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

by Clint Smith

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.

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