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

by Clint Smith

What they gave our country, and all they stole from it, must be understood together. I did not turn into Montpelier, but there was something about driving past it on the way to Monticello that reminded me that Jefferson was not singular in his moral inconsistencies; rather he was one of the founding fathers who fought for their own freedom while keeping their boots on the necks of hundreds of others.

“Slavery’s an institution. In Jefferson’s lifetime it becomes a system. So what is this slave system? It is a system of exploitation, a system of inequality and exclusion, a system where people are owned as property and held down by physical and psychological force, a system being justified even by people who know slavery is morally wrong. By doing what? Denying the very humanity of those who are enslaved solely on the basis of the color of their skin.”

Having enslaved workers, David explained, helped Jefferson maintain his lifestyle, by giving him the time and space to do what he cared about most: reading, writing, and hosting guests who came to visit.

What reverberated throughout was the humanity of the enslaved people—their unceasing desire to live a full life, one that would not be defined simply by their forced labor.

I thought of all the love that had been present at this plantation, and I thought too of all the pain.

The splitting of families was not peripheral to the practice of slavery; it was central.

Jefferson believed himself to be a benevolent slave owner, but his moral ideals came second to, and were always entangled with, his own economic interests and the interests of his family. Jefferson understood, as well, the particular economic benefits of keeping husbands and wives together, noting that “a child raised every 2 years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.”

Jefferson’s conceptions of love seem to have been so distorted by his own prejudices that he was unable to recognize the endless examples of love that pervaded plantations across the country: mothers who huddled over their children and took the lash so their little ones wouldn’t have to; surrogate mothers, fathers, and grandparents who took in children and raised them as their own when their biological parents were disappeared in the middle of the night; the people who loved and married and committed to one another despite the omnipresent threat that they might be separated at any moment. What is love if not this?

In the hours just before Jefferson died, when no one else could understand his mumbled, near lifeless words, it was another of his enslaved attendants who, knowing that he was asking to have his pillow repositioned, raised Jefferson’s head. Only a short time after, Jefferson passed away. Throughout his life, Jefferson valued the company of cosmopolitan guests, the time to read and write and think, the elegance of fine architecture, the flavor of savory food, and the fragrance of the natural world—a life in which he could nurture his mind and satisfy his tastes. This life was only possible because of the enslaved men and women he held, sold, and separated; because of the people he allowed to be threatened, manipulated, flogged, assaulted, deceived, and terrorized.

I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained it.

There were laws stating that almost any crime committed by a white person against a Black person was in fact not a crime at all.

The illogic of it all appears to reveal a simple linear truth that is often lost—oppression is never about humanity or lack thereof. It is, and always has been, about power.

“A lot of medical schools, during the history of slavery, largely depended on cadavers of enslaved people. That’s who they practiced on…Black women’s bodies were used in experiments to advance medicine, like the field of gynecology. We learn about ‘from cradle to grave’ in history, but what about postmortem? What happened to Black people postmortem? It’s like their bodies are constantly being exploited at every age, even in their death.”

But also, we can’t continue to view enslaved people only through the lens of what happened to them…We have to talk about who they were, we have to talk about their resiliency, we have to talk about their resistance, we have to talk about their strength, their determination, and the fact that they passed down legacies. Maybe they’re not physical legacies, but they passed down legacies to generations, and those legacies are living well inside of African Americans today.

“The Delta blues is so close to our musical culture in the Sahara of Africa,” he said. “When we get closer to the desert, that’s where you see many people singing along with the African banjo—very sad songs. So I found many similarities there.”

“These are their death records, names, dates that they died, how old they were when they died,” Yvonne said. “And, if all the information was recorded, you also see the name of their mom. Most of the children here died as toddlers—died very young.” She scanned the names on the granite slabs. “Most of them died of malnutrition and disease. “We do know, through others, that sometimes enslaved women would kill their own children, because they didn’t want them to grow up in the system. But we can’t officially say that here, because we don’t know why these children died. But that is something that we do see in this history: women making this really, really unimaginable decision because they understand, especially if they have young girls, what it would be like for them.”

About fifty yards from the slave cabins was a large bell, its cylinder of cast iron widening at the lip as if trying to get a better look at the earth beneath it, its color dulled by years of exposure to the elements. A coiled rope, its pale brown fibers braided tightly together, was tied to the top of the bell and hung down at its side. Historically, the role of the bell on a plantation served two purposes. It was used to signal when it was time to go out into the fields at the beginning of the day and when it was time to return at the end of it. It was also used to summon enslaved people, often when someone was about to be punished, an audible marker of the terror that enslavers maintained. At the Whitney, this bell has been repurposed, reclaimed. As visitors move through the different parts of the plantation, they are invited to ring the bell in honor of all the people who lived here and died in the struggle for freedom. I pulled on the rope. The bell’s metal tongue swung inside its body, as its chime reverberated like a heavy heart.

“If there ever was a question of the slave parentage of the American prison system, one glance at the massive penitentiary known as Angola…removes all doubt.”

“Boy, you sure feel funny when you know you’re going to die; almost like you know something only God should know.”

