Podcast

Poured Over: Clint Smith on How The Word Is Passed

By Miwa Messer / June 8, 2021 at 12:01 am

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

Hardcover $30.00

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

By Clint Smith

In Stock Online

Hardcover $30.00

How the Word is Passed is one of our most anticipated books for June 2021 — it’s a powerful portrait of America today, built from our history and Clint Smith’s incredible insight. Writer for The Atlantic, teacher and Doctor, Clint Smith is also a poet (Counting Descent) and the host of Crash Course (@thecrashcourse) Black American History. Our interview with Clint runs a little longer than usual because there’s so much shared ground to cover. Featured books: How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith, Long Division by Kiese Laymon, The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris, and The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw.Poured Over: The B&N Podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher, among other outlets. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Thursday – please follow us wherever you listen to podcasts.Hosted and produced by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang.

Poured Over is a show for readers who pore over details, obsess over sentences and ideas and stories and characters; readers who ask a lot of questions, just like Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer, a career bookseller who’s always reading. Follow us here for surprising riffs, candid conversations, a few laughs, and lots of great book recommendations from big name authors and authors on their way to being big names. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) here, and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

Barnes & Noble: Clint Smith, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over the Barnes and Noble podcast, your book How the Word is Passed, just published. This is its third day in the world.

Clint Smith: This is its third day in the world.

B&N: Third day. And I’m very excited. I’ve been waiting for this book for a really long time. And I’m going to quote you for a second. So much of the story we tell about history is really the story that we tell about ourselves about our mothers and our fathers and their mothers and their fathers, as far back as our lineages will take us. So you’re telling an incredibly fundamental story about America, you’re telling the story of us as Americans, a story of our mothers and our fathers and our lineages. So how did this book start for you?

CS: So this book started in May of 2017. When I watched the Confederate statues, several Confederate statues in New Orleans, my hometown being taken down, so a statue of Robert E. Lee, Confederate General. PGT Beauregard, Confederate General. Jefferson Davis, Confederate President, as well as some other symbols of white supremacy. And I was watching these statues come down in this place that was my home. And thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city in which there were more marches to enslavers than they were to enslave people. And what did it mean that on my way to school, every day, I went down Robert E. Lee Boulevard, on the way to get to the grocery store, I went down Jefferson Davis highway, me that my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy in the street my parents live on is named after 150 enslaved people, that when I went to plantations growing up on field trips in elementary school, you would go on these plantation tours, and nobody would even say the word slavery. And so, you know, having slavery be at once so present in my home, but also, so unnamed, in so many ways, and almost worse than being unnamed, it was erased and oversaturated, by the iconography and symbols of the Confederacy. And so I started thinking about, like how my own city reckoned with or failed to reckon with its own relationship to the history of slavery, and then kind of broaden that out and got really interested, and almost obsessed, I’d say, in thinking about how this history of slavery was remembered, in different places across the country, and what shapes, what that memory looks like, in these various places. And so I end up in the book, you know, I went to dozens of places, ended up writing about eight of them in the book, including one abroad and, and really just wanted to capture places that reflected the patchwork and plurality and heterogeneity of experiences that reflect the inconsistency of how slavery is remembered, here in the US.

B&N: And I was having a version of this conversation with a friend actually just the other day, and she, like you, grew up in places where schools were named after Robert E. Lee and other people who owned enslaved people and things, our streets are called Confederate way. What does it mean to you as a writer and a researcher and a historian that we aren’t telling these stories?

CS: Well, I think part of the reason we don’t tell this story is because people don’t want to see this country for what it is and for what it has been. Because if you are to accept the reality that this country was founded upon the principle of state sanction efforts to enslave millions of human beings, to commit genocide against millions of indigenous people, that multiple iterations of immigrant groups who came to this country experienced state sanctioned oppression, when when they arrived, then you have to accept that our current and contemporary political, social and economic infrastructure is informed by that past and is shaped by that past. And if you accept that our contemporary political, economic and social infrastructure is shaped by that past, then it blows up the sort of narrative of America which says that, if you work hard, you can get anything you want, where the myth of meritocracy, the idea that the reason one community looks one way and another community looks another way, is somehow because of the people in those communities and what they have or haven’t done, rather than being reflective of what has been done to those communities, or for failed to be done for those communities, generation after generation after generation. And so I think, part of what a rigorous and deep engagement with the history of slavery does is it gives it gives us a deeper sense of clarity about why the contemporary landscape of inequality looks the way that it does. And when I think about that, I think of this essay by James Baldwin who, in 1963, had the speech that he gave to a group in New York City educators called to talk to teachers. And he published an essay I believe in 1964. And in it, he’s he’s talking to these girls This group of educators and he’s saying, the Black child in America is told over and over and over again, that they are criminal. But the role of the teacher, anything teacher here, literally, but also as a sort of mechanism for the larger society, the role of the teacher is to help that child understand that they are not, in fact criminal. But it is the society that created the conditions and the history that created the conditions that that child is forced to grow up in. And that is, that is actually the criminal. And it’s a simple and intuitive framework. But it’s an important shift from the way that so many people, especially so many young people, who grew up to be older people, that shapes how they understand themselves in relationship to the world. And I saw this firsthand as a high school English teacher right now, so many of my young students had internalized the messages that this country told them about themselves. And thus, we’re, we’re unable to recognize that so much of the reason their communities look the way that they did, or that they were coming from communities saturated with poverty and violence, were because of a series of policy decisions that have been made by people over the course of decades. And not simply because of cultural pathologies, or deficits, or something inherent to them, or the people they love. And, I so I say all that to say, I think that slavery is a large part of that. Because it’s something that actually wasn’t that long ago. And I think the more we realize our sort of proximity to it, our temporal proximity and our physical proximity to the land upon which it took place, then then we get a better and fuller and more honest sense of why our country looks the way that it does today.

