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All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake Paperback – February 1, 2022

by Tiya Miles (Author)

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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, 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

Print length

416 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Random House Trade Paperbacks
Publication date

February 1, 2022
Dimensions

5.16 x 0.91 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

1984855018
ISBN-13

978-1984855015
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From the Publisher

All That She Carried;Tiya Miles;history;american history;us history;nba winner;Ashley's Sack

Imani Perry says Tiya Miles is a gentle genius . . . A gorgeous book;all that she carried;history

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A remarkable book.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

“Deeply and lovingly researched . . . a testament to the power of story, witness, and unyielding love.”—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Through [Miles’s] interpretation, the humble things in the sack take on ever-greater meaning, its very survival seems magical, and Rose’s gift starts to feel momentous in scale.”—Rebecca Onion, Slate

“A brilliant exercise in historical excavation and recovery . . . With creativity, determination, and great insight, Miles illuminates the lives of women who suffered much, but never forgot the importance of love and family.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello

“[An] extraordinary story . . . Unique and unforgettable.”—Ms.

“[A] powerful history of women and slavery.”—The New Yorker

“[A] sparkling tale.”—Oprah Daily

“Tiya Miles is a gentle genius . . . All That She Carried is a gorgeous book and a model for how to read as well as feel the precious artifacts of Black women’s lives.”—Imani Perry, author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons

“All That She Carried is a moving literary and visual experience about love between a mother and daughter and about many women descendants down through the years. Above all it is Miles’s lyrical story, written in her signature penetrating prose, about the power of objects and memory, as well as human endurance, in the history of slavery. The book is nothing short of a revelation.”—David W. Blight, Yale University, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Ashley’s Sack, as it is known, with its short and simple message of intergenerational love, becomes a portal through which Tiya Miles views and reimagines the inner lives of Black women. She excavates the history of Black women who face insurmountable odds and invent a language that can travel across time.”—Michael Eric Dyson, author of Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

“Tiya Miles uses the tools of her trade to tend to Black people, to Black mothers and daughters, to our wounds, to collective Black love and loss. This book demonstrates Miles’s signature genius in its rare balance of both rigor and care.”—Brittney Cooper, author of Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

“All That She Carried is a masterpiece work of African American women’s history that reveals what it takes to survive and even thrive. Read this book and then pass it on to someone you love.”—Martha S. Jones, author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

“Tiya Miles has written a beautiful book about the tragic materiality of black women’s lives across three generations, through slavery and freedom. This book is for anyone interested in learning about black people's centrality to American history.”—Stephanie Jones-Rogers, author of They Were Her Property

“[A] brilliant and compassionate account.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

About the Author

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (February 1, 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1984855018
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1984855015
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.16 x 0.91 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #13,696 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #37 in Women in History
- #38 in Discrimination & Racism
- #110 in U.S. State & Local History

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4.3 1,183 ratings

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Tiya Miles

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Tiya Miles is the author of three multiple prize-winning works in the history of early American race relations: Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom; The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story; and most recently, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits.

She has also written historical fiction: The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts (a Lambda Literary Award Finalist), shared her travels to "haunted" historic sites of slavery in a published lecture series, and written various articles and op-eds (in The New York Times, CNN.com, the Huffington Post) on women’s history, history and memory, black public culture, and black and indigenous interrelated experience.

She is a past MacArthur Foundation Fellow (“genius award”) and Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow and a current National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Award recipient. She taught on the faculty of the University of Michigan for sixteen years and is currently a Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University.

Tiya was born and raised in Cincinnati, and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, three children, and three pets. She is an avid reader of feminist mysteries, a passionate fan of old houses, and a loyal patron of Graeter’s ice cream in Cincinnati as well as Dairy Queen just about anywhere.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

1,183 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the storyline amazing, educational, poignant, and powerful. They also describe the emotional content as tragedy beautifully told, showing resilience and determination to help their families survive. Readers also praise the writing style as well-written and important.

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20 customers mention "Storyline"20 positive0 negative

Customers find the storyline amazing, educational, poignant, and interesting. They also say it's an important work, sensitively written, and feel empowered after reading.

"...Using excellent historical documentation and having tremendous intellectual rigor and integrity to tell the story, she brings all of its threads..." Read more

"...Miles, an accomplished and amazing historian, has done the same. Read this book...." Read more

"...All, in all, a beautiful contribution to our understanding of African American history." Read more

"...the beginning and periodically thereafter, but does a great job of describing the experience of enslaved people backed by objective data...." Read more

10 customers mention "Emotional content"10 positive0 negative

Customers find the emotional content of the book beautifully told, sobering beyond compare, heart rendering, and intriguing. They also say it shows their resilience and determination to help their families survive.

"This book is sobering beyond compare. Tiya Miles rips open much of the hidden torture these women have endured for years...." Read more

"...The story of the sack is straightforward...." Read more

"...clue-- and from this information she stitches together a heartbreaking and powerful history of the South during the era of slavery as well an..." Read more

"Very emotional reflection on the African American spiritual journey from slavery to today...." Read more

5 customers mention "Writing style"5 positive0 negative

Customers find the book well-written, important, and worth reading.

"...Extremely well written, and easy to read..." Read more

"...This is a well written and important book that will give you new insights and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in American history." Read more

"not perfect, but well worth reading, and highly reccomended..." Read more

"Important work, sensitively written..." Read more

3 customers mention "Genre"0 positive3 negative

Customers find the genre interesting, but not a novel or biography. They also mention that the book provides a lack of records of personal experiences of the enslaved.

