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

by Clint Smith

The duty of to-day is to meet the questions that confront us with intelligence and courage. —Frederick Douglass, “The Nation’s Problem”

Epistemic justice

You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. —Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory”

The echo of enslavement is everywhere. It is in the levees, originally built by enslaved labor. It is in the detailed architecture of some of the city’s oldest buildings, sculpted by enslaved hands. It is in the roads, first paved by enslaved people. As historian Walter Johnson has said about New Orleans, “The whole city is a memorial to slavery.”

Each chapter is a portrait of a place but also of the people in that place—those who live there, work there, and are the descendants of the land and of the families who once lived on it. They are people who have tasked themselves with telling the story of that place outside traditional classrooms and beyond the pages of textbooks. They are, formally or informally, public historians who carry with them a piece of this country’s collective memory. They have dedicated their lives to sharing this history with others. And for this book, many of them have generously shared that history with me.

Primiano Folk volk !

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.

! My political epistemic

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

men who have sought to render themselves gods.

Her voice was imbued with a gentle Texas lilt that stretched out her i’s and melted her l’s into the breeze.

Their answers were swift and sincere. “No.” “No.”

What’s fascinating about Jefferson is that this is a flaw of which he was wholly cognizant. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote, “There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal…The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”

Dostoevsky Epistemic

“I cannot decide to sell my lands. I have sold too much of them already, and they are the only sure provision for my children. Nor would I willingly sell the slaves as long as there remains any prospect of paying my debts with their labour.” Jefferson hoped to put his enslaved workers “on an easier footing” once his finances were stable, but he remained in debt for the rest of his life. Nearly all of his enslaved workers—about two hundred people at the time, at Monticello and another property—were auctioned after his death in 1826 to pay his debts.

Debt haunted like all Americans Fargo Hawley American epistemic

Donna and Grace and so many people—specifically white people—often have understood slavery, and those held in its grip, only in abstract terms. They do not see the faces. They cannot picture the hands. They do not hear the fear, or the laughter. They do not consider that these were children like their own, or that these were people who had birthdays and weddings and funerals; who loved and celebrated one another just as they loved and celebrated their loved ones. Donna seemed particularly appalled by how the institution of slavery had affected the children. “I mean, splitting families,” she said. “Oh my God, how can you split a family?” “It’s happening now,” said Grace. As the three of us held our conversation in July 2018, the Trump administration had already separated roughly three thousand children from their parents at the southern border of the United States, invoking the outrage of millions in the US and abroad.

Humanity as praxis epistemic!

When I read Jefferson’s disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is. When Robert Hayden gave us the ballads to remember how captured Africans survived the Middle Passage and arrived on these shores, it was an act of love. When Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about the children on the South Side of Chicago playing with one another in neighborhoods left neglected by the city, it was an act of love. When Audre Lorde fractured this language and then built us a new one, giving us a fresh way to make sense of who we are in the world, it was an act of love. When Sonia Sanchez makes lightning of her tongue, moving from Southern colloquialisms to stanzas shaped by Swahili, traversing an ocean in one breath, it is an act of love. 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 n...

Home visits

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.”

Not far enough Gross

“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.”

“This kind of started my path of thinking about public history,” she said. “That is, public history, historic districts, historic landmarks, the signs that people see along the road. How do I make sure that our history is part of it, or that my people are represented?” She paused. “Very literally, my people.” Following the 2017 attack in Charlottesville and the rise in white-nationalist terrorism over the past few years, Niya sees her work not just as an extension of her personal and intellectual commitments but also as a political commitment. She thinks Monticello has an important role in helping people reckon with who they are in relation to this country’s history. “I think people come to us because they’re grappling with their own identity,” she said. “And Monticello in particular is a place that is so intimately connected to who we are, or who we believe we are, as Americans with freedom and democracy. Yet it’s also a place of bondage, and now people are really, really grappling with that question. I think it makes our work here that much more important, that we are able, maybe, to navigate people through the conversation.”

In a state where plantations remain the sites of formal celebrations and weddings, where tours of former slave estates nostalgically center on the architectural merits of the old homes, where you are still more likely to hear stories of how the owners of the land “treated their slaves well” than you are to hear of the experiences of actual enslaved people, the Whitney stands apart by making the story of the enslaved the core of the experience.

