clint smith how the word is passed review

Smith’s presence at each site enables the reader to wrestle with both the history the site represents, as well as with the afterlives of that history.

The resulting text drives Smith’s arguments home in ways that a traditional work of history could never do-as an embodied narrator, Smith allows us to see just how present slavery’s legacies remain, how horrifying our history is, and how active our wars for a truthful telling of our history are. The story of his visit to each site weaves in and out of each chapter, alongside a larger telling of the historical narrative the site represents, aided by the work of public scholars who have elucidated that history, which grounds Smith’s experiences in each site’s broader historical context. Smith is present as an embodied narrator throughout the book’s seven chapters, each of which tells of a visit to a historical site that demonstrates the ways we reckon (or fail to reckon) with our country’s slaveholding past. As Smith visits historical sites across the country with some relationship to slavery (as well as one site in Senegal), he makes an important and effective call for us to examine how it is we remember our past, and how central our historical memory is to our existence today. Smith’s book is an examination of memory through an examination of sites that represent our country’s collective memory of slavery-which tend towards one of the two ends of the scale David presents in the book’s first chapter. “I’ve come to believe that there’s a difference between history and nostalgia, and somewhere between these two is memory.” So says David, a tour guide at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation, to Clint Smith in How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, out tomorrow.

Clint smith how the word is passed review