How Do You Re-Tell a Story That Has Been Told the Wrong Way?

IN 2015, I visited two plantations in rural Louisiana to write a college paper on white supremacy. One, Whitney Plantation, centered the experiences of enslaved people by sharing “firsthand accounts” and including statues of and memorials to them. The other, Oak Alley Plantation, romanticized the Antebellum South. Filled with indignation, I could not fathom how tourists at Oak Alley drank mint juleps where brutality, violence, and terror once reigned. Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed, studies sites of racialized violence in the U.S. to help form a more accurate American “public memory.” We need Smith’s poetic-sociological vision to help us tell the true, humanizing stories of our — often ugly — history.

During my visit, Oak Alley sold copies of Little Black Sambo by Scottish author-illustrator Helen Bannerman in its gift shop (the shop no longer sells this title). A racist children’s book about a family that is widely understood to be Tamil, the 1899 children’s book portrays dark-skinned Indian people through heavy “pickaninny” caricature. In the book Racial Innocence historian Robin Bernstein explains, “The pickaninny was an imagined, subhuman black juvenile who was typically depicted outdoors, merrily accepting (or even inviting) violence.” The dangerous trope desensitizes us to violence against Black and brown children, evidenced throughout history from slavery to police brutality. My family is part Tamil, and I nearly choked when I saw this “artifact” of dehumanization dressed up as nostalgia.

Smith writes, “[In Louisiana,] you are still more likely to hear stories of how the owners of the land ‘treated their slaves well’ than you are to hear of the experiences of actual enslaved people.” Whitney stands in contrast, in Smith’s words, as “a place asking the question: How do you tell a story that has been told the wrong way for so long?” By drawing upon the direct stories of survivors, Smith further describes Whitney as “an open book, up under the sky” and a “healing,” “ancestral” space. Telling untold stories is life-giving.

In his 2022 Atlantic article “Monuments to the Unthinkable,” Smith explores Holocaust memorialization in Germany. He visits former concentration camps and memorials like Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Smith is impressed by the breadth of German public memory, but also details surprising blind spots, most notably the frequent exclusion of Jewish perspectives that were “deemed too close to the subject matter.” However, the past feels appropriately immediate in Germany to Smith. This is starkly different than in the U.S., where as recently as May 2024, a school board in Virginia “restored Confederate names” to local schools. Without public memory to anchor and unite us, nostalgia and racism, both veiled and overt, distort our storytelling and education. We repeat the same cycles of silence and oppression.

“It is impossible for any memorial to slavery to capture its full horror, or for any memorial to the Holocaust to express the full humanity of the victims,” Smith concludes. “No stone in the ground can make up for a life.” Still, he contends the “very act of attempting to remember” is rich soil for growing a new world. It begins with each of us, “ordinary people [who] are the conscience.” If we let it, our conscience can compel us to honesty and action.