"What is the value of Black life in America?" In Avidly Reads
Passages, Michelle D. Commander plies four freighted modes of
travel—the slave ship, train, automobile, and bus—to map the
mobility of her ancestors over the past five centuries. In the
process, she refreshes the conventional American travel narrative
by telling an urgent story about how history shapes what moves us,
as well as what prevents so many Black Americans from moving or
being moved. Anchored in her maternal kin’s long history on and
alongside plantations in rural South Carolina, Commander explores
her family members’ ability and inability to navigate safely
through space, time, and emotion, detailing how Black lives were
shaped by the actual vehicles that promised an escape from the
confines of American racism, yet nearly always failed to deliver on
those promises. Using personal and public archives, Avidly Reads
Passages unfolds distinct histories of transatlantic slavery ships,
the possibilities presented by rail lines in the Reconstruction
South, the fateful legacies of school busing, and the ways that
Black Americans attempted to negotiate their automobility,
including through the use of road and travel compendiums such as
Travelguide and The Negro Motorist Green Book. In order to
understand the intricacies of slavery and its aftermath, Commander
began her exploration with the hope of engaging with the difficult
evidences and stubborn gaps in her family’s genealogy; what she
produced is a biting and elegiac reflection on working-class life
in the Black South. Commander demonstrates that the forms of
intimidation, brutality, surveillance, and restriction used to
control Black mobility have merely evolved since slavery, marking
Black life writ large in America, with neither the passage of time
nor the passage of laws assuring true and adequate racial progress.
Despite this bleak observation, Commander catalogs and celebrates,
through affecting stories about her beloved South Carolina
community, the compelling strivings of Southern Black people to
survive by holding on firmly to family, and their faith that new
worlds could be imagined, created, and traveled to someday. Part of
the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of
looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal
reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly
Reads Passages offers a unique lens through which to capture the
intricacies of Black life.
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