Great epistemic shift to ‘famous rebels’

Descendants of people enslaved at the Whitney still live in the areas surrounding the former plantation. A few now work at the Whitney—ranging from a director-level position to tour guides to the front desk. But much of the community still suffers from the intergenerational poverty that plagues many formerly enslaved communities more than a century and a half after emancipation. Poverty is common in Wallace, Louisiana, the area encompassing the Whitney, where over 90 percent of the population is Black.

Cancer Alley.

Neighborhoods here have some of the highest cancer risks in the country, and chemical emissions from these plants are linked to cardiovascular, respiratory, and developmental ailments. Civil rights leader Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II put it this way when describing the landscape of factories and refineries along the Mississippi River: “The same land that held people captive through slavery is now holding people captive through this environmental injustice and devastation.”

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.

that most ‘dehumanized’ enslaved people. And yet these actions epitomize the failure of this set of terms to capture what was at stake in slaveholding violence: the extent to which slaveholders depended upon violated slaves to bear witness, to provide satisfaction, to provide a living, human register of slaveholders’ power.” Julia Woodrich’s words lingered. When that man made Julia’s sister lie down in his bed he did not have to believe her to be less than human. He simply had to know that she did not have the power to stop him. To be sure, enslaved women often resisted these advances in ways large and small, but they were up against not only the physical power of the person enacting violence against them but also the power of the state, the power of patriarchy, the power of a society. These acts were not only permissible but legally encouraged. 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.iv 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.

Sylvia winter human as praxis

In her book The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, historian Daina Ramey Berry writes about how some of the country’s top medical schools—places like Harvard, the Universities of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—used the corpses of enslaved people, often purchased on the black market, as tools for their research and medical education. “The body trade was as elaborate as the trans-Atlantic

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.”

Morrison beloved

Lineage is a strand of smoke making its way into the sky even though we can’t always tell where it’s coming from, even though sometimes we can’t distinguish the smoke from the sky itself.

The Whitney exists as a laboratory for historical ambition, an experiment in rewriting what long ago was rewritten. It is a hammer attempting to unbend four centuries of crooked nails. It is a place asking the question How do you tell a story that has been told the wrong way for so long? For some, it is a place that doesn’t fully live up to its ambition, a scattered assortment of exhibits that fails to tell a cohesive story.

Epistemic CRT

So much so that in 1884 C. Harrison Parker, editor of the New Orleans Daily Picayune, wrote of the men sentenced to convict leasing at Angola that it would be “more humane to punish with death all prisoners sentenced to a longer period than six years” since the average prisoner sentenced to convict leasing would not live more than six years anyway. As one man told the National Conference of Charities and Correction in 1883, “Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to take care of him: if he was sick get a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts: we don’t own ’em. One dies, get another.”

How unalive it looked. The sky was grey and endless with sheets of clouds holding everything above it in place. Behind the clouds, small handfuls of light stretched thinly in every direction, and the breeze trembled above the uncut patches of grass in front of the museum.

! Fire

My initial sense of optimism began to fade away as Roger continued. He went on to say that this had been “a horrible prison” but quickly pivoted to discuss the positive things the prison was now doing to make life better for the people held captive there, including providing accredited college courses and degrees from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. While it was encouraging to hear about the progress the prison had made, the time line Roger provided seemed, at best, abbreviated, if not willfully misleading.

Eagleton literary theory Facts are public and unimpeachable, values are private and gratuitous. There is an obvious difference between recounting a fact, such as 'This cathedral was built in 1612,' and registering a value-judgement, such as 'This cathedral is a magnificent specimen of baroque architecture.' But suppose I made the first kind of statement while showing an overseas visitor around England, and found that it puzzled her considerably. Why, she might ask, do you keep telling me the dates of the foundation of all these buildings? Why this obsession with origins? In the society I live in, she might go on, we keep no record at all of such events: we classify our buildings instead according to whether they face north-west or south-east. What this might do would be to demonstrate part of the unconscious system of value-judgements which underlies my own descriptive statements. Such value-judgements are not necessarily of the same kind as 'This cathedral is a magnificent specimen of baroque architecture,' but they are value-judgements none the less, and no factual pronouncement I make can escape them. Statements of fact are after all statements, which presumes a number of questionable judgements: that those statements are worth making, perhaps more worth making than certain others, that I am the sort of person entitled to make them and perhaps able to guarantee their truth, that you are the kind of person worth making them to, that something useful is accomplished by making them, and so on.

