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

Purportedly the deeper story of Ashley’s Sack, an embroidered sack given from a slave mother to her child as their family was broken up on the death of their master, “All That She Carried” is really a survey of he female experience of American chattel slavery. The story of the sack is straightforward. A young black mother embroidered a few lines from a family story onto a bag which had been passed down by her grandmother, the erstwhile enslaved child ripped from her mother. As Miles points out, the historical record is thin on the family. A few references in Philadelphia social pages and a murky set of birth records.However, Miles uses the open space of the narrative to share the perspectives of men and women who endured slavery. We are presented with everything from the importance of pecans in African American cookery to the significance of a dress to an enslaved women. We are provided with insights to the humiliation of the auction block and the peril of black women treated as sexual objects. Each section begins with an (at times tenuous) connection to the Sack and provides a multitude of voices and perspectives.

My book club read this book and learned much about the enslaved woman who gave her 9-year-old daughter Ashley a sack of containing items to help her when she was sold. Next week we are going to the International African American Museum in Charleston SC to see the sack and other artifacts.

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.

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.

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.

This book was absolutely wonderful, I felt like I was missing a movie when I was away from the book!

After reading what I thought was the world's longest prologue, I realized it was indeed the book itself. Think of it as a thesis as you dive in and you will hopefully enjoy it more than I did. The purpose and content is important but I feel this could be shortened significantly and would likely capture more readers (or more readers who actually finish it).

This book is sobering beyond compare. Tiya Miles rips open much of the hidden torture these women have endured for years. Yet she also shows their resilience and determination to help their families survive. A must read for anyone who needs to know the truth, and see ways we can help make a difference in the future. Changed hearts are what we need.

Tracing a textile in the history of slavery is brought to life. How could you not read this important history?

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