Bunch of roses.
Oh yes, this kind of looks like wisteria growing up over these two are.
That is definitely whysteria.
It's morning in late April. My producer Rebecca and I are in an old cemetery in downtown Jackson, Mississippi, with Wayne Lee. Wayne's grandfather was one of the seven thousand former patients buried on the grounds of the Mississippi State Asylum. But his grandfather's not buried here. We're in this particular cemetery for something else. Wayne's a taller guy, early seventies. His full head of snow white hair is a bit windswept as he heads towards us. Each time we meet him.
He has on some variation of hiking pants cinched up around a plaid, short sleeved shirt. And there's one other thing we haven't told you about.
Wayne. I'm Wayne Lee. I'm a dawser.
If you like me, grew up on reruns of Gilligan's Island.
Mister, how what do you think of my new divine w then you might.
Have a vague idea of what dowsing is. It's an ancient tradition where practitioners use a forked branch or metal rods to find things hidden underground, most commonly water underground wells, but people dows for all sorts of things, minerals, oil, gemstones, and graves, which is where Wayne comes in.
Wayn is a grave dowser.
This means he believes he's able to find and identify unmarked graves. He takes his direction from two long, thin pieces of metal called divining rods. We'll come back to those later. See The Asylum Cemetery and its thousands of unmarked graves was a big story, but the issue of unmarked graves and forgotten cemeteries isn't a new one. In the South, the landscape is peppered with the graves of soldiers from both sides of the Civil War, hastily buried
at the sites of major battles. And of course there were millions of people in slavery on plantations, buried by enslavers who weren't eager to spend money on something as permanent or respectful as a granite headstone. But time is the biggest enemy of all grave sites, even the marked ones. People move away, Rain, humidity, and sun wipe out the landscape's memory. Kudzoo and BlackBerry vines topple and bury any markers that are left.
Well. I don't want to see anyone disrespected. I'll work in a lot of cemeteries, cleaning up cemeteries. They're not my relatives, They're just people that have been forgotten. And by using the divining rods, I can help find people. Sometimes their headstones are just under the surface. I can find them and upright them to show respect to those people. These are just forgotten souls, and I want to do everything I can to try to write that.
It's like doctor Didlake said in our first episode, honoring the dead is baked into the Southern ethos so Waine. He keeps busy, and he doesn't discriminate. He answers the call of Civil War buffs that day.
I think eleven soldiers and they were in a line, just like a trench.
He works with the descendants of people enslaved by plantation owners in the Confederacy.
Maybe it's because my ancestors had slaves, so I almost felt like they're reaching out to me, Hey, you know, help us out. I made crosses for every person that I found in that cemetery and marked it and had the names inscribed in the days they were born and died. And my hope is that someday, when somebody's trying to their ancestors, that was a slave might run across that. That's my hope. I'm just showing respect.
Respect.
Wayne's own grandfather was a patient at the State Asylum, which means that his body lies right now in an unmarked grave. His burial nearly one hundred years ago might sound like distant past, but for Wayne, that lack of resolution in his grandfather's story remains an open wound, and he's looking for a sense of closure.
I can walk around the room and say, father, can you direct me to Larius, Father, please direct.
Me to Larius.
Oh please us.
I'm Laris and Campbell.
And this is under Yazoo Clay, the site of the old Asylum, the site that's now the Medical Center for the University of Mississippi, holds seven thousand unmarked graves. That's seven thousand lives lived and tens of thousands more lives connected to those. So how did this cemetery get forgotten? The first bodies were buried at that site in the middle of the eighteen hundreds, and for the next half century plus, the story of this graveyard proceeded in a
straight line. Patients were interred, markers were laid, some stone, mostly wood, and the cemetery grew, often tended to and maintained by people in the asylum. So when the asylum closed in nineteen thirty five and the state transferred those patients to the new hospital outside of Jackson, the trajectory shifted. Now the cemetery didn't belong to the hospital. There was no hospital there. It became part of the fabric of Jackson.
The best glimpse I've gotten of the asylum in those years was from the writer you Dora Welty, who was also a great.
Photographer, and the foreground of her.
