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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a "deeply layered and insightful" ( The Washington Post ) testament to people who are left out of the archives.
WINNER: Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Harriet Tubman Prize, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, Lawrence W. Levine Award, Darlene Clark Hine Award, Cundill History Prize, Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, Massachusetts Book Award
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Slate, Vulture, Publishers Weekly
"A history told with brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness."--Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language.
Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women's faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States. All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and love passed down against steep odds. It honors the creativity and resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today.
FINALIST: MAAH Stone Book Award, Kirkus Prize, Mark Lynton History Prize, Chatauqua Prize
LONGLISTED: Women's Prize
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, NPR, Time, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Smithsonian Magazine, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ms. magazine, Book Riot, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist
Author Notes
Tiya Miles is professor of history and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Miles is the author of The Dawn of Detroit, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, among other honors, as well as the acclaimed books Ties That Bind, The House on Diamond Hill, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, and Tales from the Haunted South, a published lecture series.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
MacArthur fellow Miles (The Dawn of Detroit) paints an evocative portrait of slavery and Black family life in this exquisitely crafted history. She frames her account around a cloth sack packed in 1852 by an enslaved woman named Rose for her nine-year-old daughter, Ashley, when the girl was sold to a new master in South Carolina. In 1921, Ashley's granddaughter, Ruth Middleton, embroidered the sack with Rose and Ashley's story, but it fell out of the family's possession and wasn't rediscovered until 2007. Miles pours through South Carolina plantation records to identify Rose and Ashley, and explores the physical and psychological lives of Black women via the original contents of the sack: a tattered dress, three handfuls of pecans, and a braid of Rose's hair. For example, Rose's hair sparks a discussion of how enslaved women with lighter skin tones and longer, smoother locks were targeted for sexual assault by white men and violently punished by white women. Filling gaps in the historical record with the documented experiences of Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Keckley, and other enslaved women, Miles brilliantly shows how material items possessed the "ability to house and communicate... emotions like love, values like family, states of being like freedom." This elegant narrative is a treasure trove of insight and emotion. (June)
Booklist Review
All That She Carried is the poignant tale of a family heirloom passed down through generations of Black women. Rose, an enslaved woman in 1850s South Carolina, gave her daughter, Ashley, a sack of some items on the eve of Ashley's sale to a different owner. Rose embroidered it with a message of love that endured. Years later, Ashley's great-granddaughter, Ruth Middleton, added her own words to the heirloom, continuing the chain of the family's history. This volume paints the fascinating history of Ashley's sack in a readable, episodic account that is largely free of stuffy, academic language that often goes with this territory. Award-winning scholar Miles (Tales from the Haunted South, 2015) presents a riveting account of how Ashley's sack was rediscovered and traces Ruth's journey through the Great Migration while exploring the family's lineage. Filled with rare, archival photographs of objects from the era, this volume is a natural choice for book clubs and a must-buy for public and academic libraries alike. The book will also appeal to fans of genealogy television shows such as Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Guardian Review
Ever since narratives of the enslaved began to be published in the 18th century, writers have wrestled with how to convey the visceral brutality of slavery without robbing the subjects of their humanity. But how, especially in nonfiction, is it possible to imagine that caged world in the absence of first-hand accounts? On plantations, a literate population was considered a threat, and in America laws were passed to prohibit the enslaved from reading and writing. Apart from a few written testimonies by women such as Harriet Jacobs, who escaped and bore witness, there has been an immense silence. The Harvard historian Tiya Miles has taken a bold and innovative approach to this problem in All That She Carried, a bestseller when it came out in the US last year, now published for the first time in Britain. The story begins in South Carolina in 1852, with a stark description of the dread that would have been familiar to every enslaved woman: "Rose was in existential distress that fateful winter when her would-be earthly master, Robert Martin, passed away." Rose had no agency over her future and knew what was coming: the auction block that would separate her from her nine-year-old daughter, Ashley, for the rest of their lives. Almost