Review: To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul by Tracy K. Smith
what does it mean to be free vs. freed?
To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul by Tracy K. Smith is a rumination on what it means to descend from Blacks who were slaves, who sacrificed everything to defend a nation that treated them worse than second-class, and who continued to persevere despite the obstacles and challenges to their humanity. Smith begins her journey by searching for her ancestors in Sunflower, Alabama, through a deep dive into the archives.
“It makes you feel large, as if you, too, are held in a reciprocal regard. And also small, a mite upon the massive page of time.” (pg. 24)
With scarce and often contradictory information to go on, Smith begins to feel her way through her own familial history, but this is not a story about ancestors and their lives, but about how those lives exemplify the strength of a people in a country at war with its past and itself. How can this country embrace its sordid past and still move forward to embrace all Americans? How can we work as one to create a future that provides opportunities, fairness, and justice for all?
The summer of 2020 became a catalyst for Smith to begin this journey as so many Black Lives seemed not to matter — headlines of murdered men and women by police and vigilantes.
“These names, these lives, extend from a lineage that has never not touched me. That is what their names remind me, and likewise, what I am made to see in the record of how and by whom each of their distinct lives was stolen. The summer of 2020 affirmed this lineage constantly. It was mine. It would never not be mine.” (pg. 39)
Smith is asking these questions, even as she examines her own privilege as a college-educated women. But still, she faces those slights/hatred/otherness even as she has the privilege of teaching at Princeton, but still questioned about her right to view and use the archives. “The Freed — people like me — descend from histories of subjugation.” (pg. 40) and “It is not that we are not, most of the time, made to feel welcome and safe; it is that we are also always braced for reminders that our welcome and our safety are provisional rather than guaranteed.” (pg. 76)
To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul by Tracy K. Smith is an exploration of the past to inform the future as a way to empower those who feel powerless or marginalized. It is a way to move forward with dignity and strength against obstacles that are obvious and those that are invisible. It requires a unity we have yet, as a nation, to a achieve, and a spiritual fortitude that lifts up all Americans toward ideals that even our forefathers were unable to see fully.
“Be it personal or collective, sobriety is accountability. Facing plainly what must, or must not any longer be done.” (pg. 211)
We are too good at medicating and hiding from truth. It is time to face reality head on and work together to address the wrongs and find solutions to make this nation a nation of one for all.
RATING: Quatrain
About the Author:
Tracy K. Smith is the author of Wade in the Water; Life on Mars, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award; and The Body’s Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is also the editor of an anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, and the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, Smith served as Poet Laureate of the United States. She teaches at Harvard University, where she is a professor of English and of African and African American Studies and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.