How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
By Clint Smith (Little, Brown and Company)
I forgot how I stumbled across this book. I long have known what little I really knew about slavery in America was largely a distorted history told by white writers to cover the realities of this barbaric institution. That reality has been pushed into the legislative battles around the nation about resources of telling the history of enslavement in America. Politicians seem to be afraid of the truth, which caused me to ask, “Why?”
After reading How the Word is Passed, I can say, “I better understand the fear.”
Clint Smith tells the history of slavery by visiting certain sites and places beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation. Odd place to begin, one might think, until realizing the author of the Declaration of Independence was a slave-owner. In fact, he enslaved his own children, born to Jefferson through his common-law wife, Sally Hemings. In fact, Monticello gives a glimpse of the tortured positions of most of the slave-owning founding fathers.
From Monticello, Smith takes us to the Whitney Plantation, then Angola Prison, then Blandford Cemetery, then Galveston Island, and, oddly, New York City before ending with Goree Island, Senegal, West Africa. Each step along the way is a calculated part of unraveling the full picture of slavery in America and the banking system which supported it.
Smith, an African American writer at The Atlantic, is amazingly engaging but not angry. His prose is easy to read in some respects but hard to read in others, because as a careful historian, he writes of what he documents and experiences.
If white pastors want to get a sense of the gaps in their “education about enslaved peoples, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, the financial underpinnings for slavery and finally, where it all started,” this book can be very helpful. It will not be “easy” reading, but it will help you see with fresh eyes the toxic foundation of this nation, which continues to pour its poison into our public life and communities today.
Michael R. Chancellor
Round Rock
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