DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. After the statue of Robert E. Lee near downtown New Orleans was taken down from its 60-foot pedestal in 2017, Clint Smith became obsessed with how slavery is remembered and reckoned with and with teaching himself all the things he wishes someone had taught him long ago. Smith is from New Orleans, where at least a hundred streets, statues, parks and schools are named after Confederate figures, slaveholders and defenders of slavery.
His nonfiction book, "How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America," won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list and was on the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2021. For the book, he visited eight places to better understand the distortions in the way the history of slavery was taught to him and to most children, as well as the ways many Americans deceive themselves about that history.
Smith earned a Ph.D. in education from Harvard. He also is a poet and a staff writer at The Atlantic. His book "Counting Descent" won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. And in 2023, he published another collection of poems called "Above Ground." He's a previous National Poetry Slam champion. We're going to listen to Smith's 2021 interview with Terry Gross. But first, he reads a poem he wrote about growing up in New Orleans.
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CLINT SMITH: (Reading) Growing up, the iconography of the Confederacy was an ever-present fixture of my daily life. Every day on the way to school, I passed a statue of P.G.T. Beauregard riding on horseback, his Confederate uniform slung over his shoulder and his military cap pulled far down over his eyes.
As a child, I did not know who P.G.T. Beauregard was. I did not know he was the man who ordered the first attack that opened the Civil War. I did not know he was one of the architects who designed the Confederate national flag. I did not know he led an army predicated on maintaining the institution of slavery. What I knew is that he looked like so many of the other statues that ornamented the edges of this city - these copper garlands of a past that saw truth as something that should be buried underground and silenced by the soil.
After the war, the sons and daughters of the Confederacy reshaped the contours of treason into something they could name as honorable. They called it the Lost Cause, and it crept its way into textbooks that attempted to cover up a crime that was still unfolding. They told us that Robert E. Lee was an honest man guilty of nothing but fighting for the state and the people that he loved, that the Southern flag was about heritage and remembering those slain fighting to preserve their way of life. But, see, the thing about the Lost Cause is that it's only lost if you're not actually looking. The thing about heritage is that it's a word that also means, I'm ignoring what we did to you.
I was taught the Civil War wasn't about slavery. But I was never taught how the declarations of Confederate secession had the promise of human bondage carved into its stone. I was taught that the war was about economics. But I was never taught that in 1860, the 4 million enslaved Black people were worth more than every bank, factory and railroad combined. I was taught that the Civil War was about states' rights. But I was never taught how the Fugitive Slave Act could care less about a border and spell Georgia and Massachusetts the exact same way. It's easy to look at a flag and call it heritage when you don't see the Black bodies buried behind it. It's easy to look at a statue and call it history when you ignore the laws written in its wake.
I come from a city abounding with statues of white men on pedestals and Black children playing beneath them, where we played trumpets and trombones to drown out the Dixie song that still whistled in the wind. In New Orleans, there are over a hundred schools, roads and buildings named for Confederates and slaveholders. Every day, Black children walk into buildings named after people who never wanted them to be there.
Every time I return home, I drive on streets named for those who would have wanted me in chains. Go straight for 2 miles on Robert E. Lee. Take a left on Jefferson Davis. Make the first right on Claiborne. Translation - go straight for 2 miles on the general who slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender. Take a left on the president of the Confederacy who made the torture of Black bodies the cornerstone of his new nation. Make the first right on the man who permitted the heads of rebelling slaves to be put on stakes and spread across the city in order to prevent the others from getting any ideas.
What name is there for this sort of violence? What do you call it when the road you walk on is named for those who imagined you under a noose? What do you call it when the roof over your head is named after people who would have wanted the bricks to crush you?
BIANCULLI: Clint Smith. Now, let's hear his 2021 interview with Terry Gross when his book "How The Word Is Passed" was released. It's now out in paperback. You may hear a difference in the quality of the audio. It was recorded during the pandemic, when guests couldn't come to the studio.
