. Ken and her family, like many Mississippians,
(16:57):
never even knew there was an old asylum in Jackson.
Speaker 9 (17:00):
As time went on, they called it Whitfield. So in
our minds, we're thinking that she was buried where Whitville
is out in Pearl somewhere.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
So when Kim went to search for her great grandmother's records,
she contacted Whitfield. Every time they just say they had
no records of Zenny because Zenny was never there for Kim.
It felt like the asylum had just swallowed her hole,
(17:29):
but Zenny hadn't vanished. She was closer than anyone knew.
Speaker 9 (17:35):
My grandmother attended Tougaloo, So when I think about it,
she was not that far from where her mother was buried,
and she had no idea, no idea that that's where
she was buried.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Tugalu College is in Jackson, just six miles from the
old asylum, and for decades, Zenni's daughter and then her
granddaughter and finally her great granddaughter has right by that
cemetery like ships in the night until remember back in
(18:12):
episode two that pr road show that the Asylum Hill
project went on the one where they spoken rotary clubs
and put out newspaper.
Speaker 9 (18:20):
Adds, I see an ad in the Carthaginian, which is
our local newspaper, and it mentioned that the following people were.
Speaker 5 (18:34):
Believed to have been buried.
Speaker 9 (18:36):
At Asylum Hill, and I see her name, and so
it had a contact number. It turned out to be lighter,
and so that's how I found out.
Speaker 5 (18:51):
You have a watch roots. You know how Alex Halen.
Speaker 9 (18:55):
When he made it to Africa and he went to
the he went.
Speaker 5 (19:00):
To the to the village where Cooter Kintate was born,
and he was like, I found you. You know, That's
how I felt. I was like, oh my god, we
found her.
Speaker 9 (19:09):
I found him, and I let my family know, you know,
and you know the whole you know.
Speaker 5 (19:14):
It was like, oh my go I told Mama first. I
told her.
Speaker 9 (19:16):
I was like, you know, Grandma's in the name in
the paper, you know, and uh yeah, So it was
I felt a sense of especially a sense of relief.
But just to know that, you know, it's just I
was just so it was just mind boggling that to
(19:37):
think that, to see her name in print, to know that,
oh there's more to the story. I'm able to fill
in the gaps, just mind blowing because think about this,
by this time, my mama was in her late seventies,
you know, finding all of this out, and so, like
(19:58):
I said, all of a sud sudden zen, it went
from being you know, a story to you a real
you know, a person you think about, a person with
a whole entire life, you know, not just you know,
creating a home life with you know, her grandfather and
you know, having my you know, because basically it was
(20:20):
when they when they heard of Grandma's in it. It was
the same way she told it to us. You know,
there was there was no extra stories, you know what
I'm saying. And so to go from wow, so you
know there was an actual they go from being her
being admitted to the hospital to her dying. No no
(20:41):
news of what happened while she was.
Speaker 5 (20:43):
There, no nothing.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
What is it about connecting like these dots?
Speaker 10 (20:50):
What what does it as the person who's still alive today?
Speaker 5 (20:54):
Like what does it give you? And for lack of
a better word, completeness.
Speaker 9 (21:03):
My people always talked about their family, always, both sides,
you know, always was all of this talk about remember
what grandma did, Remember what uncle so and so did,
her cousin so and so. There was always these stories
always and when it came and so it makes me,
(21:25):
like I said, it makes me give a a sense
of completion in a way finding zen it and I
just really feel like, ah, I got it.
Speaker 5 (21:35):
This is what this is? This it it it It
feels me.
Speaker 9 (21:40):
To finally know that there was an end to her
story where the hap air said there was an end,
because it didn't. It was just such a mystery, such
a mystery as to what happened to her, well just
about everybody else, you know. You know, there was a
beginning to the story and there's an end at the store,
(22:00):
and they had they have the whole in, you know,
the whole middle. That wasn't that with her, That was
not that with her.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Come has something a lot of other descendants have been
looking for. She can just about point to the spot
where Zenny is buried.
Speaker 9 (22:19):
There's a grove of trees and the grassy area. If
I'm not mistaken, that's where she would have been buried.
I ride by there now and think, you know, she's there.
I think about it as her burial place. You know,
when I drive by, I look out there and I think,
you know there you you know, there she is. And
that's what my grandmother and her siblings did not ever have,
(22:42):
was a sense of there she is, or we can
go out there and visit her when we would like to,
or drive by.
Speaker 5 (22:48):
They did not have that sense at all. They never
knew where she was.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
So come checks in with her. She fills Anny in
on what's become of her family.
Speaker 9 (22:58):
Now, somebody they your children will raise, would love, so
you know, don't think that you know, they were just
out there in the world left to their own devices. No,
they were raised in the manner you would have want
them to be raised.