Photo is waste high grass. Behind that a thick jumble of tall trees, and right in the center, peeking through a gap in the branches, looms the decaying turret of the old asylum, isolated, haunting, beautiful. The state tore down what remained of the building in the nineteen fifties. By then, the cemetery had been swallowed by the woods from Welty's photograph, and Jackson residents began to find other uses for it.
And you know, for a long time people in the community knew that there was a cemetery there. You know, it comes up again and again when I talked to people who live in this area, they're like, oh, yeah, when I was a teenager, I rode horses there. Or it apparently used to be the place where people would go parking.
For those of you who've never been to a shop, that's sixty speak for a makeout session in a car. And that wasn't the only thing people got up to in the woods.
I know that there was a moonshine operation that got busted back in there at one point. There were reports of a lot of vandalism, you know, just people hanging out doing stuff they shouldn't do.
The woods were home to plenty of grated activities too. Kids would explore, adults would take long walks under the trees.
One of those is Bill Lee.
He's a cousin of Wayne's, the descendant and gravedolz Aer. Bill's lived in the Jackson area for over sixty years and he's a history buff the way that.
A lot of older Southern men are.
Well. I lead tours in Normandy. Oh really, yeah, I got a tour in company.
I am pleased that your children are interested in World War two.
They are very interested.
Well, that's fantastic.
Bill lives in a lakeside condo outside of Jackson. We'd gone to his place to meet up with Wayne, who driven down from North Carolina, but it turned out that Bill also had something relevant to this story. It sits by his front steps, right where other condo owners would place a stone, pelican or hang an anchor. A headstone, white marble, maybe eighteen inches high, a foot or so across, an inch thick, propped up right by the front door.
The story for how he got it starts more than half a century ago, on a walk through those woods with his young son.
We'd just go walking in the woods and we parked somewhere around there, and I thought it was just as far as just a wooded area over there. He was so small he couldn't walk. I had to put him up on.
Neck and we just started walking, and all of a sudden I looked down and there was a headstone. I said, wait a minute, what is this? And all of a sudden, and I walked a bit further and I started looking the hall around and there were scores of headstones over a sprawling area. I said, this is a big cemetery.
Now, these stone markers weren't on every grave. Most patients were buried with painted wooden markers. Families with means could pay extra for stone.
It was like a forest, and there was not a lot of underbrush because those tree canopies kept that sunlight from the grounds. I could see the whole cemetery, see all those markers out there, scores of them. Well, what do they say, seven thousand bodies out there or more?
Being a history buff the image of the cemetery stayed was built. It felt wrong that, in the space of just over thirty years, all these graves in the center of his city could just be forgotten, especially after he heard that the state had plans to remove the remaining stone markers. By the way, I haven't been able to find any record of this plan in the state archives or newspapers, but other people have told me they heard about it too, and the headstones have been gone for decades.
So Bill and a friend stage to rescue.
I said, I don't want to be able to tell people, yes, that's a cemetery out there, and yes they were markers, and here's the evidence of it right here.
Because I knew it. First of all, I said, I can't take them all.
If I could, I would have taken them all, okay, But I said I.
Can take one. I can do that.
So this is the one I'm going to take right here. And I just wanted to save it for posterity. Said yeah, hey, you say they didn't no cemeteries, there were no markers.
But here's one right here.
I got evidence, SOAVI it for.
Goodness shop That evidence has followed Bill to every house he's lived in since. When we paid Bill a visit at his condo. It was the first thing Wayne pointed out, this.
Is the first evidence I was telling you about.
Oh my gosh, can.
You imagine the first time I met Billy and I come to his house and I said, what are you doing with the headstone?
Will you read the headstone to me?
This is Timothy o'reardon died May the thirtieth, eighteen ninety three, aged sixty three years And Laida she checked it out, and he was a patient there and he was buried in the cemetery.
And it's a good shape it is.
It's sitting there for since in the seventies.
I mean, that's been out.
I reckon, right, Yeah, years thirty years old. Bill this was a rescue mission to protect his state's history, even if the state itself I might not.
See it that way.
