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, most destructive soil I've ever dug in before. You never get what you expect.
Now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You know what I'm saying.
What happened to Grandma's in it? This is a story about family.
They put him in an insane soyl Our mom said he wasn't crazy, he's just starving.
It's a story about secrets.
But if there's gonna be a good story, they've got the voices. It gets burried.
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 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 writing.
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.