Not Where We Go

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.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Under Yazoo Clay dives deep into the generations of family secrets around Mississippi’s former “lunatic asylum.” In 2012, a construction crew in Jackson, Mississippi discovered human remains at the site of the state’s university hospital. They would eventually turn out to be one of over 7,000 patients, who had died at the old asylum and been buried on its grounds. Reporter Larrison Campbell travels to Jackson to meet the families trying to get answers about their ancestors. And she tries to understand just how this “forgotten” chapter of history came to be forgotten.