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

by Clint Smith

Louis Nelson, an architectural historian and vice provost at the University of Virginia who has spent time working at Gorée, would later tell me, “In our assessment of that building, we found one chamber that was likely the holding cell for human beings would have held maybe fifteen or twenty people at a max,” though the story often told on the island was that some of them held hundreds. Nelson had been part of an international team of researchers who conducted research on the island and studied the House of Slaves and its history in partnership with local curators. “There also were pens, so there were dedicated buildings on Gorée for the containment of large numbers of people. And then lastly, those people are going to be marched in coffles down to the docks. So that Door of No Return that you stood in, that Barack Obama stood in, and that the pope stood in”—he paused briefly—“that door probably never really led to ships.” His voice dropped an octave. More likely, he said, “that was the place where waste was thrown into the sea.”

“The number of slaves is not important when you talk about memory,” he said. “When we talk about memory, we have to stand in the principles. One slave is too much.”

“History is written by the perpetrators,”

“It’s time to give to our streets the name of our heroes, because we do have heroes in Africa.” As Momar spoke, a little boy, who could have been only five or six, rounded the corner, chasing the call of his mother several paces ahead of him. Momar nodded in the boy’s direction. “It’s time to change, and the change should begin [with] the symbols, because the young boy will soon ask, ‘Who is Boufflers?’ ” As I watched that little boy turn the corner, and as I listened to Momar, I thought of how at that moment there might be little Black boys just like this one in New Orleans, running down a street named after Robert E. Lee. How there might have been little Black girls in Mississippi running down roads named after Nathan Bedford Forrest. How there might have been Black children in Georgia wandering down streets named after Jefferson Davis. I thought about the parallels between the debate in Senegal over the remnants of colonialism and the debate in the United States over the remnants of slavery. “It’s like the conversation that we’re having in the US about the Confederate monuments,” I said to Momar. “The monuments are statues of people who fought the war for the South to keep slavery, but they’re up all over. People say, ‘Why are these statues up of people who were fighting to keep slavery? That doesn’t make any sense.’ So people are trying to get them taken down now. That’s our version.” “It’s very similar,” he said, nodding. He told me about a controversy that had played...

“You must,” he said, “present how Africa was before slavery, and how it is during slavery, and how it is after slavery.”

“If you want to understand the economic situation in Africa, you have to understand what happened during slavery and how slavery has got a huge impact, because slavery has deprived us of the first input for development, which is the human force. We have to understand how colonization impacted negatively on our situation, and also how slavery deprived Africa of its workforce.” Part of what Hasan teaches his students is that we cannot understand slavery and colonialism as two separate historical phenomena. They are inextricably linked pieces of history. Slavery took a toll on West Africa’s population; millions of people were stripped from their homelands and sent across the ocean to serve in intergenerational bondage. The profound harm continued during colonialism, with much of the continent stripped of its natural resources instead of its people. Hasan reflected, “In both situations, in slavery and colonization, what you have is a system of plunder. First, in slavery, we have a plunder of human beings. Africa had been ripped of its people. And colonization is a plunder of natural resources. We have been exploited by the colonizers. On both systems, what you have is a plunder system.”

There is a phrase that Hasan believed captured the essence of the entanglement of capitalism, colonialism, and slavery: “White sugar means Black misery.” He said, “If Europe is what it is nowadays, it’s because of the blood and the efforts of Africans who have been taken to America to work on plantations and generate profits. It favored the industrial development of Europe, since part of Europe’s development was made possible by the fact that we [sent] to America slaves who worked hard to create development. That’s the root of Europe’s current development.”

After my conversation with Hasan, I asked him if I might be able to speak with some students. We made our way up a flight of stairs to another classroom, where he introduced us to a group of seven young women who were studying between classes. The room was filled with natural light and a dozen wooden desks, some with brown plastic chairs attached to them and others attached to a small wooden bench. Each of the girls was wearing the uniform required of students—navy-blue dresses with white oxford blouses underneath. Four of the girls wore head wraps that covered their hair, others had their hair showing, with thin braids stretching across their scalps. I introduced myself to the girls, who ranged in age from sixteen to eighteen, using the French that still tripped off my tongue. The girls, whose names I have changed here, chuckled, and one of them, Fatou, told me that I should speak English. The rest of them nodded. I smiled, feeling both gratitude and a slight embarrassment at my uneven first impression. I began by asking them how they had been taught about slavery throughout their school experience. “I think we learned [about] slavery in fourth grade,” Aida said, adjusting the black head wrap near the bottom of her neck. “We were told that Europeans came here, in Africa, first to discover the world and to make people Christians. But then when they came, they discovered our resources and they found out—” She corrected herself. “Or they believed,” she said, extending the la...

