In this fascinating and vital book, Smith recounts his experiences visiting a handful of places that are in some way tied to slavery in the United States. He visits Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation, which is only recently starting to include details about the enslaved people who built and maintained the plantation in the site's tours; the Whitney plantation, which centers its education efforts around the lives of the enslaved people who worked there and throughout the South; Louisiana's Angola Prison, which was once a plantation and (through some questionable Jim Crow laws that have only recently been challenged or struck down) still houses a shockingly high percentage of Black prisoners; the Confederate Blandford Cemetery; Galveston Island, where Juneteenth began; New York City, where the history of slavery has literally been paved over; and Senegal's Goree Island, where thousands of people were packed into the ships that took them from their homeland and into a life of slavery.
Smith notes in an afterword that this isn't meant to be a definitive description of each of these places and that his experience is certainly different than it might be for someone of a different race, gender, or educational background (he is a Black man with an Ivy League doctorate). That said, it's eye-opening and sometimes uncomfortable, and it's a book I'll be recommending to everyone. An amazing book that should be required reading.
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