How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A travelogue, a history, a quest, a warning and a call for a reckoning that the history of slavery is the history of our country, central and defining to who we we were and who we are, individually and collectively. In powerfully lyrical prose, Clint Smith challenges us to really learn our history, listen to our legacies, understand the recollections that "remain in the marrow of our bones," that travel through time and generations. A tour de force that will keep you engaged long past the last page.

This “important and timely” (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America—and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives.

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.

 

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

Winner of the Stowe Prize 

Winner of 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism 

A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316492928
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	12/27/2022
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	5,983
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller and one of the New York Times Top Ten Books of 2021. He is also the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent. The book won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review and elsewhere. Born and raised in New Orleans, he received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University. 

Table of Contents

Author's Note xv

"The whole city is a memorial to slavery"-Prologue 3

"There's a difference between history and nostalgia"-Monticello Plantation 8

"An open book, up under the sky"-The Whitney Plantation 52

"I can't change what happened here"-Angola Prison 85

"I don't know if it's true or not, but I like it"-Blandford Cemetery 118

"Our Independence Day"-Galveston Island 173

"We were the good guys, right?"-New York City 207

"One slave is too much"-Gorée Island 239

"I lived it"-Epilogue 270

About This Project 291

Acknowledgments 294

Notes 297

Index 319

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/22/2021

Poet and Atlantic staff writer Smith debuts with a moving and perceptive survey of landmarks that reckon, or fail to reckon, with the legacy of slavery in America. Visiting Monticello plantation, Smith describes how Thomas Jefferson’s self-perception as a “benevolent slave owner” often conflicted with his actions. On a tour of Angola prison, Smith discusses how nonunanimous jury verdicts fueled the “convict leasing system” that replaced slave labor in post-Reconstruction Louisiana, and notes that when the state switched from the electric chair to lethal injection in 1991, Angola inmates refused to build the prison death bed. At the Blandford Cemetery for Confederate soldiers in Petersburg, Va., Smith questions on-site historians about the ethical implications of preserving a place of honor for the defenders of slavery. He also checks in at the annual Juneteenth festival in Galveston, Tex., and takes an illuminating walking tour of underground railroad sites in New York City. Suffused with lyrical descriptions and incisive historical details, including Robert E. Lee’s ruthlessness as a slave owner and early resistance by Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois to the Confederate general’s “deification,” this is an essential consideration of how America’s past informs its present. Agent: Alia Habib, the Gernert Co. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Suffused with lyrical descriptions and incisive historical details, including Robert E. Lee’s ruthlessness as a slave owner and early resistance by Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois to the Confederate general’s “deification,” this is an essential consideration of how America’s past informs its present."—Publisher's Weekly

"The Atlantic writer drafts a history of slavery in this country unlike anything you’ve read before.”—Entertainment Weekly

“An important and timely book about race in America.”—Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine

"Merging memoir, travelogue, and history, Smith fashions an affecting, often lyrical narrative of witness."—The New York Review of Books

"In this exploration of the ways we talk about — and avoid talking about — slavery, Smith blends reportage and deep critical thinking to produce a work that interrogates both history and memory."—Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe

“Raises questions that we must all address, without recourse to wishful thinking or the collective ignorance and willful denial that fuels white supremacy.” —Martha Anne Toll, The Washington Post

“Sketches an impressive and deeply affecting human cartography of America’s historical conscience…an extraordinary contribution to the way we understand ourselves.” —Julian Lucas, New York Times Book Review

"With careful research, scholarship, and perspective, Smith underscores a necessary truth: the imprint of slavery is unyieldingly present in contemporary America, and the stories of its legacy, of the enslaved people and their descendants, are everywhere."—TeenVogue

“Clint Smith, in his new book “How the Word Is Passed,” has created something subtle and extraordinary.”—Christian Science Monitor

"Part of what makes this book so brilliant is its bothandedness. It is both a searching historical work and a journalistic account of how these historic sites operate today. Its both carefully researched and lyrical. I mean Smith is a poet and the sentences in this book just are piercingly alive. And it’s both extremely personal—it is the author’s story—and extraordinarily sweeping. It amplifies lots of other voices. Past and present. Reading it I kept thinking about that great Alice Walker line ‘All History is Current’.”—John Green, New York Times bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed

“The summer’s most visionary work of nonfiction is this radical reckoning with slavery, as represented in the nation’s monuments, plantations, and landmarks.”—Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

“The detail and depth of the storytelling is vivid and visceral, making history present and real. Equally commendable is the care and compassion shown to those Smith interviews — whether tour guides or fellow visitors in these many spaces. Due to his care as an interviewer, the responses Smith elicits are resonant and powerful. . . . Smith deftly connects the past, hiding in plain sight, with today's lingering effects.”—Hope Wabuke, NPR

“This isn’t just a work of history, it’s an intimate, active exploration of how we’re still constructing and distorting our history.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“Both an honoring and an exposé of slavery’s legacy in America and how this nation is built upon the experiences, blood, sweat and tears of the formerly enslaved.”—The Root

“What [Smith] does, quite successfully, is show that we whitewash our history at our own risk. That history is literally still here, taking up acres of space, memorializing the past, and teaching us how we got to be where we are, and the way we are. Bury it now and it will only come calling later." —USA Today

From the Publisher

01/01/2021

Atlantic staff writer Smith travels the country, moving from his native New Orleans to Monticello; the Whitney Plantation, which aims to preserve the experience of those enslaved; Angola, a former plantation in Louisiana that now serves as a maximum-security prison; and downtown Manhattan, where people were bought and sold. His aim: to show that slavery has been central to the making of America.

Library Journal

★ 2021-03-31
A Black journalist and poet calls for a reconsideration of the way America teaches its history of slavery.

“The story our country tells about the Civil War often flattens some of its otherwise complex realities,” writes New Orleans native Smith, a staff writer for the Atlantic. He notes the U.S. is “at an inflection point, in which there is a willingness to more fully grapple with the legacy of slavery and how it shaped the world we live in today.” However, while “some places have attempted to tell the truth about their proximity to slavery and its aftermath,” others have refused. For this book, the author traveled to nine sites, eight in the U.S. and one in Dakar, Senegal, “to understand how each reckons with its relationship to the history of American slavery.” The result is a devastating portrait with unforgettable details. At the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, historians have labored to help visitors close “the yawning gap on slavery” in their educations—“a hammer attempting to unbend four centuries of crooked nails.” By contrast, the Angola Museum at the Louisiana State Penitentiary has a gift shop with such souvenirs as “a white mug with the silhouette of a guard sitting in a watchtower surrounded by fencing.” When Smith asked his White tour guide to comment on Angola’s role in slavery, the guide replied, “I can’t change that.” At these places and other sites such as Monticello, Galveston Island, and New York City, the author conducted interviews with tour guides, visitors, and others to paint a vivid portrait of the extent to which venues have attempted to redress past wrongs. Smith concludes with a moving epilogue about taking his grandparents to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The trip elicited painful stories from their childhoods, such as his grandmother recalling walking home from school as White children in buses threw ice cream at her and hurled vicious epithets.

A brilliant, vital work about “a crime that is still unfolding.

Kirkus Reviews