B&N: And you make a really important point, there’s, you go to Blanford Cemetery in one of the chapters and and one of the things that comes up in this chapter, as you’re talking to the docent at The Chapel, and then you go to this celebration, what’s the word I want to describe what festival?

CS: It was the Sons of Confederate Veterans Memorial Day celebration.

B&N: Memorial Day celebration, okay. But at one point, you’re referring to the United Daughters of the Confederacy and want and how they wanted to rewrite the public narrative and create living monuments out of children, the idea being that they would go on and reinforce the systems that we have created. And so this is systems but it’s also people because people have put systems.

CS: No, exactly. And for context for folks, the Blanford Cemetery is in Petersburg, Virginia, is a place where the remains of 30,000 Confederate soldiers are buried, making it one of the largest Confederate cemeteries in the country. And I traveled there for the sons, Confederate veterans, as we said, Memorial Day celebration, and was engaging in conversation with these reenactors and these new Confederates and these current members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and united Daughters of the Confederacy. And it was just really interested in what the contemporary manifestation of the last cause looks like. Right And and I think when I was there, I got a lot of clarity, because it became clear that for so many people history is not about empirical evidence, it is not about primary source documents, it is not about historical fact. It is a story that they have been told. And it is a story that they tell it is an heirloom, it is something that is shaped by and shaped by and entangled in their love for certain individuals who told them certain stories that are that are not true. And so I think about one of the people I met there, a guy named Jeff. And he was, you know, sort of, he had his long ponytail and long gray beard and aviator sunglasses. And it’s a sort of biker vest adorned with Confederate iconography and symbolism all over it. And he was telling me about how he would come out to the cemetery when he was a kid with his grandfather. And they would walk around and they would sit in this gazebo at dusk, and they would watch the sunset, and they would watch as the deer would scamper through and around the tombstones, and his grandfather would share a song with him that his grandfather had sung to him, and he will share memories of the men who were buried in the cemetery. That and told him stories about the men who are buried in the cemetery who fought this war to you know, protect their families and protect their state and protect their values from this sort of aggressive and unmoraled Old North. And so Jeff grows up with this. And this is what shapes his understanding of the cemetery and its land, and almost most importantly, of himself. Yeah, right. And, and so then what happens is Jeff, what Jeff loves to do now is he loves to take his granddaughters to that same cemetery and do the same thing with his granddaughters that his grandfather did for him and tell the story about these men who were buried here, and what they fought for and what they mean. And, and it’s not true, right, and it’s a lie. And this is how the story of the lost cause perpetuates itself. Right? The story in the lost cause has been this idea that slavery wasn’t the central cause of the Civil War. And even if it was like slavery wasn’t actually that bad, it was a benevolent institution, it was, as Senator John Calhoun from South Carolina would have said, there’s a positive good for both black and white people alike, whereas the historian or would be Phillips says, in the early 20th century, as a sort of leader of the sort of academic propaganda effort in the field of history on this front that, that slavery was a civilizing institution that plantations were civilizing institutions that made that meant that black people were much better off here than they were in Africa. And one of the best things that ever happened to black people is having been forced onto ships and brought brought to to the new world where, where they could be trained and turned into Christian, so on and so forth. And so that’s what the Lost Cause is. And this is the message that is shared across generations to people through people like Jeff, and part of what I think about when I’m there is, is what would it look like if Jeff made a decision to tell a different story? Right, like, what if instead of telling the story that his grandfather told him to his granddaughters, he went around with his granddaughters to the cemetery and said, these are your ancestors, and they fought a war for a terrible thing. And you don’t have to be defined by or tethered to their decisions, we can look at their decisions and name their decisions and say that that is not who we are, and then move forward and make a different decision. But instead, what happens for so many is that they are unable to say such a thing, because their their political sensibilities, and their historical sensibilities are so deeply enmeshed and entangled in their love for these people who told them these stories. And they’re the nostalgia of these moments, like when Jeff was sitting in the gazebo with his grandfather. And so if you’re asking Jeff to accept that the things his grandfather told him were not true, then for somebody like Jeff, you are accepting them, you asking them to call their grandfather a liar, to call into question, so much of the what shaped how they were raised. And that’s a difficult thing for people. And it’s a thing that there are people who do it. But there are also millions who don’t. And I think that those people are, because they are given this false history over the course of many years. And many generations go on to be people who vote for or are elected to positions and enforce policy and support policy, that doesn’t account for the centuries of harm that have been done in their name.

