Narrator: There's a story about the Mississippi River. Engineers, in their quest for control and convenience, straightened out its meandering path to make room for houses and farmland. But every so often, the river remembers. It swells past its artificial banks and reclaims the land it once knew. People call it flooding, but as the author Toni Morrison suggests, it is not flooding; it is remembering. This powerful metaphor lies at the heart of a profound national reckoning. What happens when a country tries to straighten out the crooked lines of its own history? What happens when it tries to pave over the past?

In his book How the Word Is Passed, Clint Smith embarks on a journey to answer this question. He travels across the United States and beyond, visiting the places where the memory of American slavery lives, breathes, and is contested every day. From plantations to prisons, from monuments to museums, Smith investigates how the story of slavery is told—or left untold—and reveals that the past is never truly past. It is a living inheritance, a force that, like the river, will always remember where it used to be.

Narrator: At Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, a tour guide named David offers a crucial distinction: “There’s a difference between history and nostalgia.” History, he explains, is the story of the past using all available facts. Nostalgia is a fantasy about the past, using no facts at all. Memory lies somewhere in between. For decades, Monticello was a site of nostalgia, celebrating Jefferson the Founding Father, the architect, the philosopher, while the hundreds of people he enslaved remained footnotes.

Smith documents how that is changing. He joins a "Slavery at Monticello" tour, where the guide doesn't shy away from the brutal facts. He tells the story of Cary, a teenage enslaved boy in the nail-making factory who, in a moment of frustration, struck another boy with a hammer. Jefferson’s response was not mercy, but business. He ordered Cary to be sold "to a place so far away he'll never be heard from again," effectively a death sentence, to make an example of him.

This unvarnished history is jarring for many visitors. Smith speaks with two white women, Donna and Grace, who came to admire the architecture. After the tour, they are visibly shaken. Learning about Jefferson’s cruelty, Grace says, "took the shine off the guy." They begin to draw parallels between the separation of enslaved families and modern-day events. Their visit transforms from a tourist stop into a difficult, personal confrontation with a history they thought they knew. Monticello becomes a battlefield where the comforting nostalgia of a great founder clashes with the historical reality of a brutal slave owner.

Narrator: If Monticello represents the nation's founding contradiction, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, represents its enduring legacy. Angola is not just a prison; it is an 18,000-acre prison farm built on the grounds of a former plantation. The connection is not merely geographic. As Smith learns from Norris Henderson, a man who was incarcerated at Angola for nearly thirty years, the prison system is a direct descendant of slavery.

After the Civil War, convict leasing emerged as a new form of forced labor, and Louisiana’s non-unanimous jury law—a relic of white supremacy designed to more easily convict Black people—funneled thousands into this system. Today, men, a disproportionate number of whom are Black, still work the fields for pennies an hour, sometimes picking cotton under the watch of armed guards on horseback.

When Smith tours the prison, he asks his guide, an assistant warden, about the land’s history with slavery. The warden acknowledges it—“they housed slaves on this land, and I can’t change that”—before quickly pivoting to the prison’s modern, "progressive" programs. The answer is a perfunctory nod, a way of letting a "dead dog lie," as Norris Henderson puts it. But at Angola, the past is not dead. It is in the soil, in the labor system, and in the very logic of the institution, demonstrating an unbroken line from chattel slavery to mass incarceration.

Narrator: In Petersburg, Virginia, Smith visits Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place for 30,000 Confederate soldiers. Here, the word is passed not as history, but as a carefully constructed myth: the Lost Cause. This narrative, promoted for over a century by groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, claims the Civil War was not about slavery but about states' rights and Northern aggression.

Smith attends a Memorial Day event hosted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and speaks with attendees who passionately defend this view. One man, Jeff, insists his ancestors fought for "freedom" and tells a popular but debunked story about a Black man named Richard Poplar who supposedly fought for the Confederacy. This myth of the "Black Confederate" is a key tool of the Lost Cause, designed to absolve the Confederacy of its foundation in white supremacy.

As Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois warned, these monuments were never just about memory; they were part of a campaign of psychological terror against Black Americans during the rise of Jim Crow. They were built to assert a racial hierarchy and rewrite history in real time. At Blandford, Smith sees how this revisionism is an active, ongoing project, a story that, as one employee admits about a local legend, people embrace not because it’s true, but because they "like it."

Narrator: In stark contrast to Blandford stands the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, the first museum in America dedicated entirely to the perspective of the enslaved. Its founder, a white lawyer named John Cummings, originally bought the property as a real estate investment. But after reading historical documents detailing the lives of the people enslaved there—including an inventory listing a woman as a "good breeder"—he was so profoundly changed that he spent millions of his own money to turn the plantation into a memorial.

The Whitney refuses to sanitize the past. Visitors are confronted with the 1811 German Coast Uprising, one of the largest slave rebellions in U.S. history, which ended with the decapitated heads of rebels being placed on pikes along the river. They see the "Field of Angels," a memorial to the 2,200 enslaved children who died in the parish, and the "Wall of Honor," which lists the names of every person known to have been enslaved at the Whitney.

The director of research, Dr. Ibrahima Seck, describes the museum’s mission as creating "an open book, up under the sky." It is a place that passes the word by giving names to the nameless, voices to the silenced, and humanity to those who were systematically dehumanized. It offers a powerful model for how to reckon with history not by looking away, but by looking directly at the lives of those who endured it.

Narrator: The narrative of the Civil War often casts the North as the unequivocal "good guys." But on a walking tour of New York City, Smith uncovers a more complicated truth. New York was not just a center of abolitionism; it was a financial and commercial hub deeply enmeshed in the slave economy. The city’s banks financed plantations, its factories insured slave ships, and for a time, it held one of the largest urban slave populations in the country.

The most visceral evidence of this history was buried for centuries. In 1991, during the construction of a federal office building, workers unearthed the African Burial Ground, a 17th- and 18th-century cemetery containing the remains of up to 15,000 free and enslaved Africans. The discovery forced the city to confront a history it had largely forgotten. The site is now a National Monument, a solemn testament to the lives and labor that built the city but were erased from its official story. It serves as a powerful reminder that the legacy of slavery is not confined to the South; it is woven into the fabric of the entire nation.

Narrator: Throughout his journey, Smith realizes that the most powerful primary sources are not always in archives. In the epilogue, he sits with his own grandparents and listens. He learns that his grandfather’s grandfather was enslaved. He hears how his grandfather, as a boy in Mississippi, lived just miles from where Emmett Till was brutally murdered. He listens to his grandmother describe the daily humiliations of Jim Crow Florida—being forced to stand on a bus, walking past white schools she couldn't attend, and enduring the taunts of white children.

These are not abstract historical facts; they are lived experiences, passed down through generations. "My grandparents’ stories are my inheritance," Smith writes, "each one is an heirloom I carry." This realization brings the book's central theme to its most intimate and powerful conclusion. The history of slavery is not a distant event. It is the story of our families, a living presence that has shaped who we are. The word is passed in the quiet conversations in living rooms, in the memories of our elders, and in the lineage that connects us directly to the past.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from How the Word Is Passed is that the history of slavery is not static; it is a dynamic and contested force that is actively shaping our present. It is etched into the American landscape, embedded in our institutions, and alive in our personal memories. The book reveals that we are all, in some way, docents of this history, and we make choices every day about which version of the story we tell.

Clint Smith’s journey is a powerful call to listen—to the land, to the archives, and most importantly, to each other. It challenges us to move beyond the comfort of nostalgia and the danger of willful ignorance. The word has been passed down through generations, in stories of both immense pain and incredible resilience. The question the book leaves us with is not whether we will receive it, but whether we will have the courage to truly hear it.