All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

by Tiya Miles

Paperback, 2022

Status

Available

Call number

306.3

Genres

Collection

Your library

Publication

Random House Trade Paperbacks (2022), Edition: Reprint, 416 pages

Description

"Sitting in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is a rough cotton bag, called "Ashley's Sack," embroidered with just a handful of words that evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love passed down through generations. In 1850s South Carolina, just before nine-year-old Ashley was sold, her mother, Rose, gave her a sack filled with just a few things as a token of her love. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter, Ruth, embroidered this history on the bag--including Rose's message that "It be filled with my Love always." Historian Tiya Miles carefully follows faint archival traces back to Charleston to find Rose in the kitchen where she may have packed the sack for Ashley. From Rose's last resourceful gift to her daughter, Miles then follows the paths their lives and the lives of so many like them took to write a unique, innovative history of the lived experience of slavery in the United States. The contents of the sack--a tattered dress, handfuls of pecans, a braid of hair, "my Love always"--speak volumes and open up a window on Rose and Ashley's world. As she follows Ashley's journey, Miles metaphorically "unpacks" the sack, deepening its emotional resonance and revealing the meanings and significance of everything it contained. These include the story of enslaved labor's role in the cotton trade and apparel crafts and the rougher cotton "negro cloth" that was left for enslaved people to wear; the role of the pecan in nutrition, survival, and southern culture; the significance of hair to Black women and of locks of hair in the nineteenth century; and an exploration of Black mothers' love and the place of emotion in history"--… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member japaul22

I'm a sucker for women's history, especially that which is overlooked and undervalued. This book checked all of my boxes. It's a moving account of a common item, a cotton sack, that was kept through several generations of Black women, lost, and then found. It is currently in the National Museum of

African American History and Culture. The story is that Ashley, a 9 year old slave, was given this sack by her mother, Rosa, when Ashley was sold and the two were separated. The sack was embroidered by Ashley's granddaughter, Ruth, in the 1920s as follows:

My great grandmother Rose
mother of Ashley gave her the sack when
she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina
it had a tattered dress 3 handfulls of
pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her

It be filled with my Love always
she never saw her again
Ashley is my grandmother

Ruth Middleton
1920

In this book, Miles tries to uncover who these women were and their life story. Little is known or there to be discovered, as is not surprising, but she also explores each object include in the sack and why it might have been. She spends time delving into common life experiences of women who lived during the times mentioned. She also explores life for the unfree living in South Carolina.

This book pays homage to authors like [[Laurel Thatcher Ulrich]] whose work in [The Art of Homespun] takes a detailed look at women's lives through objects and craft, and to [[Robin Wall Kimmerer]]'s book [Braiding Sweetgrass] for exploring the Indigenous and Black American connection to each other and land. These are two books I loved and was happy to make a further connection to.

This is a fascinating book and I highly recommend. I'm taking one half star off because there were a few places that I felt the book was just a bit over-written and padded to make up for the lack of information available, but it is a tiny complaint and wasn't an over-arching problem.

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LibraryThing member FormerEnglishTeacher

The true story of a cloth sack passed down from a slave, Rose, to her 9-year-old enslaved daughter, Ashley, on the eve of the daughter’s slave sale. Rose inserted three handfuls of pecans, a lock of her own hair and a folded dress. The sack found its way to Ashley’s grandmother, Ruth Middleton,

