Happy Sunday! Sunday Salon is hosted by Deb at ReaderBuzz. Check out her post and the links to see what other bloggers have been up to in the last week.

I’ve been thinking of everyone in Florida, including some in the book blogger community like Tina of Turn the Page and Vicki of I’d Rather Be at the Beach. JoAnn of Gulfside Musing isn’t currently in Florida, but she has a home to worry about there.

Since people appreciated the list of books selected by my book group, I thought I would take today’s post to review our August book, How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith.

Book: How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith
Genre: Nonfiction
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Publication date: 2021

Source: hardback borrowed from the library

Summary: Clint Smith visited historic sites, museums, and landmarks to hear about the ways that the various sites presented the history of slavery. Through the book, we tour the famous site of Monticello Plantation, the well-known Angola Prison (but did you know that you could visit?), and the locally famous Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia. Each of these places tell the history of slavery in the United States in different ways — with more or less acknowledgment and with greater or fewer facts.

At Monticello Plantation, for example, a visitor can elect to take a tour that focuses on Thomas Jefferson’s relationship to slavery. In this chapter, we hear the stories of human beings who were enslaved by Jefferson alongside information that Smith learned from research, like the material in The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed. My group read that book many years ago and it was one of the formative experiences for me, realizing that I had as much to unlearn as I did to learn to gain a more accurate grasp of American history.

On the other hand, the house tour that almost every visitor takes when they visit Monticello barely mentions slavery.

Thoughts: I was pretty familiar with the story of Monticello Plantation but completely flummoxed by what I learned about the past and present of Angola Prison where there’s a rodeo twice a year that features prisoners in dangerous roles. They are routinely injured in the name of entertainment.

How the Word is Passed worked particularly well as a book club selection. Our participants had visited some of the places mentioned and were able to share their experiences.

Clint Smith is a poet, and our group appreciated the lyrical passages, particularly in the descriptions.

I wanted to share this quote from the chapter on Galveston Island, where the Juneteenth event is reenacted every year to demonstrate the powerful language. In fact, it inspired me to develop a special event for 2025 since our regular book group meeting falls on June 19th next year.

I thought about how Juneteenth is a holiday that inspires so much celebration, born from circumstances imbed with so much tragedy. Enslavers in Texas, and across the South, attempted to keep Black people in bondage for months, and theoretically years, after their freedom had been granted. Juneteenth, then, is both a day to solemnly remember what this country has done to Black Americans and a day to celebrate all that Black Americans have overcome. It is a reminder that each day this country must consciously make a decision to move toward freedom for all of its citizens, and that this is something that must be done proactively; it will not happen on its own. The project of freedom, Juneteenth reminds us, is precarious, and we should regularly remind ourselves how many people who came before us never got to experience it, and how many people there are still waiting.

If, like me, armchair travel is one of the ways that you enjoy learning about places and history, How the Word is Passed is a unique path to hearing rarely told stories and gaining more depth to more well-known ones.

Have you read this book? What did you think?