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

by Clint Smith

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.

Although Monticello has been open to the public since the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation purchased the property in 1923, the plantation’s public wrestling with Jefferson’s relationship to slavery began in 1993, as part of the foundation’s Getting Word oral history project, in which the foundation interviewed the descendants of enslaved people from Monticello in an effort to preserve those histories. The oral histories represented an attempt to get the descendants to share stories their elders might have shared with them. The stories that arose from Getting Word became part of the tours Monticello created based on the lives of the enslaved population there. “This is how the word is passed down,” remarked one of the descendants in an interview for the project.

Vivienne Kelley, vice president of the organization, has written that the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation “is using Jefferson’s Monticello to make a political statement about the evils of slavery” and “seems to have taken things too far.”

A political statement about the evils of slavery???? 🙄

Linnea told the story of a younger Black woman guide who worked at Monticello for about two years and experienced a range of challenges, including harassment from visitors, people asking her on dates, and even people coming up and asking, “Oh, are you related to Sally Hemings?” Another staff member was sitting in the café when a white woman who had just completed a tour came up from behind, hugged her, weeping, and said, “I’m sorry for slavery.”

So cringe

David sees it as essential that a guide be able to find the balance between telling the truth and not pushing people so much that they shut down. He told me that when you challenge people, specifically white people’s conception of Jefferson, you’re in fact challenging their conception of themselves. “I’ve come to realize that there’s a difference between history and nostalgia, and somewhere between those two is memory,” he said. “I think that history is the story of the past, using all the available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts, and somewhere in between is memory, which is kind of this blend of history and a little bit of emotion…I mean, history is kind of about what you need to know…but nostalgia is what you want to hear.”

Before I left, I wanted to understand how much David’s role as a former military officer—responsible for protecting and promoting this country’s foreign policy agenda at home and abroad—was something that felt, if at all, in tension with his role now. “I was born in the United States of America. I served the country for thirty years, so I actually believe in the idea of America,” he said, straightening up in his chair. “Are we exceptional? No. Have we had unique advantages based on geography, based on a whole host of factors? Yes. Did a group of people come together in 1776 and conceive of an idea that was pretty radical in its time and then create a system of government, through the Constitution and its amendments, that was pretty radical and pretty novel? Yeah. Have other countries found their own way? Sure. So I believe in the idea of America. I don’t believe that this country was perfect. I don’t believe it is perfect. I don’t believe it’s going to be perfect. I believe that the journey to make this a better place is worth the effort and that the United States, if you conceive it not so much as a place to be in but an idea to believe in, it is worth fighting for.”

I mentioned my conversation with Grace and Donna. “They came here—they bought a ticket, made a reservation, got on a plane, rented a car, self-identified as history buffs, and showed up, and were like, ‘I had no idea that Jefferson owned slaves,’” I said.

“I’ll show you another narrative,” she said after about a minute. “This one, she’s talking about her sister, and how the plantation owner would come to the cabin to get her sister at night. So I use these as transitions [on the tour] because, in order to really understand slavery, we have to understand what slavery meant for women.”

The violence enacted on Julia’s mother and sister are part of a long history in which Black women were seen as both undesirable and sexually objectified. This is the illogic of white supremacy; it does not need intellectual continuity.

“Number one question [we get from white visitors]: ‘I know slavery was bad…I don’t mean it this way, but…were there any good slave owners?’” Yvonne took another deep breath, the frustration from thinking about the persistence of the question visible in her face—the look of someone professionally committed to patience but personally exhausted by the emotional toll it has taken on her. “I really give a short but nuanced answer to that,” she said. “Regardless of how these individuals fed the people that they owned, regardless of how they clothed them, regardless of if they never laid a hand on them, they were still sanctioning the system…You can’t say, ‘Hey, this person kidnapped your child, but they fed them well. They were a good person.’ How absurd does that sound?”

“Not at our plantation, but I saw an inventory where the woman was twenty-nine. I forget her name.” He leaned forward and brought his hands together. “I’m going to say it twice. There’s a job on the plantation that was ‘good breeder.’ She was a ‘good breeder.’ Had nine children in eleven years. ‘Good breeder.’” He shook his head. “Very few days start without me thinking about that. And that’s when I changed. That’s when I realized that I could not have this property and make it a tourist attraction that would glorify a life of people who exploited human beings. Couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t.”