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SMITH: So much of what animated this book and served as a catalyst for wanting to write this book was watching the statues - these Confederate statues in my hometown of New Orleans - come down in May of 2017, and so statues of Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, among other symbols of white supremacy coming down after having been erected and located in different parts of the city for over a century, many of them.
And I started thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority-Black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were enslaved people. Like, what did it mean that to get to school, I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard - to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Highway - plantations on field trips as an elementary and middle school student? I was going to places that were the sites of torture and intergenerational chattel bondage, but no one said the word slavery.
And so I started thinking about, like, how that came to be because, you know, symbols aren't just symbols. They are reflective of stories that we tell, and those stories embed themselves into the narratives that a society carries. And those narratives shape public policy, and public policy obviously shapes the material conditions of people's lives.
And so the implications of this were vast. And so I started thinking about that in New Orleans. And then I kind of started thinking about, well, what did this look like across the country and across the ocean? Like, what are the different places that are attempting to or failing to tell a story about the history of slavery? And how does that shape our country's collective memory of this institution that we are told happened a long time ago but, in fact, wasn't that long ago at all?
TERRY GROSS: What were you taught in school about the Confederate generals and the owners of enslaved people whose names and statues were all over New Orleans where you grew up?
SMITH: I was taught very little, to be honest. And to the extent that I was taught anything, I was taught that, you know, Robert E. Lee was an honorable man who fought for the state and the people that he loved. I was taught that the Civil War was about states' rights and that it was reflective of a failure to compromise when, in fact, you know, all that had been happening in the decades prior to the Civil War were attempts to compromise. And what was compromised was the freedom of enslaved people.
And so part of what made me want to write this book was that, like, I remember growing up in New Orleans and being inundated with these messages - some implicit, some explicit - about why New Orleans was the way that it was, right? I was - you know, we're inundated with messages that New Orleans was the murder capital of the nation, that we incarcerated more people per capita than China and Iran and Russia, that there was a sort of culture of violence, a culture of pathology that was so deeply embedded in the city. And implicit within that is the Black people within the city because this was for - especially at that time, for a long time - a majority-Black city.
And so I was inundated with these messages as a child and as a young person, and I felt like I didn't have the language or the toolkit or the framework with which to push back against it. What happens is you almost experience sort of psychological and emotional paralysis where you, like, know that the things that this country is telling you about your community and about people who look like you is wrong. But you don't necessarily have the language or the history with which to explain it.
GROSS: So it's very hard to change the narrative of history, even when the narrative you're trying to change is proven to be wrong or distorted. But some places really are trying to change the narrative. And you visited one of those places - Jefferson's home and plantation, Monticello. And it seems that the narrative there is changing - that the tours given to people now are saying very different things about the history there than the tours that used to be given. Give us an example of that.
SMITH: Yeah. So Monticello, I think, is a really fascinating example of a place that evolves and changes over time and responds to new information and shapes their - the curation of their museum experience in that way.
And so one example of a new project that they've begun is something that started a few years ago, which is a tour that focuses on the Hemingses of Monticello, the Hemings family. And the Hemings family was an enslaved family, an enslaved Black family on Monticello's plantation who - which included Sally Hemings, who was the daughter of Elizabeth Hemings and John Wayles. So her father was a white man, and her mother was a mixed-race Black woman. And so she was actually a quarter Black, but was still enslaved on that plantation because of the sort of notions of the one-drop rule and that one drop of African blood would make you Black, which, you know, gets into a larger thing of race as a social construction.
But regardless, the Hemingses were enslaved on this plantation and were really central to what the plantation was and how it operated. And part of what Monticello has recognized is that they have to center the lives of the enslaved people who lived there and not just center the story of Monticello on Jefferson because it's much larger than Jefferson. And in order to understand it as a plantation, we have to understand the people who lived on that plantation and made it what it was outside of the context of this single man.
GROSS: I thought it was really interesting that some of the tourists are basically prepared - or you might even say warned - by the tour guides that some of what you're going to hear today might be difficult. Because a lot of the people who come to visit Monticello are just expecting a heroic story about Jefferson and not realizing that some of the story they're going to get is about Jefferson as a slave owner, somebody who bought and sold people and who had a sexual relationship with one of the people who he owned. So did that surprise you - that there were almost, like, you know, like warnings before the tour?
