When the pressures of early 1800s westward expansion and debt threaten to destroy everything he's built, a troubled Revolutionary War veteran embarks on an audacious plan involving setting one of his male slaves as his breeding sire.

A gripping, radically intimate debut novel about a group of enslaved women staging a covert rebellion against their owners. On a struggling Texas plantation, six enslaved women slip from their sleeping quarters and gather in the woods under the cover of night. The Lucys--as they call the plantation owners, after Lucifer himself--have decided to turn around the farm's bleak financial prospects by making the women bear children. They have hired a "stockman"...

The author, a descendant of Charleston plantation owner Elias Ball, tells about his experiences attempting to trace the history of his family and the genealogies of the slave families once owned by the Balls.

'How the Word is Passed' is Clint Smith's revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks - those that are honest about the past and those that are not - that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nations collective history, and ourselves.

"A wide-ranging, powerful, alternative vision of the history of the United States and how the slave-breeding industry shaped it. The American Slave Coast tells the horrific story of how the slavery business in the United States made the reproductive labor of "breeding women" essential to the expansion of the nation. The book shows how slaves' children, and their children's children, were human savings accounts that were the basis of money and credit....