It's unclear why the headstones would be moved. Institutional memory on this is surprisingly short in a state that still celebrates Confederate History Month. I did hear some markers had been broken, and there were concerns about vandalism. Regardless of the reason, the results the same. The headstones are gone. The wooden markers went the way of the Yazoo clay,
and the memories were buried with them. The morning after we saw the headstone at Bill Lee's condo, we headed over to Greenwood Cemetery to meet up with Wayne for a dowsing demonstration. The cemetery sits in the middle of downtown Jackson, a small sea of tall waving grass and old shade trees and view of the state capitol. We waited for Wayne under a live oak. The sun was dapple, the birds were the mowers were in full swing, so you may hear one or two of those. Once Wayne
pulled up and it's bright blue. Prius, it was down to business.
To go.
You have a.
Way you like to get started.
Or yeah, and I'm going to do a little demonstration with the divining rods.
Wayne's dowsing materials consist of two thin steel rods bent into an L shape. The short end's got a piece of PVC pipe around it. That's the part he's holding. The PVC means he's not touching the metal, that it can move free and clear.
And I like this to be able to move freely that way. You know, if he's spent all the way around, I'm not touching the metal at all, And so I don't want anybody thinking, yeah, he's making that turn and I can't make it turn.
When he locates the grave, the two rods swing toward his chest and over each other. When he steps off the grave, the rods swing back out. It's a dynamic X marks the spot kind of operation. If you're wondering just what the hell kind of metal can do this, the answer is any You could take.
A coat hanger. You can be done with a loan. It can't be done with copper.
This is just.
Metal that came from like home depot or blows.
The rods may not need to be endowed with specific qualities, but the dowser does. Wayne calls this a gift granted by his creator. It's one he said, became apparent the first time he picked up divining rods, which surprised even him. Real dowsers, he explains, are rare.
It was very scary for me.
I stopped.
I looked around. I'm like, am I going nuts? Nobody wants to think about that. But the thing that has happened from me by using the divining rods, it has strengthened my faith. It has told me that just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it's not real. And there's so much in this world I think that we
don't know and we don't know about. It's told me that we all have a creator, no matter what you want to call you a creator, where you want to call it God or Buddha or whatever, we have a creator that's in charge and the miracles that happen every day, just because we don't always know it. I've had several miracles happened in my life, this being one of them that I've gained this ability to do this.
When Wayne tells us that he's one of the few who can do this, I'm a little skeptical. But Wayne is so sweet and earnest that it doesn't feel like he's trying to pull one over on us. I mean he offered to demonstrate.
So I'm going to walk over to this first series of graves.
Here he trapes through the overgrown grass to a line of headstones. Then, holding a bent metal rod in each hand, he bowed his head.
First of all, I'm just gonna ask God to help me use these divining rods today. Please let your Holy Spirit work through me and let me do a good job with us today. So when I step over a grave, the rods will cross over. When I step off, the rods will open up.
Oh.
He steps over the graves and the rods make an X. But it's not just the locations of graves.
I was told by a dowser a few years ago when I first started dowsing, that he could determine the depths that the person was buried. I've never dug anyone up, so I don't know that to be a fact. So first and we'll walk to the grave crosses over, I wait for it to reopen. When they cross over again, it's how deep the person is. So the distance from here to there, which is probably around six feet.
They can point to the head of the body.
Fally, can you direct me to the head of this person? Fally, can you direct me to the feet of this person.
They can deduce gender on a place.
One rod over her. If it's a woman, the rod would turn toward her feet. If it's a man, the rough to turn toward the head.
And in one of the more awe inspiring feats, they can even lead Wayne to a specific person.
Let's say, ask for Mary Louise. Father, I'm looking for Mary Louise. Can you help me find Mary Louise? And it's not going to cross over again until I get to Mary Louise, Mary Louise. But I have the confidence and God has revealed to me that I can find people only even know who they are.
Skepticism aside, it's easy to see how the ability to not just locate but identify graves could be useful, especially when you have something like a state owned site with seven thousand unmarked graves. In fact, Wayne has dowst at the Asylum cemetery and he believes he's located his own grandfather's grave.
