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

by Clint Smith

For so much of my life my grandfather existed as a paragon of strength and fortitude. His once-domineering physique and deep voice made it impossible to imagine that he was ever on the receiving end of another man’s intimidation. In my childhood imagination he was a mountain that no storm could erode. And yet here was this story of my grandfather, an anecdote that transformed him from the mythos of my memory into a small and fragile boy—a boy being told to perform under the thinly veiled threat of violence in a state where boys like him could so easily be disappeared into the night. Emmett Till’s life had been taken because of an alleged whistle and a lie; surely it was not inconceivable that my grandfather’s life could have been taken for explicitly refusing to do what a white man asked him to. It was eight decades after emancipation, but this was still Mississippi.