B&N: And on the flip side of the people that you encountered at Blanford. There’s Monticello and Monticello is rewriting. I mean, they they seem to be really committed to rewriting the story. I mean, I know growing up, I was told Thomas Jefferson was a great man. And here are all of his accomplishments. And, and then later it was here’s his great love affair with Sally Hemings, which she’s a 14 year old slave, and slaver. That’s a whole different conversation. But now we’ve got Monticello, we’ve got docents at Monticello saying this is what reality is human beings, enslaved people.

CS: Yeah, I think Monticello is an interesting place. Because I think it is a place that is open to evolution in a place that responds to new information. So Monticello, you know, for people who visited there 10, 20, 30 years ago. The experience, you know, I talked to a lot of folks who visited you know, in their own childhoods before I and the first time I ever visited was in 2018. And their experience was very different than my own. Because this was still at a time where when scholars were rejecting the idea that Jefferson had had any sort of relationship, a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings. Right? This was at a time when there was still not a willingness to engage with Jefferson’s, the totality of Jefferson slave trading in history as an slaver, and I wanted to go to Monticello more broadly, because I think the Monticello is a sort of, Jefferson is like a microcosm of the story of America in the sense that like America is this place that has provided unparalleled, unimaginable what would have been unfathomable opportunities for millions and millions of people across generations. To accumulate wealth and upward mobility in ways that their ancestors could have never could have never imagined. And it is also a place that has created that opportunity for those millions of people at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been intergenerationally, subjected subjugated and oppressed. And the US is both of those things, it is the story of people who have accumulated wealth in ways that their ancestors could have never imagined. And it is the story of people whose necks have been stepped on in order for other people to create that wealth. And so I think when we think about America, we have to hold both of those realities at once. And I think Jefferson, similarly, is somebody who embodies and sort of personifies that cognitive dissonance in the sense that he is a person who wrote one of the most important documents in the history of the Western world, and is also someone who enslaved over 600 people over the course of his lifetime, including four of his children that he had with an enslaved woman. Obviously, we mentioned Sally Hemings. He is someone who wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, and wrote in notes on the state of Virginia that black people are inferior to whites in quote, endowments of body and mind. And so I think when we think about Jefferson, you have to hold both of those realities, you have to hold the contradictions, that he was, in many ways, a brilliant man. And he was also a deeply racist man. And that all of the things that made Jefferson you know, Jefferson was a man of many interest and did many things, philosophy, science, all sorts of all sorts of things. But his engagement in those things is only possible, because of the hundreds and hundreds of enslaved people who did all the work that allowed him to sit around writing letters and thinking thoughts and writing books all day. And so I went to my job, because I wanted to understand how a place tells the full story of Jefferson, and how we don’t even just center the story of Monticello on Jefferson, but also recognize that in many ways, Monticello belongs to the enslaved people who live there more than it does to him, right, because it belongs to the Hemings and the Faucets and the Grangers. And so many of these other families, who quite literally were on that land for longer periods of time than Jefferson. Jefferson was in Paris and DC and Philadelphia and New York for extended periods of time when he was working for the government. And these are the families who were always there, and who are building family and building community. And so they are in Monticello is a place that you know, now they have a tour that they started in just past few years, dedicated to the to the Hemings family. Now they have a tour that’s been in place for a little bit now dedicated singularly to the issue of slavery, Monticello. And it’s not to say the Monticello is perfect, they definitely are things that they can improve upon, as I think any plantation museum or any museum generally could. But I do think and I do find them to be thoughtful and responsive to new information. And people who recognize that there is a specific and unique responsibility that a plantation and not just any plantation, a plantation by one of the most formative characters in the history of our country. There’s a certain responsibility, they have to tell the story in its totality, and to make sure that they are centering people who are the people who made Jefferson’s life possible. And not just Jefferson.

B&N: David Thorson, who’s one of the guides that you met at Monticello has a great line about history. He says, I think that history is the story of the past, using all the available facts. And the nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts. And somewhere in between is memory, which is kind of this blend of history and a little bit of emotion. I mean, history is kind of about what you need to know, but nostalgia is what you want to hear. And I grew up in Massachusetts. So I grew up knowing about the 54th regimen. And I grew up knowing about abolitionists, and you know, on Nantucket, and I also grew up in the shadow of the busing crisis. I grew up in the shadow of Jay Anthony Lucas’s Common Ground. Boston is notorious for having poor relations of every possible kind. I do believe it’s probably getting somewhat better. It’s certainly isn’t the 70s and 80s anymore, or even the 90s, I mean, Boston was. I was never given the full story. I had to chase information. And there are moments where you talk about you know, Frederick Douglass was a singular human being. We are doing damage to ourselves by only talking about the people who are the extraordinary examples of whatever the situation we’ve lost all of these stories because we didn’t value the everyday and you talk, at one point, you’re talking about the Federal Writers Project and how he as a source it’s not perfect because people were tempering how they interacted with their interviewers. You know, New York was the second biggest slave market behind Charleston in the 1700s. I can guarantee you most New Yorkers do not know that. And the ones that do try not to think. So we tell these stories about the burden of the South. And and and that’s not to diminish the actual facts of the situation. But we can’t say New York and points north, clean hands, or New Jersey and points north have clean hands either. So how do we change those narratives? How do we fill in those gaps when we are in fact missing some primary sources?

