March 20, 2025 • 59 mins
Growing up, all Noah Saterstrom knew about his great grandfather was that he had been an optometrist. Those were the only words his grandmother could say about him before she’d start crying. Later, Noah discovers that the reason his family had erased this man was that he’d been sent to the state lunatic asylum. Noah decides to break the generations of silence with a show about his grandfather’s mental illness at the Mississippi Museum of Art titled “What Happened to Dr. Smith.”
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
In the South, we're big fans of parables. There's something
comforting and knowing how a story will be told, knowing
the paths and the endings of all the characters. Family
stories aren't all that different. With each telling, the beats
of the story get etched into the family history. But
(00:32):
what about when someone decides to buck tradition. What if
someone wants to tell one of those stories differently.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Dunstan was a blacksmith and he was in his blacksmith
shop and write at closing time, an old man shows
up at his shop and says, can you make me
a chalice? So he starts pounding away at his anville,
and as he's doing that, he sees this old man,
out of the corner of his eyes, start to rapidly
(01:03):
change form. And he's an old man. Now he's a
young girl. Now he's an old man again. Now he's
a beautiful woman. Now he's a young boy. And he
knows instantly that that's the devil. And so he while
he's hammering away, he just sort of without missing a beat,
he puts his tongs into the furnace, and then when
he sees them get red hot, he grabs them and
(01:24):
then grabs the devil by the nose with the tongs,
who then instantly changes back into an old man and
runs out of the blacksmith shop, saying, the blacksmith just
attack me.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I'm hearing the story of Dunstan and the Devil from
Noah Saderstrom. He's the artist whose paintings about his great
grandfather were the focus of a major show at the
Mississippi Museum of Art. It's a Saturday in April, the
morning after the show's opening. He's energetic today as he
walks me through his work, one hundred and eighty three
canvases that tell the story of his great grandfather, doctor
(02:00):
David L. Smith. We're talking about Dunstan because the parable
also makes an appearance in one of these paintings. Right
there in the center, there are two men in a tussle.
One goes to the other's face with a red hot
pair of tongs. And Noah's story of Dunstan. The saint
tangles with the devil and the experience puts him at
(02:20):
odds with his community. And that sounded like a story
he was familiar with, that of doctor Smith, the one
whose own perception of reality was so different from his
communities that he had to be sent away to the
Mississippi State Asylum.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
That story, next to the Doctor Smith's story, that seems
like a problem that Dunstan was having it.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
I'd never heard of Saint Dunstan before Noah, but after
the opening I started seeing references to him everywhere, including
on the back of a bottle of whiskey that was
fire spiced. Get it. But the story there and another
is a little different. In those versions, doubt doesn't seem
(03:05):
to play as big a role. The townspeople are glad
he ran the devil out. That's the thing with stories.
The takeaway is up for interpretation. At a certain point,
the stories become more a product of the person telling
them than the people in them. Of course, not everything
that happens becomes a story. Sometimes a thing is too
(03:27):
mundane to even remember, and sometimes it's so painful that
generation after generation works to bury it. So what happens
when one of those generations decides to unearth that story.
I'm Larison Campbell and this is under Yazoo Clay A
(03:49):
quick heads up. This episode contains mentions of sexual assault.
Noah is the first person to admit if it were
up to certain members of his face family, and not
the curators of the Mississippi Museum of Art, the show
would never have gone up. Noah's closest link to his
great grandfather, that is, the only person he ever met
(04:11):
who actually knew doctor Smith was his own grandmother, Margaret,
who died in twenty fourteen. She was doctor Smith's oldest child.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
The grandmother that I knew would be absolutely horrified that
we were even having this conversation.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
I think she'd be really torn. And she loved Noah
so much. She surrounded her room in the assisted living
facility with Noah's paintings on every wall, and yet the
very idea that this whole story is public. I don't
know if she could have studied. I'm Anna Sadistrom. I'm
(04:48):
the mother of the artist and the granddaughter of the
person of interest here, doctor Smith.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Anna's mother, Margaret, was doctor Smith's daughter. He was sent
to the asylum when Margaret was still a little girl.
His insanity trial was a big deal. Newspapers covered it,
but Anna knew none of this because her family decided
to never speak of him again.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
I don't remember at what age I realized that I
didn't know anything about my grandfather, because she would talk
about her mother quite a bit. She would tell me about,
you know, what she did, and how they went to
movies together, and how she made her clothes and everything.
She never mentioned her father. And when I asked about
(05:34):
my grandfather, she said he lost his memory and went away,
and so I thought, maybe somebody will direct him back
home sometime.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
I don't know if lost his memory is an old
euphemism for mental illness, Lord knows the South has lots
of those. But there's a heartbreaking irony here. The family's
explanation for doctor Smith's absence, for their silence, is that
he's the one who doesn't remember them, which is all
to say that there was something incredibly moving about this show,
(06:09):
about seeing a man who'd been intentionally erased be given
the floor, or rather the walls. Noah's show had taken
over more than a third of the museum's square footage.
There's the one hundred and twenty two linear feet of
panoramic painting, yes, but there was also a giant hallway
(06:29):
lined with artifacts from doctor Smith's life, photos, letters he'd
exchanged with his wife Ethel, even the beat up leather
satchel he'd used to carry his optometry supplies and a
pair of his signature round wireframed spectacles, not unlike the
ones Noah's got on off the hallway of Doctor Smith's artifacts.
(06:52):
The museum was airing a short documentary about Noah's research
and process, and over the course of a week, they
hosted a series of panel discussions that went beyond Noah
and Doctor Smith. Topics range from the Asylum Hill project
to archival ethics to ideas about memory and generational trauma.
You know when a little kid tries to keep a
(07:13):
secret and finally they're allowed to blurt it out and
the words just don't stop. It felt like that, like
an easing of conscience for this whole community. So what
compelled Noah to spend years telling the story of a
man he was always told never to mention? To understand
that we're going to have to skip twenty five years
(07:35):
back and a whole continent away. Noah and I started
talking about his show almost a year before it went up.
We'd go back and forth, his telling me how the
painting was going, my prying about any new findings he
had about Doctor Smith. But in one of our talks
he let me in on a part of his own story,
(07:56):
one that changed everything. It's two thousand and one. Noah's
in a high level graduate program at the Glasgow School
of Art in Scotland. He was married and it wasn't
going well. It's in this moment of intense stress that
he wakes up one night in the pitch black to
(08:18):
a horrible realization.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
All of my memories felt like they were planted and fake,
and that I hadn't existed until that moment, and everyone
else was convinced that my memories were real, that I
was the only one who knew that they were not.
I mean, it was deeply, deeply frightening, and it lasted
for much longer than I would have wanted it to.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
For nearly six months. This was his everyday reality, a
kind of mental break. He was experiencing. Has a diagnosis,
the personalization disorder.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
It was NonStop. It wasn't like I'm having this weird
feeling like oh, I just woke up into reality that
I realized I'm not real and my memories aren't real.
They've been They've been crafted and presented to my brain
as real, but they're not.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
He took a leave from his painting program and went
home to his parents. He started thumbing through old family
photo albums, hoping they'd trigger a reconnection between his memories
and reality. After a while, he started to paint the photos,
repossessing them in a way. It was in the midst
(09:36):
of all this when his great grandfather's absence really struck him.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
When I was having my breakdown in two thousand and one,
if I had the full context of his experience, it's
hard to say I would have been more afraid, because
I don't think I could have been more afraid than
I was. It would have been it would have given
me something to kind of puld onto, you know, instead
of like either your normal or there's the abyss. There's
(10:03):
like normal people and then there's the abyss. Whereas following
doctor Smith's life, he enters the Old Asylum in nineteen
twenty five and he lives for forty years beyond that,
and he wasn't.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
In the Abyss when he got started on this project,
Noah didn't have much to go on. It's not easy
to dig up a story that's meant to be forgotten,
a story that more than one person has taken pains
to bury. But some pieces had survived. His great grandmother,
Ethel had saved a wooden box. Inside was nearly every
(10:41):
letter she'd written during the early years of her marriage
to doctor Smith.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
I know what she had for lunch every day that year.
You know every movie she saw, every interaction she had
with her parents. It's all very like young family.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
If doctor Smith and Ethel kept in touch after he
went into the asside, she didn't save those letters. So
Noah turned to a different repository of memory, the state Archives.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
I found a doctor Smith's name in the ledger book
from the Old Asylum, which was this giant leatherbound book
that said Mississippi and Saint Hospital B on the spine.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Finally confirmation, but not much else. Fortunately that was about
to change. At Noah's next stop, a downtown gallery, a
man buying a painting overheard him telling his great grandfather's
story and introduced himself. It was Stephen Parks, the state librarian. Okay,
(11:43):
small cities have big perks, and so a couple.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Of weeks later, I'm back in Nashville and I get
a text from Stephen and saying start sending you stuff.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
And I was show advertisements for doctor Smith's optician practice, meeting,
notes from the State Board of Opticians, where doctor Smith
held a seat, newspaper articles about his engagement, his practice,
and later his very public breakdown. With every document, Noah
became more inspired. A picture of a man was taking
(12:16):
shape in his head, and then on canvas. He began
painting vignettes of what he read. But as much as
this work has brought doctor Smith back to life, I'm
not sure it's brought him back into the family. There's
a formality in the way that Noah talks about him.