Speaker 5 (23:13):
They were loved in the way that you will want
them to be loved. We did not ever forget about you.
Speaker 9 (23:18):
You always loved, you always missed. We just did not forget.
But now we have found.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
You come as the poster child for what the Asylum
Hell Project is hoping to pull off.
Speaker 8 (23:40):
I will tell this story anywhere I can. I would
be happy to. I think the more we get the
word out, the deeper our engagement will be with the community,
the more transparent will be, and the more stories that
will hear.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Back by the way, Doctor Deadlake says that any descendants
who may be listening can contact the Asylum Hill Project
through its website Asylum Hill dot org.
Speaker 8 (24:05):
We'll be happy to talk to them, describe what we're doing,
engage with them, see if they would like to give
us a name to look for.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
But of course, the Asylum Hill Project isn't just about
connecting descendants with information about their loved ones. It's about
that land, the land that the medical center needs to
build more vital medical infrastructure, the land currently occupied by
thousands of former patients, as they've talked to more people
(24:41):
like him. The folks at Asylum Hill have begun to
formulate a plan, but it's one that will take time.
There's the project of sorting archived patient records.
Speaker 7 (24:51):
I think I estimated that it would take five years,
given our current staffing, to just get everything indexed and separated.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
And of course the cemetery excavations, the process of removing
the remains to make space for the medical center's expansion.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
In an ideal world, for instance, if we don't have
constant flooding which always slows us down in Mississippi, and
if we had an appropriate crew size, still like six
or seven more years. And that's just for the excavation
that it's not the analysis. If there are let's say,
(25:29):
seven thousand graves.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
We've talked a lot about final resting places here. That's
what cemeteries are, right, except for this one. An important
thing to realize is that if we say there's seven
thousand graves, that at the end of all this there
will be seven thousand sets of remains removed from the clay.
And that brings up an awkward truth. There's a fine
(25:57):
line between being taken care of, treated like a burden.
It's hard not to worry that what these former patients are,
more than anything else, is in the way. And if
there's one clear takeaway from talking with descendants, it's that
the first and foremost duty of care owed to these
(26:18):
patients is just respect, and sometimes that looks like acknowledgment,
which doctor Didlake says is a part of what will
happen next.
Speaker 8 (26:31):
We're going to build a memorial on campus and not
re enter these individuals. That is administratively much more efficient.
It's also makes those remains available to any wonderful technologies
that are out over the horizon that can help identify
these individuals and offer them to families for traditional burial.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
So what does it mean to make remains means more available. Well,
for starters, they're not going back into the ground anywhere. Instead,
the Asylum Hill Project will build a standalone mausoleum to
house the remains above ground. This is partially in service
of the budget. If they wanted to rebury the remains,
(27:18):
they'd have to buy more land to do it on,
but it's also in service of the core aim of
the Asylum Hill Project to learn all they can about
the old Asylum, including its patients. This whole thing is
part of a university after all, and keeping everything above
ground does keep the remains more available for research. There
(27:42):
is the specter of spectacle with this plan. So Asylum
Hill did what it does best. They went out to
the descendant community and got their buy in for this
stage of the project too.
Speaker 7 (27:54):
Amazingly, I'm not sure any of us expected that we
will be at this point to but here we are.
And I mean there are people who I mean, there
are descendants who have said, you know what, I don't
like the idea of my relative being disturbed, but if
she has to be, then this is the way I
want it.
Speaker 8 (28:12):
Tone just the level of positivity of that plan has
been stunning, both in the community at large and in
the descendant community and our community advisory board. So we're
very happy about that. So that paradigm is acceptable.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
That paradigm is acceptable. It all ties back to that
Southern ethos, because maybe, just maybe building a new home
for these remains in the heart of the city is
the best chance for finally reintegrating these former patients with
their community, interweaving the threads of their lives once again
(28:57):
with the fabric of the city.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I say, people that don't appreciate and enjoy history. I said, well,
we'll relegate them to the Dead Soul Society. You can't
explain it to them.
Speaker 5 (29:14):
They just don't.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
They just don't, you know, And I don't try to
explain it there.
Speaker 5 (29:18):
But it's a fascinating thing.
Speaker 9 (29:21):
I feel at peace knowing that I found her. You know,
I felt they send some peace knowing that refounder. So
right now I'm just you know, living in that peace.
Speaker 5 (29:33):
The asylum has for me.
Speaker 11 (29:36):
It has become this almost like a I guess, a
historical shrine in my mind, because I look at Hillman,
that's one story, and you multiplied that by, you know,
a few thousand, and then you think about what it
(29:56):
would mean to capture the stories and how we can
arrive at how that leads us to a sense of
our history, because you know, I don't feel like this
is just my family's history. I you know, it's a
bigger history.
