Need a Modern Update on American History? Meet Clint Smith

Subject

Clint Smith; Books; How the Word is Passed

Description

LISTEN UP If you are unlucky enough to have an interminable drive in your future, you would be wise to bring the audio version of Clint Smith’s “How the Word Is Passed” as your companion. The book — which our reviewer described as a “cross country survey of slavery remembrance,” braiding “interviews with scholarship and personal observation” — is narrated by Smith, a poet and Atlantic staff writer whose sonorous voice carries hints of his New Orleans roots and emotion about his subject.

Between October 2017 and February 2020, Smith visited nine places where, as he writes in an author’s note, “the story of slavery in America lives on.” Readers follow him from Monticello to the Whitney Plantation, from Galveston Island to Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal, where tens of thousands of human beings became shackled to the slave trade.

How did Smith plan his itinerary? “I didn’t know where this book would take me,” Smith said in a phone interview. “I thought I was going to write a chapter on Civil War battlefields, so I went to Petersburg, Va., and went on a tour, walked around and asked people about their experiences. One of them said, ‘You should go to this Confederate cemetery down the road.’ I’d never heard of it.”

Smith had extended child care that day — his son and daughter provide a subtle shimmer at the edge of painful stories — so he ventured to Blandford Cemetery, which he said “ended up being one of the most pivotal, central experiences of the book.” On Smith’s second visit to the final resting place of 30,000 Confederate soldiers, he attended an event hosted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans; he describes how attendees quietly began filming him.

Creator

By Elisabeth Egan

Source

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/books/review/how-the-word-is-passed-clint-smith.html

Publisher

nytimes.com

File