How the Word Is Passed

This book is NOT a psychological treatise; it's an exploration. As the title implies, the book is structured around the author's visits to specific sites around the country, which makes the inquiry on how the word is passed very concrete. In many ways it reminds me of Randall Kenan's "Walking on Water," which was Kenan's travels across the country investigating what it meant to be Black in America.

There's so much to appreciate here—Smith's beautiful prose, how he deftly handles his presence at each site, his admission that asking tough questions is hard even for him, a seasoned interviewer. His writing and delivery is so good that what he learns at each site attaches to you. I'll never forget him riding that Angola bus.

I live in New Orleans where the book opens, and I've been to the first two sites in the book—Monticello and Whitney Plantation—which made it even more interesting to me. (I'm a graduate of UVa who's read every volume of Dumas Malone's biography of "Mr. Jefferson"; I've been relearning who the man was for about 10 years now.) I'm grateful for the success of this book and hope so many folks read it.

Such a good book. A poet with a background in sociology and teaching travels to a handful of historically significant sites - Monticello (to learn about the contradictions between Thomas Jefferson's ideals and the reality of his enslavement of human beings), a cemetery that hosts present-day fans, New York's sites of enslavement, etc. He relates history and the conversations he had with people he meets at these sites in a conversational, thoughtful, accessible way. The word is passed not through official historical accounts but through the handing down of people's memories, including in a moving epilogue his grandparents' memories of Jim Crow and lynchings and their grandparents' memories of being enslaved. As he writes, "My grandparents' voices are a museum I'm still learning to visit." returnreturnClint Smith is a poet, and I was struck by how often he dwells on words and on voices. It's one of the special things about this book, a kind of attention to the specifics of how words sound, how the choice of a word adds so much meaning.