I think about Michael’s last letter before he told me he was coming home: This ain’t no place for no man. Black or White. Don’t make no difference. This a place for the dead.
Michael’s letter is about Parchman Farm aka Mississippi State Penitentiary. (The passage quoted above is found on page 96 of the novel SING.) Parchman is Mississippi’s only maximum security prison still in use today. Who is Michael you might ask? He is one of the characters of the novel I referenced in last months blog, SING, UNBURIED, SING, written by Jesmyn Ward, published in 2017 and a National Book Award Winner. Other characters are Leonie, Given, Jojo, Richie, Pop, Mam, Kayla and a tree full of ……, well I will let you read this wonderful novel and find out for your self just who or what is in this tree. Some of these named characters are dead, some alive. All still walking, connecting and driving through their southern state as a multi racial, multi generational poor, but spiritually rich, (my opinion), family. I strongly recommend you find a copy of Ward’s novel to read. With that in mind I will only focus on Parchman Prison and how that institution’s ethos rekindled a specific memory of an encounter I had approximately fifty years ago while working as an attendant at the former Medfield State Hospital.
Before I do let me clarify who was the recipient of that letter Michael wrote- Leonie. She, her son Jojo, her young daughter Kayla and her best friend, Misty are in the midst of a two day drive to southern Mississippi and Parchman Prison to pick up Michael who is due to be released. It is during this trip when she recalls the subject of this letter.
In an interview Jesmyn Ward had with a Louis Elliot she explained some of the history of Parchman with the following; “Parchman Prison, where twelve- and thirteen-year- old black boys were taken for petty crimes, vagrancy and stealing– very small things. At Parchman, they were tortured and beaten like slaves. They died like slaves.”
The ethos of Medfield State Hospital was of course different from a state penitentiary created to incarcerate a criminal. The state hospital systems were created in the 1800’s as asylums for the insane. Families had a difficult path to walk if they chose to care for a family member who was acting or behaving in a manner considered bizarre. (Of course mental health care is still so difficult.) Large asylums were developed to warehouse thousands of patients at a time. As in a penitentiary some patients in state hospitals were deemed well enough to be discharged. But too many lived their lives institutionalized and were buried on the grounds of the state hospital. As I have previously stated I worked as an attendant during my later teen years at Medfield State Hospital. I grew up on the grounds in state housing afforded to my family because my father was the Head Farmer. My first friends and playmates were also living on the grounds in state housing as their parents were doctors and administrators of Medfield State Hospital.
When I was hired as an attendant, handed my first set of keys and introduced to my new boss, the head nurse of a locked ward in a building titled the Clark Building, I became immersed in the day to day stresses of aiding and attending those in seclusion, helping prepare others for electric shock therapy and much much more. The specific memory that SING,UNBURIED,SING provoked in me is one that I am only now sharing after fifty plus years of my life since I worked there.
As I continue writing this morning I have to confess that I have a change of heart about sharing the details of the incident I alluded to in my last sentence of the above paragraph. Why the change? I woke up this morning and it came to me that the details published here might be considered insensitive to the millions of unfortunate people who deal with mental health and depression issues on a daily basis.
This month, leaning against my rhetorical lighthouse, I feel comfortable sharing these facts. The almost poetical, lyrical, descriptive prose Jesmyn Ward’s “part ghost story, part road novel” is so evident in her description of the ghosts. People dead yet so alive! Memories flood back to me of the many patients I had encountered at the State Hospital. People walking, mumbling, softly swearing, shuffling with no apparent purpose. Their eyes dead, not a window to their soul. Would they too be…..again?
SING, UNBURIED, SING– please read it!
Be in peace and joy!
Thank you for reading.
Mark