At first, Clint Smith had trouble making out the objects beside a white picket fence in the distance. Then he drew closer; what he saw made him shudder.
Planted in a garden bed in front of the fence were the heads of 55 Black men impaled on metal rods, their eyes shut and jaws clenched in anguish.
Smith, a journalist and a poet, was visiting the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana as part of his quest to understand the impact of slavery in America. He had spent four years touring monuments and landmarks commemorating slavery across America and in Africa, but his stop at the Whitney, in his home state, stood out.
There he encountered no mint juleps or “Gone with the Wind” nostalgia about slavery. Instead, the plantation displayed statuettes of impoverished, emaciated Black children. Oral histories included an account from an enslaved woman who recalled how her master would come at night to rape her sister and “den have nerve to come round the next day and ask her how she feels.”
The plantation's harrowing centerpiece, though, was what made Smith stop in his tracks. The severed heads were ceramic sculptures – a memorial to the largest slave rebellion in US history. In 1811 some 500 slaves, led by a mixed-race slave driver named Charles Deslondes, marched through Louisiana in military formation before federal troops captured them. Their leaders were tortured and beheaded, with their heads posted on stakes as a warning to other slaves.
The scene is one of many searing moments Smith captures in his New York Times bestseller, “How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.”
There is no other book on slavery quite like it. Smith explores slavery's impact on the present as much as on the past. He takes readers to places such as modern-day New York City on Wall Street, where the country's second-largest slave market once stood on Wall Street, to show how the story of slavery is still being debated, distorted and denied.
Smith also visits such landmarks as Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation in Virginia and Goree Island in Senegal, a notorious slave-trading center. Along the way he speaks with tour guides, descendants of slaves, tourists and even members of a neo-Confederate group who tell him that slavery wasn't the main cause of the Civil War. Others tell him there was no such a thing as a “good” slave master.