(12:37):
Why do you refer to him as doctor Smith.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Uh, that's a good question one that like, I started
referring to him as doctor Smith because that's what all
of his optometry advertisements referred to him as. But I
didn't realize at the beginning that he referred to himself
as doctor Smith. Smith is such a common name, and
(13:03):
he'd just get lost in like doctor Smith, there's no
first name, you know, it's just doctor and Smith. He
became a kind of iconic figure in my imagination from
his name.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Doctor Smith's not a paupa or even grandfather. Familial names
implied that their owner is just that a member of
the family. Someone had pruned his branch from the family tree.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
That image of a blackboard, or you erase everything on
the blackboard with the little bits of information left. I
feel like that's what I got from my mother growing up.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
You remember Noah's mom, Anna. She'd learned early on that
her own mother, Margaret, didn't like to talk about Anna's grandfather.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
I would just say a silence, absence, this is just
not where we go. And then when I got older
and added started ask in a little deeper questions, she
would shut down right away. And if I got a
little too insistent, she would get either snappish or she
(14:10):
would tear up and say, I'm not gonna talk about it.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Anna tried to figure things out anyway.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
My mother said that anytime she and her sister were
together and their voices dropped, I'd show up. But if
there was gonna be a good story, they were gonna
lower their voices.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
And so for Noah, it's not just about understanding this man,
but about understanding just why exactly his family worked so
hard to erase him. There was shame about mental illness,
but was that the whole story? That afternoon at the museum,
(15:05):
one of the Southeast legendary spring thunderstorms rolled in as
Noah walked me through his paintings. We'll start of the
first in the first section of the panels.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
It starts with a shadow of an unknown figure, which
may be me or maybe Doctor Smith himself, or it
could be Doctor Smith's father is on the other side
of the wall of the room where doctor Smith is
being born. There's a vertical diptych kind of design. Motifs
(15:37):
are basically throughout.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
In many ways, it's a visual biography of doctor Smith's
life from birth to burial. Doctor Smith was raised in
Louisiana by a single mother, and he put himself through
optometry school. One of doctor Smith's earliest patients was a
man named Gerard Brandon, a lawyer who loomed large in
(15:59):
the Natchet social scene. More importantly, Gerard had a beautiful daughter, Ethel.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
He met Ethel Brandon, I believe because he was making
glasses for her father, and they pretty quickly started dating
and they were married the following year.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
The young couple moved up the river to Vicksburg. They
were happy. These were the years when Ethel would write
to her family about how she and her husband teased
each other, but even in the rosy glow of young love.
Noah's great grandfather may have had his own secrets that
he kept from his wife.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
He referred to having audio hallucinations for his whole life
and that they never bothered him, but they were always
there and very rarely did they make him do something
he didn't want to do. But he could have been
a fully functioning professional optometrist while being schizophrenic at the
same time.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
For years, being a fully functioning professional optometrist looked a
little different. In the South of the nineteen twenties, there
wasn't quite enough business for a brick and mortar shop,
so doctor Smith took his services on the road.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
While all this is going on and he's actively having delusions,
he starts to develop this very elaborate optical truck that,
by all accounts was a very highly functioning invention. They
check all the eyes for free, and then if only
if somebody needed glasses, he would be able to grind
the lenses on the spot. Do you know, fit the
(17:31):
glasses and everything, which would have been i mean, driving
around rural Mississippi in that in the nineteen twenties. You know,
it's hard to imagine.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
It was cutting edge, the talk of the town wherever
he went. He even got it patented. Doctor Smith and
Ethel had four kids. He might have been away much
of the time, but it was clear as kids loved
him and he loved them. Noah's mother told us a
story about how her own Margaret, kept a pair of
(18:01):
glasses he'd made for her as a child. She didn't
need them, she just liked them, and so he made
them for her. Noah's work devotes a good bit of
square footage to this period of doctor Smith's life, his
optometry truck, rural Mississippi and Louisiana images of a growing family.
(18:23):
In one part, he stands in a white shirt and vest,
facing left towards his past, as the reflection of the
sun makes his glasses opaque. In the distance behind him
a small child, a carriage, and a loose, barely discernible
sketch resembling a woman in the story of doctor Smith's life,
(18:45):
As his madness takes up more and more of the foreground,
something someone fades to the back his family, So.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Then the timeline splits again, and then you've got Margaret,
my grandmother, and Ethel back on the top. And then
that's when he enters the old Asylum.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
At this point, a gaggle of museum goers had started
trailing behind us, listening. Noah pointed to a square near
the top. Everyone leaned in, hands behind their back, doing
that polite museum squint. The image he pointed out as small. Well,
in the context of this massive painting, just one two
by two foot square. There's a neat white house.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
According to one of the only stories that I knew
growing up, grandmother and them were living in Shreveport, destitute.
Doctor Smith was not around at all, totally lost in psychosis.
Ethel and the kids there were four kids at this point,
the youngest being an infant. We're all sitting in poverty
(19:48):
in a house with no food, no resources, nothing.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
After Noah's walked through, my producer and I tucked ourselves
away in a museum office with Noah, his sister Jessica,
and his mom Anna. Remember this project wasn't just academic.
This was Noah's great grandfather, a man whose absence festered
in the family he left behind, especially for Noah's grandmother.
(20:14):
Anna's mother Margaret, and.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
She's the only one of their four children who had
an active memory of her father. But my mother was
seven when it happened, and she said she spent the
next several years sitting on the brick wall out front,
waiting for her father to come get her, because nobody
told her that he wasn't going to come. And I
(20:41):
think she carried the trauma of his loss throughout her life.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
After doctor Smith's breakdown, his wife and children didn't stay
in that neat white house. His father in law, Gerard,
arrived and wisked the family back home to Natchez. Gerard's
home was a quiet one. That Victorian sensibility of children
should be seen and not heard applied to everyone. A
house of decorum was in some ways the perfect antidote
(21:11):
to the chaotic last years with doctor Smith. But a
house of decorum isn't a place where you could ask questions.
For the first year after doctor Smith was gone, a
photograph of him remained on the mantle at her grandparents.
Margaret often stared at it. It was all she had
of her dad.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
She was caught staring at his photograph on the mantle,
and the next day it was gone.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Margaret grew up had children of her own. Gerard Brandon's
decorum no outbursts, no questions, no curiosity, found a place
in her home with her children. Gerard took his place
as a titan, and the family mythos. Here's Anna again,
Noah's mother. I was very young.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
I sort of had him confused with God. You know,
he was the sweet old man who had all the power.
I never saw him angry. I never heard him say
raise a voice or say anything unkind.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
But she never saw joy either, no outburst of any kind.
In fact, her mother, Margaret, saw.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
To that composure was of absolute value. Poise, elegance, and properness.
Speaker 4 (22:31):
Grandmother was a quintessential Southern bell in my memory.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
Yeah, she had an elegance and a presence about her.
She was a beautiful woman, and when she entered a room,
everybody was aware of it. She was.
Speaker 5 (22:47):
A power source in.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
My life, and yet she wasn't. You didn't want to
be judged by that, that power source.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
For a family interested less in the real world than
in their own created reality, perhaps there was no better
community than Natchez, Mississippi. This small town of a few
thousand sits on a bluff overlooking the river. Before the
Civil War, it was home to more millionaires per capita
than any other in the United States, because it was
(23:22):
also home to the country's second largest slave market. Many
of those grand homes still stand, although the area is
now among the poorest in the country. Regardless of present circumstances,
this ideal of Confederate glory still shapes the way residents talk.
The writer Richard Grant has this quote in Natches, you
(23:43):
only use the word home if it's antebellum. If your
house was built after the Civil War, it's trashy to
call it a home. Still, even in Natches, people build
new houses. They buck tradition. There were times Noah's grandmother
let her tried and true composure slide, but it was
(24:06):
so rare. Both he and his sister Jessica remember each one.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
I remember you telling me about it, do you.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:16):
I was in high school and it seemed like, wow,
it was such a mystery in the family. I had
no idea.
Speaker 5 (24:23):
And then not long after I asked grandmother about her father,
and I said, some didn't like I don't tell me
about your father.
Speaker 4 (24:33):
And grandmother looked surprised, and she said he was an optometrist,
and then her eyes filled up with tears, and then
everything shut down, and then it was just back to
the silence.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Exactly what happened when I asked her that they tell
me about him? What can you say about him? He
was an optometrist. Immediately tears just filling up, and then
just kind of silence while she turned the page and
started talking about something else. And that instant, involuntary well
of emotion after ninety years, she was seven when he left,
(25:12):
and she was in her nineties when this happened, and
that being the only trigger that I had ever seen
of that kind of emotion, completely instant and involuntary, was
such a sign that there's so much there un processed,
that she lived with for her whole life, and that
(25:33):
she unwillingly not meaning to, was teaching us like, this
is what we do, your.
Speaker 5 (25:41):
Places deep down inside you, and if you violate that,
you're going to feel bad about yourself.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Yeah, that's where the shame comes in. You just had
an emotional outburst. I mean my suspicion there is. The
silence is the response to the shame, and it's so
much padding. You don't ever get the shame. The shame
doesn't make it to the surface. We don't see the shame,
but we see the effects of the shame, and it.
Speaker 5 (26:08):
Gets buried down so deep that any kind of scratch
of the surface bubbles up this uncontrollable emotional response that.
Speaker 4 (26:21):
Then has to be tamped down quick.
Speaker 5 (26:24):
Yeah, and then everybody just stopped talking about it because
something got awkward.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
So back to the silence.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
You can hear even in how these three talk to
one another. They've put in the work to build relationships
founded on sincerity and honesty, not shame and silence. But
anyone with a family nose, it's hard to break patterns,
even when you want to. The thing is, it wasn't
(26:55):
just Noah's breakdown that harkened back to his great grandfather's generation.
It's how he talked about it, or how he didn't.
Noah's breakdown was in two thousand and one, and his grandmother, Margaret,
lived until twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
The episode of depersonalization I had and not being able
to know what the where I am in reality was
so horrifying to me and night marish, and I could
not There was no way out of it, and no
one else seemed to be able to tell.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
How may I ask? How she responded?
Speaker 4 (27:39):
I'm sure we never took no.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
She never knew. She never knew that I barely talked
to them about it. I don't know that I really
talked to everything about.
Speaker 4 (27:48):
It, know about it until the New York Times, until
I tell you, we have broken this pattern.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
For more than two decades now. His only sibling didn't know.
He spent six months unsure if his life was even real.
The tight lipt ethos ran so deep that Noah didn't
even realize he was carrying it out.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
I didn't know I was doing that to myself until
I let doctor Smith out of the Genie bottle. And
then the only way to do that was to like
be totally open and honest. And then all of a sudden,
it's like, wait a minute, I've got this thing that's
now out that I've been trying to keep to it.
I didn't even know that I was doing that. Not
(28:33):
that I wasn't talking about it because I was ashamed
of it, but I was afraid that if I talked
about it, I would call it back into my life
like a specter, like a monster, which you know, is
maybe more what grandmother was experiencing, not the shame, but
the like if I say his name, the monster is
going to come back to my life.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
I'm going to experience all that pain all over again.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
And when I still when that occurred to me and
I started talking about it out loud and thinking about it,
the amount of energy that it took to hold down
stuff requires not just the energy of holding it down,
but it requires this whole system of holding all these
other things in place to make sure that you don't
(29:19):
feel this or that or you know. And now everybody
has to remain calm and not talk about anything because
you don't know where if it's going to start to
blow out, and then you're going to lose control of everything.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Noah's grandmother, Margaret, spent that energy, kept that tight hold
for better or worse, all her life. Her family thinks
Noah's exhibit would have caused her a world of conflict.
