While How the Word Is Passed is indeed a reckoning with the history of slavery in America, it is also a comprehensive exploration of Black and African history beyond and before the transatlantic slave trade. Smith’s intentions behind this complex work of nonfiction can perhaps be better understood through the two epigraphs he places at the beginning of his work, the first an extract from Frederick Douglass’s “The Nation’s Problem” and the second from Toni Morrison’s “The Site of Memory.”

The first epigraph identifies a central issue within American history: that “we cannot recur to [slavery] with any sense of complacency or composure . . . it is written in characters of blood . . . and we turn from it with a shudder.” The horrors and atrocities committed during the era of American slavery cannot be forgotten, yet few wish to remember a “history . . . of stripes, a revelation of agony.” However, it is this sense of inherent discomfort that allows subtle revisions to be made to American history without notice from the general population. The perpetuation of the myth of kind and generous slave masters is driven in part by our natural aversion to the gruesomeness of the truth.

This instinct to turn away underpins each of Smith’s essays. While those at Blandford Cemetery are eager to rewrite the crimes of the past into something more palatable, Smith’s text forces the reader to confront the reality of each injustice. Smith ensures that the reader is presented with all the facts and, through these facts, dispels any remnants of the national narrative that exist purely to assuage white guilt. The sheer and unadulterated atrocity of the transatlantic slave trade is what makes it so challenging to understand, but also embodies the reason why it must be understood, fully and without shirking away from its brutality.

The second epigraph discusses the artificial amendments made to the Mississippi River and how, whenever the river runs over its new banks, it is called a flood. Morrison points out that the river itself is “not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be.” In a similar way, when a crime is committed in order to perpetuate white supremacy, it is called a racist act or an act of extremist ideology. However, this labeling disregards the fact that America was built on the foundation of slavery and a belief in the inherent validity of the racial caste system. For centuries, Black Americans were considered subhuman, and white American writers, leaders, and statesmen all conspired to ensure that the supremacy of the white race was recognized within the law of the land and within the social practices of day-to-day discrimination.

Within the context of this history, it is hardly surprising that communities of white supremacists are able to promote their ideology and convert other white Americans to their views; nor is it surprising that Black people are disproportionately represented in statistics of poverty, incarceration, and undereducation. Smith highlights how a person who views a white supremacist as an aberration is also likely to view Black crime rates as an issue embedded in the present rather than in the centuries of inequality that have fundamentally shaped the American landscape.

How the Word Is Passed deftly reveals how the past constructs the present by presenting a continuity of racist oppression spanning slavery to emancipation to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights Movement and beyond. The heightened rates of incarceration of Black people in Louisiana following the end of the Civil War cannot be separated from the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and white supremacist ideology. In the same way, the challenges facing Black Americans today cannot be separated from a national history enmeshed with centuries of racism, oppression, and persecution.

Throughout the book, Smith reiterates the significance of properly grappling with the traumas of the past so that we can ensure that they never happen again. As those who witnessed the suffering of slavery firsthand are no longer with us, it is our duty to keep their memory and legacy alive.