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.