If she'd love to see it, maybe there's a way
it could have offered solace for her too.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
And this is her shawl.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
I've brought it with me for the weekend to have
her here in hopes that there's some healing for her
in it somewhere, because I think it was a trauma
she took she head through her whole life and I'm sorry,
and I wish that she had had a different relationship
(30:15):
with this story.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Stephen King has this great quote, nothing is so frightening
as what's behind the closed door. It reminds me of
what Noah was saying about his breakdown, that maybe if
he'd known more about his great grandfather, he would have
been less afraid for himself. No one worries about monsters
in a brightly lit room. And then two weeks before
(30:42):
the show went up, just as Noah was shipping paintings
from his Nashville studio down to the museum in Jackson,
someone cut on the lights, so to speak.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Probably like seven tenths of this painting exists of the
details that were known until he entered state custody, and
then it goes dark, which is another forty years of
his life. And it took about seven years to find
all that. But then just last week, as medical records emerge,
(31:15):
that's going to give life to that whole rest of
his life, which is more than half of his existence.
He doesn't have to be a saintly character, you do.
I mean, I don't know, and so you know, I'm
not absolving him the whole things, but you don't have
to be absolved the whole thing. You know, we can't
(31:38):
be the requirement in life.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
That's next on under Yazuclay. 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
(32:02):
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 MS Museum Art dot org. That's MS Museum Art
(32:24):
dot org. Noah's family story is in many ways a
classic Southern situation, a white, well to do family working
overtime to hide their secrets. His transgression is against his
family's unspoken agreement this.
Speaker 5 (32:42):
Is not where we go.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
But there's another side to the classic Southern coin, another
implicit agreement to avoid the unspeakable. Doctor Elizabeth West is
a professor of English and Africana Studies at Georgia State University.
For her, the broken branch on the family tree was
her own grandfather. In this case, he'd removed himself. He
(33:05):
left the family when her mom was growing up. But
the reason for this went even further back in the
family history to her grandfather's uncle.
Speaker 6 (33:14):
Hillman Human revealed a history of my grandfather that I
had I had no knowledge of. There was a very
tense relationship between my grandfather and his ten children.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
The generations before that weren't much clearer. A few years ago,
she took the ancestry records her aunt had mapped out
by hand and began to digitize them, and the reason
her family didn't talk about its history became clear.
Speaker 6 (33:47):
Once it got past my grandfather's father, I was like, Wow,
these people were enslaved, and I just can't believe that.
I didn't think about it ever until that point, you know.
I mean, you talk about it in the abstract, But
once you put a name on a piece of paper
(34:08):
and you realize you're connected to that name and that
name is connected to this history, then you just you know,
then you're in.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
And she learned something else. Her great great uncle, Hillman
Cistrunk died in a different kind of confinement the Mississippi
State Asylum.
Speaker 6 (34:28):
Actually, I had no knowledge of him up until about
I don't know, five years ago.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Through careful interrogation of historical records, tax filings, census interviews,
doctor West filled in the picture of Hillman's Cistrunks life.
He was born in Georgia into slavery in the mid
eighteen fifties. The man who'd enslaved Hillman moved the whole
operation to Mississippi and that's where they stayed as the
(35:00):
Civil War raged on. Once the word ended and the
Emancipation Proclamation finally was put into effect, Hillman and his
family were free, so they settled near where they'd been
and what followed was an incredible tale of community resilience
and grit.
Speaker 6 (35:20):
He and my direct ancestor, Shadrick, who was his brother,
they the family farmed in the immediate aftermath of the war,
and right at the close of reconstruction, they actually bought
land and they worked that land for not quite twenty years,
(35:45):
because I think it was around nineteen hundred or a
little before when they paid off the mortgage on the
land and owned it outright.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
These were two land owning black men in the post
war South life was not easy.
Speaker 6 (36:01):
It was not typical blacks in the aftermath of the war.
Most of them ended up in a system that was
not very different from slavery. They ended up leasing their
labor to white farmers. So Human and Shadwick were an
(36:22):
anomaly in that sense.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Holding onto their land wasn't easy either. Legitimate support systems
were for white farmers.
Speaker 6 (36:31):
Hillman and his brother Shadwick had had dealings with this
pretty wealthy person in the area. If he didn't have
a brig building, he'd probably be called a loan shark.
But you know, loan sharks with big buildings are called businessmen.
And you look at the records and you see the
possessions that they are essentially laying on the table to
(36:53):
be able to make this loan for yet another year.
You know, a cow named Bessie. It's comparable to howk
in your car, And so it's just this grind year
after year.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
There was the grind, but doctor West could clearly see
for Hillman and his family his community, there was also
the striving for more.
Speaker 6 (37:21):
The record showed this concerted commitment to people in the
community to learn to read and write. And then you
see the records of parents and then people like Hillmen
who weren't parents, making sure that young black children were
getting registered for school. What I began to see out
(37:43):
of this is just this amazing dynamic community, first generation
free black people in a way that just doesn't get recorded.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
When Hellman's in his sixties, his wife passes away, he remarries,
and then Hellman gets.
Speaker 6 (38:03):
Sick, and then there's a white physician who comes in
and signs off, and he's admitted to the asylum from
what I can tell, in that January of nineteen twenty,
and he dies in March of that year.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Hillman's cause of death was listed as nephritis or kidney inflammation,
one of the last symptoms once the disease is most
severe dementia, a mental manifestation of the physical malady. After
Hillman's death, land disputes kickoff. The family is split into factions.
This is the era doctor West's grandfather grew up in.
(38:47):
In nineteen twenty, the year of Hillman's death, Doctor West's
grandfather leaves everything behind his family, the land he's helped work,
his home.
Speaker 6 (38:57):
Human revealed a history of my grandfather that I had
had no knowledge of, and so as a teenager, a
young boy up through his teens, these had been the
men who had shaped him, and they were land owning men.
And in his teenage years, these were the years that
(39:22):
Human and Chadrick both essentially got stripped of their land
and died. And after understanding the life his life, I
understand a lot better the kind of bitterness and disappointment
he lived with to go from the kind of childhood
(39:43):
he had remembered. I mean, they were a struggling farm family,
but they owned what they owned, they owned.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
What they worked.
Speaker 6 (39:52):
And he witnessed, you know, real time, this family being
stripped of everything. And as an eighteen twenty year old kid,
we might call him a man, but you know, he's
a kid. And he goes to Jasper, tries to find
work in a factory and Mary's, and ends up raising
(40:18):
his family as a sharecropper.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Exactly what Hellman and Shadwick didn't want for their family.
Speaker 6 (40:26):
And sometime in the nineteen forties, I'm told, you know,
he tried to convince my grandmother that they should leave,
and she didn't want to leave, and he left.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Doctor West could never wrap her head around why her
grandfather would leave his wife and ten children behind. She'd
heard that he provided made sure his family got fed,
but that was when he was there. Learning the story
of the loss and trauma he weathered at his teenage years,
that all made sense. So she took these stories back
(40:59):
to her family.
Speaker 6 (41:00):
After I was introduced to this history, I started asking
older members of my family if they knew anything about
these people. And it was just like a Eureka moment.
I remember one of the older members in my family,
very casually, she said, oh, yeah, I remember that story.
(41:22):
For many of us, you know, we are told to
just look forward. There's no point in, you know, in
looking back. I think when I share these stories, there's
there's just a lot of silence, you know, cause what
can you say. It's a lot to take in.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Doctor West was introduced to Hellman at the end of
his life, a particularly painful episode in a life with
plenty of them.
Speaker 6 (41:51):
For me, finding Himan at at the asylum was the beginning.
And you know, I have this sense of sadness when
I think that there was seven decades that he lived
and did these fantastic things, and that in three months
this was the end. But I also feel that finding
(42:16):
him wherever I found him, was more important than the place.
The story I discovered that I was able to build
out from meeting him at the asylum far out weighs
even the pain I think about that, you know, he
(42:36):
very likely suffered in the last three months of his life.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
And now with all the context, all the insight, how
does she feel towards Hillman?
Speaker 6 (42:52):
To put it just, I guess, in a simple word,
just a lot of love, you know. I mean, he
could have been very selfish, and from what I see
of him in the record, he was anything but that.
When you look at what in particular blacks in the
(43:14):
South were experiencing during that era. Yeah, yeah, you know,
I mean seventy six and quite frankly, for many black
people even in the twenty first century, is quite an
age to live to. So, you know, when I think
about it, it's just, you know, it's mind boggling to
think all of this front end of his life gets
(43:39):
capped by you know, three months in the asylum and
almost into obscurity.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Almost into obscurity. The end of Hillman's life stands out,
but the work that doctor West did ensures that it
doesn't define the man. It allowed her to paint a
fuller picture. It's not all that different for Noah. For decades,
all he knew about Doctor Smith was a headlinesworth. He
was sent to the State Asylum. But Noah's careful not
(44:11):
to let this part of doctor Smith's life become Doctor
Smith's life. The first time I walked into the room
that held Noah's paintings, I tried to just stand back
and take it all in at once. That was a mistake.
As soon as you start to break it down with
your eyes, you realize you can't. Noah deliberately refused to
(44:37):
set boundaries. Scenes flow into each other, like the flow
to life. The courtroom where doctor Smith had his insanity
hearing bleeds into our first view of the old asylum.
Hold the last canvas up to the first one, and
now it's one painting the brick from the house where
doctor Smith was born in eighteen ninety one matches the
(44:58):
brick at the State Hospital cemetery where he's buried. There's
a loose impressionistic feel to many of the paintings. One
person is painted in careful detail, while the figure two
canvas is over is a blur. In a way, It's
a peak behind the curtain. I'll look at how the
artist understands each part of the story, and the craziest part.
(45:21):
Noah says, this one hundred and eighty three canvas painting,
a work that inspired the creation of an entire room
in a museum, dozens of panel discussions, and even a
New York Times article, isn't finished. I mean it is
in the sense that it's ready to show, but not
in the sense that he'll never lay a paintbrush on
(45:42):
it again.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
When it comes to like deciphering what's real and what
isn't about not only his accounts but people's accounts of him,
it's like very it's very shifting all the time.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
Two weeks before we sat down, it shifted dramatically this one.
