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

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith published by Little Brown (2021).

 

Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America hit the top of the New York Times Bestseller List the week it was published. He is on a virtual book tour that is making his work one of the most talked about history books of the summer.

Clint Smith is a writer for The Atlantic and the book is neither a history of slavery or of the historic memory of slavery. It is a reporter’s story of visiting the places where slavery is interpreted by tour guides, reenactors, and public historians for Americans who decide to devote a few hours of their vacations or holidays to a historic site associated with slavery. Anyone who visited Stone Mountain or a Plantation in the 1970s knows that the association of those sites with the enslavement of African Americans or with post-war white supremacist violence was white washed beyond recognition. Smith visited sites of historical memory to see if that was still the case. The book’s chapters are each devoted to a different location and what stories were told about slavery. While most of the sites are in the South, Smith also visits the African burial ground in New York City.

I have been to many of the places Clint Smith travelled to, some recently, and some back when the story did not get told at all. Smith opens with his visit to Monticello, where Thomas Jefferson and his family lived in the midst of scores of enslaved Black people. I had visited Monticello a quarter century ago. I had heard that it had recently begun to tour the old zone of enslavement, Mulberry Row. My wife and I and our two children went on the tour expecting at least some mention of slavery. There was a lot on Jefferson the architect, Jefferson the statesman. We were shown clever inventions he had designed, and we learned about his love of wine and books, but nothing about slavery. At the end of the tour I asked our guide perplexedly “Why no mention of slaves?” She smiled and said I must have read about the Mulberry Row Tour and that is the one I needed to take instead. Apparently Monticello had a Black Tour and a White Tour! White people need not be troubled by thoughts of the legacy of slavery white visiting Jefferson’s mountaintop.

Smith went on the modern tour focusing on slavery and he writes about it with great enthusiasm. David Thorson guided Smith’s group. A middle aged Navy veteran, David spoke calmly and invited discussion. Apprehension Smith, a Black man, might have had at a slavery tour given by an older white man was relieved when David began his tour by saying:

“Slavery’s an institution. In Jefferson’s lifetime it becomes a system. So what is this slave system? It is a system of exploitation, a system of inequality and exclusion, a system where people are owned as property and held down by physical and psychological force, a system being justified even by people who know slavery is morally wrong. By doing what? Denying the very humanity of those who are enslaved solely on the basis of the color of their skin.”

Simple, truthful words. Powerful too.

Smith described his own reaction:

In just a few sentences, David had captured the essence of chattel slavery in a way that few of my own teachers ever had. It’s not that this information was new, it’s that I had not expected to hear it in this place, in this way, with this group of almost exclusively white visitors staring back at him.

When I write about African Americans during slavery times for my blogs, I typically refer to them as enslaved people. I am always surprised by how many negative comments this draws from white readers. I am often told that I should call them “slaves” and that my choice of words is just “PC crap.” Smith writes that David used the term “people” most often when discussing enslaved Blacks. He writes:

The decision to use “human” as the primary descriptor rather than “slave” was a small yet intentional move. He described the games the children played on warm Sunday afternoons (the only day of the week they did not have to work), the songs enslaved workers sang late into the evenings, the celebrations they took part in when someone was married. What reverberated throughout was the humanity of the enslaved people—their unceasing desire to live a full life, one that would not be defined simply by their forced labor.

Yeah, that sounds right. Go David. Public historians take note.

Only when Black people of the 18th Century are seen as people can modern visitors understand one of the most painful aspects of slavery, family separation. Unless the enslaved are seen as possessing human emotions, something many white Americans denied for generations, the selling off of children from their parents can be written off as merely economic in content. David told his tour group that “The splitting of families was not peripheral to the practice of slavery; it was central.” It was one way the money was made and the wealth of white owners was piled high.

Smith spoke with others on the tour and found, as I had 25 years ago, that many were drawn to Charlottesville where the house is located because they had heard it was an architectural wonder or because they wanted to see where the author of the Declaration of Independence lived. Two such tourists, Grace and Donna told Smith that David’s tour opened a whole new avenue into looking at Jefferson and the people he kept in bondage. Donna told Smith; “It just took his shine off. He might have done great things, but boy, did he have a big flaw.” While 400,000 visitors tour Monticello every year only one-in-five takes the slavery tour.

Smith next goes to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana. While some plantations still hold “Plantation Weddings” where slavery is ignored and Moonlight and Magnolias can be had for a hefty price, Whitney tries to tell the story of slavery. There the staff expressed frustration at white visitors who insist that there must have been a good side to slavery. Smith describes this conversation with a staffer:

“Number one question [we get from white visitors]: ‘I know slavery was bad…I don’t mean it this way, but…were there any good slave owners?’” Yvonne took another deep breath, the frustration from thinking about the persistence of the question visible in her face—the look of someone professionally committed to patience but personally exhausted by the emotional toll it has taken on her. “I really give a short but nuanced answer to that,” she said. “Regardless of how these individuals fed the people that they owned, regardless of how they clothed them, regardless of if they never laid a hand on them, they were still sanctioning the system…You can’t say, ‘Hey, this person kidnapped your child, but they fed them well. They were a good person.’ How absurd does that sound?”

Many Americans cling to the belief that “masters” considered their “slaves” part of their families. Since no slave owner ever left white members of his family to Black “members of his family,” this notion is absurd, yet it still comforts millions of whites.

