September 18, 2025 by Jessica Peck for Dreamland Books 

It is this writer’s humble opinion that we don’t do ourselves any favors by pretending the past didn’t happen. Erasing history doesn’t make it disappear; it only ensures we keep repeating it. One of the most powerful ways to resist that kind of forgetfulness is through actively choosing to read books that educate us, and Clint Smith’s “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America” is an outstanding place to start. 

In his book, Smith takes the reader with him as he travels to eight sites directly tied to the history of slavery. Each place carries its own story, and each is in a different stage of reckoning with its past. At Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, Smith confronts the contradictions of a founding father who spoke of liberty while enslaving hundreds. At Angola Prison in Louisiana, a former plantation turned prison, groups of incarcerated men still work the fields under armed guards on horseback. There, he shows how the legacy of slavery is not just behind us but built into the present. He also visits New York City, uncovering the little-known history of how slavery shaped the city’s rise, and travels to Gorée Island in Senegal, a site long tied to the memory of the transatlantic slave trade. 

And it really does feel as if you, the reader, are walking beside Smith the whole time. He writes in a way that makes you feel like you’re catching up with an old friend, as if the story is being told especially to you. That quality makes confronting the brutal history of slavery feel intimate, and at moments, gentle, maybe more than the history deserves. 

It’s not only the earnestness of his voice that makes this book so approachable, but also his gift for description. At each stop, Smith’s details bring the place to life: the air, the landscape, the wonder, and the unease of the moment. I first read Smith through his poetry collection Above Ground (a book I credit with transforming me into a “poetry person”), and he brings that same poetic eye here, painting scenes you don’t just read about but step into. 

One of the most powerful chapters comes when Smith takes the reader with him to Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia — the largest mass grave of Confederate veterans. Walking nervously beside him (while sitting in the comfort of my own home) through the tour and the Confederate reenactment, I felt tense, worried for how he might be received. People describe the war as a matter of honor or heritage, insisting it had little to do with slavery. Smith sets their words against the historical record, showing how denial protects not just monuments but identities. What struck me most was how gently he engages, even as he makes the truth plain: slavery was at the center of the Confederacy, and any story that erases that is a fantasy. 

In the Epilogue, Smith writes, “Time collapsed in on us,” as he sits with his grandmother and imagines her as a little girl growing up in a world where violence was always close by. That collapse gets at the heart of the book: the reminder that slavery and racial violence aren’t some distant past. They’re close. There are people alive today who held and loved people who were born into slavery. And what we call progress often just looks like slavery reshaped. When the past and present meet like that, it forces us to see what’s still here — and maybe opens the door, even a crack, to finally doing something about it.

Here is poem written by Clint Smith. He is a beautiful writer.

Happy Reading, 

Jess 

P.S. Thinking of the next generation? Good news! The young readers’ edition of this book comes out on September 30, 2025.