Community Read Challenge 4

1. Get your copy of How the Word is Passed and read the “Angola Prison” and “Blandford Cemetery” chapters (pages 85–172).
2. Register for the Book Discussion Group and attend the second discussion on April 2 from noon–1 p.m. in the Arts and Humanities Building, Room 227.
3. Look at discussion questions and additional resources for the “Gorée Island” and “Epilogue” chapters:

   • For “Gorée Island,” reflect on Smith’s conclusions that “Around 33,000 people were sent from Gorée Island to the New World. Perhaps it matters less whether they did so by walking through a door in this house or if they were marched down to a dock and made to board from there. Perhaps it matters less that millions of people were not sent into bondage from this island but that people from this island were sent into bondage at all. When I stood in the room in the House of Slaves that sat adjacent to the ocean, when I opened my arms and touched its wet stone walls, did it matter exactly how many people had once been held in this room? Or was it more important that the room pushed me into a space of reflection on what the origins of slavery meant?” (page 268). See additional discussion questions about “Gorée Island” chapter.

   • For the “Epilogue,” think about Smith’s conversations with his grandparents. After visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and listening to their experiences, Smith reminds us that “in the long arc of the universe, even the most explicit manifestations of racism happened a short time ago” (page 289), situating the closeness of slavery by explaining that “MY GRANDFATHER’S GRANDFATHER WAS ENSLAVED” (page 270). See additional discussion questions about the “Epilogue.”

   • We will also talk about Clint Smith’s conversation at Laxson. What did you take away? What actions should we take (in Chico, as well as nationally) to reckon with the history of slavery in the United States?

4. Get your ticketfor the Book in Common conversation between Clint Smith, Dean Tracy Butts, and Professor Nathaniel Heggins Bryant on April 11, 7:30 p.m. at Laxson Auditorium (tickets $25, free for Butte College and Chico State students).
5. Submit a question(opens in new window) that you would like Dean Butts or Professor Heggins Bryant to ask Clint Smith.
6. Attend a poetry reading by Clint Smith on April 11, 3:30 p.m. in the Arts and Humanities Building, Room 150 (Recital Hall), co-sponsored by Writer’s Voice, Northern California Writing Project, and the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. Smith will read from his award-winning books of poetry, Counting Descent (2016) and Above Ground (2023). Attendance is free

At the main Book in Common event on April 11, author Clint Smith will be in conversation with Dean Tracy Butts and Professor Nathaniel Heggins Bryant. Dean Tracy Butts is a native of Norfolk, Virginia. Butts joined the faculty as a professor of American and African American literature. Prior to her appointment as dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, she served as the director of multicultural and gender studies, chief diversity officer, and chair of the English Department. Butts is a recipient of the Lantis Endowed University Professorship, the A.S. Women’s Center Carol Burr Lifetime Achievement Award, the Black Grad Celebration Outstanding Faculty Award, and the 2015–16 Outstanding Faculty Service Award.

Nathaniel Heggins Bryant is an assistant professor of English. He hails from Virginia and North Carolina and regularly teaches classes on multicultural and multiethnic literature from the United States and across the world, focusing on working-class literature, prison writing, and film. He also serves as the University Film Series coordinator, as a REACH faculty mentor, and as the Chico State CFA chapter vice president, and he is on the Humanities Center board, too.

In this Challenge we feature Smith’s powerful poem “Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class,” first published by the Chico State English Department’s Watershed Review.  Dr. Heggins Bryant notes that he has taught the poem in Chico State classes “three times and counting. It has been a humbling and illuminating experience: twice there were no Black students in the class, and the only other time there was only one. We discuss his compact, short lines and his cultural shorthand, the way he deftly navigates the experiences of Black kids finding themselves on pedagogical islands, narratives about them going unchallenged or even reinforced by those around them. Smith's personal and academic experience enliven it; I hear and see his background as an educator in the way he refers to the deficit model that shackles Black kids to failure, or the ways their horizons are limited to success on the court and the football field. We also discuss how this participates in a long poetic traditional, the ode, as a celebration here not of the famous and powerful, but instead of the anonymous Black kid in many American classrooms, someone who is and always has been worthy of poetic address.

One thing I like to bring up with students in one class where we read this poem, Teaching Multicultural Literature, is the layers of irony in his citation of Brown v. Board of Education. By the point we discuss Smith's poem, we have already read and discussed the way Critical Race Theory has recently served as a boogeyman for politicians; we did so by actually reading directly from legal scholar Derrick Bell (one of the founders, for lack of a better word, of CRT) and his essay ‘Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma.’ Bell argues that we have uncritically celebrated the case as a landmark Civil Rights case that did much to improve the educational lot of Black children, since it ended de jure educational segregation. Not so fast, Bell cautions: the net result, from his vantage point, was a haphazard and often traumatizing integration that resulted in a new kind of de facto segregation, where Black children found themselves learning from white teachers, with white principals, reading textbooks and literature authored entirely by white people, a dynamic that wasn't the case before integration. Smith's poem manages to crystallize this idea in a poetic fragment, in a deep cut that is less than a complete sentence of poetry: ‘Brown v. Board / in the flesh.’ It is a line that somehow echoes Bell's critique of the Supreme Court case and tells us at the same time how the titular Black kid came to be the only one in the class. At the same time this line emphasizes the way Black students have bodies, are bodies, and are often only viewed as bodies: the phrase ‘in the flesh’ does so much work if we let it. This, I think, is the power of poetry if we let it do its work.”