Clint Smith on How the Word is Passed

A few weeks ago, my friend Don and I tuned in to a Terri Gross interview with “Atlantic” writer and poet Clint Smith. https://wbur.fm/3x8DGZu I thought we were somehow listening to Don’s grandson; their voices share a deep quality of calm and kindness. I immediately placed a library hold on Smith’s new book “How the Word is Passed.” The subtitle of this fascinating character study/guided tour/memoir is “A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.” Though the subject matter is deeply disturbing and already known to many of us, there is still an element of surprise for every reader, no matter your knowledge of our country’s darkest history.

Smith was raised in New Orleans and begins his study of the overt and sometimes more covert markers of slavery at the plantations not that far from his home. He arranges for guided tours, comparing the ways in which operators of these places address or fail to address the lives of the enslaved families who were held in them. He takes a particular interest in the questions that are posed from other tourists, questions that might indicate a complete lack of understanding of what they are seeing. These are the folks he approaches after the tours are finished hoping for an interview. When they comply, they are eye-opening!

One of the most horrific locations that offers tours, and a grotesque gift shop, is Angola prison. Thanks to Jesmyn West’s exquisite novel, “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” I was aware that Angola began as a plantation where prisoners were leased to the state and worked to death. Even in the 1800’s the editor of the New Orleans “Daily Picayune” wrote that a death sentence would be more humane.

Smith goes to Galveston Island to hear about the first Juneteenth celebration and heads to New York City where a walking tour on slavery and the underground railroad makes clear that the north was no innocent bystander in the slave trade. In fact, enslaved people cleared the way for Broadway to be built and constructed the wall that Wall Street was named for.

No book about slavery would be complete without a trip to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia plantation where he lived with his enslaved mistress Sally Hemmings and their children. Smith spoke at length with the directors of programming at Monticello about the drastic changes they have made to the tours of Monticello in light of the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Annette Gordon-Reed, “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.”

Clint Smith has deeply researched and annotated this book and yet it is wonderfully personal, not at all academic. He bookends his travels with conversations with his grandparents, recognizing that the best primary sources were living right next door. “My grandfather’s grandfather was enslaved.” He repeats this mantra almost as if he disbelieves it. But while pushing his eighty-nine-year-old grandad’s wheelchair through the African American Museum of History and Culture they come upon Emmett Till’s casket. His grandfather reminded Smith that Till was killed only a few miles away from where he and Smith’s grandmother lived.

There is a proverb attributed to Africa, perhaps Ghana, that says “When an old person dies, a library burns down.” There are various iterations, but the idea is clear, and Clint Smith got it. Historically accurate yet rich with personal anecdotes, “How the Word is Passed” should be required reading for our members of congress as they contemplate the calls for reparations for slavery. Smith offers us both truth and reconciliation. A wonderful read.