When I found my grandfather there to cemetery and they hadn't started zooming bodies. Yet that was the beginning of some closure for me. It's like, maybe you forgot about him, and maybe you didn't put up a marker that's still there. But I'm going to put up a marker.
As I said, the science here is iffy at best, and that's at all with the very science based identification approach of Asylum Hill and the University Medical Center, which is probably why when the medical Center found out that we and Wayne and a bunch of audio equipment were heading out to the Asylum Cemetery to record Wayne dowsing for his grandfather's grave, they politely but firmly told us to leave the tree.
Are you trying to take pictures or something?
No, no, no, no, no no.
We wanted to show us where he believes his grandfather's grave is.
Oh well, yeah, I'm sorry, but I can't.
He just not talk about it and not like.
Physically go there, which is how we all wound up at the very marked graves of Greenwood Cemetery. But there is an upside to dowsing at a cemetery where graves are marked. There might be confirmation bias, but it's easy to see if it's working. So I asked if I could give it a shot.
Does this work for everybody?
Can anybody do you do this?
I've shown several people. Some people can do it, some people can do it a little bit, some people can't do it at all.
May I try?
Sure?
Actually it turned out I was one of the people in that latter category, that's after the break.
And back up and go come forward to help them just a little more level, a little more so.
It's not the rod's barely moved.
Maybe this just meant I hadn't mastered the wrist tilt. I tried adjusting my hands.
I don't think I have you know what, Like I said, this is swimming and guy, and I said, God, you know, help me. I always pray before I do it.
I'm gonna have a meditative money to help me, and I'm going to try it again.
Sure, I tried again.
I don't think I have it.
Okay, all right, guess the rods moved slightly toward each other.
Over your hand or you're kind of a love.
All right, let's try it.
Maybe that was something, or maybe it was just that they were sitting inside hollow PVC tubes alas no dice If this was some sort of gimmick that Wayne was pulling off. It was an impressive one. Rebecca, the producer, seemed to share my doubt, which may be why I handed her the rods. Next, do you want to give it a try? Hand me all this stuff and the headphones.
Now come toward me and get straightened.
Up with me.
Now walk toward me. Oh all right, I told you alive. Well that's my asking a question. You can't ask what a person's head is. But like I said, I pray and I ask God to help me do this. M He asked with the with the head of Mary Louise.
Where's the head of Mary Louise?
Inexplicably, the rod swung clipsed, then open, then around to point the way to Mary Louise mcgheee h.
Wow. I think I think you might be a natural.
You got it. You're the first person that I know of that has done this.
Well, no, you're like a natural.
Audio as a medium has its limitations. So I'm just going to describe Rebecca's face at this moment. Her eyes are wide, she's blushing a little, like someone who's been caught. Her expression is a mixture of awe and surprise and bewilderment with just a touch of horror. To be honest, neither of us knows what to make of grave dowsing. Is it a warping of energies, a communing with something beyond ourselves? Is it the power of the subconscious or
maybe a well timed fluke. I can't say, but I'm not sure it matters, because whether or not this is real, I do believe that there's something mystical about cemeteries, energy changes places, and is there any type of land that has seen more emotion over the years than a cemetary? For Wayne, all this is driven by faith.
It's not an exact science. Will say, you know it's not real or you're making it happen. I'm not, but I can file it up. You know it's real and it works, but I can file it up. I don't do it for money. It's good to help you. I'm doing to try to show some respect for those people that are buried out there. Not just my grandfather, but for everyone that's buried out there.
All this premised on the absolute belief that his God won't lead him astray, that the Rod's point and cross true.
It's like another realm out there.
This is just.
Temporary, because I know when his voice told me to do this, do that. You know it's real, but anybody wants to believe it or not.
There's something about a physical site, a place where you can imagine your loved one is present. But finding this place wasn't the end of Wayne's search.
Well that's nice, that's really beautiful. But this must be the reservoir.
Kist a bunch of boats.
That brings us back to cousin Bill's condo, the same one where we saw that headstone.
Well, listen, welcome to my little adoble.
Thank you, this is wonderful, Thanks so much for hosting.
