Walking home

This image called to me as I walked home from my last morning with Chloe, eyes swollen but heart full. As I sit with her, I’ve been reading the Clint Smith book, How the Word is Passed, which is one of the finest history books I’ve ever read (and my PhD is in history). Smith intersperses meticulous and thorough research on the lasting effects of slavery on the culture of the USA with his own poetic observations, for example:

Describing the financial district of New York City: “Sound emanated from every direction: the staccato of jackhammers cracking blocks of concrete in their search for softer earth; cranes stretching their steel joints to lift rubble from one corner of the street to another; ambulances mazing their way through cars and crosswalks….”

Reflecting on why he is touring Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Plantation in Virginia: “I thought of how all my work, even in response to violence, stemmed from a place of love—a love of my community, a love of my family, a love of my partner, a love of those hoping to build a better world than the one we live in.” Reading what Thomas Jefferson wrote about Black people, Smith says, “I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is.”

Describing the island off the coast of Senegal where Black people departed their homes and ancestors for lives as enslaved laborers in the USA: “Clothes dangled from lines of laundry, a necklace of wet garments stringing the houses together…. The sound of the ocean was the backdrop for all conversations.” 

He makes the bloody awful history of slavery and its lasting impressions on American life palatable by the insertion of such poetry. Turn to any page and you find it. Such writing is a gift we have only to receive.