What is the value of Black life in AmericaIn Avidly Reads Passages Michelle D. Commander plies four freighted modes of travelthe slave ship train automobile and busto 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 kins 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 familys genealogy what she produced is a biting and elegiac reflection on workingclass 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 South