Clint Smith on Reckoning With History and Twitter

For your Fellow’s project you are completing your book, How the Word Is Passed, a narrative nonfiction project that explores the relationship between place and public history. Could you tell us a little more about it and why you chose it?

Before graduate school I was a high school teacher, and I became really interested in exploring how we can teach certain subjects beyond what is offered in our textbooks. This drew me to public history and what stories different museums, monuments, and memorials, and other historic sites can tell us about our past. Today, we find ourselves in a moment where we are being told that the country needs to reckon with its history of racism. And it absolutely does. Over the past couple of years, I’ve become increasingly curious what this reckoning looked like in places that had a direct relationship to the history of slavery. Were they discussing it? Were they avoiding it? What was animating those decisions? Who are the people behind those decisions? So about a year ago I visited Monticello, Mt. Vernon, and Montpellier—the former plantations of Jefferson, Washington, and Madison respectively—and the project just took off from there. I’ve visited dozens of sites across the country and hope, with this book, to tell a fuller story of how places like these are thinking about and engaging with their relationship to that part of our history.

You tweeted a thread recently about plantations as tourist destinations reckoning with their history and mentioned that you had been researching the topic for your book. What, if any, impact does the website have on your work? Have your feelings about Twitter changed over time?

In Twitter’s earlier days it was a place where I, and others, could sort of think out loud and wrestle with ideas I might have been unsure about. That space doesn’t really exist anymore. Part of it is because my following has gotten larger and part of it is because the site itself has changed and become more saturated than it used to be. Additionally, the space has, I think, become much less forgiving than it once was. Whereas five years ago I might have posted something in a stream of consciousness, now I always think twice about what I do or don’t say and if there is a way that what I say might be misinterpreted. In some ways I think of Twitter as a micro-blog, and in that sense what I posted or don’t post is much more intentional than it used to be. In terms of its relationship to the book project itself, I’ve actually been surprised by how helpful it’s been. For example, after I tweeted the thread about the plantations I had a few folks who work at different plantations reach out to me to share their perspectives and there were other people who shared resources that ended up being incredibly helpful. That’s when Twitter is at it’s best I think. That and the memes.

Can you speak to your average work week and how you share your time between your work and family lives?

I have two young kids, a 2-year-old and a 6-month-old, so part of what I’ve learned is that, at least for now, there is rarely going to be a perfect time to sit down and write for extended periods of time and that I have to find time when there’s any time at all. So I bring my laptop everywhere. I’ll write while waiting at the DMV. I’ll write while the kids are asleep in the carseat in the parking lot of Trader Joe’s. I’ll write during nap time. We recently started the youngest in full time childcare with her brother so that will certainly be helpful in terms of opening up more time. Having a family has also made me put up boundaries about my work time. For example, I don’t work on weekends anymore. Ultimately, I think it creates a much healthier balance than I used to have and it puts the entire family on the same page in terms of expectations for what certain days will look like which I think is good for all of us.

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