How the Word Is Passed, by Clint Smith

 How the Word Is Passed's subtitle,  A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, reveals a lot about the book. It is not a history. In fact, author Clint Smith is not a historian; he's a poet, journalist, and former high school English teacher with a Ph.D. in Education. Rather than a history, the book is the author's grappling with the history of slavery and how we preserve, teach/learn, and remember that history. He grapples with those topics by visiting sites where the history of slavery is either preserved or denied and talking with people he encounters there. He also does some more standard historical research, looking at relevant primary sources. 

The sites on which Smith focuses are Monticello; the Whitney Plantation, which focuses on the lives of enslaved people who labored there; Louisiana's Angola Prison, built on the site of a plantation; the confederate Blandford Cemetery; Galveston Island, where Juneteenth is of special significance; the African Burial Ground and other sites in New York City; and Goree Island in Ghana, the site from which many slave ships launched.

Where possible at each site, he takes officially sanctioned tours and scrutinizes how the site's relationship to slavery is presented to the public. He also talks to people who work at and visit the sites. Some of the sites are making serious efforts to preserve and tell the history of slavery. At Monticello, while visitors can still take a generic tour focusing on the architecture and the more traditional view of the third President, but there are also tours focused on the lives of enslaved people and the Hemings family. (I was appalled  that visitors to whom Smith spoke claimed not to know that Jefferson was a slaveholder or that separating enslaved people from their families was common practice--as a social studies educator, I felt a deep sense of failure upon reading that). 

Other sites that Smith visited ignore their relationship to slavery or attempt to "prettify" the peculiar institution. At Angola Prison, for example, no mention is made of the fact that the prison is built on the site of a plantation and that the warden used to live in a "Big House" right outside the prison. Yet the prison resembles a plantation, with black inmates toiling in the fields. Only through the inmates' newspaper is the relationship to slavery acknowledged. The people Smith interacts with at the confederate cemetery offer a stunning exhibition of historical blindness/denial.

Smith also must grapple with the idea that some sites with the best intentions are not entirely accurate. At Goree Island, for example, staff continue to provide inflated numbers of the people who passed through on their way to enslavement in the Americas, even though historical research has shown the numbers to be inaccurate. Smith asks, "Can a place that misstates a certain set of facts still be a site of memory for a larger truth?" 

I enjoyed vicariously wrestling with the questions of history, memory, and nostalgia while gaining some previously unknown information--the discussion of the Statue of Liberty is particularly interesting. Highly recommended.

Favorite passages:

"While a life like Frederick Douglass's is remarkable, we must remember that not every person who lived through slavery was like Douglass. Most did not learn to read or write. Most did not engage in hand-to-hand combat with white slave breakers. Most did not live close enough to free states in the North to have any hope of escape. No one, enslaved or otherwise, was like Douglass. There were other brilliant, exceptional people who lived under slavery, and many resisted the institution in innumerable ways, but our country's teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives, at the expense of millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told.

"I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn't simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn't they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy. It illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, despite the most brutal circumstances, attain super-human heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, and the people who maintained it."

"The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories."