How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

As Smith writes about his experience of the historical sites, he uses light, dark, and shadow to allude to knowledge/understanding, oppression and breaking, and mystery with the hope of understanding, respectively. Furthermore, it is sometimes the interplay of light, dark, and shadow that reveals how Smith processes the sites’ exhibits and his overall experience. 

Light as a symbol of knowledge and understanding first appears in the chapter on Monticello. For example, Smith writes, “A blade of light cut through the open doorframe of what may have been the Hemings’s living quarters. […]” (31). He describes a “whisper of sunlight squeezing through” (34) small openings in the roof of the Monticello slave cabin. He also notes the “splashes of light” (49) between leaves and branches on the path to Jefferson’s grave. Smith’s descriptions of these sparse amounts of lights connote the understanding he is beginning to gain about the experiences of enslaved people at Monticello. They are sparse, perhaps, because while the site has taken efforts to correct their narrative on slavery and Jefferson’s relationship to it, there remains the difficulty of recreating the experiences and personhood of the enslaved people. Furthermore, as Jefferson’s duality and complexity remains the central subject around which the narrative orbits, the understanding of enslaved people’s experience remains secondary to understanding Jefferson. 

There are, however, times where full amounts of light connote a great amount of understanding, but at the same time, such full understanding can be overwhelming and intense. For example, as Smith observes The Children of Whitney figurines, he notes that the sunlight “fell directly onto the figurines, as if they were wearing the sunlight as a shawl” (62). He writes this before discussing slavery’s devastating impact on children, who “sustained and embodied the institution of slavery, especially after the formal end of the transatlantic slave trade” (62). At Angola, he notes how his eyes must adjust to the light outside after leaving death row (114), after describing the difficult experience he has inside the space. As he talks to Jeff at Blandford, “the shade of the gazebo had moved and exposed [their] faces to the hot sun” (164). Reviewing the picture of the “Door of No Return,” he writes, “What I like about the photo is that the sun’s vibrant glow draws your attention to the door while simultaneously obscuring what’s behind it” (267). The use of full light to describe his experiences exemplifies the ways that knowledge and understanding can come from the difficult truths that must be faced in the reckoning with slavery, but it also implies that such difficult knowledge will not always feel good to receive even though it offers greater awareness. 

Darkness, on the other hand, comes to represent oppression and the breaking of Black people’s bodies and spirits. Smith’s descriptions of darkness suggest that Black oppression is the legacy that connects slavery to present-day displays of racial violence, such as mass incarceration and narrative recreation that serves white supremacy. At Gorée, he notes that his eyes never adjust to the darkness in the Cellules des Recalcitrants: “It was too dark to tell what it looked like. I turned on my phone’s flashlight, bent down, and scooted inside. The stone seemed to almost absorb the light, so it still felt dark inside the shallow cavern. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. They did not” (247). Connecting the violence of the slave trading post to the violence of plantations and prisons, he postulates that the dark chamber “might have been where the lessons on first resistance had taken place. […] Where spirits and bodies had been broken” (247). When he writes in the chapter on Blandford that the “hazy darkness wrapped around [his] skin” (121) as they stepped inside the church, he is alluding to the continued violence in the glorification of the Confederacy. The choice to de-emphasize or outright ignore the experiences of enslaved people both enacts violence and obscures truth. 

Where there are light and dark, there must also be shadow, so shadow plays an important role in Smith’s recollection of his experiences as well. Shadow implies the presence of Black oppression and mystery around the experience, with the hope of understanding and honoring Black people’s experience. Smith first alludes to the role of shadow when he describes his first impressions of Thorson: “While the shadow over David’s eyes gave him a sense of mystery, there was nothing enigmatic about what he was saying” (11). Smith writes this right before quoting Thorson’s succinct and direct definition of chattel slavery to a mostly white audience. In the Red Hat cell, Smith notes the ways that the sun coming through the door is “casting long shadows of our bodies onto the floor” (106), implying the way that the tourists can never fully know, but can gain some awareness, around the experiences of those who have actually been enslaved at Angola by being inside of the cell and noticing its conditions. As he looks at Lee’s statue “awash in sunlight” (171), he can also “feel its shadow move like a sundial around” (171) him, suggesting that confronting Lee’s slaveholding and racist past not only illuminates the violence of his deification, but also honors Black people through the recognition of that violence and a more rounded understanding of who Lee was.

While Smith’s descriptions of sunlight and the way it flows through various spaces, the darkness of rooms and feelings, and where and how shadows are cast may appear to be arbitrary descriptions that add to the poetic quality of the text, Smith includes them intentionally to provide insight into his experience of the various historical sites. Where light symbolizes understanding of enslaved people’s experiences and other difficult truths, darkness represents oppression and violence towards Black people. Shadow, then, lies somewhere in between, implying the continued presence of Black oppression with truth, knowledge, and understanding somewhere near, but maybe not yet entirely visible.