Old Colony 5 Road

Is this the road to freedom? Whose freedom?

I was on a journey, a memory check. After a poetry reading in Baton Rouge, I drove back to Missouri by way of East Louisiana State Hospital.* Most folks just called it Jackson, same name as the nearest town. Many weekends during elementary school and junior high, Daddy and I drove there to visit my mother. It seemed to take hours to get there—turns out it’s just 33 miles from our old house. I don’t know how often or how long we stayed. This trip, I hoped the visit would help me with details. I can’t ask Daddy. He just says the place was torture. Sometimes he cries.

I’m still not sure how much I want to know. But when Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022), my first book, was accepted for publication, I knew I wanted to read the poems in Baton Rouge and stop at Jackson. The collection centers on my mother’s mental illness, which was diagnosed within a few weeks of my birth. The poems explore our relationship—tender yet volatile—as well as psychiatric treatments of the latter part of the 20th century. She was diagnosed in 1959. Mama narrowly missed the ice bath, insulin coma, lobotomy. But she was just in time for (what I consider) rudimentary electroshock therapy and Thorazine. Lots of Thorazine. That I was angry at psychiatry rather than my mother surprised me. Not until I was preparing the manuscript did I fully recognize the shift in my emotions.

The truth is I feel deep and varied loves for my mother. I’ve forgiven Mama for being herself—not the made-up perfect mother I wanted—and for so often making child-me the adult. Instead I am angry at psychiatry’s arrogance, the shiny new therapies, the countless shock treatments and endless pills. Regardless of doctors’ good intentions, I feel like my mother was a science experiment.

So what happened on my visit to Jackson last September? The GPS led me to a narrow two-lane road, pitted asphalt crumbling to sand. Old Colony 5 Road, aka Hwy 951. No sign of a hospital. In fact, no sign of anything but birds, brush, and kudzu. (The photo above points the other way, to where the road intersects LA 68.) I was so glad I was there in the daylight and briefly wondered if I needed to be afraid. Could a runaway patient be in the bushes? Would someone grab me and lock me away? I got back in the car, drove south at LA 68, changed to a different mapping app. Same directions. I turned down Old Colony 5 Road again, but this time, the dead end seemed like a note to self: Stop digging for memories. It’s the end of the road. Let this go.

I did for a couple months. I wouldn’t call it freedom.

* Original name: Insane Asylum for the State of Louisiana. Current name: Eastern Louisiana Mental Health System, “a collection of drab buildings for housing and treating patients” (Katherine Sayre, “Louisiana's 170-year-old mental hospital is 'quickly deteriorating' with more than 600 patients inside,” nola.com, 22 July 2019) plus the administration building, an example of Greek Revival architecture built in 1847 as the asylum.