Noah finally got his great grandfather's medical records, including a
remarkably thorough intake interview in which, over several pages, doctor
Smith tells his whole life story.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
And it just seems like all the slack has been
let out and he is now in the asylum, and
he's just like it's all just he's writing letters to
people and there's not any need to keep it buttoned in.
He's writing letters like crazy that they're.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
Just all over the place, and somebody's given him stamps, Let.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Me give him letters.
Speaker 5 (46:37):
He did.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
One of these letters is written on letterhead that he
made because he worked in the print department, so he
worked the letter press, so he made letterhead David Doctor
David Smith, Bondar, Insissippi Hospital for his strained patient.
Speaker 5 (46:50):
I feel like it gives me a much better view
of the man, the person behind the.
Speaker 4 (47:00):
Legend in our family.
Speaker 5 (47:02):
You know, he's been this figure of mystery, but hearing
these kind of personal details, it sounds like he was
a gentle person.
Speaker 3 (47:13):
He seems very pleasant. I mean, maybe that explains why
Mama was so hurt by his loss. She loved him,
and he loved her enough to make her those classes
because she wanted some. And it must have been a
good feeling relationship, or she wouldn't have been so traumatized
(47:36):
by it. If he had been an ogre or dangerous
or hateful, or had done harmful things to her mother,
she wouldn't have suffered his loss the way she did.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
But there's of course a caveat. Noah can't be sure
if parts of doctor Smith's autobiography are based on delusions
and anything.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
And I thought I understood, you know, I have to
make sure that I'm not getting fixed on that, because
who's even real and who isn't. I've kept thinking about
like those like plenario worms. You can like their microscopic
and you could chop them in half and each one
will grow the rest of its body, you know. So
it's like any of this could just be locked off
(48:21):
and then just paint a whole new Like his autobiography,
He's like, this is what happened my entire childhood. Until
I was in my mid twenties, I didn't have any
of that information before.
Speaker 1 (48:31):
But having this information means that Noah may eventually replace
some of these canvases or repaint details. So it's likely
this is the only time this version of Noah's work
will be shown. You know.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
It's like constantly growing and reinterpreting, you know, the sacred
text of some kind. You know, you have to keep
reinterpreting and interpreting, interpreting.
Speaker 1 (48:57):
By the time the show opened, Noah and I have
been talking about his work for almost a year. Probably
another reason it was so overwhelming. There's always that cognitive
dissonance when you finally see something you've spent forever imagining.
But there was one part that threw me. It's right
in the middle, canvas number ninety two, in fact, out
(49:18):
of one hundred and eighty three. I turned to Noah,
It's funny. When I look at it, I feel like
the part that my eye tends to go to the
most is that right there. It's two men in dress
shirts and trousers. One also wears an apron, and it
appears he's grabbing the other man's nose with pliers. This
(49:40):
is how Noah came to tell me the story of
Saint Dunstan.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
And he knows instantly that that's the devil.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
As Noah explained, this is the moment of his great
grandfather's unraveling, the moment that the community decides his reality
didn't match theirs. Doctor Smith wasn't sent away just because
he'd been having delusions. He was sent away because he
was accused of a crime.
Speaker 2 (50:13):
So Doctor Smith had started to lose it and could
not really keep himself together, and he had moved his
family to Louisiana. But then to keep his business going,
he was still traveling around, and he traveled to Mississippi
to Port Gibson to check eyes.
Speaker 1 (50:32):
This was using the mobile optometry truck he'd patented. Doctor
Smith would place a notice in a newspaper and a
few days later he'd show up in that small town
with his truck. People would come to his truck. He'd
take them inside, perform eye exams, grind spectacles.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
And a fifteen year old girl went to him to
get her eyes checked and left his office saying that
he had attacked her. He was set upon by a
mob of her relative who drug him out to Hermanville,
a couple of miles away, and were in the process
of lynching him when the Clayburne County sheriff showed up
(51:10):
and arrested him.
Speaker 1 (51:12):
Instead of being lynched, doctor Smith was taken to jail.
It was a move that probably saved his life.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
And he maintained his innocence for the rest of his
life and said, I never did anything. I never did
anything to her.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
Doctor Smith avoided a criminal trial. It sounds like his
father in law, Gerard Brandon, that godlike figure pulled some strings.
What he got instead was in insanity hearing. We know
how that turned out.
Speaker 2 (51:41):
More than half of his existence was in state custody.
Speaker 1 (51:45):
And for Noah. This is another important reason to see
this work as largely unfinished because this pivotal moment in
his grandfather's life, this act that meant that his daughter
Margaret never saw him again, and that he would spend
the second half of his life in state custody, that
got him so carefully erased from his family that his
great grandson had to spend the better part of a
(52:05):
decade figuring out who he was. Noah's still wrestling with it.
Speaker 2 (52:12):
In the interviews with him, it seems as if he's
wanting to say that it's not that nothing happened, but
I did not force myself on her. That's more the
phrasing that seems to come out.
Speaker 1 (52:27):
Of course, Noah knows that there's no such thing as
consensual sex with a fifteen year old, and he knows
that doctor Smith's mental illness is wrapped up in this
alleged attack. In those same records, doctor Smith tells the
asylum's doctors he's part of a breeding program run by
the Secret Service. With this painting, Noah intentionally broke his
(52:50):
family tradition of keeping people in the dark. But what
happens when you turn on the light and you still
don't know what you're looking at?
Speaker 2 (52:59):
How I'm suppose to relate to doctor Smith, and all
the characters in this story change depending on what information
is available. You know, I mean he sat there being
kind of a silent monster figure for a century, and
ever since the story started coming out, it's like, how
much compassion should I have? Is he mentally ill? Is
(53:22):
he a monster? Did he commit this crime? He was
he forcefully committed? Was he happy there? You know?
Speaker 1 (53:28):
Was he healthy?
Speaker 2 (53:29):
Did he have friends? All that stuff is like these
unknown qualities right now.
Speaker 1 (53:35):
Noah represents doctor Smith in this Unknown Girl with Dunstan
and the Devil a metaphor about belief, but he's not
sure it will stay that way, and so.
Speaker 2 (53:45):
It's like it keeps me constantly moving. Well, how am
I going to represent him? Do I represent him as
a lonely and pitifoil figure or was he completely happy
for forty years in the asylum? I feel like I
have to constantly shift my weight.
Speaker 1 (54:00):
He suspects his family did too. There was shame, yes,
about mental illness and about his alleged assault, but maybe
it was mixed with uncertainty about how to feel about
this man they'd all loved so much. The way Noah
wrestles with this is clearly painful. He's so deeply conflicted.
(54:22):
Maybe sometimes it's just easier to start your story at
a point that's pasted all that uncertainty and pain.
Speaker 6 (54:29):
Our story starts with the first generation, like Freeborn. I
don't think it's necessarily always intentional, but I think it's
the way we are inculturated in America. Who wants to
build a history of themselves as rooted in slavery, and then,
(54:51):
especially when that slavery is also tied to an insane asylum,
which is also another kind of taboo, And so you
start your history at the point that is less painful
and more pleasing.
Speaker 1 (55:14):
The night before we left town, we met up with
Noah for a drink at the Hotel bar across from
the Mississippi Museum of Art. As we were saying our goodbyes,
he mentioned offhand that he'd sold a few paintings to
the hotel. He painted them years ago, just as he
was starting to conceptualize his show, and they were hanging
right down the hall, so we walked over to see them.
(55:35):
The paintings were self portraits, and one Noah was working.
His daughter, who often watches him paint, sits on a
ledge nearby. Kind of reminded me how Margaret watched her
own dad, doctor Smith, making glasses. And then, to my surprise,
there in that same painting was Doctor Smith. He's gray,
(55:56):
somewhat faceless, but he's there across from a silhouetted teenaged girl.
Noah was just as surprised. He'd forgotten that was there.
Speaker 4 (56:07):
I learned.
Speaker 2 (56:08):
All I knew at that point was that if fifteen
year old girl had gone to to have him check
her eyes, and she left saying that he had assaulted her.
So I was trying to figure out how I would
paint those two together.
Speaker 1 (56:28):
This painting was big, over five feet tall, much bigger
than any one canvas from the show. But it was
also a one off, a good way to explore ideas.
But I stopped.
Speaker 2 (56:40):
You know, it's unformed because I stopped painting it because
I'm sure I hit the same wall, like, I don't
know how to I can't portray this, you know, I
don't know what I'm portraying.
Speaker 1 (56:50):
But then the museum gave him this platform to tell
Doctor Smith's story. He had to choose which one to tell.
Speaker 2 (56:58):
But I've clearly made it very hard. I have a
very hard time trying to figure out how to make
that those two be together. You know, I do not
at all dismiss the idea that he could have done it.
You totally could have done it.
Speaker 1 (57:10):
You can hear Noah wrestling with this idea and with
his own new role in the family myth making. So
when it came to the show that would present this
man to the world, Noah opted to let the answer
shape shift mold to the eye of the beholder. He
put it to Saint Dunstan.
Speaker 2 (57:31):
But that story, next to the doctor Smith story, it's like,
that seems like a problem that Dunstan was having it,
you know, was he imagining what was going on? Did
he attack an old man? Nobody saw him change except Dunstan.
An old man went in, and then an old man
went out saying that Blacksmith attacked him. I'm real cautious
(57:55):
about like making a saint comparison with doctor Smith, But
it was just so which it's so chimed so much.
Speaker 1 (58:05):
Saints and sinners, truth and lies. These binaries are the
underpinning for countless parables, myths, and family legends. But the
real stories, the ones underneath those, they're always more complicated
than that. That's true of doctor Smith's story, and it's
certainly true for the state institution where he spent the
(58:28):
last part of his life.
Speaker 4 (58:30):
What ends up is the Southern Gothic, the terrain of
terror and a couple of the reports. People say, what
are we supposed to do when people show up at
the door?
Speaker 2 (58:39):
Are we supposed to just leave them out on the streets?
Speaker 4 (58:42):
Oh, everyone who.
Speaker 3 (58:43):
Worked in the asylum was evil and they would have
stolen anything valuable that the patients had.
Speaker 1 (58:47):
Obviously that's not the case. Dig deeper, and sometimes you
only find more to question. That's next on Under Yazoo Clay.