In Louisiana, in order to ensure there were more convictions, and thus more prisoners available for labor, in 1880 the state legislature shifted the requirement for juries from unanimous to non-unanimous. This way courts could allow a few Black people to serve on the jury—in accordance with their new rights as freed persons—but by requiring only nine of the twelve jurors to convict someone of a crime, they effectively subverted any political power Black people, or those sympathetic to them, might otherwise have had.

The unsettling nature and placement of the image was compounded by the fact that it welcomed its viewers into a gift shop stockpiled with an extensive inventory brandishing the Angola name.

Angola has a *gift shop*?

As I walked around the relatively small room, there were various T-shirts touting the Angola Prison Rodeo, a biannual event that takes place every Sunday in October and over the course of one weekend in April. There were caps that read simply ANGOLA STATE PEN. There were ashtrays, built from license plates, stacked on top of one another (Angola is where every license plate in the state of Louisiana is made). I thought about the cruel irony of people so restricted in their own movements creating something that facilitated mobility for so many others. There were shot glasses, sunglasses, and T-shirts with the prison’s name emblazoned across their breasts. But what stood out most in the gift shop, sitting on a shelf at the far end of the store, was a white mug with the silhouette of a guard sitting in a watchtower surrounded by fencing. Above the picture it said ANGOLA, and beneath the picture it read A GATED COMMUNITY.

Christ

Each of these three men was found guilty of taking someone’s life, but standing in this room, I couldn’t understand how taking their lives in return made things any better.

If in Germany today there were a prison built on top of a former concentration camp, and that prison disproportionately incarcerated Jewish people, it would rightly provoke outrage throughout the world. I imagine there would be international summits on closing such an egregious institution. And yet in the United States such collective outrage at this plantation-turned-prison is relatively muted.

Two-thirds of the people on death row in Louisiana are Black; an estimated one out of every twenty-five people who are sentenced to death in the United States is innocent.

“Jobs in the field? Seven cents an hour.” I leaned in, thinking I had misheard. “Seven cents,” Norris said again.v “This place really is just like the plantation was. Just to utilize all the free labor that they can get,” Norris continued. “They lost all that free labor to emancipation, and now how are we going to get that free labor back? You got all these folks wandering around with no real skills, don’t know what to do, well, we can create laws to put them back in servitude, and that’s what they’ve done. Where do they work? They go right back to working convict leasing, working these same plantations that they were freed from.”

Well, for what did he fight? State rights? Nonsense. The South cared only for State Rights as a weapon to defend slavery…No. People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege, and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War.

He told me that he does not call the country’s deadliest war the “Civil War” because it distorts the truth. “We call it the ‘War Between the States’ or ‘of Northern Aggression, against us,’” he said. “Because what they call the Civil War is not really the Civil War. Southern people don’t call it the Civil War because they know it was an invasion…If you stayed up North ain’t nothing would’ve happened.” When Jeff said “nothing would’ve happened,” I wondered if he had forgotten the lives of millions of Black people who would have remained enslaved. For these people, the status quo that Jeff seemed beholden to would have meant remaining in bondage. Or did he remember but not care?

In a speech from 2000, Lyons outlined his vision for the society he hoped the Sons of Confederate Veterans would build: “The civil rights movement I am trying to form seeks a revolution…We seek nothing more than a return to a godly, stable, tradition-based society with no ‘Northernisms’ attached, a hierarchical society, a majority European–derived country.”

“nothing more than”

Without slavery, these papers argued, there would be no difference between poor whites and free Blacks. The Louisville Daily Courier warned non-slaveholding white Southerners about the slippery slope of abolition and the dangers of racial equality: “Do they wish to send their children to schools in which the negro children of the vicinity are taught? Do they wish to give the negro the right to appear in the witness box to testify against them?” The paper did not stop there, and went right to the issue it knew animated the most fervor and fear among white Southern men: would non-slaveholding white men accept a society in which they “AMALGAMATE TOGETHER THE TWO RACES IN VIOLATION OF GOD’S WILL”? Propaganda like this helped to convince non-slaveholding whites that abolition was an existential threat to Southern society. Without slavery, they were told, they would be forced to live, work, and inevitably procreate with their free Black neighbors. This was a proposition that millions of Southern whites were unwilling to accept.