Speaker 12 (30:16):
And my brother passed away two years ago some kind
to kind of carry on what he had started. It
was very important, a lot more important to him all
those years that he spent on it that it was
to me. I was just a kid, and I didn't
didn't know, but as you get older, you know that means.
Speaker 5 (30:35):
More to you.
Speaker 12 (30:36):
And so I'm sure he's there with my granddad saying
where to go.
Speaker 13 (30:39):
Brother.
Speaker 14 (30:41):
I just burst into tears. I really didn't expect to
do that.
Speaker 5 (30:45):
I hadn't even gotten into it.
Speaker 15 (30:46):
But that's what you're supposed to do when you hear
his name, and that's what your body knows to do,
burst into tears.
Speaker 14 (30:53):
Any question that success. And there was an impulse like
the two of us just stood there, held on to
each other for a long time. I have no idea
what was going around us while we were doing that, but.
Speaker 15 (31:10):
Yeah, I mean, the thing that strikes me about all
of it is how unfinished. All of it feels like,
all the conversations, all of the interactions, there's nothing like, wow,
that's done. There's nothing done, you know, not remotely done.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Nothing is done. None of it is finished. The family
story goes on because the family does a little more
whole than before.
Speaker 9 (31:41):
And it just felt like, you know, it was just
a puzzle missing, you know, you it feels like now
the piece, like I have the piece of the puzzle
that I just felt like that my family needed.
Speaker 8 (31:54):
If you have any standing in the state of Mississippi.
Part of your work is writing wrongs. There are many
for this.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Project.
Speaker 8 (32:05):
I don't see it so much as an overt effort
to right wrongs, because I think that assumes the old
stereotypical asylum motif of a terrible place, overcrowded, abandoned people,
and that's not the picture that's emerging from the history
(32:29):
that we're collecting.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Now.
Speaker 8 (32:32):
Are there things that could have been done differently and
we want to both acknowledge and learn from those.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Sure, the story of Asylum Hill is one of discovery, memory, pain,
and catharsis. But most of all, the story of Asylum
Hill is unexpected. A crew of scientists, historians, artist, school
council professors, and gravedousers, all digging deeper in search of understanding.
(33:22):
At the Mississippi Museum of Art, Noah's exhibit was up
for nearly six months. Visitors came through, sat with the work,
reckoned with their own histories. Museum staff told me that
they lost count of how many people made a point
to let them know that Noah's family story of mental
illness was not all that unlike their own, and the
(33:42):
exhibit offered another very tangible way for museum goers to engage.
Speaker 4 (33:48):
Okay, so y'all this thread right here, I try to
go over.
Speaker 5 (33:54):
It's not a big deal.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
Then oh, I try to go over this and ideally.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Out under the other one on its own.
Speaker 13 (34:02):
So don't even worry about that that was starting. I'll
go over it because that, in the end makes it
loop around the edge.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Well, on the night of Noah's opening, we noticed this
hulking structure, blond wood and string. It was tucked into
the corner of the room next to Noah's painting, cordoned
off behind red velvet ropes.
Speaker 13 (34:23):
Like I was saying, you can make the end sort
of come.
Speaker 4 (34:26):
To about this point perfect, that'll be fine, and then
let your foot off.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
It was a loom four feet wide, maybe a bit taller.
Speaker 13 (34:38):
There's not a whole lot of these out in the world.
It was like a big batch of them made for
a craft school in Canada in the nineteen twenties, and
this is one of them. Sometimes people will contact me
because they'll be looking for Millville loom and they'll run
across me in contact me.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
Like where'd you get it?
Speaker 13 (34:55):
But looms are like that.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
That was the loom's owner, my name's Emily Wicki. Emily's
not a weaver by trade. She's an archaeological field tech,
one of the field tech's working on the Asylum hillsite.
Speaker 4 (35:09):
It beat it down, okay, or we'll get this out.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
She'd set this loom up at the museum with a
very specific project in mind, a collaborative one. Over the
course of the summer, anyone who'd come to see Noah's show,
to visit the museum would be invited to weave a
few rows.
Speaker 5 (35:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 13 (35:30):
So my idea is for anyone that comes in that
will at once too that would feel as if it
will hopefully enjoy it, to sit down and add to this.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
So I asked her about the colors of the threads.
She'd dyed them herself, using natural dyes like black walnut, indigo,
golden rod, and yazoo clay, taken straight from the old
Asylum cemetery. The project is community driven to its core,
(36:01):
from the weavers down to the pattern Emily's embedded within
the loom.
Speaker 4 (36:07):
The warp is the vertical threads that.