SMITH: It did. So the tour you're referencing is the Slavery at Monticello Tour. And one of the things that was most interesting about it is that, to your point, a lot of people come to this place having no conception of Jefferson as someone who owned enslaved people. And so I spoke to these two women after my tour, Donna (ph) and Grace (ph). And I had been watching them during the tour given by this man David Thorson, who's a tour guide at Monticello. And he talked about slavery and Jefferson and Jefferson's relationship to slavery in ways that were more direct than any teacher I had ever had.
And it was clearly deeply impacting these women. And their mouths were agape, and they were clearly sort of unnerved and unsettled. And I went up to them afterwards and spoke to them, and they were just like, I had no idea Jefferson owned slaves. I had no idea that Monticello was a plantation. And mind you, these are people who bought plane tickets, who bought hotel rooms, who rented cars to come to this place almost as a pilgrimage to see the home of the third president of the United States, one of our Founding Fathers, but had no conception of him as someone who enslaved human beings.
GROSS: Yeah. And getting back to Sally Hemings for a second, she was 16, and Jefferson was in his mid-40s when he started his sexual relationship with her. So he's having sex with somebody who he owns, and she's 16.
SMITH: Right. Part of what Monticello is doing, too, is trying to sort of complicate notions of the history that we've been taught and saying that, you know, we cannot understand what Sally Hemings' relationship to Jefferson was as something that was fully consensual because he owned her. And that is - should serve as an entry point to us thinking about the way that Black women throughout the history of slavery, were treated - the way that their bodies, in so many ways, were not their own and the ways that they were subjected to rape and to assault and to just an onslaught of subjugation to their bodies in ways that I don't think this country has fully accounted for.
GROSS: So when you think about the Declaration of Independence - and Thomas Jefferson was one of the drafters of the Declaration - what do you have to reconcile in your mind?
SMITH: I mean, Jefferson, I think, generally is such a fascinating historical figure for me 'cause I think he's sort of a microcosm of America. He's a microcosm of the dissonance and the disconnect and the contradictions of this country, in the sense that America is this place that has provided unimaginable, unparalleled opportunities for millions of people across generations to build wealth and create opportunities for upward mobility and has done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been subjugated and oppressed across generations. And the story of America is both of those things, and we have to hold both of those things at once to recognize the totality and complexity of this country.
And I think Jefferson, similarly, you know, is the man who wrote one of the most important documents in the history of the Western world and is also someone who enslaved over 600 people over the course of his lifetime, including four of his own children. He is someone who wrote in one document that all men are created equal and wrote in another document that Black people are inferior to whites in both endowments of body and mind.
And so I think that Monticello and Jefferson - and one of the reasons I wanted to go there for this book is that I wanted to explore how this place tells a fuller, more honest, robust story of this person so that we can have a fuller, more honest, more robust understanding of this country that he was one of the creators of.
BIANCULLI: Clint Smith speaking to Terry Gross in 2021. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 2021 interview with author, historian and poet Clint Smith. Two of his works, the poetry collection "Counting Descent" and the nonfiction book "How The Word Is Passed," are now out in paperback.
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GROSS: In the epilogue of your book, you write about your grandparents, and you actually interview them. And so, I'd like to start this section of our interview with asking you to read a paragraph about your grandfather's grandfather. And to me, this is almost like a prose poem.
SMITH: I'd be happy to. (Reading) My grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. They shared a name, a lineage, and the hard soil of Mississippi. My grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. I thought about how I felt pulled closer to the center of the concentric circle of history. My grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. I said it out loud and let it idle on the edges of my lips. My family told me that my grandfather's grandfather was born into slavery, and I never knew until I asked.
GROSS: When did you ask?
