How the Word Is Passed

Clint Smith answers by visiting the places where American slavery is remembered, half-remembered and denied: Monticello, the Whitney Plantation, the Angola prison, a Confederate cemetery, a Juneteenth celebration, even a slaving site in Senegal. At each he listens - to guides, tourists, descendants - and measures the distance between history and the stories we prefer.

A poet by training, Smith writes with grace and restraint, letting contradictions speak before he does. intendle recommends it as one of the most illuminating books on memory and race in years, humane rather than hectoring. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times 10 Best Book of 2021, it has become a fixture of community and classroom reading.