in the 1920s, and Ruth added an embroidered narrative in the form of 10 lines recounting the history of her female ancestors. The majority of this story is based on speculation, so words like “might be,” “could be,” “we can assume,” make up a good part of author Tiya Miles’ story of the sack. That said, Miles’ speculation is well founded in its research, interviews and dot-connecting facts, the results of her research throughout the South and in South Carolina specifically. Many of the disaster and explorer adventures I’ve read (“The Perfect Storm” comes to mind), those that don’t depend on diaries or letters for research, have a similar tone. That isn’t to say that this is a work of fiction, however. My guess is this book is a popular selection for women’s book clubs since the most impactful characters are women. In fact, the few mentions of men tend to be in derogatory terms, many, like the ruthless slave holders, well deserved. There is much helpful information at the conclusion of the story itself, information which I wish Miles had placed at the beginning of the book as an introduction instead of at the end. One explanation in particular deals with language. Throughout the book Miles uses the term “unfree” as a substitute for “slave.” She explains in an essay after the conclusion why she did this. She said in recent years there has been a backlash in academic circles to certain terms traditionally used in articles about this period in American history. The term “slave,” according to Miles tends to “dehumanize” the person to whom it refers. She explains that she decided to use a variety of language, some of which certain groups have objected to. She gives good reasons for these exceptions. Miles said much of her funding came from a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, and the Endowment stipulated that they wanted a product (eg. a book) that would be geared toward a general public audience, not an academic audience. I applaud the Endowment for requiring this. Had it not, chances are Miles’ publication might have gathered dust in an academic library with relatively few people reading it. As it is, I’m sure the book has told well to the general public, to readers like myself. In the myriad of books about slavery and this general time in our country’s history, “All That She Carried” is an important entry.

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LibraryThing member froxgirl

This combination of an academic examination of enslavement in the S. Carolina rice belt and the discovery of a humble artifact passed from mother to daughter and then lost for decades is comprehensive and moving. Historians may quibble because there's some necessary conjecture here, when the

plantation’s inventory of Black enslaved workers is recorded in the same column as cows and plows, but the power and the importance of this fabric diary and eulogy cannot be denied (the book won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2021). In 2007 in Nashville, a cotton sack with embroidery on it is found in a dusty pile of fabric remnants in a yard sale. The finder recognizes the inherent value and traces down the origin to an opulent antebellum home, Middleton Place in Charleston, SC, and donates it to the Middleton Place Foundation. Here is the inscription, lovingly embroidered: My great grandmother Rose/mother of Ashley/gave her this sack/when she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina/it held a tattered dress/ 3 handfulls of pecans/a braid of Roses hair. Told her/It be filled with my Love always/she never saw her again/Ashley is my grandmother/Ruth Middleton 1921. The author explores the meaning of the sack and its contents: hair, cloth, pecans, and overwhelmingly, love and despair at the forced parting. The pain described is tempered by the love and longing, but the anger and anguish caused by enslavement and family separation will persist forever. This is nothing that anyone could or should ever be implored to "just get over it."

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LibraryThing member Beth.Clarke

A completely accessible historical non-fiction book. Ashley's bag draws in the reader, but goes far beyond the history of the bag. A great read for history buffs!

LibraryThing member spinsterrevival

This book was a beautiful and difficult read; I don’t think I’ve cried so much, and I tear up every time I look at the photo of Ashley’s Sack. Tiya Miles builds for us a biography of these women while also telling a history of slavery in South Carolina that was excruciating to hear. I loved

this book and also appreciate the notes and bibliography as I need to learn more. The importance of things and crafting the memory’s story stand out to me as I grow older.

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LibraryThing member muddyboy

This is a biography of a slave woman and her family over several generations. The link is needlework words sewn into sack cloth passed down from the 1850's and it resurfaces in the 1920's until it ultimately today where it is on display in a museum.Miles does a vast amount of research on the small

hints the family left as well as the practices of slave women of that era including the needlework and hair art that was once in common use. The book is full of historical insights and as a college history teacher I learned much. The book is a joy to read.

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LibraryThing member cbl_tn

My great grandmother Rose
mother of Ashley gave her this sack when
she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina
it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of
pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her
It be filled with my Love always
she never saw her again
Ashley is my grandmother
Ruth Middleton
1921

From these few lines

embroidered on a nearly 200-year-old cotton sack, historian and Harvard professor Tiya Miles opens up a depth of story and collective memory. I thought this book was going to be about Rose, Ashley, and Ruth. It is about much more than that. It’s about the history of slavery and enslaved women, particularly in and around Charleston, South Carolina. It’s about material culture, especially textiles and women’s history. It’s about historiography, about the historical method for researching and writing about the lives and experiences of enslaved people in the absence of documentary evidence.

