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

David Thorson is a middle-aged white man, military veteran, and tour guide at Monticello Plantation. Described as professorial and evenhanded, Thorson leads tours that emphasize Thomas Jefferson’s relationship to slavery. The contents of his tours and discussions with Smith play an influential role in the understanding that Smith conveys as he reaches his conclusions about reckoning with slavery. For example, Thorson’s deliberate and intentional language around enslaved people’s humanity foreshadows Smith’s recognition at the Whitney that slavery relied on the human capacities of enslaved people, not their dehumanization. Thorson’s belief in the idea of America finds voice in Smith’s reflections of Galveston and New York City, and his discussion of enslaved families at Monticello incites the theme of white supremacy’s disruption of Black families.

Thorson’s most influential piece, however, is the chapter’s title quote: “There’s a difference between history and nostalgia” (8). In the longer quote from which the title quote is pulled, Thorson identifies memory as the middle ground between history and nostalgia (41). This conceptualization of memory factors in Smith’s assessment of various other historical sites. He even references Thorson again in the chapter on Gorée as he considers the gaps in the memory of slavery and what each site is doing to try to fill those gaps.

Niya Bates is Monticello’s Director of African American History and the Getting Word Project. Smith’s inclusion of Bates in his recollection introduces key points that remain central to Smith’s discussion. One is the role of lineage in the reckoning with slavery. Bates reveals that her personal investment in public history stems from her recognition of her family members in the photo at Cloversfield Plantation. While Bates’s story exemplifies that the descendants of enslaved people have a personal investment in a public reckoning with slavery, the larger idea is that lineage undergirds one’s personal investment, both in reckoning with slavery and maintaining historical narratives that obscure the role and memory of slavery. The idea of lineage and personal investment continues to unfold in later chapters.

As the former owner of Monticello and a “founding father” of the United States, Thomas Jefferson (Notes on the State of Virginia) exemplifies the complexity and duality of America’s relationship to slavery. As Smith’s experience of Monticello highlights this complexity, Smith supplements his recollection of Monticello by citing historians who corroborate the complexity of Jefferson’s relationship to slavery. For example, when the topic of Monticello’s enslaved families comes up in Thorson’s tours, Smith cites Lucia Stanton on how Jefferson preferred to sell and buy family units because of his awareness of the impact of family separation; however, he did still engage in the practice by separating families between his properties and his own family members especially when he was struggling financially. Here, Smith indicates the tension between Jefferson’s moral and economic interests, which only a discussion of slavery could illuminate.

Another example of the way that slavery illuminates Jefferson’s and the nation’s complexity is the tension between political interests and personal beliefs. After Smith recalls Donna and Grace’s disappointment at the schism between Jefferson’s public image and personal beliefs, he goes on to cite historical evidence demonstrating that Jefferson “was above all a statesman” (25), who minimized his private condemnation and ambivalence towards slavery in favor of supporting the interests of his constituents in Virginia, who expressed an “increasingly steadfast opposition to any semblance of abolition” (25). Jefferson’s relationship to slavery, then, represents the US’s relationship to slavery and the treatment of Black people generally, as moral interests and personal awareness of white supremacy’s impact come second to economic and political interests, as well as the comforts of white lifestyles that the subjugation of Black people makes possible.

Sally Hemings (b. unknown-1835) also illuminates Jefferson’s and the nation’s relationship to slavery. In Smith’s text, Hemings’s story not only exemplifies the effort to reckon with slavery’s reality, but it also highlights how the interaction between sexual and racial power dynamics during slavery must be attended to in that reckoning. It was scholarly and scientific work confirming the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson, as well as their production of offspring, that prompted Monticello to reconsider and correct their narrative around Jefferson’s relationship to slavery. Bates, Dillard, and Grim all attest to the centrality of Hemings’s story to the narrative and work at Monticello. 

Given the power dynamics involved in Hemings and Jefferson’s relationship, Hemings’s story also illuminates Black women’s experiences of slavery. In the chapter on Monticello, Smith notes that relationships like Jefferson and Hemings’s were common at the time: “The relationships were inherently corrupted by the power dynamics embedded within them. These women were in no position to refuse the advances of their owners, or of any white man who wanted them” (32). While some scholarly sources on Hemings highlight her agency and the ways that she may have used the relationship to her advantage, for Smith, she exemplifies that the interaction of white supremacy and patriarchy created a common experience for enslaved Black women in which they were subject to the violence of both.

Charles Deslondes (1789-1811) was an enslaved plantation overseer in New Orleans who led an 1811 German Coast slave revolt. Deslondes and other enslaved people marched along the Mississippi River engaging in armed attack on several plantations. Participants in the revolt were subdued within 48 hours and slaughtered by decapitation (54-55). The severed heads exhibit is the Whitney’s way of acknowledging the revolt, and Smith opens the chapter with discussion of the exhibit and the history behind it. Deslondes and the 1811 revolt highlight the centrality of slavery and slave resistance to the foundation and expansion of the United States., Deslondes’s story also emphasizes the effort put into securing and reinforcing white supremacy in the face of Black resistance.

Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870) was a Confederate general and eventually the overall commander of the Confederate States Army. He led the Army of Northern Virginia from 1862 until its surrender in 1865. In the South, Lee remains a revered, if controversial, hero, and military historians consider Lee a master of strategy on the battlefield, similar to Napoleon Bonaparte. Lee is a towering figure in American history whose legacy has recently been challenged in regard to his relationship with slavery. Although Lee was a slaveholder and actively resisted racial equality after the war (he believed Black people should not be allowed to vote), the Lost Cause narrative maintains his image as a flawless, godlike figure. Many streets, buildings, and parks have been named after Lee and statues have been erected in his honor despite “Lee’s hesitancy to erect [Confederate] memorials after the war” (127). Smith notes that in Alabama and Mississippi, as of 2020 there is a Robert E. Lee Day that Lee’s birthday, January 19, is celebrated on the same day as Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

In the South and elsewhere, attitudes toward Lee are changing. Statues of Lee have been removed in Richmond, VA; New Orleans, LA; and, infamously, in Charlottesville, VA, an event that sparked the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in 2017. Smith visited the Lee monument in Richmond before it was removed in 2021.

Richard Poplar is the only Black person who is buried at the Blandford Cemetery. Historical evidence indicates that he was most likely a cook for the Confederate soldiers rather than a soldier engaged in combat. However, in Confederate mythology, he serves as a Black Confederate soldier who exemplifies that the war was not about slavery, and that even Black people were willing to fight against the North’s invasion of the South.

Al Edwards, Sr. is an elderly Black Texas politician and Civil Rights activist who successfully led the campaign for Juneteenth to become a state holiday in 1979. His son, Al Edwards II, speaks with Smith to provide more information about his father’s work and the experience of the first Juneteenth celebrations following state recognition. Edwards, Sr., is from an earlier generation of Civil Rights activists who believed that recognizing and confronting Black people’s history in the United States could be done within the very systems that have codified and maintained Black subjugation. Smith describes Edwards, Sr., as “a paragon of persistence” (205) and “an important reminder that the stakes of this holiday had once been even greater than they are today” (189). Edwards, Sr.’s founding of Juneteenth as a Black Independence Day shows the importance of symbolism: Not only must there be efforts to reconceptualize and/or eradicate white supremacist symbols, but there must also be the creation of symbols that honor Black people’s experiences and stories.

Jackie Bostic is a Black woman in her 80s who is the great-granddaughter of Jack Yates. Yates was a leader in the Houston community of formerly enslaved people who, in collaboration with the community, purchased Houston land in 1872 to establish Emancipation Park, the site of the country’s earliest Juneteenth celebrations. Conversation with Bostic brings up a key point in Smith’s discussion of reckoning with slavery—that Black people’s resistance and efforts are rooted in love for family and community. For example, Bostic reveals that Yates was willing to sell himself back into slavery to reunite with his wife and 11 children (200). Furthermore, he built a church and set up schooling so that “newly freed people in his community had the civic bedrock upon which to build the rest of their lives” (200). Bostic also shares that her own resistance rested upon not understanding how majority Black populations could be “forced to abide by rules that were made by somebody else” (200). These stories show a sense of autonomy and agency in both Yates’ efforts and Bostic’s resistance. The inclusion of their stories suggests that autonomy and agency among Black people has been and continues to be key in confronting white supremacy and reckoning with slavery.

Damaras Obi is the guide for the walking tour of the Underground Railroad in New York City. She represents not only the global scale of slavery and its impact, but she also pushes back against the idea that white people in the North are not implicated in slavery. She most explicitly acknowledges the global scale of slavery when she shares her family background. While the mention of her Nigerian father and Dominican mother suggests that she is not descended from people enslaved in the US, it underscores her point that the history of slavery is a global history. West Africans were the majority of those enslaved, and they were brought not only to the United States, but all parts of the Americas, including the Caribbean and Latinx countries. The global scale of slavery has been an integral part of Smith’s discussion, especially in terms of capitalism. Obi’s pushback against the “good guy” narrative pervasive to New York and other Northern states with regard to slavery underscores Smith’s understanding that the legacy of slavery is embedded in all parts of the US, not merely the South.

Thomas Downing was a free Black man in the 19th century who used his restaurant as a cover for hiding escapees coming from the South. Smith includes Downing’s story to push back against the idea that white abolitionists were the central driving force in bringing about emancipation. For Smith, Black abolitionists like Downing were the driving force of abolition because not only did they sustain their commitment to freedom when white support flagged, but they also understood that antislavery and antiracism were interlinked efforts.