I've always known that I'm an experiential learner. In many ways I had in mind that 15-year-old Clint. It was a four-year project in which I was attempting to teach myself and learn about so many of the things that I wish I had learned about when I was 15. Priya Chhaya: Who did you write the book for, and how does that reflect the power of the places where the story is being told?Ĭlint Smith: The book is written by someone who did not begin this project as an expert on the history of slavery. Below is a condensed and edited version of that conversation. This summer, I had the privilege of talking with Smith about his book, the role of public historians, and the power of words as vehicles to tell the full American story. And then to what extent they were maybe doing something in between.” And to what extent they were running from it. And to what extent they were being honest about it. What are the implications of that? And so, I started thinking a lot about how different places have told the story of their relationship to American history and specifically slavery,, and then broadened it out to start thinking about how different places across the country and across the oceans thought about this history. And thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city in which there were more homages to its enslavers than there were to enslaved people. It is a book that is relevant, accessible, and filled with needed moments of honesty.įor Smith, the creation of this book began in May 2017 when, he says, “I watched the statutes of several Confederate monuments come down in my hometown New Orleans. At each stop, Smith takes his readers on a journey as he considers the role this history plays in our present understanding of who we are as Americans and emphasizes the weightiness that comes from listening to the stories presented at each of these places. In a lot of ways, this sentiment is an undercurrent of Smith’s new book, How the Word is Passed, which is a deeply personal story about his relationship to his own past as a Black man in the United States, and also, as the subtitle states, "a reckoning with the history of slavery across America." The book is divided into eight chapters, each focusing on a single place-in addition to a final stop at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. The surface of all that rests beneath us, Meteor Shower, a poem in Clint Smith’s 2017 book of poetry Counting Descent, speaks of our place in the universe, of how we, as human beings, are carriers of history, that we bring our stories with us as we travel through life.
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