With the heart of a teacher, the eye of a poet, and the mind of a researcher, Clint Smith teases apart and weaves together the threads of history, nostalgia, place, and memory to tell a powerful story — not of slavery's distant past, but of a legacy that lives and breathes among us.

Smith visits, personally and through interviews and primary sources, the Whitney Plantation and the maximum-security Angola Prison in his home state of Louisiana, Jefferson's Monticello Plantation and Blandford Cemetery's thousands of fallen Confederate soldiers in Virginia, a Juneteenth celebration in Galveston (Texas), the site of the second largest slave market in the U.S. (right in downtown Manhattan), Gorée Island and the Door of No Return in Senegal, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C., and countless other sites and that inform the narrative but aren't specifically featured. What comes together is more than a well-curated tour. It's a generous, gracious, engaging, intensely personal yet scholarly exploration. The descriptive writing is lyrical and poignant without being overwrought, the interviews reveal both a courage and a kindness, and the research is perceptive and fair-minded. It's difficult material presented in an accessible, approachable way—one of the least intimidating but most profoundly affecting books on history and slavery that I have ever read.