Roger moved from discussing the Indigenous communities and French exploration of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries straight to post–Civil War America—skipping the period in which Angola existed as a plantation worked by enslaved Black people. He mentioned convict leasing without explaining that it was an explicit tool of economic and racial subjugation, in which men were starved, beaten, and housed in former slave quarters. He failed to mention that the land upon which Angola is built had once been the plantation of Isaac Franklin, a man whose business, Franklin and Armfield, became one of the largest slave-trading firms in the United States.

Roger’s “I can’t change that” seemed to provide the pretense of acknowledgment while creating distance from personal culpability. It was reminiscent of a refrain laced throughout our country’s conversations about the history of racism.

when I had sat in class and heard a white classmate say, “Well, my ancestors didn’t own slaves,” or heard a political commentator on television say, “Why are we still talking about slavery? People need to get over it.” Or a politician say, “We can’t wallow in the past. It’s time to focus on the future.” When I hear these deflections, I think of all the ways this country attempts to smother conversations about how its past has shaped its present. How slavery is made to sound as if it happened in a prehistoric age instead of only a few generations ago. In his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that the story the country tells about its relationship to chattel slavery is willfully distorted. “Our histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right. Slavery appears to have been thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center…One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over.”

Historical epistemic

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.

institutional contrition,

CRT ! Ideology Epistemic

let dead dogs lie.” But I didn’t want that. I wanted the prison to create a sign at the entrance naming that it had been a plantation. I wanted markers erected in the places where incarcerated people had died, and for the first and the last sentence of every tour to begin with the word “slavery.” I wanted Angola, where 71 percent of people are serving life sentences and three-quarters of the population is Black, to not pretend as if that was a coincidence. What I wanted more than anything was for this prison to not be here, holding these people, on this land, with this history. It all felt so profoundly irredeemable.

Mumia Abu-Jamal has noted, “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.”

At another stop, the bus came to a halt in the middle of a dirt road that we could not see the end of, that melted into the fields in the distance. On our left were two conjoined buildings, white with red trim. One had black shingles laid across its slanted roof. The buildings were surrounded by chain-link fencing that had been weathered into penny rust and muted silver, messy tangles of barbed wire sitting on top of them. The grass was a puzzle of brown patches, though green enough to not look wholly forgotten. Clouds continued to coat the sky with a thin membrane of light grey as the sun hummed softly behind them. These were the buildings known collectively as the Red Hat cell block. The Red Hat cell block was constructed after an attempted escape in 1933.

! Beautiful

land. Forty cells lined its corridor, each room measuring five by seven feet. The block became known as the Red Hat because when the men went out to work in the fields, they wore straw hats that had been dipped in red paint to make them easily identifiable.

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

Robert E. Lee was a slave owner who led an army predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of slavery. A letter Lee wrote to his wife in 1856 is often used as a means of demonstrating that Lee couldn’t have fought for the Confederacy in order to protect slavery because he believed slavery was “a moral & political evil.” Devoid of additional context—and an acknowledgment of the fact that Lee owned enslaved people—this assertion might seem to shield Lee from allegations of racism and bigotry. And yet two sentences later: I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is Known & ordered by a wise & merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy. While Lee believed slavery would one day come to an end, he also seemed to believe it was up to God when that happened. It was a view common of those in Lee’s world. He, and his fellow enslavers, had no control over it. Everyone, including the enslaved, were simply meant to wait for divine intervention.

! Epistemic

During the war, Lee was, like his contemporaries, disturbed by the sight of Black soldiers in Union ranks. White soldiers under his command ruthlessly executed Black soldiers who attempted to surrender during the infamous Battle of the Crater—the first time Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had faced large numbers of Black troops. The Battle of the Crater is helpful not only in contextualizing Lee but in contextualizing the cemetery itself.

It was clear, too, in the early twentieth century, when W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in a 1928 essay: Each year on the 19th of January, there is renewed effort to canonize Robert E. Lee, the greatest confederate general. His personal comeliness, his aristocratic birth and his military prowess all call for the verdict of greatness and genius. But one thing—one terrible fact—militates against this, and that is the inescapable truth that Robert E. Lee led a bloody war to perpetuate slavery. Copperheads like The New York Times may magisterially declare, “Of course, he never fought for slavery.” 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. And Lee followed Virginia…Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel—not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God. It is not simply that statues of Lee and other Confederates stand as monuments to a traitorous army predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of slavery; it is also that we, US taxpayers, are paying for their maintenance and preservation.