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 Schasson
and myself with help from Angela Yee and Amy Machado,
(59:10):
with editing and sound design by Morgan Fuz 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
In the South, we're big fans of parables. There's something
comforting and knowing how a story will be told, knowing
the paths and the endings of all the characters. Family
stories aren't all that different. With each telling, the beats
of the story get etched into the family history. But
(00:32):
what about when someone decides to buck tradition. What if
someone wants to tell one of those stories differently.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Dunstan was a blacksmith and he was in his blacksmith
shop and write at closing time, an old man shows
up at his shop and says, can you make me
a chalice? So he starts pounding away at his anville,
and as he's doing that, he sees this old man,
out of the corner of his eyes, start to rapidly
(01:03):
change form. And he's an old man. Now he's a
young girl. Now he's an old man again. Now he's
a beautiful woman. Now he's a young boy. And he
knows instantly that that's the devil. And so he while
he's hammering away, he just sort of without missing a beat,
he puts his tongs into the furnace, and then when
he sees them get red hot, he grabs them and
(01:24):
then grabs the devil by the nose with the tongs,
who then instantly changes back into an old man and
runs out of the blacksmith shop, saying, the blacksmith just
attack me.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I'm hearing the story of Dunstan and the Devil from
Noah Saderstrom. He's the artist whose paintings about his great
grandfather were the focus of a major show at the
Mississippi Museum of Art. It's a Saturday in April, the
morning after the show's opening. He's energetic today as he
walks me through his work, one hundred and eighty three
canvases that tell the story of his great grandfather, doctor
(02:00):
David L. Smith. We're talking about Dunstan because the parable
also makes an appearance in one of these paintings. Right
there in the center, there are two men in a tussle.
One goes to the other's face with a red hot
pair of tongs. And Noah's story of Dunstan. The saint
tangles with the devil and the experience puts him at
(02:20):
odds with his community. And that sounded like a story
he was familiar with, that of doctor Smith, the one
whose own perception of reality was so different from his
communities that he had to be sent away to the
Mississippi State Asylum.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
That story, next to the Doctor Smith's story, that seems
like a problem that Dunstan was having it.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
I'd never heard of Saint Dunstan before Noah, but after
the opening I started seeing references to him everywhere, including
on the back of a bottle of whiskey that was
fire spiced. Get it. But the story there and another
is a little different. In those versions, doubt doesn't seem
(03:05):
to play as big a role. The townspeople are glad
he ran the devil out. That's the thing with stories.
The takeaway is up for interpretation. At a certain point,
the stories become more a product of the person telling
them than the people in them. Of course, not everything
that happens becomes a story. Sometimes a thing is too
(03:27):
mundane to even remember, and sometimes it's so painful that
generation after generation works to bury it. So what happens
when one of those generations decides to unearth that story.
I'm Larison Campbell and this is under Yazoo Clay A
(03:49):
quick heads up. This episode contains mentions of sexual assault.
Noah is the first person to admit if it were
up to certain members of his face family, and not
the curators of the Mississippi Museum of Art, the show
would never have gone up. Noah's closest link to his
great grandfather, that is, the only person he ever met
(04:11):
who actually knew doctor Smith was his own grandmother, Margaret,
who died in twenty fourteen. She was doctor Smith's oldest child.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
The grandmother that I knew would be absolutely horrified that
we were even having this conversation.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
I think she'd be really torn. And she loved Noah
so much. She surrounded her room in the assisted living
facility with Noah's paintings on every wall, and yet the
very idea that this whole story is public. I don't
know if she could have studied. I'm Anna Sadistrom. I'm
(04:48):
the mother of the artist and the granddaughter of the
person of interest here, doctor Smith.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Anna's mother, Margaret, was doctor Smith's daughter. He was sent
to the asylum when Margaret was still a little girl.
His insanity trial was a big deal. Newspapers covered it,
but Anna knew none of this because her family decided
to never speak of him again.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
I don't remember at what age I realized that I
didn't know anything about my grandfather, because she would talk
about her mother quite a bit. She would tell me about,
you know, what she did, and how they went to
movies together, and how she made her clothes and everything.
She never mentioned her father. And when I asked about
(05:34):
my grandfather, she said he lost his memory and went away,
and so I thought, maybe somebody will direct him back
home sometime.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
I don't know if lost his memory is an old
euphemism for mental illness, Lord knows the South has lots
of those. But there's a heartbreaking irony here. The family's
explanation for doctor Smith's absence, for their silence, is that
he's the one who doesn't remember them, which is all
to say that there was something incredibly moving about this show,
(06:09):
about seeing a man who'd been intentionally erased be given
the floor, or rather the walls. Noah's show had taken
over more than a third of the museum's square footage.
There's the one hundred and twenty two linear feet of
panoramic painting, yes, but there was also a giant hallway
(06:29):
lined with artifacts from doctor Smith's life, photos, letters he'd
exchanged with his wife Ethel, even the beat up leather
satchel he'd used to carry his optometry supplies and a
pair of his signature round wireframed spectacles, not unlike the
ones Noah's got on off the hallway of Doctor Smith's artifacts.
(06:52):
The museum was airing a short documentary about Noah's research
and process, and over the course of a week, they
hosted a series of panel discussions that went beyond Noah
and Doctor Smith. Topics range from the Asylum Hill project
to archival ethics to ideas about memory and generational trauma.
You know when a little kid tries to keep a
(07:13):
secret and finally they're allowed to blurt it out and
the words just don't stop. It felt like that, like
an easing of conscience for this whole community. So what
compelled Noah to spend years telling the story of a
man he was always told never to mention? To understand
that we're going to have to skip twenty five years
(07:35):
back and a whole continent away. Noah and I started
talking about his show almost a year before it went up.
We'd go back and forth, his telling me how the
painting was going, my prying about any new findings he
had about Doctor Smith. But in one of our talks
he let me in on a part of his own story,
(07:56):
one that changed everything. It's two thousand and one. Noah's
in a high level graduate program at the Glasgow School
of Art in Scotland. He was married and it wasn't
going well. It's in this moment of intense stress that
he wakes up one night in the pitch black to
(08:18):
a horrible realization.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
All of my memories felt like they were planted and fake,
and that I hadn't existed until that moment, and everyone
else was convinced that my memories were real, that I
was the only one who knew that they were not.
I mean, it was deeply, deeply frightening, and it lasted
for much longer than I would have wanted it to.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
For nearly six months. This was his everyday reality, a
kind of mental break. He was experiencing. Has a diagnosis,
the personalization disorder.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
It was NonStop. It wasn't like I'm having this weird
feeling like oh, I just woke up into reality that
I realized I'm not real and my memories aren't real.
They've been They've been crafted and presented to my brain
as real, but they're not.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
He took a leave from his painting program and went
home to his parents. He started thumbing through old family
photo albums, hoping they'd trigger a reconnection between his memories
and reality. After a while, he started to paint the photos,
repossessing them in a way. It was in the midst
(09:36):
of all this when his great grandfather's absence really struck him.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
When I was having my breakdown in two thousand and one,
if I had the full context of his experience, it's
hard to say I would have been more afraid, because
I don't think I could have been more afraid than
I was. It would have been it would have given
me something to kind of puld onto, you know, instead
of like either your normal or there's the abyss. There's
(10:03):
like normal people and then there's the abyss. Whereas following
doctor Smith's life, he enters the Old Asylum in nineteen
twenty five and he lives for forty years beyond that,
and he wasn't.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
In the Abyss when he got started on this project,
Noah didn't have much to go on. It's not easy
to dig up a story that's meant to be forgotten,
a story that more than one person has taken pains
to bury. But some pieces had survived. His great grandmother,
Ethel had saved a wooden box. Inside was nearly every
(10:41):
letter she'd written during the early years of her marriage
to doctor Smith.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
I know what she had for lunch every day that year.
You know every movie she saw, every interaction she had
with her parents. It's all very like young family.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
If doctor Smith and Ethel kept in touch after he
went into the asside, she didn't save those letters. So
Noah turned to a different repository of memory, the state Archives.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
I found a doctor Smith's name in the ledger book
from the Old Asylum, which was this giant leatherbound book
that said Mississippi and Saint Hospital B on the spine.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Finally confirmation, but not much else. Fortunately that was about
to change. At Noah's next stop, a downtown gallery, a
man buying a painting overheard him telling his great grandfather's
story and introduced himself. It was Stephen Parks, the state librarian. Okay,
(11:43):
small cities have big perks, and so a couple.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Of weeks later, I'm back in Nashville and I get
a text from Stephen and saying start sending you stuff.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
And I was show advertisements for doctor Smith's optician practice, meeting,
notes from the State Board of Opticians, where doctor Smith
held a seat, newspaper articles about his engagement, his practice,
and later his very public breakdown. With every document, Noah
became more inspired. A picture of a man was taking
(12:16):
shape in his head, and then on canvas. He began
painting vignettes of what he read. But as much as
this work has brought doctor Smith back to life, I'm
not sure it's brought him back into the family. There's
a formality in the way that Noah talks about him.
(12:37):
Why do you refer to him as doctor Smith.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Uh, that's a good question one that like, I started
referring to him as doctor Smith because that's what all
of his optometry advertisements referred to him as. But I
didn't realize at the beginning that he referred to himself
as doctor Smith. Smith is such a common name, and
(13:03):
he'd just get lost in like doctor Smith, there's no
first name, you know, it's just doctor and Smith. He
became a kind of iconic figure in my imagination from
his name.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Doctor Smith's not a paupa or even grandfather. Familial names
implied that their owner is just that a member of
the family. Someone had pruned his branch from the family tree.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
That image of a blackboard, or you erase everything on
the blackboard with the little bits of information left. I
feel like that's what I got from my mother growing up.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
You remember Noah's mom, Anna. She'd learned early on that
her own mother, Margaret, didn't like to talk about Anna's grandfather.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
I would just say a silence, absence, this is just
not where we go. And then when I got older
and added started ask in a little deeper questions, she
would shut down right away. And if I got a
little too insistent, she would get either snappish or she
(14:10):
would tear up and say, I'm not gonna talk about it.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Anna tried to figure things out anyway.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
My mother said that anytime she and her sister were
together and their voices dropped, I'd show up. But if
there was gonna be a good story, they were gonna
lower their voices.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
And so for Noah, it's not just about understanding this man,
but about understanding just why exactly his family worked so
hard to erase him. There was shame about mental illness,
but was that the whole story? That afternoon at the museum,
(15:05):
one of the Southeast legendary spring thunderstorms rolled in as
Noah walked me through his paintings. We'll start of the
first in the first section of the panels.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
It starts with a shadow of an unknown figure, which
may be me or maybe Doctor Smith himself, or it
could be Doctor Smith's father is on the other side
of the wall of the room where doctor Smith is
being born. There's a vertical diptych kind of design. Motifs
(15:37):
are basically throughout.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
In many ways, it's a visual biography of doctor Smith's
life from birth to burial. Doctor Smith was raised in
Louisiana by a single mother, and he put himself through
optometry school. One of doctor Smith's earliest patients was a
man named Gerard Brandon, a lawyer who loomed large in
(15:59):
the Natchet social scene. More importantly, Gerard had a beautiful daughter, Ethel.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
He met Ethel Brandon, I believe because he was making
glasses for her father, and they pretty quickly started dating
and they were married the following year.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
The young couple moved up the river to Vicksburg. They
were happy. These were the years when Ethel would write
to her family about how she and her husband teased
each other, but even in the rosy glow of young love.
