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A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
by Clint Smith
Book Reviewed by:With legislatures around the U.S. rushing to ban the teaching of critical race theory, it's clear that the backlash against an honest appraisal of systemic racism remains virulent and damaging. It's this reactionism that makes How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith not just timely but vital to the discussion of race in the U.S. and beyond.
The book unfolds as a series of vignettes capturing Smith's travels around the U.S. and West Africa, visiting sites with a direct connection to chattel slavery. It begins, understandably, with plantations that are now historical sites. He visits two — Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home where the tours and material culture (objects produced or used by humans) don't adequately address its role as a plantation populated by slaves, and Whitney in Louisiana, where that legacy is on full display.
Smith interviews tour guides and fellow visitors, showing how Monticello's shifting emphasis is beginning to challenge traditional perceptions of Jefferson, particularly among white Americans, but that there is still much of Jefferson's views on race that aren't discussed. For example, Smith details Jefferson's theorizing on Blacks' inferiority to whites in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, as well as his relationship with slave Sally Hemings, none of which are addressed on the house tour at Monticello.
At Whitney, Smith recounts the material culture that boldly addresses the massacres of slaves who revolted, and the children ensnared in slavery's dehumanizing clutches. Smith tackles a common refrain about slaves' own culpability for not escaping their circumstances, delivering an incisive distillation of how structural racism perpetuates oppression: "I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn't simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had…This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy that illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, despite the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights."
The narrative then moves to former-plantation-turned-prison Angola, also in Louisiana. Angola was a leading institution of "convict leasing," a loophole in the 13th Amendment that perpetuated slavery conditions for imprisoned Black people. Smith's experiences in the macabre gift shop, the terrifying execution room and the inhumane cells from now-closed cell blocks are gut-wrenching, as are his retellings of wrongly convicted inmates who were executed and current tour guides' obfuscation of Angola's brutal history.
From there, Smith spends a long chapter on Blandford Cemetery in Virginia, burial site of thousands of Confederate soldiers, using it as a springboard to explore monuments to Confederate leaders and soldiers that mushroomed across the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mostly built at the height of the Jim Crow era, these monuments claimed to honor the "Lost Cause," an alternate version of Civil War history where the North was the aggressor and the South, rather than being rebels attempting to preserve slavery, were loyal family men preserving an idyllic, bucolic way of life (see Beyond the Book).
Smith has tense conversations with Memorial Day celebrants at Blandford Cemetery at a ceremony run by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Even without outright animosity, these exchanges show the difficulty white people have in confronting their ancestors' failings, and their inability to separate those failings from how they view themselves. Smith lets the unsaid undercurrents from his interviewees reverberate through the pages, while expertly layering in citations of historical documents that prove the Confederacy's commitment to preserving slavery, and hence the falsity of the Lost Cause.
He goes on to explore the importance of Juneteenth (recently made a federal holiday) in Texas where the final announcement of slavery's end was made two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Smith follows the history from the joy of the announcement to the agony of racist policies enacted against Black people post-Reconstruction, and centers on the significance of teaching history honestly.
Smith visits New York City and shares how Wall Street was, figuratively and literally, built by slavery. Slaves constructed the actual wall for which the area is named, even though the wall is long gone, and it was via the slave trade that early financiers in New York made their fortunes. Smith's unflinching look at the North's role in slavery and systemic racism is incredibly important — as important as dismantling the Lost Cause mythology — because it refutes the idea that the North was always "good" or that discrimination and oppression are only geographic phenomena.
His last chapter reinforces that point by visiting the embarkation point of thousands of slaves in the West African nation of Senegal. Smith describes how American and African history are connected, and how African tribal groups interacted with Europeans in a more complex way than is commonly assumed. Likewise, for Senegalese people, reclaiming their history means teaching everything that came before and after the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and equipping students "with an intellectual and historical tool kit, so they won't accept and internalize the idea that Africa has no history, that Africa's poverty is its own fault, that Africa would be better off if it were under European control."
This book's strengths are many, including Smith's mellifluous language and his ability to crystallize the meaning of white supremacy and its effects for Black Americans. The connections he draws both spatially and temporally between the actual lived horrors of slavery and the world as we know it today are both brilliant and vital, as is his emphasis on education and how the teaching of the past is really a reflection of current attitudes, fears and prejudices.
How the Word Is Passed should be required reading for white Americans to gain a fuller understanding of what slavery meant and how its legacy permeates the world in a way they may not see or understand. It's a long-overdue narrative that will increase all readers' understanding of systemic racism and how the past is never as far away as it may seem.
This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in July 2021, and has been updated for the
January 2023 edition.
Click here to go to this issue.
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