Preach ! Epistemic Fire 🔥

The contrast between the two was conspicuous in ways not dissimilar to that between the two cemeteries at Monticello. There were far fewer tombstones at the People’s Memorial Cemetery than at Blandford, and those there were indiscriminately scattered across the brown grass. There were no flags ornamenting the graves. There were no hourly tours available for people to remember the dead. There was history, but also silence.

rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” with the crowd joining in. Then, seamlessly, the guitarist strummed his guitar once more and the crowd began a spirited rendition of the famous song “Dixie”: Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton Old times there are not forgotten Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land The song was originally written in the 1850s to be performed as part of a minstrel show in which white actors dressed up in blackface. Over time, it became the de facto Confederate anthem, and the song would play as Confederate soldiers prepared to enter battle. The song became a symbol of “massive resistance”—a movement to prevent school desegregation that grew to encompass resistance to civil rights more broadly—in the mid-twentieth century. The Ole Miss marching band even played it on the football field; they performed while wearing Confederate-inspired uniforms. I looked around as everyone sang in unison, lifting their voices in an almost paradoxically mellifluous tribute to a fallen ancestral home. A home never meant for me.

!

I was fascinated by the conciliatory equivocation of his tone, and his desire, it seemed, not to push a demarcation between the Confederacy and the United States but to assimilate the memory of the Confederacy more fully into the country’s historical consciousness. Confederate soldiers, according to this narrative, were US military veterans just as those who had fought in World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq. It did not seem to matter that they had fought against the US; he believed they should be remembered as US veterans themselves. Gramling’s speech sounded so much like similar Memorial Day celebrations after the end of Reconstruction, when orators exclaimed that this day should be one of reconciliation, paying tribute to the sacrifices made by both Confederate and Union soldiers without accounting for what the war had actually been fought over.

Douglass remained a fierce critic of the Lost Cause in the immediate aftermath of the war and over the course of the rest of his life. In 1871, he spoke with great fervor about the danger of forgetting why the war was fought: We are sometimes asked, in the name of patriotism, to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember, with equal admiration, those who struck at the nation’s life, and those who struck to save it—those who fought for slavery, and those who fought for liberty and justice. I am no minister of malice. I would not strike the fallen. I would not repel the repentant; but may my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I forget the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted, and bloody conflict. In 1931, W. E. B. Du Bois attacked the decision to erect Confederate monuments as ahistorical and irresponsible: The most terrible thing about War, I am convinced, is its monuments—the awful things we are compelled to build in order to remember the victims. In the South, particularly, human ingenuity has been put to it to explain on its war monuments, the Confederacy. Of course, the plain truth of the matter would be an inscription something like this: “Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery.” But that reads with increasing difficulty as time goes on. It does, however, seem to be overdoing the matter to read on a North Carolina Confederate monument: “Died Fighting for Li...

!

The Lost Cause was not an accident. It was not a mistake that history stumbled into. It was a deliberate, multifaceted, multi-field effort predicated on both misremembering and obfuscating what the Confederacy stood for, and the role that slavery played in shaping this country.

The idea of using enslaved people during the war had been suggested by Confederate general Patrick Cleburne, but the proposal was scoffed at by the majority of Confederate leadership because it undermined the entire basis upon which the war was being fought. Leadership found themselves in a position in which they could choose to perpetuate slavery or give everything they had to win the war and secure independence—a choice many Confederate leaders were unwilling to accept. Robert M. T. Hunter, a senator from Virginia, is reported to have said, “What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?” Another Confederate leader, General Howell Cobb, was even more explicit: “If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” In a last-ditch effort to salvage

The following are excerpts from several declarations of secession, speeches presented at secession conventions, and other documents related to secession (italics are my own): Mississippi: Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization…There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. South Carolina: A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. [Lincoln] is to be entrusted with the administration of the Common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some o...

!!!!!!!!’

Lincoln thought of them as distinct. In a September 18, 1858, speech as part of his fourth senatorial debate with Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln claimed: I will say…that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. In fact, for much of his political career Lincoln was a public advocate of “colonization,” a plan he pushed for throughout the first half of the Civil War. The

!