How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

Little, Brown and Company June 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, by Clint Smith Little, Brown and Company, June 2021

Reviewed by Carolyn Webb

I first heard Clint Smith being interviewed by Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” (Fresh Air, NPR, June 1, 2021). His new book, How the Word is Passed, had just been published. His easy manner of speaking belied the seriousness of his topic – how Americans teach, talk about, and even sometimes celebrate our history of slavery.

Smith visited many of the iconic places of slavery – Jefferson’s Monticello, The Whitney Plantation, Angola Prison, Galveston Island, Goree Island, the Blanford (confederate) Cemetery, and New York City. As he tours these places, you feel you are along with him, listening to the tour guides, seeing the places, hearing the words of the confederate celebrators. He asks hard questions, even when he is the only Black person there. He sometimes returns a second time to talk to the tour guides and directors again, to walk the grounds again.

Monticello is the only place he writes about that I have visited. At the time, there was no mention of Sally Hemmings. Now there are exhibits and tours about the Hemmings. Some people on Smith’s tour were shocked to learn Jefferson had hundreds of slaves and Hemmings was the mother of several of his children, none of whom he freed, including Sally. Nothing that Jefferson accomplished would have been possible without his slaves.

While I lived in New York City and have visited many times, I did not know that NYC was the capital of American slavery for more than two centuries. Slavery in New York City started with the Dutch, and included enslaved Native Americans as well. On his walking tour, Smith learns of a huge burying ground which had been covered with cement and buildings. It was discovered in 1991 when construction began on a 34-story federal building. Thirty feet below the city street level, the burying ground is six acres and holds at least 15,000 remains of enslaved and free Africans. It is, to me, an incredibly stark reminder that the North was as complicit as the South in enslaving human beings.

Other places visited by Smith are all disturbing – Goree Island, off the coast of Africa, where African men, women and children were held in insufferable quarters, awaiting passage across the ocean. The Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, is the only plantation in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on the lives of enslaved people. One memorial there, The Field of Angels, is dedicated to 2,200 enslaved children who died between the 1820s and the 1860s. The Angola State Prison, in Louisiana, is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. It is named after the country in Africa from which many slaves had come and is built on the former Angola Plantations site. Smith’s tour here is unnerving, to say the least. Angola’s reputation as a notoriously horrible prison continues to this day.

Blanford Cemetery, in Petersburg, Virginia, is the second largest cemetery (First is Arlington) in Virginia. It is largely a cemetery of confederate soldiers, including 30,000 who are mostly unknown. Smith goes there to an annual gathering/celebration where confederate flags fly everywhere; as the only Black person there, he feels very wary and uncomfortable. After the speeches are over, he converses with several people about the Civil War and the soldiers buried there. People are generally unwilling to acknowledge that the Civil War was caused by slavery.

In the Epilogue, Smith interviews his grandparents. His first sentence is: My Grandfather’s Grandfather was Enslaved. He repeats this sentence several times; the emotional impact of it hard to take in. It is stunning to think of how close in time that is to the present. Smith’s discussions with his grandfather and grandmother, the first he has had with them over the issue of slavery, are extremely poignant.

How the Word is Passed is a remarkable new look at our country’s sordid and sad history of slavery. It is absolutely clear that until our entire country comes to grips with this issue and begins honest discussions about the ways slavery has perpetuated racism to the present day, things will not change. It is a book I’m going to read again, to take it all in again. I want to remember it.

Smith is also a poet, and his book of poetry, Counting Descent (Write Bloody Publishing, 2016), is a collection of 61 poems, many of which had me holding my breath to the end. Smith was awarded the 2014 National Poetry Slam championship. He is also a writer for the Atlantic.

Here are some links to interviews and reviews of Smith’s book, including a NYT review, NPR article, and interview with the Washington Post on YouTube.

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