CS: Yeah, I mean, it’s so important. So many of the things you said there are so important. So you know, on the New York front, as you said, was the second largest slave port in the country after Charleston, for an extended period of time. It’s a place that was the financial capital of the country, and whose financial infrastructure made possible the expansion and perpetuation of slavery in the South where these enslavers had financial and economic relationships to the north, but also, there were enslaved people in New York, right. I think sometimes people are like, Oh, well, you know, New York, financed, slavery, and that’s not great, but like they weren’t having they didn’t have slaves themselves, they 100% enslaved people themselves, right. And they engaged in the process of gradual emancipation early, prior to the Civil War, but that in no way absolves them of having had slavery, present on that land, with, you know, through the British through the, the Dutch and the British, both and so, and also, you know, on the eve of secession, the mayor of New York City, Fernando Wood, was trying to get the city to secede from the Union, because New York’s relationship financially and in many ways, politically, for so many of them was so deeply entangled and invested in the states that were seceding from the union, South Carolina and the like. And so, you know, I remember when I came across that piece of information, I was like New York City tried to secede from the Union, like, I mean, it runs counter to the entire narrative of cosmopolitanism, then that you are that we’re inundated with growing up where, you know, we are made to feel as if the Statue of Liberty has always been there welcoming immigrants of every kind, to the city, and that it is the bastion of opportunity, and, and multiculturalism. But this even the Statue of Liberty itself was originally conceived as a statue that was meant to honor the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War. And that meaning has been erased over time, as well. They even physically moved the broken shackles that Lady Liberty was, at one point, holding in the conception of the design, from her hands, to like, barely visible below the robe, and my her feet in a way that you can’t even see it unless you’re, you know, looking from an aerial view and a helicopter or plane. And so, you know, the Statue of Liberty is in some ways, you know, it is in some ways, a microcosm of how we tell the story of slavery in this country and in the north, right, where we have, like, literally hidden it in places that we can’t see it, even though it is deeply present there. And I think, you know, the question of how do we fill those gaps in? I mean, one of the people that I write about in the book is a woman Damaris Obi, brilliant artist, educator, public historian, who leads these walking tours around New York City focused on the history of slavery and the Underground Railroad. And, and doesn’t hold back I mean, begins the tour by saying like, look, some of you are going to be confronted with information that is going to be deeply unsettling and make you uncomfortable. And I need you to lean into that. And she one thing that she told me afterwards, she was just like, Our understanding of slavery is so limited in this country that you would choose, like you would be shocked at how many people come on this tour, who are American, I mean, it has a lot of international visitors, but also who are American, who think that the Underground Railroad was a real railroad. Right. She was like, that’s, that is. I have experienced people like that every tour. And so there’s this balance. I think that these public historians like to Damaris have to strike, where you at once need to make sure you maintain a sort of rigor and don’t hold back in sharing information that is reflective of the history of this country, but also a sort of generosity that meets people where they are recognizes that, that there are a lot of people, like the people I met at Monticello, Donna and Grace, who came from Vermont, on a pilgrimage to see Jefferson’s home. But had no idea that Jefferson owned human beings, had no idea that Monticello was a plantation, in the same way that people in New York come on a walking tour of the Underground Railroad. And they’re like, where’s the train? And that is reflective of how millions and millions of people across this country, think about and understand, or rather misunderstand the history of slavery. And so I think that it demands accountability. And it also demands meeting people where they are and recognizing that so many people have failed to be taught about this in any sort of way that gives them any semblance of understanding of the relationship that slavery has to this country.

B&N: The Whitney plantation is one of the places you write about, and they’re doing an amazing job changing the way the narrative is told, at least, close to New Orleans. And I have to say, John Cummings, he said he’d originally had different plans for the plantation. And then he went through the records of the plantation. And he saw an enslaved woman identified as a good breeder. And he said, I can’t I will not do what I was planning to do, we have to tell the truth. And and I respect that quite a lot. And one of the things though, that the Whitney seems to have really been able to hone in on as well, is children. And you do mention this also, I should say, in the New York chapter, you know, when the African Burial Ground is found, it turns out that half of the bones there are children under the age of 12. The Whitney Plantation, again, they have the remains of 202,200 children on the property, and they are trying to get people to see this in a way that they have not previously been shown. Slavery.

