I bought Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America almost as soon as it came out in 2021 after repeatedly hearing what an amazing book it was. But as I mentioned in post earlier this month, I was deep in the world of Nazis and couldn’t face adding America’s history of slavery to the stew in my head. So I put it on the high-priority T0-Be-Read piles that live on my office window sill,* with a promise that I would get to it soon. (Soon is relative in TBR time.)

How the Word is Passed is indeed amazing. Beginning with his home town of New Orleans and ending with discussions with his grandparents, Smith leads the reader on a tour of sites related to the history of slavery and how those sites have been used to tell that story. He does not simply consider the obvious sites.** For instance he looks at historical sites related to the slave trade in New York City—an incisive demonstration of the point that slavery and the slave trade played critical roles in the country as a whole, not just in the south. At each site, he considers not only how the story is told, but who is telling it, who is listening to it, and what stories are being left out. He shares his own reaction to each site, sometimes in physical terms. He makes it clear that slavery, and the long emancipation that followed, have a long tail in this country, emotional as well as economic.

As I read How the Word is Passed, I found myself thinking of Dolly Chugh’s A More Just Future.  Chugh discusses how to deal with the discomfort of coming to terms with the disjunction between the history we were taught and the history we we weren’t taught. Smith gives us a personal demonstration of that discomfort. In a discussion of the project as the end of the book, he tells the reader that not only is the book not a definitive account of sites related to slavery, but it is not a definitive account of the sites he chose to visit. Instead, it is “a reflection of my own experience, concerns, and questions at each place at a specific period of time.” Smith’s writing is beautiful, thoughtful and powerful. He kept me turning the pages even when the reading was painful. My heart ached as I read.

If you chose to read one book about Black history this year, How the Word is Passed would be an excellent choice.***

*As opposed to the TBR piles that sit on my office floor waiting for room to open up on the TBR bookshelf, where some books have waited for a long, long time. I will point out that all of the books I am reading for Black History Month are from the high-priority stacks. (I occasionally bemoan the sheer volume of books waiting for me to read them someday, but as I discovered while writing The Dragon From Chicago, books find their time. More than once I discovered I already owned just the book I needed.)

**Monticello, I’m looking at you.

***Personally, I intend to read more over the coming year, though not in such a concentrated way. I will share a list of books from my shelves, read and unread, in my newsletter on February 27. (A good reason to sign up for the newsletter if you don’t get it already. Here’s the link: http://eepurl.com/dIft-b )