We sat on two over stuffed plaid chairs in Bill's living room, looking out over a marina full of pontoon boats. Wayne so believes in everything that he's doing, not just his dowsing, but understanding his grandfather's story, and he wanted to get it right for us. He laid out a whole spread of newspaper clippings, photos, and articles on Bill's white tile counter, most of them in sheet protectors. Perched on a barstool, he bounced his knee as he talked.
The only thing I knew was our grand dator was put in a middle institution, and that they said he was crazy. I didn't have all the diagnosis and all that. I didn't know him, But then, you know, was there a problem. I feel like even though the hospital did all they could to help take care of him, I feel like they did they should have kept better records. It shouldn't be that years go by and people say, well, we didn't even know they were there. We just build
over them. You know, it's not important. They're dead. It didn't matter.
We started out talking about Wayne's grandfather, the little Wayne had been told about him. The family's narrative had always been somewhat simple. Quayne's grandfather wasn't crazy, he was starving. To the modern ear, maybe that sounds like denial, but a century ago in rural Mississippi, it was real. Historically, there were lots of reasons people were called insane, and the causes of what we consider mental illness weren't all
the same as they are now. One of the biggest drivers of patients to the state hospital wasn't even what we now consider mental illness.
It was malnutrition.
Well, since he died in thirty two and I wasn't born until fifty two. I didn't know a lot about him, you know, had met him. All that I knew was that, you know what our mother had told us when she was eighteen. They were very poor sharecroppers in Mississippi. There were five children. They didn't have any food to eat, and he basically gave them his food. He got really sick, He got very delusional. He had swords on his hands and feet, and they didn't know what was wrong with him.
They were supported, they'd have a car, they couldn't take him to a hospital. And so the story that we were told was that a neighbor contacted the sheriff and said, you need to take this man to the hospital. Said, you know, he's very paranoid. He thinks someone's coming to get him. So the sheriff came, and then my mother was the oldest, she was eighteen. She signed the paperwork for the sheriff to take him to the mental hospital. According to my mom, they didn't know he was going
to a mental hospital. She thought they were just taking him to the hospital. And the story that we always heard was they didn't find out until like six months later that he had died. Affected her a lot, and it also caused some risks in the family from what I understand, because she supposedly signed the paperwork for the
sheriff to take her father. The youngest child was ten, and my mom always said that some of the younger ones held it against her, that you know, she'd sent her father off and need to come.
Back, and that was it.
The end of his grandfather's life stayed shrouded in mystery. But in the nineteen seventies, Wayne's brother decided his family needed answers.
My brother James Lee called him Tom. He had polio when he was three. It always made him a little more of a homebody. He had got into studying all of our family history. When he was a teenager. He was writing the hospital. I've got a copy of a letter that he said in seventy seven, which he wouldn't have been a teenager then, but not far from it,
asking about our grandfather. And he had called down there to the hospital and asked about our father and grandfather and they said, well, we don't know where he is. We can't send you any medical records against the law, and that he might be buried under one of these buildings out here. Owner a street we don't know. And so my brother was pretty persistent about that through the years, and he got me interested probably about fifteen years ago.
And so 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's spent on it that it was to me. I was just a kid and I didn't didn't know.
At this point, seventy five years had passed and they had nothing to go off of but their mother's teenage memories. Wayne knew the answers about his grandfather existed. They lay in those medical records his brother had tried to get back in the seventies.
In every step of the way, they were always said no, no, no, we're not giving out any records.
Knowing the answers were there, only to have someone say you can't have them. It ate at Wayne, but getting them would require waiting into an ethical and bureaucratic mess only the Deep South can cook up. This wasn't just some clerk being difficult to understand why Wayne couldn't get those records. We have to talk about how the state views the bodies laid to rest at Asylum Hill for starters. They don't call them bodies. Here's doctor Ralph Didlake, the mind behind the Asylum Hill Project.
We have, in a way inherited these patients, and we want to care for in the very best way we can. We need to set a standard, we need to be an example, and we need to treat these as our patients.
This perspective, though, complicates things because the medical center can't share patient records without patient consent, which presents a problem in this case because the patients have all passed on.
Even in the pediatric world, parents don't give consent for their children. They give permission for their children. That's the modern bioethics theories at the moment.