CS: Yeah, the Whitney is, is so fascinating, because it is the only plantation in Louisiana and one of the only plantations in the country that is, as you allude to dedicated to telling the story of slavery from the perspective of the enslaved. And it is surrounded by what is the sort of constellation of plantations, where people continue to hold weddings, where people, you know, have the best day of their lives, some of us are trying to celebrate the best day of their lives, one of the most joyous days of their lives in the home of a former enslaver where, you know, I’ve talked to wedding planners who said that people will use the former slave cabins as bridal suites for these events, and so The Whitney is a place that fundamentally rejects the idea that a plantation can be understood as anything other than an intergenerational side of torture. Right, and, and that you understand it structurally in that way. And then also understand that the people who were the victims of that torture were human beings who were working to create a life for themselves, and some sense of purpose and meaning and value in the face of what are just unfathomable, unimaginable circumstances. And to your previous point, one of the things that they do so well, I think, is utilize the narratives of the Federal Writers Project, which is for those who are unfamiliar, a New Deal era initiative that happened in the late 1930s, in which over 2300 formerly enslaved people were interviewed. And so these were people who were children during the end of slavery and who were elderly, moving into the early 20th century. And, they use these narratives throughout the museum time and throughout the plantation, to help us understand that the stories that we hear most about slavery, like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Olaudah Equiano, that those stories are important, and they are important to engage with and they are central to helping us develop an understanding of what slavery was. But those are also people whose experiences are not reflective of the vast majority of enslaved people. Frederick Douglass is not just like an exceptional enslaved person. This is like an exceptional human being like they don’t make human beings like them. Like they don’t make human beings like Harriet Tubman all the time, you know, like that. These are like exceptional, exceptional almost otherworldly people. And so the stories that we get from folks like them should be engaged with but should not be understood as being, again, reflective of what most enslaved people experienced. Because if that’s the case, then what happens is what happened to me when I was a kid, where like, the only thing I read about is, you know, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. And I’m like, Well, why didn’t all slaves run away? Like, they ran away? Like why? And, I’m filled with a sort of crippling shame around that now. But I think that that’s the sentiment that a lot of people, not even just children, but like a lot of people have, because those are the only stories we get. And if we don’t get a fuller, more robust set of stories, then we don’t understand the extent to which slavery was a system that existed for over 250 years, that impacted millions of people in millions of different ways. Right, and it depended on so many factors where you were, what period of time it was. And just like who you were, as a person the same way that like all black people are different today and share different social, political, ethical, philosophical sensibilities. It was the same thing with the millions of enslaved people back then. And I think to the extent that we can get their stories through things like the Federal Writers Project, or many of the narratives that were collected through historically Black colleges and universities and those students in the early 20th century, I think they are helpful because they give us give us a more complete picture of what slavery was, and allow us to not fall into the trap of thinking that every enslaved person, if they didn’t do make the same decisions, as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman somehow was deciding making a decision to stay enslaved, which I think is one of the most sort of insidious logical conclusions of such a project.

B&N: That and I think anything we can do as a culture and as a society to take respectability politics out of the conversation. I believe that false morality that we ascribed, and continue to ascribe to systems and situations are continuing to do significant damage. You go to Angola state prison in this book, and Angola has a gift shop. Angola has a rodeo. Angola has a wall where there are stills from all of the movies that have been shot there. Angola also has one of the largest Death Row populations in the country. And in fact, at one point had the machinist in their shop, building the bed that they used to administer the death penalty. The men there work for seven cents an hour. How do we end up with a place like Angola? How do you reform a place like Angola? How do you change the stories? Angola has a gift shop?