If I had it to do over, I would read “Little Sack of Something: An Essay on Process” first. If I had understood how and why the book came to be before I dug into it, I don’t think I would have been as disappointed at the outset when I realized that the book I was reading wasn’t the book I thought I was going to read. I was also annoyed by some repetition of ideas and expressions from chapter to chapter, until a friend pointed out that the book probably originated in chapters that were presented on different occasions. The footnotes indicated that my friend’s observation was correct.

I am drawn to biographies and books about historical events. While the author tells readers about Rose, Ashley, and Ruth, their stories are told in support of a broader and more abstract thesis. The research and use of source material is exemplary. Unusually for a trade publisher these days, this book includes numbered footnotes, and they take up roughly a quarter of the space. I do wish it also included a bibliography, which would have made it easier to add references to my reading wishlist.

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LibraryThing member thornton37814

Miles tells the story of a family heirloom that became a museum piece, rescued in 2007 from a yard sale--a cotton sack on which was passed down by an enslaved woman named Rose to her daughter Ashley and eventually to Ashley's granddaughter Ruth Middleton who embroidered its story in 1921. We learn

about far more than the sack itself. We learn about plantation life, about the women themselves, and so much more. Miles' research impresses the reader. The material object came to life through the telling of the story. While the chapters work together to tell the story, a careful reader observes they were written as separate stories because of the repetition of some themes. I love the Charleston area and have visited many of the plantations mentioned in the story. It's a fascinating story that touches readers.

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LibraryThing member bblum

So detailed yet imaginative since so much is from careful historical conjecture. Obviously this book would be fascinating for the museum archivist and it shows how a historian has to piece history together but it is dense and hard to read for very long.

LibraryThing member rivkat

Reflective account of how Black women survived and loved under slavery and Jim Crow, using fragmentary materials—centered on Ashley’s sack, embroidered with Ashley’s story of her mother’s love when she was sold away from her mother at age 9 by her granddaughter. I see why people like this,

but I kind of preferred Marisa Fuentes’ reconstruction of Black women’s lives in Barbados because its language was less flowery though no less forthright about what is forever lost about the lives of people who mostly left few material traces and whose archival traces are almost always written by their oppressors.

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LibraryThing member Sheila1957

This starts with a bag from a family kept as slaves in South Carolina. But this story becomes so much more. While the original owner/maker of the bag is not easily identified, and her child is also hard to identify, their descendants were identified. Their story is told as best it can be with no

living descendants to be found. This book tells the stories of others who were unfree and had similar stories.

This was a hard book to read as it had a lot of information that I was never taught in school. I learned a lot as to why fabric and clothing were important. I liked learning of how hair was used within the unfree black families as a connection to their ancestor and link to their descendants. The story/stories are not pretty, but they need to be told for those who were not part of that time to learn about it and to stop it from happening again. This story is to teach us about cultural differences and to respect them. This story is to teach us history that has not been cleaned up and sanitized to be palatable. While Rose and Ashley cannot be definitively identified, their story needs to be told so they are not forgotten.

After closing the cover, I will not forget Rose, Ashley, or the countless others who stories were similar.

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LibraryThing member janerawoof

The story of a bag belonging to slave Ashley, whose mother had packed it for her. Contents were a tattered dress, 3 handfuls of pecans, a braid, and her mother's love. The book tells how it came down to Ashley's granddaughter, who, in 1921, embroidered a statement concerning the contents on the

bag. It is now part of the collection in the Smithsonian's African-American Museum. Thew author digresses with materials about all aspects of slavery, some absolutely horrendous, the Civil War, the failure of Reconstruction and other subjects. The book could have been much shorter; it was too detailed for my taste, but there wasn't enough about this Black family, and of necessity, much was conjecture.

