Reckoning with America’s history of slavery

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 number one on the New York Times bestseller 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 is remembered. 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 Dissent, 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 wrote a book called Above Ground, which is a book about the history of slavery. 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. 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 a citizen. 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 four 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 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 spelled 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 two miles on Robert E. Lee. Take a left on Jefferson Davis. Make the first right on Claiborne. Translation, go straight for two 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 a black body. 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? Clint Smith. Now, let's hear his 20-year-old self. He was in a 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. 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, 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 our country's collective memory of this institution that we are told happened a long time ago, but but in fact, wasn't that long ago at all? 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? 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 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. Right. And so part of what made me want to write this book was that 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? Right. I was, you know, 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. Right. I was, you know, we incarcerated more people per capita than China and Iran and Russia, that there was a sort of culture of pathology that was so deeply embedded in the city. Right. And so part of what made me want to write this book was that I remember growing up in New Orleans and being inundated with these messages, some implicit, some implicit about why New Orleans was the way that it was, right? 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. 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, they're not going to hear the story of Monticello. They're going to hear the story of Monticello. They're 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? It did. So the tour you were 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 and Grace, and I had been watching them during the tour given by this man, David Thurston, who's a tour guide at Monticello. And he talked about slavery in 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. 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. 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, uh, to rape and to assault, um, and to just an onslaught of, of subjugation to, to their bodies, um, in ways that, that I don't think this country has fully accounted for. 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? I mean, Jefferson, I think generally is such a fascinating historian. I mean, he's such a historical figure for me because I think he is sort of a microcosm of America. He's a microcosm of the dissonance and the, the, 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, and, 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. Uh, 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, uh, 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, is that I wanted to explore how, how this place tells a fuller, more honest, robust story of this person, um, so that we can have a fuller, more honest, more robust understanding of this country that he was one of the creators of. In the epilogue of your book, you write about your grandpapers, grandparents, um, and you, 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. I'd be happy to. My grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. They shared a name, a lineage, and a hard soil of Mississippi. I thought about how I felt pulled closer to the center of the concentric circle of history. 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. When did you ask? 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 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 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, that I never would have known otherwise. You know, the reading that you did for us, it's almost like you 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, because it sounds like it was almost in its own way, a shock to have the specificity of that. Yeah, I think it gave me a different sense of my proximity to that history. Again, because you know, as I, as I sort of mentioned, like we are taught that the history of slavery is something that we have to remember. And, 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'm encountering information that's like my grandfather's grandfather was enslaved, you know, this person who, who I love, this person who I was raised around, this person who was so central to, to my life. And, 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 four-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 in into slavery and this is in 2016 and so it's a reminder that there are people still alive today who 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 when you realize our proximity to that you you gain a different understanding of 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 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 clint smith welcome back to fresh air it's really a treat to have you back on the show um 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 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 yeah well it's so good to be back with you terry um it's it's always a pleasure to be on this program and with regard to 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 the simultaneity of the human experience how do we move through our lives holding wonder joy awe alongside fear despair a sense of catastrophe uh and 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 uh joy and levity and laughter uh 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 in a macro context in a geopolitical context in an ecological context but also in the specific granular details of our own lives and you have the ability to put it all in words that really perfect the thought clarify the thought um so would you read for us all at once i'd be happy to um all at once the redwoods are on fire in california 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 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 before we get to more of your poems i want to ask you about your non-fiction book how the word is passed um that's about the legacy of slavery and the monuments commemorating the confederacy and slaveholders and the distortions of history has your book been banned there's so many books now fiction and non-fiction related to black history that have been banned or that are under consideration for removal from the classroom yeah you know it's interesting because i think there are a couple different ways that book banning manifests itself as a as a sort of political and social phenomenon i'm not specifically familiar with whether or not the book has been banned uh by particular school districts or uh that there are whether or not there are librarians who are prevented from uh from loaning it out uh i've heard a few stories anecdotally but 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 i mean 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 the visit was cancelled the purchase the book was cancelled 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 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 and 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? By chance. 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. 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 landmine that was two feet to the left. You come from children who shared their bread when they didn't have to. You come from a world where you're not alone. of slavery that shaped why their family looks the way that it does today. 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. Did you always know you wanted to be a father? And when you were younger, 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? Oh, man. Well, I thought that once you reach your 30s, you were like an elderly person. So I was like, you know, I couldn't, I was like, 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 opened. It's 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 happen. 