In his book The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, historian Kenneth M. Stampp contends that white Southerners who did not own slaves still actively supported the institution as “a means of controlling the social and economic competition of Negroes, concrete evidence of membership in a superior caste, a chance perhaps to rise into the planter class.” Or as historian Charles Dew said, “If you are white in the antebellum South, there is a floor below which you cannot go. You have a whole population of four million people whom you consider, and your society considers, inferior to you. You don’t have to be actively involved in the system to derive at least the psychological benefits of the system.”

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.

But as I think of Blandford, I’m left wondering if we are all just patchworks of the stories we’ve been told. 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. Just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.

A ninety-two-year-old formerly enslaved man named Felix Haywood recalled with nostalgic jubilation what that day meant to him and so many others: “The end of the war, it come jus’ like that—like you snap your fingers…Hallelujah broke out…Soldiers, all of a sudden, was everywhere—comin’ in bunches, crossin’ and walkin’ and ridin’. Everyone was a-singin’. We was all walkin’ on golden clouds…We was free. Just like that we was free.”

I asked Stephen why he thought more white people didn’t participate in Juneteenth events. “They think it’s just a Black thing,” he said. “And my argument is it’s not ‘a Black thing,’ it’s an American thing. This is the final bit of freedom for us all. And that’s just so important.”

In 1979, newly elected Texas state legislator Al Edwards Sr. introduced House Bill 1016, which would make June 19th a state holiday. Over the course of four months Edwards built a diverse coalition of support across the state legislature. As one Juneteenth celebrant put it, “Even if the American people in the United States didn’t really set that day aside for us, I believe they owe it to us anyway…they ought to give the colored man a day for his freedom. It should be a red spot on the calendar and really took aside for.” Edwards’s campaign proved successful, and in 1979, Texas became the first state to create a holiday in honor of Black emancipation.

We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud but it didn’t make ’em rich.”

Reflecting on what celebrations after the first official Juneteenth were like, he said, “It was a totally different thing. We had fireworks! It was a big deal because Dad was giving it the relevance and significance that US Independence Day has. Because it was essentially our Independence Day, and he wanted to make sure that people understood that we do view this that way. Just as the rest of the nation views the Fourth of July.”

In my experience—as both educator and student, as researcher and writer—there was little mainstream discussion of who Black people were before they reached the coasts of the New World, beyond the balls and chains. This was something I had heard when I lived in Senegal, a decade prior, that we Black Americans were taught so little of our traditions, our cultures, our voices before we were taken and forced onto ships that carried us across the Atlantic. As Sue pointed out, the risk is that Black Americans understand our history as beginning in bondage rather than in the freedom of Africa that preceded it.

So on a warm September day in Houston, as summer was collecting its things and autumn was peeking around the corner, I went to Emancipation Park, an historic landmark in the city’s Third Ward.

The red people from Manhattan Island crossed to the mainland, where a treaty was made with the Dutch, and the place was therefore called the Pipe of Peace, in their language, Hoboken. But soon after that, the Dutch governor, Kieft, sent his men out there one night and massacred the entire population. Few of them escaped, but they spread the story of what had been done, and this did much to antagonize all the remaining tribes against all the white settlers. Shortly after, Nieuw Amsterdam erected a double palisade for defense against its now enraged red neighbors, and this remained for some time the northern limit of the Dutch city. The space between the former walls is now called Wall Street, and its spirit is still that of a bulwark against the people.

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.

“Almost all of our country is a burial ground,” Damaras observed as her arms swept across her body. “Go to any state in the country,” she said, “and you will find the remains of people who have been here before we called this America.”

“Don’t believe anything if it makes you comfortable.”

Memory, for me, is often a home where the furniture has been rearranged one too many times.

There are the gaps that exist inside me, a Black man in America unable to trace my roots past a certain point in history. Whose lineage beyond the plantations where my ancestors were held remains obscured by the smog of displacement. They are the gaps that I am trying to understand, the gaps I am trying to fill.

My grandparents’ stories are my inheritance; each one is an heirloom I carry. Each one is a monument to an era that still courses through my grandfather’s veins. Each story is a memorial that still sits in my grandmother’s bones. My grandparents’ voices are a museum I am still learning how to visit, each conversation with them a new exhibit worthy of my time.