SMITH: It was in the process of writing this book. You know, one of the reasons I wanted to end the book with the interviews and conversations with my grandparents is based on a trip that I took with my grandparents to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And we were walking through the museum. I was pushing my grandfather in his wheelchair, and my grandmother was walking a little bit in front of us. And I had this moment where I was walking through this museum, and I realized that so much of the violence and history that was documented in this museum was something that they had experienced firsthand. You know, my grandfather, born in 1930, Jim Crow apartheid, Mississippi. My grandmother, born in 1939, Jim Crow apartheid, Florida. You know, this history, the history that we are made to feel happened in the Jurassic age almost, is something that they - they've lived through.
And when I spoke to my grandmother, she had this refrain. You know, when I asked her about the - our trip to the museum, she was just like, I lived it. I lived it. I lived it. Like, she was looking around and realizing that, like, so much of what she was seeing, she lived through it and experienced it directly. And I just really, you know - I had spent these years working on this book, interviewing strangers and going into the archives and thinking about primary source documents, and asking people I had just met their life story and what their relationship to the history of slavery was. And I realized I had never been as intentional in doing so with my own family. And so I sat down and had this series of conversations with my grandparents and just learned so much about them and their history and their own lineage, which is my own in ways that I never would have known otherwise.
GROSS: You know, the reading that you did for us, it's almost like you're just mulling over and saying to yourself over and over, my grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. And I'm sure, like, you knew in some abstract level that your ancestors had been enslaved. What was the difference between knowing abstractly and finding out that your grandfather's grandfather was enslaved? Like, 'cause it sounds like it was almost, in its own way, a shock to have the specificity of that.
SMITH: Yeah, I think it gave me a different sense of my proximity to that history. Again, because, you know, as I sort of mentioned, like, we are taught that the history of slavery is something that happened, you know, almost like when there were dinosaurs. It was like the dinosaurs, "The Flintstones," and slavery. You know, like in so many ways, that's how young people are taught to think about it. They are taught to think that this is something that was terrible but was a long, long, long, long time ago. And when I encounter information that's, like, my grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. You know, this person who I love, this person who I was raised around, this person who is so central to my life and my own identity is someone who was only a generation or two removed from a family member who had been born into slavery.
And so I think about my own 4-year-old son sitting on my grandfather's lap. And I imagine what it would have been like for my grandfather to sit on his grandfather's lap. And I'm reminded that this history that we are told was so long ago wasn't, in fact, that long ago at all. The woman who opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture alongside the Obama family in 2016, who rang the bell to sort of signal the opening of this museum, was the daughter of an enslaved person, not the granddaughter, not the great-great-granddaughter, but, like, was the daughter of someone who had been born into slavery. And this is in 2016.
And so it's a reminder that there are people still alive today who loved, who were raised by, who knew, who were in community with people who had been born into chattel slavery. And I think when you realize our proximity to that, you gain a different understanding of how the idea that what our society and what our country looks like today would not be impacted by that is both morally and intellectually disingenuous.
BIANCULLI: Clint Smith speaking to Terry Gross in 2021. After a break, we'll hear another of their conversations. And critic-at-large John Powers reviews "Lanterns," the new TV show featuring the classic DC comics character Green Lantern. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. We just heard Clint Smith's interview about the distorted way the history of slavery was taught to him and most children and the ways many Americans deceive themselves about that history. Now, let's hear another of our interviews with Clint Smith - this one from 2023 about his book of poems titled "Above Ground." It deals with the legacy of slavery in a more personal way through poems addressed to his young children about what their grandparents endured and escaped. The poems also are about fatherhood and the joy and anxiety surrounding it, especially as a Black father.
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GROSS: Clint Smith, welcome back to FRESH AIR. It's really a treat to have you back on the show. Your book opens with a prose poem about something I've been thinking about a lot, and I know a lot of other people think about this, too. And that is, how do you hold two opposing thoughts in your head at the same time - gratitude for the things that are right in your life, and anger or fear about everything that's wrong in your life or in politics or in the larger world or with the Earth itself? What were you trying to reconcile when you wrote this? What was happening in your life?
