My rating: 5 of 5 stars
For almost a decade Americans have once again attempted to grapple with its history of slavery, segregation, and racism. Yet current political movements for justice are not the only ways in which Americans can do so. In many of our public historic sites attempts are made to explain this history as well. Sometimes this story is told well, other times it is not. In this combination of history and travelogue, Mr. Smith takes his reader on a journey to several places across America and one place in Africa that have a direct connection to America’s history of slavery to see how that history is presented or, in some cases, obfuscated.
Starting with Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, and ending in one of the many ports where Africans were forcibly removed from their homeland to the slave markets and plantations of America and elsewhere, Mr. Smith does a tremendous job of showing how central these places are to America’s history of slavery and, by extension, how central the history of slavery is to the development of the United States of America as a nation. Like any book dealing honestly with this subject, this is not an easy read. The amount of suffering and death that the system of chattel slavery incurred is staggering, disheartening, and quite counter to the story of America many of us learned in our classrooms. And yet, illustrating this counter narrative is exactly the point of this book. By showing how many of our public historic sites tell the story of slavery in America, and too often fail to do so, it forces the reader to seriously question the traditional story of America as the land of the free and the home of the brave. Once that narrative is questioned, it then becomes possible to tell a more complete and honest history of our country and ask what can be done in the present to make this country what we have always been told it was.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. As a poet, Mr. Smith brings his skill with the written word to bear on a difficult topic and thus puts the reader in these places as though they were there themselves. His interviews with tour guides and average people alike helps to illustrate just how our educational system and our public historic sites have failed to tell a full and honest story about the history of slavery in America. And at the sites that Mr. Smith visits that obscures that history, whether by design or by accident, he does a tremendous job of setting the record straight. Though this book is not a comprehensive examination of these public sites, this book can be the starting point for discussing how we do talk about America’s past and what can be done to improve it. Judging by the number of politicians and “parent groups” that are currently seeking to ban books and textbooks from schools and libraries that try to tell a more honest history of America, a book like this couldn’t be more timely.
Whether you are a lifelong American history buff or new to the subject, whether you have visited all of these historic sites or none of them, this is a great book to start with when examining the full story of America’s slave past.
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