Noah's great grandfather may have had his own secrets that
he kept from his wife.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
He referred to having audio hallucinations for his whole life
and that they never bothered him, but they were always
there and very rarely did they make him do something
he didn't want to do. But he could have been
a fully functioning professional optometrist while being schizophrenic at the
same time.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
For years, being a fully functioning professional optometrist looked a
little different. In the South of the nineteen twenties, there
wasn't quite enough business for a brick and mortar shop,
so doctor Smith took his services on the road.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
While all this is going on and he's actively having delusions,
he starts to develop this very elaborate optical truck that,
by all accounts was a very highly functioning invention. They
check all the eyes for free, and then if only
if somebody needed glasses, he would be able to grind
the lenses on the spot. Do you know, fit the
(17:31):
glasses and everything, which would have been i mean, driving
around rural Mississippi in that in the nineteen twenties. You know,
it's hard to imagine.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
It was cutting edge, the talk of the town wherever
he went. He even got it patented. Doctor Smith and
Ethel had four kids. He might have been away much
of the time, but it was clear as kids loved
him and he loved them. Noah's mother told us a
story about how her own Margaret, kept a pair of
(18:01):
glasses he'd made for her as a child. She didn't
need them, she just liked them, and so he made
them for her. Noah's work devotes a good bit of
square footage to this period of doctor Smith's life, his
optometry truck, rural Mississippi and Louisiana images of a growing family.
(18:23):
In one part, he stands in a white shirt and vest,
facing left towards his past, as the reflection of the
sun makes his glasses opaque. In the distance behind him
a small child, a carriage, and a loose, barely discernible
sketch resembling a woman in the story of doctor Smith's life,
(18:45):
As his madness takes up more and more of the foreground,
something someone fades to the back his family, So.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Then the timeline splits again, and then you've got Margaret,
my grandmother, and Ethel back on the top. And then
that's when he enters the old Asylum.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
At this point, a gaggle of museum goers had started
trailing behind us, listening. Noah pointed to a square near
the top. Everyone leaned in, hands behind their back, doing
that polite museum squint. The image he pointed out as small. Well,
in the context of this massive painting, just one two
by two foot square. There's a neat white house.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
According to one of the only stories that I knew
growing up, grandmother and them were living in Shreveport, destitute.
Doctor Smith was not around at all, totally lost in psychosis.
Ethel and the kids there were four kids at this point,
the youngest being an infant. We're all sitting in poverty
(19:48):
in a house with no food, no resources, nothing.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
After Noah's walked through, my producer and I tucked ourselves
away in a museum office with Noah, his sister Jessica,
and his mom Anna. Remember this project wasn't just academic.
This was Noah's great grandfather, a man whose absence festered
in the family he left behind, especially for Noah's grandmother.
(20:14):
Anna's mother Margaret, and.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
She's the only one of their four children who had
an active memory of her father. But my mother was
seven when it happened, and she said she spent the
next several years sitting on the brick wall out front,
waiting for her father to come get her, because nobody
told her that he wasn't going to come. And I
(20:41):
think she carried the trauma of his loss throughout her life.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
After doctor Smith's breakdown, his wife and children didn't stay
in that neat white house. His father in law, Gerard,
arrived and wisked the family back home to Natchez. Gerard's
home was a quiet one. That Victorian sensibility of children
should be seen and not heard applied to everyone. A
house of decorum was in some ways the perfect antidote
(21:11):
to the chaotic last years with doctor Smith. But a
house of decorum isn't a place where you could ask questions.
For the first year after doctor Smith was gone, a
photograph of him remained on the mantle at her grandparents.
Margaret often stared at it. It was all she had
of her dad.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
She was caught staring at his photograph on the mantle,
and the next day it was gone.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Margaret grew up had children of her own. Gerard Brandon's
decorum no outbursts, no questions, no curiosity, found a place
in her home with her children. Gerard took his place
as a titan, and the family mythos. Here's Anna again,
Noah's mother. I was very young.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
I sort of had him confused with God. You know,
he was the sweet old man who had all the power.
I never saw him angry. I never heard him say
raise a voice or say anything unkind.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
But she never saw joy either, no outburst of any kind.
In fact, her mother, Margaret, saw.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
To that composure was of absolute value. Poise, elegance, and properness.
Speaker 4 (22:31):
Grandmother was a quintessential Southern bell in my memory.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
Yeah, she had an elegance and a presence about her.
She was a beautiful woman, and when she entered a room,
everybody was aware of it. She was.
Speaker 5 (22:47):
A power source in.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
My life, and yet she wasn't. You didn't want to
be judged by that, that power source.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
For a family interested less in the real world than
in their own created reality, perhaps there was no better
community than Natchez, Mississippi. This small town of a few
thousand sits on a bluff overlooking the river. Before the
Civil War, it was home to more millionaires per capita
than any other in the United States, because it was
(23:22):
also home to the country's second largest slave market. Many
of those grand homes still stand, although the area is
now among the poorest in the country. Regardless of present circumstances,
this ideal of Confederate glory still shapes the way residents talk.
The writer Richard Grant has this quote in Natches, you
(23:43):
only use the word home if it's antebellum. If your
house was built after the Civil War, it's trashy to
call it a home. Still, even in Natches, people build
new houses. They buck tradition. There were times Noah's grandmother
let her tried and true composure slide, but it was
(24:06):
so rare. Both he and his sister Jessica remember each one.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
I remember you telling me about it, do you.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:16):
I was in high school and it seemed like, wow,
it was such a mystery in the family. I had
no idea.
Speaker 5 (24:23):
And then not long after I asked grandmother about her father,
and I said, some didn't like I don't tell me
about your father.
Speaker 4 (24:33):
And grandmother looked surprised, and she said he was an optometrist,
and then her eyes filled up with tears, and then
everything shut down, and then it was just back to
the silence.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Exactly what happened when I asked her that they tell
me about him? What can you say about him? He
was an optometrist. Immediately tears just filling up, and then
just kind of silence while she turned the page and
started talking about something else. And that instant, involuntary well
of emotion after ninety years, she was seven when he left,
(25:12):
and she was in her nineties when this happened, and
that being the only trigger that I had ever seen
of that kind of emotion, completely instant and involuntary, was
such a sign that there's so much there un processed,
that she lived with for her whole life, and that
(25:33):
she unwillingly not meaning to, was teaching us like, this
is what we do, your.
Speaker 5 (25:41):
Places deep down inside you, and if you violate that,
you're going to feel bad about yourself.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Yeah, that's where the shame comes in. You just had
an emotional outburst. I mean my suspicion there is. The
silence is the response to the shame, and it's so
much padding. You don't ever get the shame. The shame
doesn't make it to the surface. We don't see the shame,
but we see the effects of the shame, and it.
Speaker 5 (26:08):
Gets buried down so deep that any kind of scratch
of the surface bubbles up this uncontrollable emotional response that.
Speaker 4 (26:21):
Then has to be tamped down quick.
Speaker 5 (26:24):
Yeah, and then everybody just stopped talking about it because
something got awkward.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
So back to the silence.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
You can hear even in how these three talk to
one another. They've put in the work to build relationships
founded on sincerity and honesty, not shame and silence. But
anyone with a family nose, it's hard to break patterns,
even when you want to. The thing is, it wasn't
(26:55):
just Noah's breakdown that harkened back to his great grandfather's generation.
It's how he talked about it, or how he didn't.
Noah's breakdown was in two thousand and one, and his grandmother, Margaret,
lived until twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
The episode of depersonalization I had and not being able
to know what the where I am in reality was
so horrifying to me and night marish, and I could
not There was no way out of it, and no
one else seemed to be able to tell.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
How may I ask? How she responded?
Speaker 4 (27:39):
I'm sure we never took no.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
She never knew. She never knew that I barely talked
to them about it. I don't know that I really
talked to everything about.
Speaker 4 (27:48):
It, know about it until the New York Times, until
I tell you, we have broken this pattern.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
For more than two decades now. His only sibling didn't know.
He spent six months unsure if his life was even real.
The tight lipt ethos ran so deep that Noah didn't
even realize he was carrying it out.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
I didn't know I was doing that to myself until
I let doctor Smith out of the Genie bottle. And
then the only way to do that was to like
be totally open and honest. And then all of a sudden,
it's like, wait a minute, I've got this thing that's
now out that I've been trying to keep to it.
I didn't even know that I was doing that. Not
(28:33):
that I wasn't talking about it because I was ashamed
of it, but I was afraid that if I talked
about it, I would call it back into my life
like a specter, like a monster, which you know, is
maybe more what grandmother was experiencing, not the shame, but
the like if I say his name, the monster is
going to come back to my life.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
I'm going to experience all that pain all over again.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
And when I still when that occurred to me and
I started talking about it out loud and thinking about it,
the amount of energy that it took to hold down
stuff requires not just the energy of holding it down,
but it requires this whole system of holding all these
other things in place to make sure that you don't
(29:19):
feel this or that or you know. And now everybody
has to remain calm and not talk about anything because
you don't know where if it's going to start to
blow out, and then you're going to lose control of everything.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Noah's grandmother, Margaret, spent that energy, kept that tight hold
for better or worse, all her life. Her family thinks
Noah's exhibit would have caused her a world of conflict.