"...There is such a lack of records of personal experiences of the enslaved that this book completes" Read more

"This book is not a novel. It is a book based on actual people who lived but with few historical facts to make it an accurate history book...." Read more

"Interesting. Not a novel or biography. More like a history book...." Read more

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cat person

Brilliant Work

Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2024

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What Tiya Miles has done with her subject is awesome. Ashley's sack is small, but the story that Miles weaves is broad and deep. Examining every relevant factor pertaining to it, Miles makes this humble object the symbol of eternal love and strength. Using excellent historical documentation and having tremendous intellectual rigor and integrity to tell the story, she brings all of its threads together for us to bear witness and carry forward.

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lamae

amazing story. lovingly and deftly stitched.

Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2021

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The moment I picked up this book, I took out my pen. I knew I'd mark it up. I knew I'd be taken on a journey with the author leading the way. I often do this with books I know I will love. I underline, circle and highlight. I placed this book on mud cloth covering a chest beside my bed. It is beside other books that leave me thinking and breathing again. What an exhale. Like Tiya Miles, the author, I have ancestry in Mississippi. Via this book, she took me to the south, but also to the unnameable places where black women/women period have fought for their humanity (indeed, I have seen knitting old women in the frigid North Atlantic doing something similar. Fighting!). They save themselves. They save their families. Some do so via cloth. Each stitch on fabric that may be passed on to a loved one signals their/our determination to live, but also seeable and unseeable histories involving ever-hurting people. They are still strong people. I have not finished this book. I stop to savor what it is saying. I also cannot get the hand-sewn curtains made of cotton that my late grandmother gave me out of my mind's eye. I can still see her uneven stitches. She had arthritis. She also had great love. At the time I received the curtains, which are pictured here, I was leaving for another state, but she wanted to give me something. Something that may not have been much. She gave me a part of herself when she presented those curtains. Miles, an accomplished and amazing historian, has done the same. Read this book. It will remind you of this one thing: we are strong enough to get through this difficult moment in world history. Remember the ancestors. Remember the things they have been stitched, touched, passed down. Remember.

127 people found this helpful

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D. K. Bagshaw

New insights into the lives of enslaved African Americans and their descendants

Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2023

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I'm so glad this was a choice of my book club. I didn't like it at first, it seemed to go around and around with three women whose names I couldn't keep straight. A lot of repetition about the sack in the beginning, the end, and the commentaries in between. So I skimmed over those until I got to the parts that hooked me containing information I'd never heard about (spoiler alert):

The description of Charleston as a walled city, in which enslaved people could come and go, but had to wear stitched badges (reminding me of the Nazi stars of David) and could be watched from the ramparts, rooftops and balconies. The importance of dress and how the women wove their own fabrics, and sewed their Sunday-best dresses of bright colors, and in the fourth generation, stayed home and embroidered like proper ladies.

The importance of the pecans I enjoyed, but since I grew up with pecans, I felt the author didn't give them their due. Did Rose pack them shelled for Ashley's consumption on her journey, or in their shells for later cracking and "picking." Of course, we don't know, but could speculate.

The Kindle version didn't work well with inserts, so I looked at the paperback which is more satisfying, but wish the photos could have been printed in color. I'd buy a hardback if that were true.

All, in all, a beautiful contribution to our understanding of African American history.

3 people found this helpful

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happy reader

Fascinating!

Reviewed in the United States on May 17, 2024

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Based on one single item, Miles tells a story of many people, in slavery and after slavery, but still in challenging times. She keeps bringing the story back, but it is much more than a story of one item. Extremely well written, and easy to read (other than the challenging emotional context - even for this white person - hope I can be considered an ally).

Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2022

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About two chapters into this book I read the reviews by previous readers, wondering if I was the only person having problems with the author's writing. I understand that any non-fiction piece of a historical time will contain some guessing instead of fact but this book gets bogged down with way too much conjecture. The main subject, a cloth sack given to a daughter by her mother while both were slaves was an emotional example of the inhumane treatment of African Americans during slavery in this country, and for that this book is important.

10 people found this helpful

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belinda

Great experience.

Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2024

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The book arrived ina timely manner and in great condition. Seller was communicative and prompt.

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Kenneth W. Kickbusch

Tina Miles has written a "break-through" book about the daily realities of American slavery.

Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2023

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Historian Tina Miles has written a break-through book. She writes of slavery not as an adjunct to the "real white American history", but as having a distinctive, real, lived, personal daily reality. ALL THAT SHE CARRIED illustrates that there is no record of daily events in the lives of slaves: no record of births, deaths, sales, families, weddings, joys, celebrations, successes, or failures. The "sack" prepared by a black slave mother for her eight year old daughter about to be sold to another owner, found and identified by a distant free relative in 1922, clarifies for all of us that American slavery produces a very long and ugly shadow.

6 people found this helpful

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Miss W. Cabral

Fab read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 28, 2024

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Would recommend

NUNO LOMELINO RODRIGUES PEREIRA

...um trabalho de investigação e escrita assinalável.

Reviewed in Spain on September 27, 2023

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...um dos meus melhores livros deste ano. Extraordinário. Um trabalho muito sério sobre uma época em que tudo foi negado a quem foi privado de si mesmo.

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