Back Draft: Clint Smith

History may be recorded in textbooks, but that’s not where it lives. Rather, it’s in the blood of the people who carry that history inside them, and the complex places they and their descendants inhabit.

Clint Smith’s latest book, How the Word Is Passed, is a history of American slavery that centers the lives of those people and places. Whether he’s describing his Black grandfather sitting in his living room or his white tour guide at Monticello Plantation, Smith brings his readers skin-close to his subjects, so we feel them pulsing underneath his sentences. Given that Smith is an accomplished poet and nonfiction writer, I was excited to discuss with him how his book borrows from both genres. I was surprised to learn when talking to him that literary fiction is perhaps what most influenced his creative process, enabling him to delve deeply into America’s ugliest truths.

– Ben Purkert for Guernica

Guernica: How’d you pick this section of text for us to discuss?

Smith: It was a hard exercise for me to decide, because I’ve never done something like this before. It was fascinating—and a little frustrating—to try and find a “before” and “after” because, in my writing process, I’m revising throughout. I’m the kind of a writer where, especially in prose, when I write a paragraph, it’s rare that I just go to the next paragraph. Typically, I’ll edit pretty extensively before moving on. Anyway, I chose this section because it’s from the epilogue in my book.

Guernica: Why is that significant?

: The book as a whole is exploring how different places reckon with—or to reckon with—their relationship to the history of slavery. But, in the epilogue, I take