If she'd love to see it, maybe there's a way
it could have offered solace for her too.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
And this is her shawl.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
I've brought it with me for the weekend to have
her here in hopes that there's some healing for her
in it somewhere, because I think it was a trauma
she took she head through her whole life and I'm sorry,
and I wish that she had had a different relationship
(30:15):
with this story.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Stephen King has this great quote, nothing is so frightening
as what's behind the closed door. It reminds me of
what Noah was saying about his breakdown, that maybe if
he'd known more about his great grandfather, he would have
been less afraid for himself. No one worries about monsters
in a brightly lit room. And then two weeks before
(30:42):
the show went up, just as Noah was shipping paintings
from his Nashville studio down to the museum in Jackson,
someone cut on the lights, so to speak.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Probably like seven tenths of this painting exists of the
details that were known until he entered state custody, and
then it goes dark, which is another forty years of
his life. And it took about seven years to find
all that. But then just last week, as medical records emerge,
(31:15):
that's going to give life to that whole rest of
his life, which is more than half of his existence.
He doesn't have to be a saintly character, you do.
I mean, I don't know, and so you know, I'm
not absolving him the whole things, but you don't have
to be absolved the whole thing. You know, we can't
(31:38):
be the requirement in life.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
That's next on under Yazuclay. 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
(32:02):
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 MS Museum Art dot org. That's MS Museum Art
(32:24):
dot org. Noah's family story is in many ways a
classic Southern situation, a white, well to do family working
overtime to hide their secrets. His transgression is against his
family's unspoken agreement this.
Speaker 5 (32:42):
Is not where we go.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
But there's another side to the classic Southern coin, another
implicit agreement to avoid the unspeakable. Doctor Elizabeth West is
a professor of English and Africana Studies at Georgia State University.
For her, the broken branch on the family tree was
her own grandfather. In this case, he'd removed himself. He
(33:05):
left the family when her mom was growing up. But
the reason for this went even further back in the
family history to her grandfather's uncle.
Speaker 6 (33:14):
Hillman Human revealed a history of my grandfather that I
had I had no knowledge of. There was a very
tense relationship between my grandfather and his ten children.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
The generations before that weren't much clearer. A few years ago,
she took the ancestry records her aunt had mapped out
by hand and began to digitize them, and the reason
her family didn't talk about its history became clear.
Speaker 6 (33:47):
Once it got past my grandfather's father, I was like, Wow,
these people were enslaved, and I just can't believe that.
I didn't think about it ever until that point, you know.
I mean, you talk about it in the abstract, But
once you put a name on a piece of paper
(34:08):
and you realize you're connected to that name and that
name is connected to this history, then you just you know,
then you're in.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
And she learned something else. Her great great uncle, Hillman
Cistrunk died in a different kind of confinement the Mississippi
State Asylum.
Speaker 6 (34:28):
Actually, I had no knowledge of him up until about
I don't know, five years ago.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Through careful interrogation of historical records, tax filings, census interviews,
doctor West filled in the picture of Hillman's Cistrunks life.
He was born in Georgia into slavery in the mid
eighteen fifties. The man who'd enslaved Hillman moved the whole
operation to Mississippi and that's where they stayed as the
(35:00):
Civil War raged on. Once the word ended and the
Emancipation Proclamation finally was put into effect, Hillman and his
family were free, so they settled near where they'd been
and what followed was an incredible tale of community resilience
and grit.
Speaker 6 (35:20):
He and my direct ancestor, Shadrick, who was his brother,
they the family farmed in the immediate aftermath of the war,
and right at the close of reconstruction, they actually bought
land and they worked that land for not quite twenty years,
(35:45):
because I think it was around nineteen hundred or a
little before when they paid off the mortgage on the
land and owned it outright.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
These were two land owning black men in the post
war South life was not easy.
Speaker 6 (36:01):
It was not typical blacks in the aftermath of the war.
Most of them ended up in a system that was
not very different from slavery. They ended up leasing their
labor to white farmers. So Human and Shadwick were an
(36:22):
anomaly in that sense.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Holding onto their land wasn't easy either. Legitimate support systems
were for white farmers.
Speaker 6 (36:31):
Hillman and his brother Shadwick had had dealings with this
pretty wealthy person in the area. If he didn't have
a brig building, he'd probably be called a loan shark.
But you know, loan sharks with big buildings are called businessmen.
And you look at the records and you see the
possessions that they are essentially laying on the table to
(36:53):
be able to make this loan for yet another year.
You know, a cow named Bessie. It's comparable to howk
in your car, And so it's just this grind year
after year.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
There was the grind, but doctor West could clearly see
for Hillman and his family his community, there was also
the striving for more.
Speaker 6 (37:21):
The record showed this concerted commitment to people in the
community to learn to read and write. And then you
see the records of parents and then people like Hillmen
who weren't parents, making sure that young black children were
getting registered for school. What I began to see out
(37:43):
of this is just this amazing dynamic community, first generation
free black people in a way that just doesn't get recorded.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
When Hellman's in his sixties, his wife passes away, he remarries,
and then Hellman gets.
Speaker 6 (38:03):
Sick, and then there's a white physician who comes in
and signs off, and he's admitted to the asylum from
what I can tell, in that January of nineteen twenty,
and he dies in March of that year.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Hillman's cause of death was listed as nephritis or kidney inflammation,
one of the last symptoms once the disease is most
severe dementia, a mental manifestation of the physical malady. After
Hillman's death, land disputes kickoff. The family is split into factions.
This is the era doctor West's grandfather grew up in.
(38:47):
In nineteen twenty, the year of Hillman's death, Doctor West's
grandfather leaves everything behind his family, the land he's helped work,
his home.
Speaker 6 (38:57):
Human revealed a history of my grandfather that I had
had no knowledge of, and so as a teenager, a
young boy up through his teens, these had been the
men who had shaped him, and they were land owning men.
And in his teenage years, these were the years that
(39:22):
Human and Chadrick both essentially got stripped of their land
and died. And after understanding the life his life, I
understand a lot better the kind of bitterness and disappointment
he lived with to go from the kind of childhood
(39:43):
he had remembered. I mean, they were a struggling farm family,
but they owned what they owned, they owned.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
What they worked.
Speaker 6 (39:52):
And he witnessed, you know, real time, this family being
stripped of everything. And as an eighteen twenty year old kid,
we might call him a man, but you know, he's
a kid. And he goes to Jasper, tries to find
work in a factory and Mary's, and ends up raising
(40:18):
his family as a sharecropper.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Exactly what Hellman and Shadwick didn't want for their family.
Speaker 6 (40:26):
And sometime in the nineteen forties, I'm told, you know,
he tried to convince my grandmother that they should leave,
and she didn't want to leave, and he left.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Doctor West could never wrap her head around why her
grandfather would leave his wife and ten children behind. She'd
heard that he provided made sure his family got fed,
but that was when he was there. Learning the story
of the loss and trauma he weathered at his teenage years,
that all made sense. So she took these stories back
(40:59):
to her family.
Speaker 6 (41:00):
After I was introduced to this history, I started asking
older members of my family if they knew anything about
these people. And it was just like a Eureka moment.
I remember one of the older members in my family,
very casually, she said, oh, yeah, I remember that story.
(41:22):
For many of us, you know, we are told to
just look forward. There's no point in, you know, in
looking back. I think when I share these stories, there's
there's just a lot of silence, you know, cause what
can you say. It's a lot to take in.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Doctor West was introduced to Hellman at the end of
his life, a particularly painful episode in a life with
plenty of them.
Speaker 6 (41:51):
For me, finding Himan at at the asylum was the beginning.
And you know, I have this sense of sadness when
I think that there was seven decades that he lived
and did these fantastic things, and that in three months
this was the end. But I also feel that finding
(42:16):
him wherever I found him, was more important than the place.
The story I discovered that I was able to build
out from meeting him at the asylum far out weighs
even the pain I think about that, you know, he
(42:36):
very likely suffered in the last three months of his life.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
And now with all the context, all the insight, how
does she feel towards Hillman?
Speaker 6 (42:52):
To put it just, I guess, in a simple word,
just a lot of love, you know. I mean, he
could have been very selfish, and from what I see
of him in the record, he was anything but that.
When you look at what in particular blacks in the
(43:14):
South were experiencing during that era. Yeah, yeah, you know,
I mean seventy six and quite frankly, for many black
people even in the twenty first century, is quite an
age to live to. So, you know, when I think
about it, it's just, you know, it's mind boggling to
think all of this front end of his life gets
(43:39):
capped by you know, three months in the asylum and
almost into obscurity.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Almost into obscurity. The end of Hillman's life stands out,
but the work that doctor West did ensures that it
doesn't define the man. It allowed her to paint a
fuller picture. It's not all that different for Noah. For decades,
all he knew about Doctor Smith was a headlinesworth. He
was sent to the State Asylum. But Noah's careful not
(44:11):
to let this part of doctor Smith's life become Doctor
Smith's life. The first time I walked into the room
that held Noah's paintings, I tried to just stand back
and take it all in at once. That was a mistake.
As soon as you start to break it down with
your eyes, you realize you can't. Noah deliberately refused to
(44:37):
set boundaries. Scenes flow into each other, like the flow
to life. The courtroom where doctor Smith had his insanity
hearing bleeds into our first view of the old asylum.
Hold the last canvas up to the first one, and
now it's one painting the brick from the house where
doctor Smith was born in eighteen ninety one matches the
(44:58):
brick at the State Hospital cemetery where he's buried. There's
a loose impressionistic feel to many of the paintings. One
person is painted in careful detail, while the figure two
canvas is over is a blur. In a way, It's
a peak behind the curtain. I'll look at how the
artist understands each part of the story, and the craziest part.
(45:21):
Noah says, this one hundred and eighty three canvas painting,
a work that inspired the creation of an entire room
in a museum, dozens of panel discussions, and even a
New York Times article, isn't finished. I mean it is
in the sense that it's ready to show, but not
in the sense that he'll never lay a paintbrush on
(45:42):
it again.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
When it comes to like deciphering what's real and what
isn't about not only his accounts but people's accounts of him,
it's like very it's very shifting all the time.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
Two weeks before we sat down, it shifted dramatically this one.