a century ago, the author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston lamented that the history of slavery was still constructed largely from the primary sources of enslavers: journals, manifests, diaries and bills of sale. "All these words from the seller," wrote Hurston, "but not one word from the sold." All That She Carried finds a way to give voice to the wordless by using a mundane, domestic object - a cloth sack and its contents - to thread an extraordinary tale through the generations. Miles writes that when Rose considered her daughter's fate, she "gathered all of her resources - material, emotional, and spiritual - and packed an emergency kit for the future". The heart swells as one reads that, in 1921, almost 70 years later, Ruth Middleton, the great granddaughter of Rose - who'd headed north in the Great Migration from South Carolina to Philadelphia - embroidered the following lines on the sack: My great grandmother Rose Mother of Ashley gave her this sack when She was sold at age of 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 Ruth's actions were an example of what Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, in The Age of the Homespun, calls the "enduring habits of possession, and mnemonic power of goods". The cotton sack was a family treasure and signifier of hope and resilience. Miles contrasts its ability to conjure silenced memories with the marble monuments of Confederate generals that were erected "to bury a nation's sin". Following Ruth's death in 1942, the sack vanished. Miles tells how it was discovered in 2007 by a white woman at a flea market near Nashville, Tennessee, who quickly realised she had "stumbled upon a precious object". An online search led her to Middleton Place, a nonprofit foundation that was once the home of extraordinarily wealthy slave holders, Henry and Mary Middleton. Infuriatingly, Ashley's keepsake found its way back from Philadelphia to South Carolina when the shopper donated it to Middleton Place - a return to the scene of the crime, as it were. It's presently on loan to the Smithsonian Institution. Like a literary detective or lawyer, Miles sets out to trace the narrative of the women whose lives were bound by the sack. It is introduced as the most important evidence, almost in the way of a courtroom exhibit, since official records are inadequate: Rose and Ashley's enslaved lives only merited two perfunctory entries in their enslaver's ledger. She ably conjures plantation life in the antebellum south, drawing on memoirs and other narratives of the enslavement, such as Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), to fill out Rose and Ashley's stories. Miles's descriptions are often prefixed with qualifying words: "'imagine", "perhaps", "is it too much of a stretch?" The recurring speculations and suppositions might cause some historians to wince. But Miles's great achievement is her ability to wield an extraordinary empathy, closer to the German Einfühlung from which the English word derives - an act of feeling into, of projecting oneself into another body. Time and again, she introduces painful scenes with "picture this", and we, the readers, do just that, even as we instinctively turn away from what we might see. She is mindful, too, of the danger of slipping into pornographic depictions of the violence endured. "Our review of the scene will stop here," she writes on the brink of describing an enslaver's act of sexual violence. The book successfully invokes a toxic period in American history with powerful reflections on the artefacts - all now lost - placed in Ashley's sack and listed on its front: the braid of Rose's hair; the tattered dress; three handfuls of pecan nuts. And then, of course, the "whispers of love". Working her way through each in turn, Miles explores the cultural significance of each item. The braid of hair is the most unusual object, according to the author, and perhaps the most symbolic. It offers "a glimpse into Rose's beliefs about spirit power, transcendent connection"; she concludes that the mother's hair was meant to enliven the sack with her spirit. The tattered dress that Ashley would have to make do with was a coarse, poor quality garment of "Negro cloth", a badge of slavery. Miles argues that sumptuary laws - dictating what unfree women could wear - were born of the plantocracy's fear of the enslaved getting above their station, and thereby of appealing sexually to white men. The three handfuls of pecans surprise Miles, as the nut was an expensive delicacy, but it could also be foraged - a regular practice among enslaved people, she notes, who gathered food and poached for their own survival. Finally, the whispers of love are, without doubt, an expression that death shall have no dominion over Rose; she will continue to have a permanent presence in her daughter's life. The contents of the sack clearly represented a mother's devotion. They challenged the slaveholders' disregard for both mother and daughter, evident in the ledger which merely listed the named property of Robert Martin, and the monetary worth of Rose ($700) and Ashley ($300) when they were put on display on the auction block. Miles marvels at the way Ruth managed, through her embroidered intervention - made even more affecting by its Haiku-like brevity and concision - to transform Ashley in this story from a cowed victim to empowered witness. Ultimately, like the sack itself, All That She Carried "stands in eloquent defence of the country's ideals by indicting its failures", and reads as a continuation of the thread that embroidered Rose's sack: "of love made manifest in the preservation of things passed on".