SMITH: Yeah. Well, it's so good to be back with you, Terry. It's always a pleasure to be on this program. And with regard to this first poem, so much of what I've been thinking about over the last several years is what you've kind of alluded to - the simultaneity of the human experience, which is to say, how do we move through our lives holding wonder, joy, awe, alongside fear, despair, a sense of catastrophe?
And a lot of what I'm thinking about in this collection are - is that idea in a sort of - in the context of the larger human experience, but also through the prism of parenthood and how parenthood is both the thing that shows you parts of yourself that you have never experienced before in ways that you are incredibly proud of, and also in ways that you're ashamed of - how being with your kids is, you know, full of joy and levity and laughter and also that parenthood is one of the most exhausting difficult and fear-inducing experiences in the world. And so I'm thinking about the simultaneity of our lives, both in a macro context, in a geopolitical context, in an ecological context, but also in the specific granular details of our own lives.
GROSS: And you have the ability to put it all in words that really perfect the thought, clarify the thought. So would you read for us "All At Once"?
SMITH: I'd be happy to. "All At Once."
(Reading) The redwoods are on fire in California. A flood submerges a neighborhood that sat quiet on the coast for three centuries. A child takes their first steps and tumbles into a father's arms. Two people in New Orleans fall in love under an oak tree whose branches bend like sorrow. A forest of seeds are planted in new soil. A glacier melts into the ocean, and the sea climbs closer to the land. A man comes home from war and holds his son for the first time. A man is killed by a drone that thinks his jug of water is a bomb. Your best friend relapses and isn't picking up the phone. Your son's teacher calls to say he stood up for another boy in class.
(Reading) A country below the Equator ends a 20-year civil war. A soldier across the Atlantic fires the shot that begins another. The scientists find a vaccine that will save millions of people's lives. Your mother's cancer has returned, and doctors say there is nothing else they can do. There is a funeral procession in the morning and a wedding in the afternoon. The river that gives us water to drink is the same one that might wash us away.
GROSS: Before we get to more of your poems, I want to ask you about your nonfiction book, "How The Word Is Passed." That's about the legacy of slavery and the monuments commemorating the Confederacy and slave holders and the distortions of history. Has your book been banned? There are so many books now, fiction and nonfiction, related to Black history that have been banned or that are under consideration for removal from the classroom.
SMITH: Yeah. You know, it's interesting because I think there are a couple different ways that book-banning manifests itself as a sort of political and social phenomenon. I'm not specifically familiar with whether or not the book has been banned by particular school districts or that there are - whether or not there are librarians who are prevented from loaning it out. I've heard a few stories anecdotally, but I've not seen a lot of that.
But what I'm more familiar with - an example I have is there was a school in which the students and teachers selected "How The Word Is Passed" as a - as their common read. And it was a private school. And they were going to buy 2,000 copies of the book, and I was going to come speak there. And I've done this at several different universities over the past year or so. And so I was excited to do this at a school with younger students and be in conversation with those educators and those students about so many of the themes that come up in the book.
But then my speaking agency got a note that said that a decision had been made from above, from a board level that decided that they were not going to do - have "How The Word Is passed" be the common read anymore because they didn't want any sort of controversial critical race theory books being inserted into the lives of students and having them indoctrinated with a particular set of views. And so the visit was canceled. The purchase of the book was canceled. And I think that that's something that's, in some ways, much more common for so many authors than what's happening in the - in terms of the specific public list.
GROSS: Let's talk about your poems. And I want you to read one that's in part about what your grandparents lived through growing up in what you describe as the apartheid South. Your grandfather was from Mississippi and your grandmother from Florida. And it also refers to the miracle of your son being born, your first child, because he was hard to conceive and then the pregnancy ended up being very risky. Would you read it for us?
SMITH: "By Chance."
(Reading) If the doctors said you were impossible and you arrived anyway, does it mean they were wrong? Or does it mean you defied science? What is the difference between science and a miracle other than discovering new language for something we don't understand? The day we brought you home, I stayed up all night and watched you sleep in your bassinet because I was afraid if I closed my eyes, you'd vanish.