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LibraryThing member markm2315

This book had two main strengths for me. First, the idea of it; using a rare African-American family keepsake and the detective work around its origin as the basis for the whole study. Second, the way in which it brings home the horrors of slavery beyond our usual intellectual awareness of it by

associating it with stories from the particular area where Ashley’s sack originated. On the other hand, the author’s often lengthy and florid prose, and her willingness to speculate about many different possible real and symbolic significances of every aspect of the sack and its contents (the textile used, the type of embroidery, the history of the pecan…) wore on me.

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LibraryThing member lauralkeet

In 1921, a young woman named Ruth embroidered a message on a cloth bag, documenting its history. The bag belonged to Ruth’s grandmother Ashley, whose mother Rose gave it to her in the 1850s when, as enslaved people, they were forcibly separated. Ashley was just 9 years old; Rose packed the bag

with items that would sustain her and remind her of her heritage. Years later, the bag turned up in a thrift shop and eventually found its way to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Historian Tiya Miles conducted extensive research to learn more about these three women and the sack passed down through the generations. The historical record offered very little about Rose and Ashley, although Miles was able to connect a few dots in the public record and develop a credible hypothesis about where they were enslaved. Where specifics were lacking, she used writings by and about other women of that period to bring Rose and Ashley to life. These personal narratives, describing living conditions, sexual violence, separation of families, and the economics of slavery, were emotional and compelling.

Miles also seeks meaning in the sack, the objects it contained, and Ruth’s embroidery. Unfortunately, this is all based on supposition. Did Rose have advance warning of her separation from Ashley, allowing her to thoughtfully pack a bag? Did Ruth design her embroidery, specifically choosing lettering and thread colors for impact? Or did both women simply use whatever was closest at hand? Miles gets carried away, turning every act into a pivotal moment in history, and loses credibility in the process. Despite this rather significant flaw, this was an interesting portrayal of the lives of women during eras of enslavement and early freedom in the United States.

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LibraryThing member streamsong

In 2007 at a Nashville yard sale what appears to be a very old cotton sack is found among other odds and ends of cloth. On this bag is this embroidered inscription:

“ My great grandmother Rose
mother of Ashley gave her this sack when
she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina
it held a tattered dress 3

handfulls of
pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her
It be filled with my Love always
she never saw her again
Ashley is my grandmother
— Ruth Middleton, 1921”

Based on the last name embroidered on the bag, the finder donates it to the prestigious Middleton Place Foundation in Charleston, SC, a museum of an antebellum plantation.

Eventually it comes to the attention of historian Tiya Miles. She uses the very sketchy slave records of Middleton Plantation to try to trace Rose and her daughter Ashley (an unusual name for an ‘unfree’ person as Miles calls the enslaved). Although these names do not occur in the Middleton records, she does find them among the records of a nearby slave holder.

There are not many facts to be found. The genealogical line of the woman who did the embroidery died out two generations later without heirs. The contents of the sack are gone; it is empty.

And so Tiya details what she can find, speculates on events, and fills the book with details such as what this bag may have originally held, the only types of cloth unfree people were allowed to use for clothes, the meaning of wild pecan trees to Native people in the area, and the use of hair strands twisted into various ornaments for remembrance. Because of the paucity of facts available, at times she seems to be stretching points as she gives symbols to the colors of the embroidery Ruth Middleton used.

And yet, this empty sack and the story of the frightened nine-year-old girl sold away from her grieving mother never to see each other again, thoroughly captured my imagination. The sack is now on loan to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History – one of very few documented possessions of the unfree who, generally, weren’t allowed possessions. It’s a story that documents a moment in time but is witness to people untraceable earlier than this event and unknowable regarding the lives of both giver and receiver. It is totally searing and illuminates the atrocity of slavery.

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