“This is the problem of the memory of slavery, that we have all these gaps.” The gaps. Gaps that have to be filled. Gaps that David Thorson spoke of at Monticello when 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.” There are the gaps that Monticello is attempting to fill by making clear that the story of Thomas Jefferson cannot be told without the story of the Hemings family. A reminder that we cannot read what Jefferson wrote about the United States in his Declaration of Independence while ignoring what he wrote about enslaved people in his Notes on the State of Virginia. There are the gaps that serve as a catalyst for the Whitney Plantation’s commitment to a story that not enough plantations are willing to tell. It is a place that has refused to accept that a plantation should be a site of weddings and not a site of reckoning, a place that centers on the story of the enslaved, because enslaved people are at the center of the story. There are the gaps that Angola prison tiptoes around even though there are eighteen thousand acres of evidence under its feet, a place where thousands of Black men still dig plows into the soft earth of its fields. There are the gaps that Blandford Cemetery fills with fiction, and flags from an army who fought a war to keep millions of people in chains. It is a place less interested in what truth looks li...

Emmett Till. Till, as many know, was a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who was visiting his family in Money, Mississippi, in 1955 when he was brutally murdered by two white men. It is not simply that he was murdered but also that he was kidnapped, beaten, shot in the head, his neck tied to a large metal cotton gin fan, and his body thrown in the Tallahatchie River. Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, said Till had whistled at her, grabbed her, and made lewd comments to her in the grocery store where she worked as a cashier. Six decades later, however, Carolyn admitted that she had lied about the incident. Emmett had never touched her or said anything explicit. We approached Emmett’s casket, its bronze hue radiating under the museum lights. It sat open, exposing us to a photograph of what Emmett’s mother, who insisted on an open-casket funeral, had chosen to show: what white supremacy had done to her son.

The year my grandfather was born, a gallon of gas was twenty cents and a loaf of bread was nine. Slavery had ended six decades ago, and twelve years later everyone would forget. The year my grandfather was born, he had eight siblings and two parents and a grandfather born into bondage he tried to bury. The year my grandfather was born, millions of Americans were unemployed and over a thousand banks shut down. The Great Depression had taken a deep breath, and the US didn’t exhale for years. The year my grandfather was born, twenty-one people were lynched and no one heard a sound. The trees died and the soil turned over and the leaves baptized all that was left behind. The year my grandfather was born, there were full trains leaving Mississippi, and only empty ones coming back.

“I can tell you the thing that affected me most was that as I got old enough to go to school, you could not go to school if you were Black—‘colored,’ they called us then—until you were six. And you had to start in the pre-primer and primer, meaning you were eight years old getting into first grade. Which means that if you followed all the way through their program, passing each year, you would finish tenth grade at eighteen,” he told me, rocking back and forth in his chair. “And that was all the education they had for Blacks in the county …You would finish tenth grade at eighteen and be ready to work on the farm. And if you were industrious, they would hire you to clean the courthouse.” My grandfather was a bookish child, and many people, Black and white alike, took notice. He told me that a couple of the white women in town “learned that I was an avid reader, and they started leaving the Saturday Evening Post and Time magazine and all kinds of books and magazines like that on their back porch.”

asked my grandfather how all of this had made him feel. He responded by saying that because his mother and father both worked for white people who liked them, he always believed everything would be fine. “If you had some white people that would vouch for you,” you would be okay, he said, “as long as you stayed in your boundaries.” He said he always thought they would be safe because his family “stayed in our place.”

When my grandfather was about sixteen, a Black man in Brookhaven—the town to which he had moved to attend high school—told the police about a white man who was selling liquor on the black market. While Prohibition ended nationally upon the signing of the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933, Mississippi continued to enforce it until 1966. “He was one of the members of the Klan,” my grandfather said of the white man selling the alcohol. “He was arrested based on the testimony of this Black guy, and so they came after this Black guy, the night riders.” He paused. “I can’t know if they were ‘Klansmen’ or not, but they all did the same thing,” He took a deep breath and looked forward, staring at a blank wall. “The night riders, henchmen, whatever you wanna call them, came and got him, and hung him on a tree and cut off his penis and put it in his mouth.” I had never heard this story before. And I had never heard my grandfather describe something so gruesome. “I stayed out of downtown at night, and I made sure when I went downtown that I stayed where people could see me,” he said. I looked at my grandfather as he said this and wondered if he still harbored any anger from these moments. I asked him if there would ever be an America in which white Americans were not actively working to keep themselves positioned atop the racial hierarchy. He thought for a moment and then said, “Some of them will never give it up.”

The year my grandmother was born, the Florida Panhandle was burning hot with white terror. Black children were taught to keep their eyes down, their mouths shut, and to make it home before the sun dissolved behind the trees. The year my grandmother was born, the country was on the cusp of entering a war being fought across two oceans. Black men would be sent to fight for freedom and come back to a land where they didn’t have their own. The year my grandmother was born, she was held in her mother’s arms and had no way of knowing how soon that embrace would disappear and never return, how soon her mother’s face would become something she couldn’t remember. The year my grandmother was born, there were laws that wrapped themselves around the necks of everyone she knew, and no one knew if they would let go.