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. I want you to read a poem about that. Elizabeth. I want you to read a poem about meeting your wife and deciding to try to conceive pretty soon because of the problems of fertility. Counting Descent 2. 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 have been a risk to both of their lives. I met my wife two years, one month and seven days before our first child arrived in 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 doctor's appointments, we started trying to have a child because the doctor 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. So that was a follow-up poem to the title poem of your first book of poetry, which was 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? Yeah, I should say that this poem and the one that preceded it were inspired by a mentor of mine. Uh, uh, Alan Michael Parker, who's a professor at Davidson College where I went and he was my advisor. He was one of the people who introduced me to poetry and he has a poem in this book that you, in his book that uses a similar conceit that I was, I was so drawn to. Um, I think numbers are such an interesting way to, to document one's past. I like the idea of the specificity of these moments. And, 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. 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. Gold Stars. 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 seven, you can get three boxes of detergent for the price of two. And on aisle five, there is an incredible father running errands alone with his children. Everyone in the store burst 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. Your wife must love that poem and the acknowledgement of the disparity between how men are just like acknowledged and applauded for just being a father out in public with their kids in the way women are just expected to be that way. 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. Clint Smith, it's been great having you on the show again and hearing you read your poems and talk about how you've been able to do that. Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me. A temporary spin on the DC Comics series Green Lantern, which has been around since 1940. Kyle Chandler stars as Hal Gordon, whose status as the Green Lantern is threatened by the appearance of his successor, played by the British actor Aaron Pierre. Our critic at large, John Powers, has seen the seven episodes available for preview and says that Lanterns is a superhero show aimed at people who may not like comic book heroes. When I was a kid, I loved comic books. Spider-Man was my favorite. And my mom was cool with that. What she wasn't cool with was my college-age cousins, or their dads, reading about superheroes, too. When will these dummies grow up, she'd say. But a funny thing happened. It was the comics, not the dummies, that began to grow up. Ever since the watershed year of 1986, with the advent of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's Watchmen, the most ambitious superhero stories have aimed to tackle adult themes. Which is how we get a series like HBO's Lanterns, the latest in the scores of superhero series to air in the last 20 years. Riffing on the DC comic Green Lantern, this mashup of superpower action, odd couple comedy, and old-school cop story boasts the pleasures, and betrays the perils, of pushing the comic book envelope. Kyle Chandler stars as Hal Jordan, a one-time test pilot whose fearlessness led the guardians of the universe to anoint him a green lantern, an intergalactic cop whose lantern-powered ring allows him to fly, and create objects out of solid green light. But over the years, Hal's become a scruffy, hard-to-handle wiseacre. The guardians want to replace him with his understudy, John Stewart. That's Aaron Pierre, a tall, no-nonsense ex-sniper, whose parents-in-law have been trying to get him to go to school, but he's not able to. Hal Jordan, a one-time test pilot, whose fearlessness led the guardians of the universe, to anoint him a green lantern. The guardians of the universe, trained him from boyhood to become the first black green lantern. Predictably, the garrulous Hal knows this, and connives against his would-be protege. When there's a mysterious murder in Rushville, Nebraska, the two get called in to see if there's anything outer-spacey going on. Naturally, there is. Soon, they're dealing with a macho rancher, his enigmatic wife, and a team of ETs out to kill a so-called manhunter, an alien who's taken human form. Oh yes, Hal and Jon Stewart also wrangle with the local sheriff, played by Kelly MacDonald, who invariably exudes such niceness that she'd be a blast as a James Bond villain. Of course, this being a new-fangled superhero story, our two lanterns don't wrap things up neatly. Here, early on, Hal grills a Rushville local, whom he suspects is actually a space alien. I love football, too. When did Nebraska win its first national championship? Sorry? Uh, you love football. You're from Nebraska. Husker's first championship, when was that? Uh, it was 1970, Bob Devaney. That is correct. How about their first 200-yard rush? Uh, Frank Solich. First Heisman winner? Johnny Rogers. I see. Where did Harry Potter go to school? Excuse me? Harry Potter, boy wizard. What was the name of the school? It was a book. I don't read a lot. Well, you go to the movies, don't you? They only made like 22 of them. Oh, I watch a lot of football. That's the rub, isn't it? What? Pretending to be someone that you're not. You learn all the specifics, but you don't learn what everyone else knows. I had a pleasant time watching Lanterns. It's got sharp dialogue and a strong cast. Laura Linney turns up as a shape-shifting, not altogether trustworthy guardian of the universe. I especially enjoyed the bi-play between Chandler's seedy, freewheeling Hal and Pierre's Jon Stewart, an honorable Sidney Poitier-type character whose immaculate poise must withstand a man whose antics drive him crazy. Of course, you don't need superheroes for this kind of stuff, as countless buddy cop movies have made clear. This points to a key issue facing shows like Lanterns. Does the theme you're exploring actually require superheroes? Are they only there to milk IP, provide brand recognition, and justify action sequences in which entire neighborhoods get flattened? Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is the best Batman movie. Yet what it says about vigilante justice was done better and more powerfully in the film Dirty Harry, whose heroes only superimposed. The only super power was being played by Clint Eastwood. Lanterns is relatively sparing in its use of comic book elements. In this, it joins the likes of Spider Noir, Watchmen, the great TV series, not the dire movie, and The Delightful Wonder Man, one of this year's best shows, which Disney foolishly just canceled. These series care less about showing their heroes doing super things than exploring the meaning and cost of being a superhero. Both for one thing, and for another, they care less about showing their heroes doing super things than exploring the meaning and cost of being a superhero. for oneself, and for the world. Here, Jon Stewart faces a big question. Does he really want to become a Green Lantern? Or are there good reasons to turn down all that power? Now, I have to note that I watched Lanterns with a 23-year-old DC Comics fan who did not find that question especially compelling. Although he enjoyed watching, he kept loudly asking when the show would finally go into outer space like the comic, and when the ring would start creating cool green stuff. For him, why do Green Lantern, if it's going to be more like Lethal Weapon or True Detective? A reasonable question. In fact, Lantern shows the trickiness of retooling comic book characters for a grown-up audience. If the show is too comic book-y, viewers like me will get bored by the CGI mayhem and mind-numbing superhero mythology. If they're not comic book-y enough, the genre's loyal fans will feel cheated of the geeky fun stuff that made them fans. It's not only in the Odyssey that you must find your way between Scylla and Charybdis. Jon Powers reviewed the new HBO series Lanterns, which premieres Sunday. On Monday's Fresh Air, when you're dieting to lose weight, human evolution is often working against you. We'll talk about why with Daniel Lieberman, author of The Green Lantern. and founder of Harvard's Department of Evolutionary Biology. He'll also talk about diets he's tested and the often contradictory information about what's healthy to eat and what's not. Hope you can join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Biancullo.