The Sunday New York Times reviews HOW THE WORD IS PASSED: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith. Here are some excerpts from the review.
Where are we, exactly, in the great American slavery reckoning? Like a poorly written series watched only on random weeknights, it’s beginning to lose coherence, even — or maybe even especially — when you pay attention. In one episode, protesters are tearing down Confederate statues and the nation is on the cusp of reparations; by the next, the federal government has condemned basic education about slavery as a form of totalitarian brainwashing. The Harriet Tubman 20 flutters from season to season like an unresolved subplot. Are we in the backlash, the whitelash, or the backlash to the whitelash, and when will white liberals lose interest? It’s enough to give anybody whiplash, especially those of us who, as descendants of the enslaved, can’t safely stop watching the interminable show
Perhaps the only way to get a clearer picture is to visit individual communities, where the national culture war yields to quieter yet no less monumental struggles over the meaning of particular historic sites. A growing number of books feature such analyses — “Denmark Vesey’s Garden,” by Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, for instance, focuses on Charleston, S.C. — but none have attempted an appraisal quite so expansive or intimate as “How the Word Is Passed,” a cross-country survey of slavery remembrance by the poet and Atlantic staff writer Clint Smith. Gregarious, learned and engagingly open-minded, the book meets America where it is on the subject — which is to say, all over the place. Beginning in his hometown, New Orleans, Smith visits nine places that memorialize or distort their link to the legacy of slavery, from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello to the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan. He skillfully braids interviews with scholarship and personal observation, asking, “How different might our country look if all of us fully understood what had happened here?
The result is a tour of tours and a reckoning with reckonings, which sketches an impressive and deeply affecting human cartography of America’s historical conscience. The book’s standout quality is the range and sincerity of its encounters. Smith walks with tourists, guides, teachers, scholars, ex-convicts, local historians and heritage zealots, managing to catch nearly everyone in a moment of unscripted candor. His ease with strangers is charmingly apparent. After a tour at Monticello focused on Jefferson’s slaveholding, one conservative Southerner says, “This really took the shine off the guy.” In the chapel of Blandford Cemetery, in Petersburg, Va., which honors each rebel state with a Tiffany stained-glass memorial, a nervous docent admits that “we try and fall back on the beauty of the windows” whenever the topic of slavery arises. Later, Smith attends a Memorial Day event at the cemetery organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, where a member earnestly tries to convince him that Black men served as officers in the Confederacy.
Smith offers a more encouraging portrait of Galveston, Texas, visiting a Juneteenth celebration at the spot where it is widely believed that Union forces entering the state announced Emancipation. There he meets Al Edwards, a Black state legislator who spearheaded the holiday’s official recognition in 1979. Another success is the House of Slaves on Gorée Island in Senegal, a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site, which Smith frames as a counterpoint to America’s miseducation. At a local boarding school, he interviews girls who demonstrate impressive knowledge of the slave trade, and who roll their eyes at the mention of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who infamously excluded Africa from the concept of history.
Yet the triumph of remembrance poses its own dilemmas of truth and falsehood. Smith confronts the House of Slaves’ curator about Senegalese tourism officials’ long exaggeration of the number of individuals shipped from the site. After visiting a small holding cell and the famous Door of No Return, which looks out over the Atlantic, he wonders: “Did it matter whether enslaved people had actually been held there or did it matter that my sense of what bondage meant for millions of people had been irreversibly heightened? Can a place that misstates a certain set of facts still be a site of memory for a larger truth?” Similar questions about artifice arise at Louisiana’s Whitney Plantation, the first such site devoted to the memory of the enslaved in the United States; the founder, a white trial attorney named John Cummings, controversially augmented the original complex with historic buildings relocated from elsewhere.
In New York City, by contrast, vestiges of slavery are everywhere present yet scarcely marked. On a tour of the financial district — where offices were nearly built over the segregated colonial cemetery that is now the African Burial Ground National Monument — we learn that enslaved workers helped to clear land for the construction of Broadway, and that the Statue of Liberty may well have been intended by Édouard René de Laboulaye as a celebration not of immigration but of abolition…
Smith has a penchant for evoking people and places, and occasionally garlands his text with descriptions of voices, landscapes and curricula vitae that distract from the substance of his research. His generosity of spirit also leads him to affirm some instances of remembrance that might deserve more scrutiny. When I visited the Whitney Plantation in 2018, I was taken aback by its uncritical memorial to the 1811 German Coast Uprising, which Smith uses to open a chapter. It “honors” participants in the slave rebellion by displaying them just as their murderers did, as heads on pikes.
But it’s surely a sign of strength when even a book’s shortcomings vindicate its larger project. Smith’s unapologetically subjective map of American memory is an extraordinary contribution to the way we understand ourselves…
Sounds reminiscent of “Confederates In the Attic” but for slavery.