How the Word Is Passed (adapted for Young Readers)

Adapted for young readers, this nonfiction work follows Clint Smith, a former high school English teacher, as he travels to eight sites in the United States and one abroad to examine how each confronts its relationship to American slavery. Despite growing up in New Orleans, once the heart of the domestic slave trade, and being a descendant of enslaved people, Smith did not fully understand how slavery shaped America. Watching the 2017 removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in New Orleans prompted him to investigate slavery's legacy. In a prologue, historian Leon A. Waters leads Smith through a city where enslavement hides in plain sight: The street where Smith's parents live is named after a man who owned more than 150 enslaved people.

Smith's first destination is Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's Virginia plantation. Tour guide David Thorson, a retired US Navy veteran, defines slavery as a system of exploitation justified by denying enslaved people's humanity based on skin color. David explains how Jefferson's Farm Book tracked enslaved people and how Jefferson sold, leased, and mortgaged them to pay debts. Smith imagines enslaved families who lived at Monticello for generations, only to be separated and sold after Jefferson's death. The Sally Hemings exhibit addresses the enslaved woman with whom Jefferson fathered six children, a relationship Jefferson scholars denied for two centuries. Smith visits a replica slave cabin a quarter the size of Jefferson's entrance hall and contrasts the ornate Jefferson family graveyard with the unmarked burial ground of over 40 enslaved workers nearby.

At the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, Smith encounters a site that centers enslaved people's stories. An exhibit of 55 ceramic faces memorializes the 1811 German Coast uprising, the largest slave rebellion in US history, inspired by the 1804 Haitian Revolution, in which enslaved people in Haiti overthrew French rule and founded the first Black-led republic. Yvonne Holden, the director of operations, shares her family's history of fleeing racial terror during the Jim Crow era, a period of legalized racial segregation across the South. Inside a church on the grounds, life-size clay sculptures of children confront visitors with the reality of child enslavement. The Whitney draws on the Federal Writers' Project, a 1930s effort collecting firsthand accounts from formerly enslaved people, to center their voices. Yvonne addresses the most common question from white visitors, whether there were any good slave owners, by comparing it to praising a kidnapper for feeding a stolen child.

Smith visits Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, accompanied by Norris Henderson, who spent nearly 30 years incarcerated there for a crime he maintains he did not commit. Henderson explains how, after the Civil War, white politicians imposed convict leasing, imprisoning Black people under fabricated charges and renting them to companies for labor under conditions as brutal as slavery. At the Angola Museum, a photograph of Black men being marched into fields by a white woman on horseback appears startlingly recent. The assistant warden, whom Smith calls Roger, omits that Angola was once a plantation and that the land belonged to Isaac Franklin of Franklin and Armfield, one of the largest slave-trading firms in the country. When Smith asks about the prison's connection to slavery, Roger deflects. Smith cites W. E. B. Du Bois's observation that American histories discuss slavery so impartially that "nobody seems to have done wrong." Henderson reveals that field workers earn seven cents an hour. As the bus departs, Smith watches Black men laboring in fields and reflects that the parallel with chattel slavery, in which enslaved people were legally treated as property, requires no metaphor.

At Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia, one of the largest mass graves of Confederate servicemen in the South, Smith provides historical context: The states that seceded explicitly identified slavery as their central cause, and the Confederate constitution protected the institution by name. He traces the Lost Cause, a movement that emerged in the late 19th century to recast the Confederacy as about heritage rather than slavery. Smith attends a Memorial Day event hosted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a heritage group for descendants of Confederate soldiers. Keynote speaker Paul C. Gramling Jr. admits of a Memorial Day origin story, "I don't know if it's true or not, but I like it," revealing that emotional appeal matters more than accuracy. After the event, a 63-year-old attendee named Jeff claims the war was about states' rights and tells a fabricated story about a Black Confederate officer. Smith notes how the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a women's heritage organization, shaped future generations through pro-Confederate lesson plans and revisionist books placed in schools.

On Galveston Island, Texas, Smith attends the annual Juneteenth reenactment, where Union general Gordon Granger's 1865 proclamation announcing the end of slavery is read aloud. Granger arrived more than two years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation because enslavers in Texas deliberately withheld news of emancipation. Smith traces Juneteenth's evolution from early celebrations that criticized the Lost Cause narrative, through suppression under Jim Crow, to the 1979 push by Texas state legislator Al Edwards Sr. to make June 19 a state holiday.

In New York City, Smith joins a walking tour led by Damaras Obi, who challenges the assumption that New York was always on the side of abolition. Damaras explains that by the mid-18th century, one in five New Yorkers was enslaved, that Wall Street is named for a wall built partly by enslaved labor, and that the city had the second-largest slave market in the US after Charleston. Smith visits the African Burial Ground National Monument, where a 1990 construction project uncovered hundreds of skeletal remains from a site estimated to have held 10,000 to 20,000 people. He also visits the site of Seneca Village in Central Park, an independent Black community destroyed in 1857 when the city seized the land.

Smith's final destination is Gorée Island, off the coast of Dakar, Senegal, where the House of Slaves contains the Door of No Return, a symbol of the point from which captured Africans were sent into bondage across the Atlantic. When Smith raises the discrepancy between the claim that millions passed through Gorée and scholars' revised estimate of approximately 33,000, curator Eloi Coly responds that "one slave is too much" and that the house is "a symbol of the slave trade." At a nearby boarding school, history teacher Hasan Kane teaches Africa's history before, during, and after slavery, framing slavery and colonization as two connected systems of plunder. Kane is the best friend of Dr. Ibrahima Seck, the Whitney Plantation's director of research, a connection underscoring the global scope of the history Smith traces.

In the epilogue, Smith turns to his own family. His 89-year-old grandfather, born in Monticello, Mississippi, recalls being threatened with a whip by a white store employee for refusing to dance. His 79-year-old grandmother describes enduring racial violence during segregation. Walking through the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, she says, "I kept saying, 'I lived this.'" Smith reflects that his grandfather's grandfather was born into slavery and concludes that the history of slavery is not secondary to America's founding but central to it, requiring a collective effort to learn and confront.