On Mississippi politics for years, so I'm used to state institutions hiding information behind arcane laws and statutes, and I can imagine why they'd want to keep these records hidden. In many cases, they won't paint a rosy picture of life and the state asylum. So I was pretty surprised to find out that the push to unveil these medical records came from a state sponsored institution, the Asylum Hill Project. But if you want to release records, first you've got
to find someone to release them too. That means finding next of ken. How exactly do you do that? When all the graves are unmarked and the last one was Doug more than eighty years ago, that's.
When we come back.
The largest art museum in the state, the Mississippi Museum of Art, connects Mississippi to the world and the power of art to the power of community. Located in downtown Jackson, the museum's permanent collection is free to the public. National and international exhibitions rotate throughout the year, allowing visitors to experience.
Works from around the world. The gardens at.
Expansive Lawn at the Mississippi Museum of Art are home to art installations and a variety of events for all ages. Plan your visit today at Msmuseum Art dot org.
That's MS Museum art dot org.
The University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson is heading up an archaeological excavation as.
Part of a program called the Asylum Hill Project, and today representatives from a UMC came to the Wayne County Library to invite locals to get involved in that project.
We have spoken at libraries and rotary clubs and anyone who would stand still and listen all over the state to try to get the message out so they can inform us and we can inform them.
The Asylum Hill Project basically went on a statewide tour across Mississippi, hell bent on tracking down any descendants they could. If you'd even heard a whisper in your family of someone who'd been sent to the Old Asylum, they wanted to talk.
To you one.
They have the old history of the families, They have the documents, they have the photographs. We would like to archive all of that. They need to sign off on what we are doing, so we have that community engagement piece. We also want to be fully transparent. We don't want anyone in any part of the state to feel that we're up here doing this without informing everyone.
This is where that Southern ethos comes back in that reverence for the grave.
We want this.
To bring these people who have been in this unmarked cemetery. We want to bring them back into the community in some way, and we think that preserving those stories, if the family desires, that helps us fill in the gaps of the story of the institution and memorializes them in some way. We have the ethical standing to do what
we're doing. Have we entered into an ethical calculus, Absolutely, because the needs of our future patients are our ethical burden and we have to weigh that against the interests of the individuals buried there in the descendant community.
But even after clearing the ethical hurdles, there were still legal issues. If you've ever filled out a form in a doctor's office, you've probably heard of HIPPA. It's that law that keeps medical records from being seen by anyone who is in either the patient or the provider. That stays in effect until the patient's been dead for fifty years. Mississippi had a second law in the books for mental health records that shielded them like until the end of time.
Hey, privacy is privacy.
In order to get individual patient records, they had to sign an affidavid and have a witness and all of that that they are the people who should be getting these records, you know. And that's just something that was just worked I mean recently, like within the past two months that we've worked out. The Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities does have custody now of many of the old individual patient records. I'm very sensitive about those. I try not to gawk. Would I want anybody looking at
my mental health records? No, and so I try to be very respectful.
And then there was the logistical quagmire. There are more than one thousand boxes of records, all jumbled together, no rhyme or reason, newly rescued from a storage unit. The only way to parse through them all is to parse through them all, box by box, page by page, and not just anybody can do it. Remember our old friend Hippa. Some of the patients whose records are in those boxes could have died in the last fifty years. So in order to look through any of these records, you've got
to have special Hippa training. So for many of the families of these former patients, the suspense will be building for a while.
You know, I'm very sensitive about like who gets to see those But they're all together, they're not separated by years. I think I estimated that it would take five years, given our current staffing, to just get everything indexed and separated.
Wayne, though, is one of the lucky ones.
And so finally a month ago, I get a copy of those medical records. So I'm getting closure.
In terms of length.
His grandfather's file fell somewhere in the middle sixty two pages. He'd laid them all out for us to see on his cousin Bill's kitchen counter.
What is legible in them?
Is there anything that you think is like worth.
Sharing with us?
Yeah, I'll share it all with you. What's legible. And some of it wasn't legible until I went through and connected the dots.