CS: Yeah. Yeah, it is a, I could have written an entire book about just Angola, and my experience there. So Angola is, as you mentioned, a prison. It is the largest maximum security prison in the country. It is 18,000 acres wide, bigger than the island of Manhattan. It is a place where 75% of the people held their black men, over 70% of them are serving life sentences. And it is built on a former plantation. And what I tell folks is that if you were to go to Germany, and you have the largest maximum security prison in Germany, built on top of a former concentration camp, in which the people held there were disproportionately Jewish, that place would be a global emblem of anti semitism, and rightfully so. It will be abhorrent, it will be disgusting, we will never allow a place like that to exist because it would run counter to all of our moral and ethical sensibilities. And yet, here in the US, we have the largest maximum security prison in the country, where the vast majority of people held there are Black men serving life sentences, who go out and work in fields of what was once a plantation for virtually no pay, while someone watches over them on horseback with a gun over their shoulder. And so part of what I’m thinking about when I go to a place like Angola is, what are the ways that the history of white supremacy not only enacts physical violence against people’s bodies, but also collectively numbs us to certain types of violence is that in another global context would be wildly unacceptable. And to the point that like, not only does this place not address its relationship to the history of slavery? I went on this tour and they didn’t talk about it, and I brought it up and they were like, yes, bad stuff happened here, but we don’t, we can’t, you know, we can’t change that. We just got to move forward. And that sort of like we can’t change that. Ethos was like, sort of filled The entire space because it was an effort to sort of sidestep and ignore that part of their history. So it’s not only that, but that this place has a museum that doesn’t mention slavery at all. And connected that Museum is a gift shop, where you have that sell shot glasses, that sells, you know, and then this gift shop is still online until you know, maybe they’ll hear enough of these interviews, and then they’ll like, you take it down. But that has a gift shop with shot glasses and coffee mugs and baseball caps and sweatshirts and, and one of the things that I saw when I was there was a coffee mug that had the silhouette of a watchtower on it. And you can see the sort of small silhouette of a guard with a gun standing at the top of that Watchtower. And above and below the silhouette on this coffee mug. It said in gola a gated community. And so it’s not only that, the that this place doesn’t address its relationship to this history, but it is almost making a mockery of and belittling, belittling the experience of people who continue a 1000s of people who continue to be held in that prison, you know, places in Auschwitz and some of these other camps in or form of camps in Germany, you know, they have restaurants and gift shops, museums, but, you know, one they I think are tastefully done, and two are directly acknowledging what happened there. And three are not places where people continue to be held, right? Like there are 1000s of people who are still there, and you have a coffee shop, or a coffee mug, that that is quite literally making a joke, right about what they are experiencing. And so Angola is a strange and chilling and haunting place. That very much, in which the landscape of what is transpiring there, is eerily reminiscent of the history of slavery. And that’s not to say, you know, it is slavery, because I think slavery and mass incarceration are phenomenologically distinct entities and should be interrogated as such, but it’s to say, to evoke the scholar, or invoke the scholar, Cydia Hartman, that our prisons are shaped by the afterlife of slavery, right, we’re like, you can’t look at Angola or Parchman prison in Mississippi, and not see the connection to that history. Because it’s all over the place.

B&N: Is there any hope that we can fix this?

CS: I think so. I mean, I think that, you know, Angola is a, it is a safer place. I mean, again, this is all relative, you know, so it is a safer place than it once was, is a place where the incarcerated people there have more, I put opportunity in air quotes, but like more opportunity to get some semblance of education or participate in programming than they want to did. That doesn’t make it a good place. But I’d be remiss if I tried to suggest it, what it is now is the same as what it was in 1890. And that’s not the case. I think there are lots of people like Norris Henderson, who is one of the formerly incarcerated folks, I spent time with him that chapter and who is with me on this tour, he was incarcerated in Angola for almost 30 years, who are doing important, important, important work both in prisons and outside of prisons, to reshape what our country’s relationship to the carceral state looks like. And so Norris is one of the people who led the ballot initiative a few years ago, that made it so that Louisiana no longer used non unanimous juries, to convict people of crimes. We were one of the only two states in the country, US and Oregon, in which you could have a non unanimous jury and convict someone of a crime. And I asked Norris, I was like, Well, how many people here are were convicted of non unanimous juries? And he’s like, Clint, that’s an important question. But you can’t even understand the impact of non unanimous juries because there’s so many people in here who took plea deals, because the prosecutor will come in and be like, I don’t even have to get the whole jury to say, you did it. I just have to get 10 out of 12 You know, and that would shape somebody’s decision about whether or not they go to trial or not. And so, and he worked alongside some other, you know, advocates and formerly incarcerated people who are leading this work to get rid of that and that is meaningful. And that is progress. And that is important. There is still a long, long way to go. You know, the current social function of prison is to take people away from society for as long as possible and render them caricatures or invisible, so that we don’t think about them. And to the extent that we do think about them, we think about them as people who are not fully human or people who are morally empty, or people who are singularly responsible for the decisions that they made to end up in prison. And we know that’s not the case. We know that from history, you know, that from sociology that we can’t disentangle the fact that the vast majority of people in prison are people who grew up in poverty, and that the poverty in the communities they grew up in, are the result of state sanctioned decisions that had nothing to do with them. So you know, people have agency and free will and can make their own decisions, but we have to understand those decisions in the context from which they are emerging.

B&N: I remember hearing about Juneteenth when I was an adolescent in Massachusetts, but it wasn’t a big thing. And not a lot of people knew about it. And I didn’t actually know the roots were in Texas, until a few years ago, and you talk about how the community approaches. Juneteenth as an American moment and not just as a Black American moment. And can we just talk about Galveston for a second?

