Book review: Clint Smith’s How the word is passed

How the Word Is Passed is a first-person account of Clint Smith’s travels to places in this continent and Africa to uncover stories that have been lost or hidden about the tragic legacy of slavery in this country. This inquiry has personal as well as political implications for Smith whose ancestors, as close in his lineage as his grandfather’s grandfather, were enslaved. In all the places he visits--Monticello Plantation, The Whitney Plantation, Angola Prison, Blandford Cemetery, Galveston Island, New York City, and Goree Island (Senegal)--he finds stories that connect the past to the present. In this book he brings his new unsettling understandings of history to the light of day so readers also can begin to understand them. This book is a gift to the world and to me.

Writer, poet, and scholar Clint Smith was not a new name to me before hearing of this book. For nearly five years I listened to him share his thoughts about current events as a regular guest on Pod Save the People, hosted by racial justice activist and organizer DeRay McKesson. Smith often brought news to the podcast about mass incarceration and racial injustice, the focus of his own scholarly work. Smith also talked about his experiences teaching writing in prisons, and from time to time, read poetry. Some people will recognize his name as one of the poets contributing to the NY Times 1619 Project publication in 2019. He has now left the podcast to pursue new opportunities and new audiences. 

In each of the places he describes in this book, Smith is confronted with ways in which the history of slavery and racial oppression in its aftermath have been distorted in the American consciousness. In most places, attempts were being made to uncover lost stories and make public this information. An exception to these efforts was at the Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia, where roughly 30,000 Confederate soldiers were buried after the Civil War. Many visitors come to the cemetery to pay their respects to the war dead, many of them their own ancestors, and also, to admire exquisite stained glass windows in the cemetery’s chapel, each window is dedicated to a different state of the Confederacy. These windows were created by Louis Comfort Tiffany whose deeply discounted price made their purchase by the Ladies Memorial Society possible.

Feeling uncomfortable with the one-sided account of this place sympathetic to the Confederate dead, Smith asks his tour guides how they can talk about the history of the cemetery and the beauty of the chapel’s stain glass windows without spending any time considering the violence and harm caused by the war fought to defend the immoral practice of slavery. Smith is told more or less that the reasons for the Civil War were complicated and slavery was not really part of their ancestors’ motivation for fighting in it. Smith tells them, “You were talking about how for a lot of people they can come in here and just see the windows. And appreciate the history and décor of the church. But for me, as someone whose ancestors were enslaved, it is very difficult for me to disentangle any of it. I think there is a profound dissonance, even to be here. I think I experience it probably in a very different way than a lot of your visitors.” They acknowledge that they rarely hear someone make the point he is making, saying, “What would you guess…eighty-five, ninety percent of our visitors are white?”

Toward the end of his visit there, one of the guides cringes when she sees Smith noticing a flyer for a Sons of the Confederacy gathering to be held on the cemetery grounds on Memorial Day. He decides to return to the cemetery for the event where he hears speakers defending monuments honoring Civil War soldiers and unambiguously denying a connection between slavery and the Civil War. In conversations with several men attending the rally, one man tells him, “Well, basically everybody always hears the same things, ‘It’s all about slavery.’ And it wasn't. It was about the fact that each state had the right to govern itself.” For most of the rest of this chapter, Smith presents historical evidence to the contrary, including. each state’s declarations of secession that explicitly identify the need to maintain slavery as the reason for secession.

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I read How the Word Is Passed because of my interest in the topic and the respect I already had for Smith’s intellectual curiosity and rigor. But there was something else I wanted from it as well. I am writing a book that, though the focus is different, addresses some of the same issues of how the past informs the present, even as the past has been hidden from view. In my case I am reckoning with the legacy of European ancestors who settled in multiple places on this continent, examining the connection between the land they settled and the dispossession of that land by Indigenous nations. Travel also is a part of my investigation as I visit the places of their leaving Europe and arriving here. I have been thinking hard about how to structure my story, how to write about what I can only imagine based on available contextual information and often-biased political histories. Though our narratives are very different, reading about Smith’s process of discovery gave me a certain confidence in how I am writing about my own experiences and the difficult truths that arise.

As I investigate my ancestral histories, so many questions come up that I wish I had been curious enough to ask my own ancestors about when they were still alive. I like that Smith ground-truths what he learns in his travels through conversations with his maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother. As he shared stories with his grandmother, she confirmed things he had learned, saying repeatedly, “I lived it.”  I found myself wishing these kinds of conversations were still possible for me, but they are not.  Shortly before my father’s passing I showed him a photograph of his parents holding one of my cousins, asking why my land-locked grandparents were on a beach, and he told me a rather dramatic story about a death in the family I had never heard before. I realized there were things never told me as a child, probably deemed inappropriate or uninteresting to me at the time, that would have meaning for me as an adult. Daddy is not around, however, to answer my new questions, like what he knew about his own grandparents’ immigration to Iowa or what he had been taught about the Black Hawk War. My mother died more recently but her dementia robbed us both of conversations we might have had about her ancestors’ lives. 

Clint Smith is a skilled storyteller; he keeps the reader engaged even as the content is emotionally hard to bear. His writing is lyrical. He brings his poetic sensibilities to every page. After many hours listening to Smith speak on Pod Save the People, it was his very specific warm, passionate, serious voice in my head as I read this book. I am glad that he has brought into the world these stories, as difficult as they are to process. At the end of the chapter on his visit to the Blandford Cemetery, he writes,

“What would it take—what does it take—for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life? Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been? Just because something is difficult to accept doesn’t mean you should refuse to accept it.”

If any kind of racial justice is to be realized there must be a reckoning with the truth about the horrific inheritance of slavery. And only in that reckoning can necessary repairs be made.