Speaker 13 (36:09):
Are running through this, and I did all of the
planning and setting a bath. It's called dressing the loom
because it takes so long to set it up, but
then to see it create this pattern that's you don't
even understand how it's happening.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Which the community represented in that pattern isn't just the living,
the people who can get to the museum and add
their personal touch to this cloth. It's also every patient
who passed through the doors of the old asylum between
eighteen ninety two and nineteen nineteen that we're in that viole.
The vertical strings on this loom, their color and how
(36:47):
they alternate with each other represent actual data about the
people who once lived at the asylum, their race, their gender.
Speaker 4 (36:56):
Yeah, do so right over here, I reference these by
any reports of who die. And they separate all of.
Speaker 7 (37:06):
This explains it it basically does.
Speaker 13 (37:09):
They separated it by male.
Speaker 7 (37:11):
And female and white and population of color.
Speaker 13 (37:15):
Okay, so I separated it. And here like.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
That, every single vertical thread represents four patients. A black
thread signals a new year.
Speaker 13 (37:27):
So every time you see the stripes change, there's two
colors for one year, and every time you see that rollover,
that's another year.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
And as the number of patients that the asylum grows,
so do the stripes, widening from left to right. As
more and more people of color become patients at the asylum,
vertical green threads begin to outnumber gray. The facts the data.
Emily embedded these into the vertical pattern when she's set
(37:55):
up the loom, but the horizontal patterns those up.
Speaker 5 (38:00):
To the weaver.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
The colors they pick, how they pass the shuttle from
one hand to the other, whether they were nervous or
forceful or methodical, all informs what the final fabric will
look like.
Speaker 13 (38:15):
So I've done the hard part of setting up the
warp and doing the calculations to make it a specific
type of weave. But the way the pattern is embedded,
people will be able to do all kinds of different patterns,
and by they can make it as plain or as.
Speaker 4 (38:34):
Crazy or abstract as they want.
Speaker 5 (38:36):
So hopefully.
Speaker 13 (38:38):
Every time someone weaves, they'll be sort of connecting to
that past and will be sort of complicating those overly
simplified statistics in my mind. But I hope it'll mean
many different.
Speaker 5 (38:58):
Things to many people.
Speaker 13 (38:59):
I hope everyone will come and have an experience with it.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
The weaving isn't just for the edification of the living.
After all, this cemetery, what's left of it it's never
really about us, And neither is this fabric that Emily
and others have brought into being, because this isn't just
a cloth or a throw that's being woven. It's a
(39:24):
burial shroud, much like the ones the patients themselves were
buried on, sometimes with too many safety pins.
Speaker 16 (39:33):
Yeah, but I love the idea of being buried and
like getting returned to the earth, like returning to the mother.
You know, I just really love that he was talking
about shame and like how you have shame from an
unmarked grave and not knowing what happened to someone. But
like it's really kind of beautiful, like like we really
don't our graves don't last that long.
Speaker 13 (39:51):
You know, a lot of comfort in knowing the ephemeral
like of my mistakes and otherwise.
Speaker 5 (39:59):
But just you know, I just find that to.
Speaker 4 (40:01):
Be comforting that I'm just this little part of a
bigger story, you know, a huge story.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
Fifty million years ago, some bits of a mineral called
smectite got swept up, carried along on fast moving waters
flowing south. Eventually the water slowed and the minerals fell,
settling down forming layer upon layer of clay. Time passed
(41:00):
the sun rose, the rain fell, the rivers changed course.
A city got built on top of the clay. The
rain fell, the sun rose, the clay swelled and shrank,
and foundations got wrecked. At an asylum on a hill,
(41:26):
a cemetery was laid into this clay. At an asylum
on a hill, a cemetery was forgotten. Then, not all
too long ago, hands scooped up some of that fairy clay.
Speaker 5 (41:44):
They added it to.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
Water, and added yarn to the dark orange slurry. The
two sat there together for weeks, one staining the other.
Then that pair of hands pulled out the yarn, wrung
out most of the water and most of the clay.
(42:06):
At the end of it, all that yarn would be
wound around a spool and set on a loom. It
would become part of a fabric, one created by hundreds
of pairs of hands, intimately weaving the past into the present.
(42:28):
It's like I said at the beginning, Yazoo clay is
the bane of central Mississippi. It wreaks havoc on everything
from our homes to our graves to our memories. But
it's also the source of great beauty. Mississippians, after all,
grow deep roots. We kind of can't help it. Maybe
(42:51):
that's why we're so hung up on the dirt therein
(43:14):
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 Shasson
and myself with help from Angela Yee and Amy Machado,
with editing and sound design by Morgan Fuz and Erica Wong,
and thanks to Blue Dot Sessions for music. Special thanks
(43:35):
to Betsy Bradley at the Mississippi Museum of Art, as
well as Leida Gibson at the Center for Bioethics and
Medical Humanities at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Visit
Jackson and Jay and Deny Stein.