Kirkus Review
A professor of history at Harvard chronicles the historical journey of an embroidered cotton sack, beginning with the enslaved woman who gave it to her 9-year-old daughter in the 1850s. In this brilliant and compassionate account, Miles uses "an artifact with a cat's nine lives" to tell "a quiet story of transformative love lived and told by ordinary African American women--Rose, Ashley, and Ruth--whose lives spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, slavery and freedom, the South and the North." The sack, originally used for grain or seeds, was passed from Rose to her daughter Ashley in 1852, when Ashley was put on the auction block, and passed by Ashley to her granddaughter, Ruth Middleton. In the early 1920s, Ruth embroidered its history on it, including its contents: "a tattered dress 3 handfulls of pecans a braid of Roses hair," also "filled my Love always." The sack is now on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Like those of most enslaved people, the stories of Rose and Ashley are largely lost to history, but Miles carefully unravels the records and makes a credible case that they may have been the property of Robert Martin in coastal South Carolina. From there, the author moves outward to sensitively establish the context in which the two managed to survive, describing how South Carolina became "a place where the sale of a colored child was not only possible but probable." By the time Miles gets to Ruth, the historical record is more substantial. Married and pregnant at 16, Ruth moved from the South to Philadelphia around 1920 and eventually became "a regular figure in the Black society pages." With careful historical examination as well as empathetic imagination, Miles effectively demonstrates the dignity and mystery of lives that history often neglects and opens the door to the examination of many untold stories. A strikingly vivid account of the impact of connection on this family and others. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Miles (history, Harvard Univ.; The Dawn of Detroit) illuminates the lives of three generations of Black American women via a patched and embroidered cotton sack now displayed in the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Rose, an enslaved woman in South Carolina, filled the sack with what provisions and keepsakes she could for her 9-year-old daughter Ashley, who was sold away from her in the 1850s. Years later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered a narrative of the family history on the sack. From these small clues, Miles delves into Black Americans' experience of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the Great Migration. With skillful writing, the author carefully explores South Carolina's history of economic dependence on slavery, and discusses the efforts of enslaved people to obtain sustenance and clothing and maintain family connections. Drawing on scant genealogical records and letters from people who were formerly enslaved, as well as research on ornamentation, Miles creates a moving account of three women whose stories might have otherwise been lost to history. VERDICT Readers interested in often-overlooked lives and experiences, and anyone who cherishes a handcrafted heirloom, will enjoy this fascinating book. With YA crossover appeal, the accessible, personal writing sets this book apart.--Laurie Unger Skinner, Highland Park P.L., IL
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Ruth's Record My great-grandmama told my grandmama the part she lived through that my grandmama didn't live through and my grandmama told my mama what they both lived through and my mama told me what they all lived through and we were suppose to pass it down like that from generation to generation so we'd never forget. --Gayl Jones, Corregidora, 1975 Then I found the slave lists. There were bundles of them, in thick sheaves, each sheaf containing a stack. When a rice planter handed out shoes, he wrote down the names of who got them. To pay taxes, he made an inventory of his human property. If he bought fabric so people could make clothes, he noted how many yards were given to each person. When a woman gave birth, the date and name of the child appeared. --Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family, 1998 As a young woman with modest means and few prospects, Ruth Middleton transformed her life by moving north. Taking a leap into the unknown as a Black woman in the 1910s required tremendous courage. Ruth was still a teenager at the time, living in Columbia, South Carolina, and laboring as a domestic. She may have already met her future fiancé, Arthur Middleton, a South Carolinian from Camden and a tiremaker by trade. And she would have known from what she heard and saw, and perhaps from incidents in her own life, that the South was still a dangerous place for African Americans at the start of the new century. The first generations to be born to freedom found few job opportunities beyond the agricultural work their forebears had done, risked indebtedness in the sharecropping system, and faced public humiliation as well as unpredictable violence in everyday life. Perhaps Ruth and Arthur evaluated their situation and determined that only drastic change would better it. For they, like so many other African Americans fed up with the dusty prejudice of the South, packed their retinue of things and traveled northward seeking safety and opportunity. Ruth and Arthur made this move amid the uncertainty of World War I and a deadly flu epidemic, joining what historians have called the first wave of the Great Migration, which would, by the 1970s, reshape the demography and political landscape of the entire United States. African Americans who had predominantly lived in the rural South relocated in the hundreds of thousands to the urban South, urban Midwest, urban West, and urban North in search of physical security and economic opportunity. Half a million of these travelers relocated to northern cities in the period when Ruth uprooted herself, between 1914 and 1920. They pulled up stakes, packed their bags, and left behind all they knew and many whom they loved. Those who departed must have faced tough decisions about which