CS: Yeah, so I went to Galveston. Interestingly enough, I went there, just a few weeks after I spent time with the sons, Confederate veterans at Blanford. And so, there was a lot of whiplash, to say the least, going from a place that was lifting up and celebrating the Confederacy, to a place where there were union reenactors and Black people dressed in Union garb, whose work was dedicated to celebrating this profound moment in American history that has come to mark in many ways, the end of slavery, right? You know, the fact that Juneteenth is not a national holiday, I think is a profound moral failure. But it certainly has become more popular than it than it has ever been. And I would not be surprised if in the future, it does become a national holiday. But it is a state holiday in Texas, and was founded as such by a guy named Al Edwards, about 40 years ago, and I was there at the Al Edwards annual prayer breakfast. And it was this really remarkable moment. Because I was there on the island, on the land, where in 1865, two months after General Lee had surrendered at optimatics. And more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, that enslaved people in Texas, the 250,000 enslaved people in Texas, were finally told that they were free. And this was through general order number three given by Union General Granger, and they do this process where they sort of reenact general Granger making this announcement in in the building where the sort of myth around Juneteenth was that he made it from the balcony on a place called the Aston Villa. And so we were inside Aston Villa. And it’s surrounded by these members of the community, many of whom are the descendants of people who were enslaved in and around Galveston. And there was one particular moment where we all stood up and started singing the Black national anthem. And, you know, this is a song that I have heard in thousands of different ways throughout my entire life. But hearing Lift Every Voice and Sing, and watching the way that people’s faces shifted, watching the way their mouths moved, watching how the lyrics of this song that is born of so much struggle, and grief, and mourning, and hope was not an abstraction to them. It was it was literal, it was embedded in their memories of their ancestors of the of their great grandfathers and great grandmother’s. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. I think the the entire room, you know, engaged in this chorus of memory, is what it is. And it was so important, I think for me to be there. And I think in the book, to highlight a place not that is thinking about memory in a way that is centered on joy, in a way that is centered on remembering, both mourning the fact that their ancestors had had their freedom delayed by people by enslavers who attempted to prevent them from knowing that they were, in fact already free. And so to be sure, mourning that, but also celebrating the end of one of the worst things that this country has ever done. And not only celebrating the end of it, but celebrating the millions of people across centuries, who worked to make that moment possible. Because enslaved people were fighting to end slavery from the moment enslaved people were brought to these shores. And so that means the vast majority of people who fought to end slavery, never got to see freedom themselves. But the work that they did, made freedom possible for all those people who began to experience it at the end of the Civil War, and that sentiment, and that sense of the lineage that we are a part of, of people who, who fought for things that they knew they might never see, but fought for it anyway, was so present in that space. And it will stay with me for a long time.

B&N: And it’s one of the better pieces of reckoning that we have in America. I mean, it is an amazing moment. But you talk about reckoning a lot in the final chapter, you’re in Senegal, which was a point of sale for many enslaved people before they came to the United States. And one of the questions you wrestle with in this chapter is What does reckoning look like? And I asked this too, as someone who is Japanese American, I am fully aware of what Japan did in Korea and Nanjing and Manchuria and Taiwan, and obviously, the United States. And that’s a legacy I live with. So how do we live with the legacy of what came before us? So I mean, it makes me think of Yaa Gyasi’s novel, Homegoing. And the opening chapter, which is, it is remarkable, but it is painful, and it is exactly what literature is supposed to do. But the idea that you could turn around and sell someone from your own community. And then it really does come back. I mean, I remember as a kid in Massachusetts being taught that the molasses trade was all about molasses and sugar. We exchanged molasses for enslaved people in the Caribbean, but it was taught as the molasses trade. So how do we as a culture, and I mean, a world culture, how do we come to terms with what we have done? And how we teach these lessons?

CS: I think we have to engage with this history, honestly, I think we have to absolutely lean into and recognize the complexity. And often the contradictions of our history, while at the same time being clear about things that were not actually morally complex, right, like so there. I think there’s a distinction there where slavery is not a morally complex issue. There is a there’s a right and there is a wrong, indigenous genocide is not a morally complex issue. There is a right and there as a wrong, such as the case for so many things. But I think we can recognize the complexity that exists within the history. So an example I think of is abolition. I was taught that abolitionists were, I was taught about abolition in a very binary sort of way, right, like, abolitionists were good. And the slavers were bad. And I was like, oh, and then what happens is that makes everybody think that they would have been an abolitionist. If they were growing up in the mid 19th century. They’re like, Oh, I would have been, I would have been right there with Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. And I wouldn’t, you know, I would have been on the Underground Railroad and this and that, you know, as a side note, I always tell people that like who you are now is who you would have been then what you do now. But in the context of abolition, part of what you realize when you get older and engage with history in a more nuanced way, is that you recognize that like, abolition wasn’t one thing, right? that there were lots of people who called themselves abolitionists who had very different conceptions of what should be done to with or for black people. So you had somebody like William Lloyd Garrison, you had somebody like Frederick Douglass? You had somebody like Harriet Tubman, you had somebody like Abraham Lincoln, who was like, I think slavery is wrong. But I don’t think that white people should have to live next to black people, and we should send them to Liberia or to Haiti or to South America. And you caveat that by saying Lincoln’s views on black people in slavery continued to evolve, and were evolving throughout the Civil War. And you know, and he was shot and killed before they could evolve any further. So we don’t really know, as the historian Eric Foner, would say we don’t know where he would have ended up. But it is true that, you know, when he was in his Lincoln Douglas debates, he was saying that, like black people, we’re not equal to white people. And, even though slavery should end, that does not necessarily mean I am for the equal rights of black people. And I And Lincoln was not unique in that I think that’s a position that many people held, but I bring that up, because I think that it is a helpful framework to understand that like, some things, when we look back historically, we want to make black and white, when they’re actually filled with gray. And part of what we’ve tried to do when we’re teaching this history is make everything create a shorthand or overly simplify everything, when we actually should lean into the complexity, lean into the contradictions and complexity of a Lincoln lean into the contradictions and complexity of Jefferson lean into the contradictions and complexity of Africans trading other Africans into bondage, right. Let’s not pretend that that’s something that didn’t happen. But let’s also be honest about how, you know, the idea that, like, all at an African is trading his brother into bondage is is a Western imposed construction, because they didn’t see each other as brothers necessarily, right. They were different cultures and different ethnic groups and different tribes, in the same way that like, nobody looks at, you know, wars between Britain and France. And Bentham was like, look at those white brothers fighting against one another, and like killing each other and chopping each other’s heads off, because that is not how we have socially constructed our notion of whiteness in ways that we are socially constructed our notions of blackness so I say that because that is a reality in most Africans had no conception that they were selling people into intergenerational chattel slavery, which wasn’t something that existed in Africa. And it’s very different than having a prisoner of war, or somebody who was imprisoned in your community, which isn’t to say that, that it is good to trade that person for goods. But it is to say that it is different than the idea that your child is inherently made into a slave because of the status of their mother. And that is like a historically unique thing that is, in so many ways unique to the experience of slavery in the new world in the Americas. So lean into complexity. And don’t run away from it. Because we’re a complex, contradictory, messy country, and our history is exactly the same.