These were files from the nineteen thirties. The originals were handwritten by nurses and doctors, and nurses and doctors in a hurry. Add on to that the fact that they were digitized in the earliest days of scanning technology. And you realize Wayne wasn't speaking figuratively when he said connect the dots. Wayne painstakingly went through the records, cross referencing with Laida to figure out medical terms from the era.
And one of the things that is said there at the end of a couple of the reports, like where the nurse said, you know, he had a good day, he had a bad day or whatever. A couple of times they said acted stupid today. There was a clinical term that he just didn't agnrmal today. Most of the days they said he was well they said from the beginning that he causing problem. He was very paranoid. He wouldn't get out of there. He couldn't get out of bed.
And it says large stool, that kind of thing, small stool, visually bad day, restless, and then you get to hear one three bath giving back dress, sleeping, very restless. Sure what that is? Expired? He had a half glass of milk inspired at one on the third.
A man's death noted in the same breath as the sleeping habits. But in spite of the faint writing, the outdated vocabulary, all the things that made these records almost indecipherable, Wayne still got the answer that he needed the most one. It turns out the state had tried to give Wayne's brother back in the seventies.
This is from the hospital to my brother James Teelee. Dear mister Lee, the Medical Record Department has received your letter concerning John Benedict Whitfield. We regret regret that we will not be able to provide a copy of your grandfather's hospital record, as State Statute forty one twenty one ninety seven prohibits release of medical records. However, we can understand your family's concern with the circumstances of your grandfather's death.
The cause of this was peleagra, which is a clinic deficiency syndrome and of course is not an inherited disease. It may be helpful for you to know that the record indicates that JB. Whitfield's father, Joseph Whitfield, died at the age of ninety of old age. It has also stated that there was no history of mental illness in the family. We hope the information would be meaningful to you and your family. Sincerely, Fay Thomas, Medical Record Department.
Cause of death polagra. Like Fay's letter mentioned, it was a nutrient deficiency, not a mental illness. We'll come back to palagra later on. It plays a large role in the old asylum story. As for Wayne, a palagra diagnosis was sweet, sweet relief.
See, I grew up with a little bit of the stigma of they thought your grandfather was crazy. They put him in an insane asylum. You know, was he was?
He not?
Our mom said he wasn't crazy, he was just starving. And so it was great to get the medical records a month ago, which clearly says he has plagra. He had symptoms of that that caused these effects. There was no male illness in the family, and so you know, there's some closure with that.
He sounded relieved on us that he was in there for differently, Okay, Wayne had driven about twelve hours straight from Durham, North Carolina to Jackson, Mississippi, just to speak with us. He wanted to make sure his grandfather's story got told. But then Wayne told us.
His I always knew that my youngest son had some issues. He was a really sweet kid, good kid, but always had a fear that maybe he had inherited something from his mom. He was a teenager, he started developing mintal illness and became homeless when he was like seventeen eighteen.
We lived on the street, off and on. My first wife had mental problems, Her mother had mental problems, her grandmother had mental problems, and one time she kind of threw it up to me, where your grandfather had mental problems?
Like So, anyway, Wayne and his first wife had children together, two boys. When those boys were thirteen and nine years old, Wayne got full custody. It was the end of a rough, brutal divorce.
I knew that she definitely had the mental illness because she would make up all this stuff in her mind, she would believe it. But anyway, I've had to deal with some madal illness.
Things settled down for a while after that, but once Wayne's youngest hit his late teenage years, things took a turn.
He robbed a bank when he was nineteen. So he walked in the bank, handed them a note, said I need eighty five thousand dollars and they laughed and said, yeah, me too. He said, no, I think you might have misunderstood me. I need eighty five thousand dollars. This is a hold up, and I have a weapon. Well he didn't, but anyway, they gave him the money. He went to prison for three and a half years his terrible experience.
When as sun got out, he emerged with a diagnosis paranoid schizophrenia. Wayne learned that his son had been hearing voices since his twenties.
If somebody walked in a room, a lot of times, he would just start laughing and I couldn't figure out what he was laughing about, And I said, what are you laughing about? Oh nothing, And it would just be uncontrollable, and in time, one day it finally came out that like if a woman walked in the room, he said, the voice would say, boy, she has big And so then it made sense that every time we went somewhere in public somebody comes walking up, he just looked and
he'd laugh and he put his head down. And then sometimes he just had to walk out of the room. But he was hearing voices.
