Title: How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
Author: Clint Smith
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company 2021
Genre: U.S. History / Memoir
Pages: 336
Rating: 5/5 stars
Reading Challenges: Winter TBR List
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves.
It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation–turned–maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.
A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted.
Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith’s debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be.
Another contender for my Top Books of 2022. This book partly U.S. History, partly memoir has me rethinking everything I know about the history of slavery in America and how it informs our society today. Overall, I knew a lot of the history presented, but I still found myself learning new-to-me facts and situations. But what I really hooked onto was the connection between those stories, how we tell them, and how it affects us today. Smith does a beautiful job showing the reader the connections between those three things and making the reader confront our own skewed perspectives. I found myself reflecting back to what I have been taught, what I taught, and what was missing. I kept thinking about the quote at the end of the book:
“The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.” (pg. 289)
I keep coming back to this idea and then reexamining what it meant to examine this history. I loved how Smith put in in an early chapter of the book:
“But there is enormous value in providing young people with the language, the history, and the framework to identify why their society looks the way it does. Understanding that all of this was done not by accident but by design. That did not strip me of agency, it gave agency back to me. I watched these young people share this history, and I dreamed of what it might mean if we could extend these lessons toe very child. How different might our country look if all of us fully understood what has happened here?” (pg. 179)
We need to put our history out into the open, examine it from all sides, and then take lessons from it. We need to learn to be able to move forward in a purposeful way. For my own personal life, I will be thinking about my own past, and my family’s past, and how we have been complicit in the continuation of slavery in America. Smith has so much to teach each one of us about our role in this country. The book and the lessons I learned are going to keep coming back to me for years to come. Such a powerful read.
