In the prologue to his new book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, writer-poet Clint Smith reveals its highly personal nature. This opening section finds Smith at home in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he is trying to make sense of the transatlantic slave trade in the United States and how New Orleans, a hotbed of intense chattel slavery, fits into that history.
“It was in May 2017—after the statue of Robert E. Lee near downtown New Orleans had been taken down from its sixty-foot pedestal—that I became obsessed with how slavery is remembered and reckoned with, with teaching myself all of the things I wish someone had taught me,” Smith writes.
How the Word Is Passed reads like this throughout. It follows a distinct pattern of place, personal reflection, and then a deeper dive into history and politics. Smith, a staff writer at The Atlantic, has produced a book that is part travelogue and part memoir. Smith serves as a kind of tour guide for his readers, though he is ably assisted in his travels by several of his own competent and conscientious guides.
At times, Smith’s book recalls John A. Williams’s 1965 travelogue, This Is My Country Too, another reflective book of prose featuring an accomplished magazine journalist seeking answers regarding his American life. How the Word Is Passed also makes me think of Susan Neiman’s amazing book, Learning from the Germans, because overall Smith seems to be saying that America is not being honest about its often wicked past.
How the Word Is Passed accomplishes this by creating its own space to challenge the accepted narrative in the United States regarding its enslavement of African people. Smith does what Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe insisted was necessary for Black writers—to tell stories from their own perspective. As he put it, “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
Smith pieces together the history of U.S. slavery through the medium of place, as opposed to historical figures.
Using eight different destinations related to the history of the slave trade in the United States, Smith weaves a compelling narrative that allows him to take down some of the hunters who haunt our history.
The places are Monticello and Blandford Cemetery in Virginia, the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, Galveston Island in Texas, New York City, Gorée Island in Dakar, Senegal, Smith’s own hometown of New Orleans, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.
In visiting these parts of the world, Smith pieces together the history of U.S. slavery through the medium of place, as opposed to historical figures. Gone are many of the usual historical actors. Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln are mentioned only in passing. Instead, ordinary people, such as the various tour guides Smith encounters, are the stars of his story.
So, too, are many of the unknown victims of white supremacy.
Some of Smith’s narrative contains material that will be familiar to those who have sought it out. “Monticello,” the first full chapter, is yet another takedown of Thomas Jefferson, perhaps America’s most famous founder. While the paradox of Jefferson’s life—being opposed to slavery while fully immersed in its privileges of holding enslaved people—has been examined in depth before, Smith’s visit to Monticello provides a deeper deconstruction of the man.
He describes the approach taken by one tour guide, David, as the equivalent of a “crossover” in basketball. Equipped with little information on the lives of Jefferson’s African slaves, David nonetheless tries to humanize the Africans who were enslaved, referring to them constantly as “human beings.” This was the crux of chattel slavery; the enslaved Africans were not human beings, so they could be treated inhumanely, sold off like chairs or tables, and ultimately, if necessary, discarded.
Chapter two, “Whitney Plantation,” is also a well-known location to historians and others who are educating themselves on slavery. The chapter recounts Smith’s visit to the most famous of all U.S. plantations, in Wallace, Louisiana. It stands apart from all other U.S. plantations, Smith says, “by making the story of the enslaved the totality of the experience.”
Yet the visit, like Smith’s reflection of his hometown of New Orleans, causes him to curse U.S. history itself.
“I thought of my primary and secondary education,” Smith writes. “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?
The Whitney Plantation includes a memorial to a slave revolt that erupted on the coast of Louisiana, led by an African slave named Charles Deslondes. Though it was the largest such revolt in U.S. history—about 500 slaves rose up, and dozens were executed, their heads placed on poles—it is not an event affixed in U.S. folklore like John Brown’s raid or the Nat Turner rebellion.
According to Smithsonian magazine, this omission was intentional. The insurrection almost succeeded and was much larger than originally reported. If word leaked out about such a rebellion, other Africans in bondage might follow suit.
Another chapter deals with Louisiana’s infamous Angola prison, which developed a “convict leasing” system created in the aftermath of slavery that Smith describes as “gruesome.” Sentencing these men to death, he argues, would have been much more humane. Angola prison is built where the plantation of Isaac Franklin was once located. According to Smith, the plantation “produced 3,100 bales of cotton a year, a yield higher than most other plantations in the South.” And when chattel slavery ended, it was adapted into new forms of oppression.
Perhaps the most contentious chapter in Smith’s book is the one called “Blandford Cemetery and Sons of Confederate Veterans.” More than 30,000 Confederate soldiers are buried here. Smith uses the visit to comment on the involvement of Black soldiers in the war on the side of the Union. If there is any doubt that the war was about Black oppression and white supremacy, Smith lays it to rest:
“For whites in the Confederate Army, seeing these Black men in Union uniforms represented a profound and infuriating turning point in the war, one that tapped into their worst impulses. The use of Black soldiers was a threat to the entire social order the South had been predicated on. Black soldiers in the Union Army did not simply reflect a new demographic composition of their military opponents; Lee’s army saw Black soldiers as participants in a slave revolt, an insurrection of the most nightmarish proportions that was being actively supported by Lincoln and the U.S. government.”
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A Black troop of Union soldiers during the Civil War.
Smith’s other target in this section is General Robert E. Lee, about whom he finds nothing redeeming. Lee was a slaveholder and a white supremacist who, even after the defeat of the Confederacy, did not embrace “racial equity” or believe that Black people should vote. But as with Jefferson, the racist truth about Lee’s life became “sanitized” over the years, even as Frederick Douglass denounced Lee and was, Smith says, “disgusted” by this attempt to fudge facts.
But it is in the West African nation of Senegal where Smith arrives at his true destination: the question of how African people, worldwide, will deal with slavery. This chapter, “Gorée Island and the House of Slaves,” shows how the United States continues to stumble in trying to face its own nation’s history of slavery.
Momar Niang, Smith’s guide in Senegal, states what should happen regarding the evil of African slavery everywhere in the world. “We should not shy away from it. We have to study this story,” Niang tells Smith. “This is a part of our collective memory. [W]e have to talk about the responsibility of the colonizers, those who [came] to take slaves and brought them to the Americas and Brazil [and elsewhere]. But also it is the responsibility of Africans.”
In a certain way, whether intentional or not, Smith has become one of those responsible Africans who is taking on this task and doing it well.