"How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America"

Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, in Virginia, was not only his home but a plantation. A World Heritage site, it has also become a place to memorialize the 607 people Jefferson owned in his lifetime, enslaving even his own six children he had with Sally Hemings. As reporter/researcher Clint Smith notes, the person who wrote "all men are created equal" "believed that Black people, as a rule, were not capable of poetic expression. 'Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.'"

Himself a poet and staff writer at The Atlantic, Smith, a New Orleans native with a Harvard doctorate, visits "eight places in the United States as well as one abroad to understand how each reckons with its relationship to the history of American slavery." Smith calls on scholarly accounts, empathetic interviews with those attending the sites he visits, and oral histories--the way tenuous memories are passed down.

He visits "plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, historical landmarks, and cities," mostly in the South but also New York and Senegal, site of the "Door of No Return."

"How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America" ($18.99 in paperback from Little, Brown and Company; also for Amazon Kindle) is the 2023-2024 Book in Common for Butte College, Chico State (resources at csuchico.edu/bic) and other community organizations. (Smith is scheduled for a Laxson Auditorium presentation April 11, 2024.) It is a stunning book, rigorously fact-checked and yet deeply personal.

"Here I was, on a plantation that enslaved hundreds of people who had skin like mine, having a conversation with a white, conservative, Fox News–consuming woman from Texas, whose mother had conveyed to her throughout her life that people like me were—that perhaps I was—better off dead than alive. A woman with whom, surprisingly even to me, I was sharing photos of my fourteen-month-old son."

"The history of slavery," he concludes, "… is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories." There are big gaps in our collective memories, and this book succeeds in filling them in.

"The Underground Railroad"

Colson Whitehead won a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for his searing novel, "The Underground Railroad" ($16.95 in paperback from Anchor/Doubleday; also for Amazon Kindle). He is scheduled to speak at the Shasta College Theatre in Redding on Tuesday, October 16 at 7:00 p.m. as part of the school's Community Speaker Series. The event is free and open to the public; details at bit.ly/2QAGdWu.

The story begins with Cora, a young slave on a Georgia cotton plantation before the Civil War. The stunning audio version is voiced by Bahni Turpin who, as Publishers Weekly put it in a starred review, "takes great pains to handle the nuances of dialect without resorting to caricature." Caesar, another of the slaves on the Randall plantation, surreptitiously invites Cora to join him in his departure through the "underground railroad."

Whitehead imagines an actual railroad, hidden in a series of massive tunnels under the South, maintained by abolitionists. Cora can hardly believe what she sees. "The tunnel, the tracks, the desperate souls who found salvation in the coordination of its stations and timetables--this was a marvel to be proud of. She wondered if those who had built this thing had received their proper reward." 

Lumbly, the station agent, replies: "Every state is different. … Each one a state of possibility, with its own customs and way of doing things. Moving through them, you'll see the breadth of the country before you reach your final stop." 

Cora will take the name "Bessie" in South Carolina, becoming a nanny to the Anderson children. Her treatment is a far cry from the unspeakable horrors the Randall brothers inflicted on their slaves (Big Anthony is tortured for days; then, "visitors sipped spiced rum as Big Anthony was doused with oil and roasted"). But it becomes clear the state is no haven for runaways.

More escapes. There will be journeys on the underground railroad to North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana. Throughout, the slave catcher Ridgeway haunts Cora's path; the final bloody confrontation speaks volumes. 

Possibilities? Maybe. But even at times when Cora experiences relative freedom, she realizes that "whether in the fields or underground or in an attic room, America remained her warden."