![]() ![]() ![]() And thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city in which there were more homages to its enslavers than there were to enslaved people. ![]() It is a book that is relevant, accessible, and filled with needed moments of honesty.įor Smith, the creation of this book began in May 2017 when, he says, “I watched the statutes of several Confederate monuments come down in my hometown New Orleans. At each stop, Smith takes his readers on a journey as he considers the role this history plays in our present understanding of who we are as Americans and emphasizes the weightiness that comes from listening to the stories presented at each of these places. In a lot of ways, this sentiment is an undercurrent of Smith’s new book, How the Word is Passed, which is a deeply personal story about his relationship to his own past as a Black man in the United States, and also, as the subtitle states, "a reckoning with the history of slavery across America." The book is divided into eight chapters, each focusing on a single place-in addition to a final stop at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. The surface of all that rests beneath us, Meteor Shower, a poem in Clint Smith’s 2017 book of poetry Counting Descent, speaks of our place in the universe, of how we, as human beings, are carriers of history, that we bring our stories with us as we travel through life. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |