How the Word Is Passed summary

As Clint walks toward the 11,000-square-foot, 43-room mansion, the air glimmers with heat; mulberry trees dot the landscape, providing respite from the glaring sun.

He’s taking a tour of Monticello: former home to Thomas Jefferson – and hundreds of enslaved people in its heyday. The tour group of almost exclusively white visitors, a jarring sight on a plantation that has had its ratios reversed, looks uneasy. Their guide, David Thorson, is explaining how slavery was a system of inequality and exclusion, justified even by those who knew it was wrong.

Clint is facing a gruesome scene: the heads of 55 Black men, affixed atop metal pikes, their eyes shut and faces frozen in expressions of anguish. 

The ceramic statues glint in the light. 

As a kid, Clint traveled on the I-10 West from New Orleans many times for family visits, Boy Scout camps, and soccer tournaments. But this time, the bus takes an unfamiliar exit. It slowly merges onto Highway 66 and heads toward Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola – a prison built on a former cotton plantation belonging to Isaac Franklin, who ran one of the country’s biggest slave-trading firms.

Clint is sitting next to Norris Henderson, a former inmate who spent 27 years in Angola for a crime he didn’t commit. Since his release, Norris has worked toward criminal justice reform; he recently placed a successful ballot measure that ended Louisiana’s practice of nonunanimous jury decisions. Until then, a person could be convicted of a felony with only nine out of twelve jurors in agreement.

The smell of freshly cut grass infuses the air. Clint watches as Black men push lawn mowers around gravestones bedecked with Confederate flags. He’s standing in Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia, where the bodies of close to 30,000 soldiers lie.

During the Civil War, Confederate soldiers who died in battle were often buried where they fell; the South didn’t have the means to transport them to cemeteries. In 1866, a year after the war ended, a group of women in Petersburg wanted to rectify this. They formed the Ladies’ Memorial Association and began exhuming remains – and reburying them at Blandford Cemetery. Eventually, the ladies turned the cemetery’s old church into a memorial, with stained-glass windows honoring the fallen from each Confederate state.

June 19, 1865 – Union general Gordon Granger is standing on the balcony of Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas. In his hand, he holds an order and declares, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” Or so the story goes.

While there’s no evidence to support that the event unfolded exactly like this, the myth has become tradition. Each year, this scene is reenacted as part of the Juneteenth celebrations in Galveston, a small island off mainland Texas. Clint watches people in the audience reacting to the words. Some are shaking. Some close their eyes and smile. Some embrace. History is alive in the room.

The wind whips around Clint as he walks from the station to the National Museum of the American Indian. A small group is already gathering around their guide, Damaras Obi, for a walking tour on slavery and the Underground Railroad in New York City.

Throughout history, she begins, people have been enslaved for various reasons: they owed money or were prisoners. But New World enslavement – chattel slavery – was a different story. It stemmed from the European idea of a racial caste system – from the idea that Africans were inherently subhuman.

The ferry from Dakar takes just 15 minutes, but it transports Clint to another world. The hustle and bustle of the city is gone; in its place are swaying palm trees, weathered homes, and the gentle lapping of waves.

He’s standing on Gorée Island, which lies just off the coast of Senegal in the Atlantic Ocean. Gorée played a key role in the slave trade from the 1500s until 1848, when France abolished slavery in its colonies. During that time, the island was the main hub for enslaved Africans taken to the New World.

After traveling across the US, and an ocean, to better understand the past and how it’s shaped the present, Clint turned his focus to his own lineage. He interviewed his living grandparents – his mother’s father and his father’s mother – and was shocked to learn something he’d never known: his grandfather’s grandfather had been enslaved.

Together, they walked through the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), a museum in Washington, DC, that puts Blackness at the center of America’s narrative.