I don’t know what I would have said. I wanted voices to add texture to the images these men had become. I wanted them to be more than their bodies. More than flesh and fields and tools and emblems of a history no one here seemed willing to sit with. I did not want to remember them as silence. But as quickly as we saw them, they began to recede.

it’s like knowing your history, knowing what our folks went through, and all of a sudden, having one of these cotton sacks in your hand.” He cupped his hand and then closed his fingers around the bag we were both imagining in his grasp. His knuckles were dark and cracked, and when he reopened his hand he rubbed the inside of his palm with his thumb. “I think that’s the biggest challenge more than anything else,” he continued. “Not the work but just the mindset of being there and knowing you’re kind of reliving history, in a sense. I’m going through the very same thing that folks fought and died for, so I wouldn’t have to go through it, and here it is all over again.”

White Southerners’ commitment to the Confederate cause was not predicated on whether or not they owned slaves. The commitment was based on a desire to maintain a society in which Black people remained at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

“Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee.” “Take a left on Jefferson Davis.” “Make the first right on Claiborne.” Translation: “Go straight for two miles on the general whose troops slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender.” “Take a left on the president of the Confederacy, who understood the torture of Black bodies as the cornerstone of their new nation.” “Make the first right on the man who allowed the heads of rebelling slaves to be mounted on stakes in order to prevent other slaves from getting any ideas.”

What would it take—what does it take—for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life? Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been? Just because something is difficult to accept doesn’t mean you should refuse to accept it.

Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.—The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine.

Bostic nodded sympathetically, no doubt familiar with how startling the story of a free Black man paying to be re-enslaved must sound to those first hearing it. It was a devastating truth that revealed the lengths enslaved people would go to in order to prevent their families from being separated. The love he had for his family outweighed every other consideration.

In April 2018, eighth graders at Great Hearts Monte Vista North charter school in San Antonio were asked to complete a worksheet titled “The Life of Slaves: A Balanced View,” which had two columns in which the students were meant to write the “positive” elements of slavery in one and the “negative” elements in the other. A textbook that had been used at the school included a description of how slavery included “kind and generous owners” and enslaved people who “may not have even been terribly unhappy.” The Texas State Board of Education has since revised the standards so that, across the state, slavery is understood to have played a “central role” in causing the Civil War.

“Racism is first and foremost a social practice, which means that it is an action and a rationale for action, or both at once. Racism always takes for granted the objective reality of race…so it is important to register their distinctness. The shorthand transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss.”

“They are forcibly brought here to the New World, and these men come here bearing names like Peter Portuguese and Anthony Congo. Obviously the Africans don’t have names like Anthony and Peter. The very first thing you want to do to an enslaved person is you want to strip them of their identity, and how do you do that? You take away their [given] African names and you replace them with new European names.” The captured Africans’ last names often indicated where they were stolen from or reflected a connection to the person who took them from their birthplace—this, Damaras said, helped the enslavers keep track of their cargo.

Prior to 1741, almost three-quarters of the enslaved workers in New York had come from the Caribbean. After the alleged plot, New York slave owners acquired the majority of their workers directly from Africa. This way, they thought, enslaved people would have a harder time communicating with one another. And therefore would be less likely to plan a mass rebellion.

Struck by the presence of these banks and their proximity to the former slave market, I could not help but think of slavery’s relationship to some of the country’s largest banking institutions.

Moses Taylor, a nineteenth-century banker who was the director of the City Bank of New York, Citibank’s predecessor, managed the capital coming from Southern sugar plantations and was intimately involved in illegally trafficking enslaved people into Cuba.

“JPMorgan Chase completed extensive research examining our company’s history for any links to slavery…we are reporting that this research found that between 1831 and 1865 two of our predecessor banks—Citizens Bank and Canal Bank in Louisiana—accepted approximately 13,000 enslaved individuals as collateral on loans and took ownership of approximately 1,250 of them when the plantation owners defaulted on the loans.”

The financial capital in the North allowed slavery in the South to flourish.

“Yes, well, you’re not the same race as many other people in New York, and people’s lived experiences may be different from yours. Your perspective might be valid in your social circle; in other social circles it may not be. That’s all.”

In the nineteenth century, Black people lived in fear that at any moment a slave catcher could snatch them or their children up, regardless of status or social position. In the twenty-first century, Black people live in fear that at any moment police will throw them against a wall, or worse, regardless of whether there is any pretense of suspicion other than the color of their skin.

In 1829, the New York arm of the ACS concluded that removing Black people from the United States was an effective way to purge the country of a “degraded population.”

As the narrator in James Baldwin’s 1960 short story “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” puts it, “I would never know what this statue meant to others, she had always been an ugly joke for me.”

“One of the first meanings [of the statue] had to do with abolition, but it’s a meaning that didn’t stick,” said historian and author of the book The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story Edward Berenson in a 2019 interview.

The museum stated directly that for many groups—Black people, women, Chinese immigrants, and a host of others—the statue’s torch of liberty did not glow for them.

“Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country [exists for the] colored man.”

As I looked around the perimeter, I actually couldn’t see any place from which someone would be able to see the chains. They weren’t only partially hidden beneath her robe, it seemed they were fully hidden from anyone who wasn’t viewing the statue from a helicopter.

This section was very eye opening to me. I had never heard the stories about how the statue of liberty was originally designed with chains in her arms instead of the book.