Threads

And the patients would come out on the front lawn.

But as the city moved that way, they had to bar the poor chests because they became a buggy problem.

Well, they would get out and show out on the lawn and people would stop riding around.

Oh no, no horse than Puggy.

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.

There are a lot of stories too.

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.

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.

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 had lots of people who've come from the community and said, yeah, oh yeah, that was like the place to go.

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.

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 remember that's expression he used. I could hear those poor souls wailing in the asylum.

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, the one out in Whitfield.

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 into this building that was literally condemned by the time the patients moved out.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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, it's pretty self explanatory. But I also wanted to ask you.

Kim is a lot of things to a lot of people. She's a school counselor right now pre k.

Through second grade. They thank you a superstar. Every day you is like walking on a red carpet every day.

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.

Time there's a yes, there is actually a count on the third floor, but.

I mean it's oh really That might be.

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, in which case it doesn't look like they have as

Yeah, welcome out.

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.

My aunt's she swooped in for a hug.

Hello.

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.

One gentleman from the community said, I'm going to walk you home, but let me run out here to get a lamp.

You know, to her great uncle's fashion choices.

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.

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.

Grandmother, right, So do you know about her? Uh? Bits and pieces?

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.

Had four children.

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 lot of her you know, family members uh are buried in the Pilgrim Rest Church cemetery.

Except for her, But I'll get to that.

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.

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.

Kim's grandmother was Jenny's youngest child, not even ten years old yet.

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, 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.

But Kem's great grandfathers and his husband, Monroe, remained devoted. His wife was his wife in sickness or in health.

According to my cousins, my great grandfather would to visit her at least three times.

And that must have been a hard track.

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.

A model TA kind of a car.

Who knows, you know, to think about him getting back and forth three times.

Or he loved her. You can't tell me you didn't love her.

He was if he was determined to visit her three times.

Yeah, he meant to bring her home.

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.

Are you bringing this inning home? And he said, I don't know.

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 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

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 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.

My grandma was being on visiting cemeteries. It was it was a whole thing for.

Them to have the churches to get together and clean the cemetery. You know, mowld the lawn of the cemetery changed out the flowers.

That was the whole thing. That was a day set aside to do that kind of thing.

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.

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.

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.

Now.

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.

But what Twain's are saying.

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.

But they never had it. They never tried to keep it a secret.

It wasn't a secret that she went to Whitfield, as they called it.

It was never they never did.

Never did they, And I will say that, yeah, it wasn't something they tried to had.

They were always very upfront about it.

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, never even knew there was an old asylum in Jackson.

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.

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, but Zenny hadn't vanished. She was closer than anyone knew.

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.

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 episode two that pr road show that the Asylum Hill project went on the one where they spoken rotary clubs and put out newspaper.

Adds, I see an ad in the Carthaginian, which is our local newspaper, and it mentioned that the following people were.

Believed to have been buried.

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.

You have a watch roots. You know how Alex Halen.

When he made it to Africa and he went to the he went.

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.

I found him, and I let my family know, you know, and you know the whole you know.

It was like, oh my go I told Mama first. I told her.

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 think that, to see her name in print, to know that,

There, no nothing.

What is it about connecting like these dots?

What what does it as the person who's still alive today?

Like what does it give you? And for lack of a better word, completeness.

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, 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.

This is what this is? This it it it It feels me.

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, 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.

Come has something a lot of other descendants have been looking for. She can just about point to the spot where Zenny is buried.

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, was a sense of there she is, or we can go out there and visit her when we would like to, or drive by.

They did not have that sense at all. They never knew where she was.

So come checks in with her. She fills Anny in on what's become of her family.

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.

They were loved in the way that you will want them to be loved. We did not ever forget about you.

You always loved, you always missed. We just did not forget. But now we have found.

You come as the poster child for what the Asylum Hell Project is hoping to pull off.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

I think I estimated that it would take five years, given our current staffing, to just get everything indexed and separated.

And of course the cemetery excavations, the process of removing the remains to make space for the medical center's expansion.

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, seven thousand graves.

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 line between being taken care of, treated like a burden. It's hard not to worry that what these former patients are,

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.

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, 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

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.

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.

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 with the fabric of the city.

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.

They just don't.

They just don't, you know, And I don't try to explain it there.

But it's a fascinating thing.

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.

The asylum has for me.

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 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.

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.

More to you.

And so I'm sure he's there with my granddad saying where to go.

Brother.

I just burst into tears. I really didn't expect to do that.

I hadn't even gotten into it.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing is done. None of it is finished. The family story goes on because the family does a little more whole than before.

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.

If you have any standing in the state of Mississippi. Part of your work is writing wrongs. There are many for this.

Project.

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 that we're collecting.

Now.

Are there things that could have been done differently and we want to both acknowledge and learn from those.

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. At the Mississippi Museum of Art, Noah's exhibit was up for nearly six months. Visitors came through, sat with the work,

Okay, so y'all this thread right here, I try to go over.

It's not a big deal.

Then oh, I try to go over this and ideally.

Out under the other one on its own.

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.

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.

Like I was saying, you can make the end sort of come.

To about this point perfect, that'll be fine, and then let your foot off.

It was a loom four feet wide, maybe a bit taller.

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.

Like where'd you get it?

But looms are like that.

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.

It beat it down, okay, or we'll get this out.

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.

Yeah.

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.

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, from the weavers down to the pattern Emily's embedded within the loom.

The warp is the vertical threads that.

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.

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 they alternate with each other represent actual data about the people who once lived at the asylum, their race, their gender.

Yeah, do so right over here, I reference these by any reports of who die. And they separate all of.

This explains it it basically does.

They separated it by male.

And female and white and population of color.

Okay, so I separated it. And here like.

That, every single vertical thread represents four patients. A black thread signals a new year.

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.

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 up the loom, but the horizontal patterns those up.

To the weaver.

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.

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.

Crazy or abstract as they want.

So hopefully.

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.

Things to many people.

I hope everyone will come and have an experience with it.

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 burial shroud, much like the ones the patients themselves were buried on, sometimes with too many safety pins.

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.

You know, a lot of comfort in knowing the ephemeral like of my mistakes and otherwise.

But just you know, I just find that to.

Be comforting that I'm just this little part of a bigger story, you know, a huge story.

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 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, a cemetery was laid into this clay. At an asylum

They added it to.

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. 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. It's like I said at the beginning, Yazoo clay is