B&N: That seems like a really excellent moment to end the show. But can I ask you what you’ve been reading? But seriously, because you’re also a poet. So who else have you been reading? And there’s, there was so much good publishing on June 1.

CS: I mean, even just June 1, I was like, June 1, itself was bananas. I mean, it’s just just the books published on that day. I mean, Carol Anderson, The Second. Ashley Ford, Somebody’s Daughter, Ocean Vuong’s paperback, which was like, I mean, that joint was, I have no words. I mean, that book gave me a different understanding of what a novel could be. Yeah. And I don’t have enough good words to to give that book. Zakiya’s book, The Other Black Girl, Kiese Laymen’s reissue, Long Division. I mean, it’s incredible. And so that’s all that was all just 48 hours ago. That was Tuesday. What have I been reading? So I just read John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed, which was fantastic. And like, John is a friend and I host Crash Course Black American history.

B&N: Which is fantastic. I will totally give that a shout out.

CS: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it’s been it’s been fun. I’ve enjoyed sort of the process of putting the script together and it’s funny to see like an animated version of yourself. I can’t I just read the Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw. Oh, man. Talk about a great short story collection. I think I just finished this book literally like, yet last night. It’s been, I’ve been listening to it actually in the audio book, I can’t remember the narrator’s name, but like, she does such an incredible job. And I just felt like I was there with these. I mean, the women and the stories and the ways they overlap, but we’re also so distinct and just so their voices were so rich, like the stories were, I mean, I was just so invested in all of them. And I was like, I got so invested in you in just 30 minutes, and now you’re gone. But that’s short stories for you. Johnny Sun, Goodbye, Again. I love that. Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire Pain, like you talked about a man master narrative nonfiction. That guy is just, I read, Say Nothing over the pandemic. And I was like, how on earth did he do this? And I was like, There’s no way he can do that again. And then I read Empire pain. I was like, Damn, he did again. Yeah, so those are some of the books that I’ve been reading lately. Safia Elhillo’s Home Is Not a Country also, which is amazing YA book in verse. She’s a dear friend. Yeah, there’s some really talented, they’re just some really talented writers in the world. And there’s never enough time to read everybody.

B&N: Well, it’s a good moment to be in books, I’ll tell you, it’s a really good moment to be in books, we covered a lot of ground. Is there anything that we missed, that you want readers to know about How the Word is Passed?

CS: I think like any book, it is a book that is made possible by community. Now this book would not be possible without the academic historians, who go into the archives, without the public historians who tell the stories in in the sun and on the land, without the teachers, without the activists, without the artists, without the sort of educators, without this ecosystem of people who were so generous in spending and sharing their, their stories with me. And I hope I did them justice. And then you know, also shout out to my wife, who we have two small kids, I have a four year old and a two year old and so like, I have no conception of what it means to be a father without also being a father trying to write a book. And because I started writing this book at the same time, in the same month, my my first child was born. And so you know, my wife has been, you know, just a bedrock and this wouldn’t have been possible without her. And, you know, when I said, Honey, I’m gonna go spend the day with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, she, she let me go, she was and she was like, you have to take your white friend and she was like, You got to take gotta take William and so she wouldn’t let me go alone understandably but but she she believed in the vision of this book, and I’m grateful and so many you know, so many people have their hands on this. I love that Alfred Lloyd Tennyson line from Ulysses. I am a part of all that I’ve met. And, and I feel that in my bones, you know that who I am and what makes this book possible is because of people and conversation and moments that have shaped me, and I think that’s the cool thing about any book. It’s a reflection of not only the person who wrote it, but also all the people who made that person who they are.