items they could afford to bring along on the journey and which things they would give away or abandon. Practical objects like skillets and skirts, cherished things like handmade quilts, and valuable items like tools and books might each have been scrutinized, weighed, and considered. We have no inventory of a great migration of things that accompanied African Americans northward and westward. Ruth Middleton's case stands as a precious exception. When Ruth arrived in Philadelphia around the year 1918, she brought along the cotton sack that Rose had prepared for Ashley. Ruth's attachment to the textile reflects an important aspect of women's historical experience with things. While free men have historically owned and passed down "real" property (especially in the form of land), women have typically had only "movable" property (like furniture and linens--and, if the women in question were slaveholders, people) at their disposal. Although American women possessed a limited form of property, they used that property intentionally to "assert identities, build alliances, and weave family bonds torn by marriage, death, or migration." A New England-born white woman in the colonial era, for example, cherished a passed-down painted chest not only for its function but also for the ways in which the object connected her to her women forebears, reinforcing a sense of belonging not to male ancestors but to a line of women. Ruth Middleton, who would take her husband's name upon marriage, as was the American legal custom, also took her foremother's sack as she traveled north. And one day, when she was herself on the verge of motherhood, Ruth decided to annotate it. Ruth's fabric testament to Black love and women's perseverance did not--perhaps could not--exist in any historical archive. Though necessary to the work of uncovering the past, archives are nevertheless limited and misleading storehouses of information. While at times imposing and formal enough as to seem all-encompassing in their brick, glass, and steel structures, archives only include records that survived accident, were viewed as important in their time or in some subsequent period, and were deemed worthy of preservation. These records were originally created by fallible people rather like you and me, who could err in their jottings, hold vexed feelings they sometimes transmitted onto the page, or consciously or unconsciously misconstrue events they witnessed. Even in their most organized form, archived records are mere scraps of accounts of previous happenings, "rags of realities" that we painstakingly stitch together in order to picture past societies. Even when compared with the motley rags that make up the archives of history, the nineteenth-century seed sack that we are exploring together here appears particularly threadbare. Ruth's embroidery is the only definitive primary source detailing the fate of Rose and Ashley. In addition, read in a certain mood, Ruth's verse on the bag can feel more like poetry than reportage. Slight on facts and specifics, the embroidered text states only three names (Rose, Ruth, and Ashley), one place (South Carolina), and one date (1921). None of the sources that scholars typically use to reconstruct histories of slavery directly address this object. No plantation supply log exists that tells of the sack's manufacture or acquisition. No mistress's handwritten letter describes an interaction with Rose. No formal bill of sale lists a buyer of Ashley. No published slave narrative describes this family and their travails. The bag dates back to the 1840s or 1850s, but the writing was added in the 1920s. And perhaps most glaringly--and, for the historian, most alarmingly--we have only one person's word that events took place as described and that the bag was packed with the listed items. Ruth Middleton, that one person, probably rendered the details as she recalled them. While we can presume that she told the truth as she knew it, Ruth's version of events was formed, like any other, through the lenses of memory and narrative desire--what she consciously or unconsciously wanted this family story to mean. There is no reason to think that Ruth wrote this story as fiction, given the form she chose (amateur embroidery on a personal object with no commercial value at the time) as well as the first-person voice she used. The intimate, possessive, and immediate tone of the line "Ashley is my grandmother" suggests that Ruth knew this relative and remembered her. The tale she stitched for private use was by no indications imagined, and by all reckoning, it was true to Ruth. Still, as a vehicle of historical recovery, memory is at least as fallible as paper records. It is possible, even likely, that Ruth mistook, mis-recalled, or rearranged aspects of her emotional family account. We all do this when drawing out and thinking through memory, a malleable store of information "retrieved even as it is refashioned." Nevertheless, with steady hands we can thread the eye of this needle and ask what Ruth's record can tell us about Black women, Black families, women crafters, and Black material, as well as social, worlds. By doing so, we refuse to give up on those many people of the past who did not--could not--leave behind troves of documents. To abandon these individuals, the "archivally unknown" who fell through the cracks of class, race, and position, would consign them to a "second death" by permitting their erasure from history.8 It would also mean turning our faces away from fuller, if unwelcome, truths about our country and ourselves. Ruth's account, subjective and incomplete as it may be, stands as a baseline rebuttal to the reams of slaveholder documents that categorized people as objects. Her list of a dress, a braid, pecans, and whispered love accounts for the things that sustained life, rather than rendering lives as things. If Ruth's text did nothing else but replace the "slave list" of our cultural script with Rose's shimmering inventory, it would be enough. And yet Ruth's cloth chronicle does much more. By recovering, for history, Rose, her life conditions, and her act of love, Ruth sets the record straight. Excerpted from All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.