The time Wayne's son spent in prison did nothing to help his mental illness.
Prisons are basically to punish, and so he got out. I got him Section eight housing and got him more jobs, but nothing ever lasted. You know, got him medical care, but you can't make somebody take a medication. If they have mental problems. You know, hopefully you can help them, but you can't make them.
Wayne's son went in and out of prison, off then back on to the street. This went on for more than a decade. At the end of it, Wayne's son was killed by another man near his age, also suffering from mental illness.
And when he died, you know, that night it was terrible and I was praying about it, and I couldn't sleep, and I said, God, I said, don't let me go to the dark side. Don't let me be better, help me through this, and I got through it. I had no remorse toward that family, toward the man that did it. I felt sorry for him and his family because it could have been my son. That could have been the other way around. And so that's how I have That's why I guess I have certain feelings about me wellness.
It's because I've moved through it with people. Never in my family other than my son, but with my ex
wife and her family. Illness is a tough thing. But always knew, you know, we had been hearing that Pelegro was involved in it, but I just never got it official until you know, reading all these medical records and just from the research that I had done on Palegro, you know, it said it causes these problems, and yeah, and whether he was or he wasn't, I've never looked at it like, well, that's not a reflection on me. But like you said, it could be traced or passed down.
So when you said that your ex wife used to say, well, you know you have this in your family. Was it in the context of your son that she would say that or.
Yeah? And it's like, yeah, that's.
The past, that's the past.
The past that can be left in the ground or brought back to life that can bring pain or bring comfort, or a mix of both. Wayne's closure doesn't just lie in the diagnosis and how that connects to present and future generations of Wayne's family. That lies in those brief moments in notes the nurses outlined in knowing that the asylum staff, even with their limited resources, had tried to help his grandfather, it showed that this man hadn't been
locked away and forgotten. And what does it mean to have like for somebody who has died, what does it mean for them to have a memorial.
Just acknowledging that that person r relative than that this was their life, This is when they were born and died, and this is where they're lived show in respect.
What is the value if you have died of being acknowledged by the living?
I don't think is there anything for the deceased? Maybe it is, I don't know.
Oh well, It's like Evil Peron when she was dying, they said what is your greatest wish?
And she said, I want to be remembered. I want to be remembered.
That's the reason I'm putting a stone over in this cemetery over here, that it is.
We all want to be remembered for goodness sake.
And I thought, you know, this is the man I never met. You know, I'm not sure about the afterlife, and I'm not sure if he's up in heaven he's cheering me on. But in the last couple of days, I was thinking, you know, maybe he's just there saying, hey, guys, this is my grandson. He's trying to tell the world that we're here and where I am. And I love them for that.
As Southerners were predisposed to make meaning from our histories, probably more than we should. Our regions unwillingness to move on, our tendency to continually valorize the past its offen our Achilles heel. But on a small scale like one cemetery and it's keepers. Maybe holding the past close can help you move on Wherever you believe people go when they're gone, whatever you believe should be done with their remains. What better memorial than to tell their stories, to remember their lives.
So Initially, of course, what brought about this project was the need for UMMC to reclaim the land, but it has turned into more of a commitment. I think to tell these stories, to tell the stories of the descendants, and a lot of people that we're trying to give voice to the patients. Giving voice seems to pushy to me. I think if we are quiet enough and we learn enough about what was going on, we could hear their voices. We don't need to give them voice. The voices are there.
The voices are there, and sometimes the story they tell it's not the one you thought you were going to hear. That's next on under Yazuklay.
I mean my suspicion there is the silence is the response to the shame, and it gets.
Arried down so deep that any kind of scratch of the surface bubbles up this uncontrollable emotional response that then has to be tamped down quickly.
Under Yazuklay 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 Schasson and myself with help from Angela Yee and Amy Machado, with editing and sound design by Morgan Fus and Erica Wong, and thanks to Blue Dot Sessions for music. Special thanks 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.