(Reading) Once, a long time ago, your grandmother escaped a war and your great-grandfather fought in one. You come from good fortune. You come from a history that is arbitrary and cloaked in luck. You come from a land mine that was 2 feet to the left. You come from children who shared their bread when they didn't have to. You come from the parachute that didn't open, then did.
GROSS: Do you tell your children about what it took for them to get here, for you to get here, what your grandparents endured and how they survived?
SMITH: I do. Absolutely. I think it's really important for them to know. And this poem is actually speaking to the experience not only of my own grandparents but also thinking specifically of my wife's mother, who was born in Nigeria and escaped Nigeria during the Biafra War and who walked from Nigeria to Cameroon when she was a child and who ended up being able to move to the United States and make a life for herself when such a thing was so uncertain.
And so, you know, I'm thinking about the sort of - what it means for my children to be the descendants of people who were enslaved and also the descendants of people who were colonized and what it means to carry both of those lineages in their bodies. And I - it's important for us to communicate those realities to them.
And obviously, you do it in a way that's developmentally appropriate. You do it in a way that allows them to understand - that's not going to traumatize them. But it is important for our kids to have an understanding both in a sort of micro, familial context where they come from, but also to understand the sort of larger social realities of colonialism, of slavery that shaped why their family looks the way that it does today.
BIANCULLI: Clint Smith speaking to Terry Gross in 2023. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 2023 interview with author, historian and poet Clint Smith. They're discussing his latest book of poetry, called "Above Ground."
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GROSS: Did you always know you wanted to be a father? And when you were younger and - well, when you were older, when you were a young man and you looked around and you saw the people who were parents your age and older, what did you see?
SMITH: Oh, man. Well, I thought that once you reach your 30s, you were, like, an elderly person.
GROSS: (Laughter).
SMITH: So I was like - you know, I couldn't - I was like, well, once you have kids, you're like old. You must be on - I didn't know what Social Security was. But I was like, well, whatever version of the thing that old people get is, is probably what you get when you turn 30. I always thought that I was going to be a dad. I don't think there was ever a point in which that didn't feel like something I was moving toward. And with the exception, and I write about this at the beginning of the book, is when my wife and I got news that we were - that fertility was going to be difficult for us. And it was very uncertain.
And the pregnancies themselves, when they even happened, were uncertain and incredibly emotionally and physically difficult, especially for my wife. I always imagined myself as being a father. But there were certainly moments where fatherhood felt more distant. And so I feel enormous gratitude to look at these two little humans that we brought into the world because there was a point in which that that was - it was uncertain whether or not that would happen.
GROSS: I want you to read a poem about that. And this is a poem about meeting your wife and deciding to try to conceive pretty soon because of the problems of fertility.
SMITH: "Counting Descent 2." (Reading) My son was born on the 71st day of spring on the fifth floor of a hospital in a city with a history of burning. He had two grandmothers in the room and four generations in the world. My daughter was born on the 59th day of winter and two doors down from the room her brother was born in 21 months before. Both of my children were induced several weeks before they were due because waiting any longer would've been a risk to both of their lives.
I met my wife two years, one month and seven days before our first child arrived, and three relationships after I assumed no one like her existed. We sat at a table in a city 893 miles away from where we live now for four times more likely than we planned and talked about things we had spent half our lives attempting to forget. When the bar closed, we walked two miles to her apartment, where two dates later, we'd kiss for the first time. After 17 months and three doctors' appointments, we started trying to have a child because the doctors said we had less than a 1% chance. I'm not sure how they came up with that number. But I remember all the doctors kept saying, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.
GROSS: So that was a follow-up poem to the title poem of your first book of poetry, which is also about thinking about your past in terms of numbers. I'll just quote a few lines. You write, my grandfather is a quarter century older than his right to vote, and two decades younger than the president who signed the paper that made it so. Why do numbers have so much power where you're counting, you know, the days, the months, the distance between?
