Some families were enslaved at Monticello for three generations or more. It was the home of thousands of enslaved people, including several large families. It belonged to Jefferson, yes, but it was not his home alone. I looked around the lawn and imagined what Monticello would have been like two centuries ago. Monticello Plantation (Charlottesville, Virginia) Visit Smith’s website and listen to him reading an excerpt.(By the end of July, he had already done 120 interviews.) As interview 121, we talked to him about storytelling, what didn’t make it into the book (which we’ve excerpted by location on the following pages), and how his former English students at Parkdale High School in Maryland are now DMing him. This summer, we caught up with Smith, who was on a whirlwind author’s tour.
1 on the Times bestsellers list and was nominated for a National Book Award. He was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air and made the cover of Poets & Writers magazine. Smith turned those visits - what the New York Times called his “cross-country survey of slavery remembrance” - into a book that came out in June 2021, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.
It was also a journey to fill in his own gaps. Soon after, Smith became “obsessed” with how slavery is remembered and reckoned with, and for nearly three years, he traveled around the world, visiting museums, plantations, cemeteries, prisons, and historical landmarks to learn how different places - and the people who run or visit those places - confront, or fail to confront, the legacy of slavery. Even the street where his parents still live, he came to understand, was named after a man who owned more than 150 slaves during his lifetime. Lee was taken down in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith, Ed.M.'17, Ph.D.'20, realized he knew little about his city’s relationship with slavery, including the hundreds of parks, schools, and statues named after Confederate figures and local slaveholders. In May 2017, after the statue of Robert E.
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