By Tiya Miles
Random House 2021
385 pages History
A very quick summary: A renowned historian traces the life
of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to
craft an extraordinary testament to people who are left out of the archives.
Dr. Tiya Miles is a Harvard historian. All That She Carried won the 2021 National Award for nonfiction. It is a meticulously-researched look at an embroidered feed sack that was found among a lot of fabric at a Nashville flea market in 2007. The purchaser realized that this was more than very old fabric, and donated it to the Middleton Place museum. The book’s author saw the sack while it was on loan to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC. She was immediately attracted to the sack and sought to learn and reconstruct what turned out to be an amazing story. Her research showed that Rose, a slave, filled the sack with three items when her daughter Ashley was sold as a little girl. The sack contained a lock of Rose’s hair, a tattered dress, and three handfuls of pecans. When the sack came to the great-granddaughter Ruth, she embroidered the story of the sack on the front of the bag.
More than telling the story of the sack, Miles relates those
three items to historical evidence of their importance. For example, the lock
of hair examines the importance of African American women’s hair, up to the
present. The tattered dress leads to a discussion of the importance and skill
of dressmaking, embroidery, and quilt making in defining a woman’s role—in the
Black community—and in women’s roles across the ages. The pecans could either have
been eaten or planted, and Miles discusses slave labor and what Rose and Ashley’s
role might have been during their life and times. She says, “Out of the shadows
Rose would emerge, bearing the sack as a lifeline and staking a claim on her
family’s continuance amid and despite unrelenting change.”
My sister has been creating a history of our families, and
she has traced our people to some of the first settlers in what would become
the United States. While Miles was attempting to trace the family that included
Rose, Ashley, and Ruth, she ran into many dead ends, and was only able to find
the possibility of who the family members were, not who they actually
were. I was so struck by the differences. One of her discoveries was a
record that turned up both names in an estate inventory shortly after the slave
owner, Robert Martin, died in 1852. Because there were very few women named
Ashley, Miles is quite sure that she had the correct family, and Ashley had a
value price, just like the cattle.
The trauma of separation is a major theme of the book, and
we must assume that there were thousands of stories similar to the story of
Rose, Ashley, and Ruth. What Miles shows
is that the sack marks “ a spot in our national story where great wrongs were
committed, deep sufferings were felt, love was sustained against all odds and a
vision of survival for future generations persisted.”
All That She Carried will continue to haunt me
in the weeks and months ahead. At my church book group, where we read and
discussed the book, everyone brought something that they would take with them
if they had to leave home quickly. What would you carry?
Here is a book talk with Dr. Miles
at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
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