SMITH: Yeah, I should say that this poem and the one that preceded it were inspired by a mentor of mine, Alan Michael Parker, who's a professor at Davidson College, where I went. And he was my adviser. He was one of the people who introduced me to poetry. And he has a poem in this book that - in his book that uses a similar conceit that I was so drawn to. I think numbers have such an interesting way to document one's past. I like the idea of the specificity of these moments. And for me, poems, especially these sorts of poems in this collection, are time capsules.
They are attempts to capture a moment in time. They are attempts to archive a moment, a feeling, an idea, an event, so that I might be able to look back on it in the way that one looks back at a picture in a photo album or now a picture in your phone from years ago and be drawn back into a moment. And I think that using numbers in the sort of conceit of this poem and the previous "Counting Descent" is just another way of creating sort of time capsules within the larger time capsule of the poem.
GROSS: There's a poem I'd like you to read about being out at the pharmacy with your two young kids. And if you have any greatest hits, any poems you think of as greatest hits, I would imagine this would be one of them. So this poem is called "Gold Stars."
SMITH: "Gold Stars." (Reading) On the days when I am out alone with my children, I'm made to feel as if I am a saint or a god or the undisputed best father of all time. What I mean is that when we walk into CVS and my daughter is wrapped on my chest, and my son toddles at my side, people stop and look and gasp and point and walk up to me asking to shake my hand. Men pat me on the back. Women touch my shoulder and touch their hearts.
The manager at the front of the store comes on to the loudspeaker to say, excuse me, may I have everyone's attention? On Aisle 7, you can get three boxes of detergent for the price of two. And on Aisle 5, there is an incredible father running errands alone with his children. Everyone in the store bursts into applause. And someone walks over to hand me a crown and a ribbon and a coupon for an all-you-can-eat buffet. Just the other day, a woman at the park told me how wonderful it is that I took the time to babysit my own children.
Just the other day, I changed a dirty diaper, and someone said, praise Jesus. Just the other day, a man on the road stopped his car in the middle of the street, rolled down his window and told me I was father of the year. It's not that I don't appreciate the sentiment. It's just that this man has no idea what kind of father I actually am. All he saw was me and two children and a diaper bag teeming with crackers. And it's not that I don't want people to tell me I'm doing a good job. It's just that I am praised for the sorts of things no one ever thanks my wife for. I am adorned in a garland of gold stars for simply being in this body.
GROSS: Your wife must love that poem and the acknowledgment of the disparity between how men are just, like, acknowledged and applauded for just being a father out in public with their kids and the way women are just expected to be that way.
SMITH: Yeah, it's one of those things where - you know, and we talk about this all the time and experience it in such profoundly different ways all the time. And I think there's an additional layer because, you know, she's a Black woman and I'm a Black man. And so that is in conversation with the sort of already conspicuous difference that I think men and women often, of any race, experience with regard to people's perception of their role as parents.
And it's one of those things where it's nice to tell parents they're doing a good job. Like, it is - I do feel oftentimes that, like, you know, parents should get a parade. Parents should get a - you know, should get - have random people come up to them and give them crowns and give them coupons and give them - and tell them they're doing a great job. So it's not to say that that shouldn't happen. But it is to ask us to examine why we do that for fathers in a way we don't do for mothers.
And I think that there's things to unpack from that that have to do with race and that have to do with people's - the sort of pathologies around Black fatherhood that have existed in our public consciousness for a long time. And so I think when people see a Black father, they want to celebrate it. Like, when they see a Black father with his young kids, it feels worthy of praise. And so I understand where it's coming from, even if I think it's important to push back against the impulse to do it only for the fathers and not for the mothers.
GROSS: Clint Smith, it's been great having you on the show again and hearing you read your poems and talk about your life. Thank you so much.
SMITH: It's been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
BIANCULLI: Clint Smith speaking to Terry Gross in 2023. His book "How The Word Is Passed" and his collection of poetry "Above Ground" are both out in paperback. Coming up, John Powers reviews "Lanterns," a new TV show reviving a very vintage comic book hero, Green Lantern. This is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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