“We just [were taught] that Africans were nasty, bad people,” she said, a wave of shame rising in her eyes. “We didn’t know anything good about them. They were monkeys. They referred to them as monkeys swinging on trees. They lived in the Congo and they were savages and all those kinds of things. But we didn’t learn anything good about them.” She continued: “To me, in my mind, it was like another world, and everybody in Africa was bad. That’s all I ever heard. Never knowing that we were part [of it], we came over, and we didn’t come over on our own. How did we get here? I didn’t learn that we were forced here. I didn’t learn that.” She added, “You have a very deep fear …you stay in your place. You knew your place as a Black person—I’m using the word ‘Black,’ but we were called Negroes. You just knew there were things you could and could not do and you didn’t have freedom. I didn’t have a feeling of freedom that we could accomplish or achieve. It made you—I don’t want to say less than a person, or less than a human … ” She paused. “I used to have a really, really bad inferiority complex.”

“We weren’t afraid as much of the animals that might attack us; we were afraid of what people would do if they saw us out walking. When we saw a car coming, we would run in the woods.” When my grandmother and her siblings were spotted walking along the road, even if they weren’t subjected to outright physical violence, they were often subjected to verbal and physical harassment. My grandmother told me about how white children—on their own school buses, heading to their own schools—would, upon seeing them, lower their windows and throw things at them, epithets sizzling from their lips. “What kind of things did they throw?” I asked. “Whatever they had. If they are eating an orange or apple or something, they’d just throw it out on us. If they had ice cream,” she said, sighing, “they would throw that on us.” She remembers them calling out, “ ‘Go home, nigger! You ain’t got no business here.’

“A lot of people just got lost. They don’t know where they went.”

I have seen it happen to others, and it could happen to me. It could happen to you. It could happen to any of us. Time collapsed in on us. I saw my grandmother sitting in front of me become the little girl she once had been. I imagined her walking home along that north Florida road, her ankles lightly dusted by the dirt that spit out from under her shoes. Heat rising from the splintered red earth beneath her feet. Wildflowers lining the sides of the road, their stems leaning over to kiss the clay. I saw her, books in hand, trying to avoid the eyes of the children who targeted her. My grandmother, who only wanted books that did not have the pages torn out of them, who only wanted to be able to use the restroom in a bus station without being expected to relieve herself outside like a dog, who only wanted to walk through the world without being consumed with fear that she might be disappeared into the night. I imagined the faces of those white children on the bus, their mouths full of violence, their jaws contorted with callousness when their lips opened, their adolescent brows raised in anticipation of her quiet surrender. I imagined how the laughter must have cascaded among them. Their bellies full of malice. I imagined how their heads jettisoned themselves from the side of the bus, how their small arms clawed over half-opened windows just to throw food at my grandmother in a spectacle of cruelty. These children were not born to hate this way. They had been taught. They had...

As we finished our conversation, I asked my grandmother about her thoughts on our trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “It was really depressing, very depressing to see that. I had a hard time, even now, trying to accept the fact that we can be so cruel to one another. It’s just so inhumane. Looking at the slavery as it existed with the chains around your neck, hands all bound. You can’t go to the bathroom. That was really real. So it was very, very depressing.” “What about the parts that were specific to segregation?” I asked. “It just kind of made me go back to that time of life when I lived this. I kept saying, ‘I lived this.’ So it wasn’t anything new for me. For some people, it’s like, ‘Oh, really?’ No, it was for real, and I had lived it.” She continued: “I knew about when Emmett Till was killed and dragged. That was just horrible …We knew about the rioting, we knew about the fires, and all those kinds of things. So it was not anything surprising to me, because I lived it. “It’s surprising, even the younger generation today, they can’t believe [it],” she said. “They can’t see how we went through it. How did we allow somebody to treat us that way? And if I show movies in school, the kids would say, ‘Nobody would do that to me. Nobody would do that to me.’ ‘No, I wouldn’t have done that.’ ‘Why didn’t y’all fight back?’ I’m like, ‘Hey, you hear about so many people who fought back. A lot of it is not in the textbooks, but a lot of people ...

When I think about the history of slavery and racism in this country, I think about how quick we are to espouse notions of progress without accounting for its uncertain and serpentine path. I think of how decades of racial violence have shaped everything we see, but sometimes I find myself forgetting its impact on those right beside me. I forget that many of the men and women who spat on the Little Rock Nine are still alive. I forget that so many of the people who threw rocks at Dr. King are still voting in our elections. I forget that, but for the arbitrary nature of circumstance, what happened to Emmett Till could have happened to my grandfather. That the children who threw food at my grandmother and called her a nigger are likely bouncing their own great-grandchildren on their laps. That the people who lynched a man in my grandfather’s town may have had children who inherited their parents’ hatred. That the woman who stood alongside the Obamas to officially open the National Museum of African American History and Culture was the daughter of a man born into slavery. My grandfather’s grandfather was born into slavery, while my grandmother’s grandfather was born at its edge. We tell ourselves that the most nefarious displays of racial violence happened long ago, when they were in fact not so long ago at all. These images and videos that appall our twenty-first-century sensibilities are filled with people who are still among us. There are people still alive today who knew a...