Noah finally got his great grandfather's medical records, including a
remarkably thorough intake interview in which, over several pages, doctor
Smith tells his whole life story.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
And it just seems like all the slack has been
let out and he is now in the asylum, and
he's just like it's all just he's writing letters to
people and there's not any need to keep it buttoned in.
He's writing letters like crazy that they're.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
Just all over the place, and somebody's given him stamps, Let.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Me give him letters.
Speaker 5 (46:37):
He did.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
One of these letters is written on letterhead that he
made because he worked in the print department, so he
worked the letter press, so he made letterhead David Doctor
David Smith, Bondar, Insissippi Hospital for his strained patient.
Speaker 5 (46:50):
I feel like it gives me a much better view
of the man, the person behind the.
Speaker 4 (47:00):
Legend in our family.
Speaker 5 (47:02):
You know, he's been this figure of mystery, but hearing
these kind of personal details, it sounds like he was
a gentle person.
Speaker 3 (47:13):
He seems very pleasant. I mean, maybe that explains why
Mama was so hurt by his loss. She loved him,
and he loved her enough to make her those classes
because she wanted some. And it must have been a
good feeling relationship, or she wouldn't have been so traumatized
(47:36):
by it. If he had been an ogre or dangerous
or hateful, or had done harmful things to her mother,
she wouldn't have suffered his loss the way she did.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
But there's of course a caveat. Noah can't be sure
if parts of doctor Smith's autobiography are based on delusions
and anything.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
And I thought I understood, you know, I have to
make sure that I'm not getting fixed on that, because
who's even real and who isn't. I've kept thinking about
like those like plenario worms. You can like their microscopic
and you could chop them in half and each one
will grow the rest of its body, you know. So
it's like any of this could just be locked off
(48:21):
and then just paint a whole new Like his autobiography,
He's like, this is what happened my entire childhood. Until
I was in my mid twenties, I didn't have any
of that information before.
Speaker 1 (48:31):
But having this information means that Noah may eventually replace
some of these canvases or repaint details. So it's likely
this is the only time this version of Noah's work
will be shown. You know.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
It's like constantly growing and reinterpreting, you know, the sacred
text of some kind. You know, you have to keep
reinterpreting and interpreting, interpreting.
Speaker 1 (48:57):
By the time the show opened, Noah and I have
been talking about his work for almost a year. Probably
another reason it was so overwhelming. There's always that cognitive
dissonance when you finally see something you've spent forever imagining.
But there was one part that threw me. It's right
in the middle, canvas number ninety two, in fact, out
(49:18):
of one hundred and eighty three. I turned to Noah,
It's funny. When I look at it, I feel like
the part that my eye tends to go to the
most is that right there. It's two men in dress
shirts and trousers. One also wears an apron, and it
appears he's grabbing the other man's nose with pliers. This
(49:40):
is how Noah came to tell me the story of
Saint Dunstan.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
And he knows instantly that that's the devil.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
As Noah explained, this is the moment of his great
grandfather's unraveling, the moment that the community decides his reality
didn't match theirs. Doctor Smith wasn't sent away just because
he'd been having delusions. He was sent away because he
was accused of a crime.
Speaker 2 (50:13):
So Doctor Smith had started to lose it and could
not really keep himself together, and he had moved his
family to Louisiana. But then to keep his business going,
he was still traveling around, and he traveled to Mississippi
to Port Gibson to check eyes.
Speaker 1 (50:32):
This was using the mobile optometry truck he'd patented. Doctor
Smith would place a notice in a newspaper and a
few days later he'd show up in that small town
with his truck. People would come to his truck. He'd
take them inside, perform eye exams, grind spectacles.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
And a fifteen year old girl went to him to
get her eyes checked and left his office saying that
he had attacked her. He was set upon by a
mob of her relative who drug him out to Hermanville,
a couple of miles away, and were in the process
of lynching him when the Clayburne County sheriff showed up
(51:10):
and arrested him.
Speaker 1 (51:12):
Instead of being lynched, doctor Smith was taken to jail.
It was a move that probably saved his life.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
And he maintained his innocence for the rest of his
life and said, I never did anything. I never did
anything to her.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
Doctor Smith avoided a criminal trial. It sounds like his
father in law, Gerard Brandon, that godlike figure pulled some strings.
What he got instead was in insanity hearing. We know
how that turned out.
Speaker 2 (51:41):
More than half of his existence was in state custody.
Speaker 1 (51:45):
And for Noah. This is another important reason to see
this work as largely unfinished because this pivotal moment in
his grandfather's life, this act that meant that his daughter
Margaret never saw him again, and that he would spend
the second half of his life in state custody, that
got him so carefully erased from his family that his
great grandson had to spend the better part of a
(52:05):
decade figuring out who he was. Noah's still wrestling with it.
Speaker 2 (52:12):
In the interviews with him, it seems as if he's
wanting to say that it's not that nothing happened, but
I did not force myself on her. That's more the
phrasing that seems to come out.
Speaker 1 (52:27):
Of course, Noah knows that there's no such thing as
consensual sex with a fifteen year old, and he knows
that doctor Smith's mental illness is wrapped up in this
alleged attack. In those same records, doctor Smith tells the
asylum's doctors he's part of a breeding program run by
the Secret Service. With this painting, Noah intentionally broke his
(52:50):
family tradition of keeping people in the dark. But what
happens when you turn on the light and you still
don't know what you're looking at?
Speaker 2 (52:59):
How I'm suppose to relate to doctor Smith, and all
the characters in this story change depending on what information
is available. You know, I mean he sat there being
kind of a silent monster figure for a century, and
ever since the story started coming out, it's like, how
much compassion should I have? Is he mentally ill? Is
(53:22):
he a monster? Did he commit this crime? He was
he forcefully committed? Was he happy there? You know?
Speaker 1 (53:28):
Was he healthy?
Speaker 2 (53:29):
Did he have friends? All that stuff is like these
unknown qualities right now.
Speaker 1 (53:35):
Noah represents doctor Smith in this Unknown Girl with Dunstan
and the Devil a metaphor about belief, but he's not
sure it will stay that way, and so.
Speaker 2 (53:45):
It's like it keeps me constantly moving. Well, how am
I going to represent him? Do I represent him as
a lonely and pitifoil figure or was he completely happy
for forty years in the asylum? I feel like I
have to constantly shift my weight.
Speaker 1 (54:00):
He suspects his family did too. There was shame, yes,
about mental illness and about his alleged assault, but maybe
it was mixed with uncertainty about how to feel about
this man they'd all loved so much. The way Noah
wrestles with this is clearly painful. He's so deeply conflicted.
(54:22):
Maybe sometimes it's just easier to start your story at
a point that's pasted all that uncertainty and pain.
Speaker 6 (54:29):
Our story starts with the first generation, like Freeborn. I
don't think it's necessarily always intentional, but I think it's
the way we are inculturated in America. Who wants to
build a history of themselves as rooted in slavery, and then,
(54:51):
especially when that slavery is also tied to an insane asylum,
which is also another kind of taboo, And so you
start your history at the point that is less painful
and more pleasing.
Speaker 1 (55:14):
The night before we left town, we met up with
Noah for a drink at the Hotel bar across from
the Mississippi Museum of Art. As we were saying our goodbyes,
he mentioned offhand that he'd sold a few paintings to
the hotel. He painted them years ago, just as he
was starting to conceptualize his show, and they were hanging
right down the hall, so we walked over to see them.
(55:35):
The paintings were self portraits, and one Noah was working.
His daughter, who often watches him paint, sits on a
ledge nearby. Kind of reminded me how Margaret watched her
own dad, doctor Smith, making glasses. And then, to my surprise,
there in that same painting was Doctor Smith. He's gray,
(55:56):
somewhat faceless, but he's there across from a silhouetted teenaged girl.
Noah was just as surprised. He'd forgotten that was there.
Speaker 4 (56:07):
I learned.
Speaker 2 (56:08):
All I knew at that point was that if fifteen
year old girl had gone to to have him check
her eyes, and she left saying that he had assaulted her.
So I was trying to figure out how I would
paint those two together.
Speaker 1 (56:28):
This painting was big, over five feet tall, much bigger
than any one canvas from the show. But it was
also a one off, a good way to explore ideas.
But I stopped.
Speaker 2 (56:40):
You know, it's unformed because I stopped painting it because
I'm sure I hit the same wall, like, I don't
know how to I can't portray this, you know, I
don't know what I'm portraying.
Speaker 1 (56:50):
But then the museum gave him this platform to tell
Doctor Smith's story. He had to choose which one to tell.
Speaker 2 (56:58):
But I've clearly made it very hard. I have a
very hard time trying to figure out how to make
that those two be together. You know, I do not
at all dismiss the idea that he could have done it.
You totally could have done it.
Speaker 1 (57:10):
You can hear Noah wrestling with this idea and with
his own new role in the family myth making. So
when it came to the show that would present this
man to the world, Noah opted to let the answer
shape shift mold to the eye of the beholder. He
put it to Saint Dunstan.
Speaker 2 (57:31):
But that story, next to the doctor Smith story, it's like,
that seems like a problem that Dunstan was having it,
you know, was he imagining what was going on? Did
he attack an old man? Nobody saw him change except Dunstan.
An old man went in, and then an old man
went out saying that Blacksmith attacked him. I'm real cautious
(57:55):
about like making a saint comparison with doctor Smith, But
it was just so which it's so chimed so much.
Speaker 1 (58:05):
Saints and sinners, truth and lies. These binaries are the
underpinning for countless parables, myths, and family legends. But the
real stories, the ones underneath those, they're always more complicated
than that. That's true of doctor Smith's story, and it's
certainly true for the state institution where he spent the
(58:28):
last part of his life.
Speaker 4 (58:30):
What ends up is the Southern Gothic, the terrain of
terror and a couple of the reports. People say, what
are we supposed to do when people show up at
the door?
Speaker 2 (58:39):
Are we supposed to just leave them out on the streets?
Speaker 4 (58:42):
Oh, everyone who.
Speaker 3 (58:43):
Worked in the asylum was evil and they would have
stolen anything valuable that the patients had.
Speaker 1 (58:47):
Obviously that's not the case. Dig deeper, and sometimes you
only find more to question. That's next on Under Yazoo Clay.
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 Schasson
and myself with help from Angela Yee and Amy Machado,
(59:10):
with editing and sound design by Morgan Fuz 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
Host
Larrison Campbell
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