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

by Clint Smith

“I’d like to end my tour here,” Damaras said. “Thank you for being uncomfortable with me.” She looked at each of us and clasped her hands together, lifting and dropping them between each word to create the effect of punctuating her remarks. “If there’s anything I can leave you with, question everything. Myself, everything you read, everything you hear. Fact-check, fact-check, fact-check.” She pulled her hands apart and swept them across each other. “Don’t believe anything if it makes you comfortable.”

We approached Emmett’s casket, its bronze hue radiating under the museum lights. It sat open, exposing us to a photograph of what Emmett’s mother, who insisted on an open-casket funeral, had chosen to show: what white supremacy had done to her son. I had seen images of it before, and did not need to listen to anything other than the soft buzzing light above us to know of Mamie Till Mobley’s unceasing sobs. My grandfather looked at the casket, his eyes moving unhurriedly across its frame. “He was killed in the next town over from where your grandmother and I lived. Only a few miles away,” he said without looking up. While I knew vaguely about how the smoke of slavery and Jim Crow had billowed over their lives, I did not know the specific shapes of their silhouettes. I did not know how either of them had walked through this burning country without turning into ash.