How the Word Is Passed
This #thankyouthursday, I am grateful for How the Word Is Passed.
The full title is How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, and author Clint Smith does a remarkable job of making a complicated and painful topic feel intimate and accessible.
Slavery is “a subject that nobody wants to touch, because nobody wants to really talk about it,” says Jackie Bostic, one of Smith’s many interviewees. “But it’s what is going to continue to tear our country apart, until we’re willing to understand it happened. It really happened.”
Slavery really happened. And understanding slavery really is core to understanding the United States of America, past and present.
I regret that I didn’t begin to learn the truth about slavery and its lasting repercussions until well after college, and I regret that so many of my fellow American citizens are similarly undereducated and misinformed.
But books like How the Word Is Passed can be enormously corrective. And what I most appreciate about Clint Smith’s reporting is that the descriptive narrative of his explorations is interwoven with solid and compelling research.
At one point Smith attends an event held by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. A white man approaches Smith and says, in a seemingly threatening manner, “if you write about my ancestors, I want it to be correct. I’m concerned about the truth, not mythology.”
And indeed, Smith supplies an impressive amount of incontrovertible evidence (e.g., direct excerpts from state cessation documents) that justify his conclusion that “to look at primary source documents and convince yourself that the central cause of the war was anything other than slavery requires a remarkable contortion of history.”
Understanding our history is important because we are still living it today. And if we have any chance of truly moving forward, a reckoning is precisely what’s needed. So I’m very grateful for a book that makes that reckoning feel possible.
Love > fear,
Christina
p.s. Did you know the Statue of Liberty was initially meant to be holding a torch in one hand and broken shackles in the other? She’s holding a tablet instead, likely because Americans weren’t willing to take such a public stance in support of emancipation (even after it had already happened). I can’t stop thinking about that.