SMITH I feel that when I’m reading your work, Jackie, with my kids. Like you’re doing what August Wilson did, recording decades of black life and cycles. I remember growing up and learning the history of slavery and feeling —

WOODSON: Shame.

SMITH Yes. And guilt. Feeling bad that this piece of my history was making everybody uncomfortable. Your books tell these beautiful stories of survival and triumph.

WOODSON Growing up I felt so ashamed and guilty, but no one was talking about it as triumph, right? And as our country’s negative history, not our negative history. Even the way we said “slave” instead of “enslaved.” “Enslaved” takes the onus off us. Then the older I got the more I understood our history and the grace of our survival. Thank goodness for Mildred Taylor and Virginia Hamilton and Nikki Giovanni, the writers who came along and started putting black girlhood on the page in a way that felt relevant to me. And the fact that they’d once been black girls made it even more important.

SMITH The black history we got was just this little drop in February.

WOODSON I hated every time we got to pre-Civil War history. I was like, oh no, here we go. Harriet Tubman, Phillis Wheatley, the poet who learned to write from her nice white master. Nat Turner of course, because he died. Those were the biographies we got.

My daughter had an assignment where everyone in the class had to write a journal of someone from the 18th century. Her school has lots of kids of color, but everyone wanted to write from the white point of view. So I came in and said, I’ll write that! I wrote a journal of an enslaved girl. There was joy, there was playing, there was hard work, and there was resentment that she had to be enslaved to a white girl her same age. I wrote four journals that they still use. In my final one the girl finds out that the master’s daughter who she’s been enslaved to is her half sister. And then I was like, O.K. teachers, you can take it from there. [She laughs.]

Tracy, your new book, “Wade in the Water,” also takes the slavery narrative and makes it into something that feels new.

SMITH All I really did was listen to the letters that were out there, this Civil War correspondence between black soldiers and their families, or letters by black veterans or descendants of deceased veterans. Those voices felt so current, as though they were almost whispering from yesterday. I couldn’t imagine wanting to do anything other than saying, let’s just get these voices together, and maybe somebody else will want to hear them in the same way. There’s one moment where the father of a soldier says, “I’m willing to sacrifice my son in the cause of Freedom and Humanity” — he capitalizes those nouns. I’m reading it and thinking, do we really understand: If you were enslaved, freedom and humanity are not these abstractions.