The visit Clint Smith made that has attracted the most public attention is to Blandford Cemetery on the Petersburg battlefield in Virginia. The cemetery has a Confederate section with a chapel whose Tiffany windows honor the Confederacy. The tour highlights the beauty of the glass, but ignores the armed struggle to perpetuate slavery that the windows were installed to memorialize. Spotting an announcement that the Sons of Confederate Veterans would be observing Confederate Memorial Day at the cemetery Smith decides to attend with a Black friend.

If you have attended a recent school board meeting where “voters,” inflamed by Fox’s moral panic about Critical Race Theory, have shown up to denounce any mention of slavery in history class because it “makes white children ashamed of their ancestors,” the Memorial Day scene at the cemetery will sound familiar. The history told by the Sons takes race and slavery out of the story of the Confederacy and substitutes unverified anecdotes for historical research. Smith quotes the speech by the national president of the group,  Paul Gramling, who said:

“I’ve read several people writing about Memorial Day and how it started. I come across one the other day. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I like it. And I wanted to share that with you this afternoon.” He read aloud an account of a Memorial Day ceremony that took place on April 25, 1866, in Columbus, Mississippi, when a group of women “decorated the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers,” he said, his voice like an old rocking chair sliding back and forth on its crescent legs. “The [United Daughters of the Confederacy] will forever honor all of our country’s heroes with undying devotion and that of our Confederate dead, who have earned their rightful place to be included as American veterans. We should embrace our heritage as Americans, North and South, Black and white, rich and poor. Our American heritage is the one thing we have in common, and it is what defines us.” ,,,

“I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I like it”—that comment, spoken at the start of Gramling’s speech, had been strikingly honest and deeply revealing. I was struck by the cavalier framing Gramling used….

As he continued his speech, Gramling turned his attention away from history and began describing a talk he had given that addressed the present-day controversy around Confederate monuments standing across the country. “I told them that we have a common enemy today and that common enemy seeks to eradicate this country’s moral fabric. I told them that if they were to succeed in eradicating all things Confederate, what comes next?” I was struck by the stillness in his face, how serious his eyes were as they scanned the crowd. “Our enemies know that if they can take us out, the rest of this country is going to be easy for their picking. Now, thirty years we have been dealing with people trying to take away our symbols. When these monuments were erected over one hundred years ago, in our towns, they were erected in these cities and these towns, the whole town was involved in it. I know in Shreveport [Louisiana], where I’m from, we have a monument there, in Caddo Parish Courthouse, and at the dedication of that monument in 1906, there was hundreds of thousands of people there at the dedication.” People in the crowd nodded. My ears prickled with nervous heat. “But to think about these men that lay here, buried, that look like that up there…” He pointed in the direction of what looked to be a thirty-foot statue of a Confederate soldier to the crowd’s right. “If you take a good look at him, that was all there was to it as far as dealing with the elements, [dealing with] the enemy. And to know that we have thirty thousand of these men buried here, known only to God. And then I think about all the monuments across this country that naysayers are decrying, ‘Get rid of them. That offends me. I don’t like it.’… I refer to them as the American ISIS.” He looked out into the crowd, who murmured affirmation, and his face contorted with delight. “I have even written about this in the Confederate Veteran, in my article, because they are nothing better than ISIS in the Middle East. They are trying to destroy history they don’t like. And like I said, once they go through the Confederate symbols—US symbols, Christian symbols, will be next.” Each syllable of Gramling’s words were cigarette embers being pushed onto my skin. I thought about all of my friends back home in New Orleans who had spent years fighting to have the Confederate monuments removed. So many of them were teachers committed to showing their students that we did not have to accept the status quo as unchangeable.

Smith’s visit to the African Burial Ground in New York City is different because rather than white wash the history of slavery, the city simply ignored it for more than a century, until construction of a Federal office building unearthed the bones of the enslaved. Many were children. In Senegal, Smith visits Goree Island where slaves were embarked for sale in the Western Hemisphere. While the students he meets in Senegal know that some Senegalize participated in the slave trade, he finds that ahistorical narratives have infected the stories the guides there tell tourists.

While Clint Smith visited a number of historic sites, some several times, each chapter tells the story of a single visit and relies heavily on the guide’s words, recorded by Smith. He inserts reflections by other visitors on what they have heard. In some chapters he seeks out the historian who designed the tour or exhibit, but the centerpieces are the sites as experienced by the visitor. This reporterly approach gives Smith’s own impressions added power.

While an academic book on slavery, the Civil War, or Reconstruction might get a few thousand readers, millions of Americans get their history lessons from historic sites, movies, and Bill O’Reilly’s books. A few years ago I was saddened to see that half the Top Ten bestselling history books that year were written by Fox TV personalities.

Our historic sites have gotten better at telling the story of race and slavery than they were in my youth. Many cities are no longer allowing their cityscapes to be populated with statues dedicated to the defenders of the enslavement of African Americans. However, I often think on the fact that while 80,000 people a year take the slavery tour at Monticello, 5 million visit the Confederate Disneyland that is Stone Mountain, where the engraved figures of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis are animated each night in a laser light show projected on a mountain where the Ku Klux Klan was reborn at the start of the 20th Century. Clint Smith’s well-written page-turner is a corrective.

 

 

 

 

 

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