All That She Carried

Courtesy Middleton Place, CC BY-SA 4.0

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, by Tiya Miles, 2021, Random House.

You may have heard the story, or seen the humble, yet extraordinary, embroidered cloth sack in an article or in real life at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Known as Ashley’s sack, the bag embodies a mother’s love and is a testament to the power of that love in unimaginably desperate times. All That She Carried is an expansive telling of the story of Ashley’s sack, a visceral material artifact of slavery in the southern United States. That the sack still exists is a triumph of human care, that it even needed to be made in the first place is an almost unbearable sadness.

Around 1850, the small cloth sack was given by a woman named Rose to her nine-year-old daughter Ashley, as they were forcibly separated and Ashley was sold on the auction block. Rose filled the bag with a tattered dress, three handfuls of pecans, and a braid of her own hair, and was never to see her daughter again. Ashley survived, and kept the bag with her, passing it on to her own daughter Rosa, who gave it to her daughter Ruth, the one who embroidered the story, which had obviously passed down through the generations, into the cloth in 1921. The bag surfaced in 2007 at a flea market, where it was recognized as the numinous object that it is, and made its way into the safe hands of a museum.

Historian and author Tiya Miles describes the first time she saw a photo of Ashley’s sack: “...a dingy white cloth discoloured by patches of dirt or blood and seared with punctures. Sentences formed from scrupulous stitching trailed across the cotton weave, an embroidered story of the bag’s heartbreaking origins in a family’s forced division. (...) Seeing the sack, experiencing its material nature, changed everything. The image stole a beat from my heart. This object was dazzling in its immediacy, devastating in its story, and stunning in the simultaneity of the gut responses it elicited. I had been studying Black history for 20 years. I had visited African American museums, stared unbelievingly at leg chains and neck irons, but no remnant from dark times had arrested my spirit quite like this one.”

Miles then spent the next five years researching and writing this book, and has done a remarkable job of revitalizing Rose and Ashley’s story, against the dearth of records of Black women’s lives as slaves. She takes an ingenious approach – rigorously researching records that do exist, identifying a likely individual as the Rose of the story, then opening out to contemporary stories of the time to fill the gaps of what might have happened. As compelling as the material object of the sack is, these stories were what really affected me.

I confess that while I thought I knew about slavery, had read books and seen movies and studied it in school, I really had no idea. It was an abstract concept, had happened in another time and place. Reading passages in the book that list the names of enslaved people, with a dollar amount next to their names, didn’t really affect me until I stopped and let the fact sink in that the money was not going to them as a wage but was a commercial transaction between slave owners. The injustice of it was incomprehensible to me – a relatively well read and educated person of blinkered privilege. 

Miles recounts the systematic dehumanization, torture, rape and murder of enslaved people with sensitivity and compassion, as far as that is possible to do when confronted with such horror. I was near tears as I read – yet I was held by Miles’ own commitment to truth, respect and fierce care for the people whose stories she relates. 

All That She Carried feels even more urgent and meaningful as I read it while the news is full of stories of “freedom” convoys and protests against the perceived injustice of public health protocols in this time of the pandemic. I feel that I have been woefully unappreciative of my own freedom, and the genuine freedom that exists in Canada today. 

Of particular interest to artists will be the visual essay, “Carrying Capacity”, included in the book. A response by a number of artists to Ashley’s sack, it proves that, as Miles says, “the sack itself finds echoes across the contemporary art landscape as artists turn and return to visions of inheritance and the natural world. That Ashley’s sack still has the capacity to carry these multiple needs for viewers is further testament to Rose’s ability to provide resources for a journey she could only imagine. So, too, do artists equip us with tools for the road ahead.”

In closing, Miles asks, “Can we commit our imaginations – like Rose, Ashley, Rosa and Ruth once did – to packing the sacks, carrying the seeds, and stitching the story cloths of tomorrow? All of our past, what we have valued and what we have undervalued, must be brought along in this way, tucked and preserved inside the shelters of our story sacks. For, in our collective quest to survive with peoples and planet intact – nothing is immaterial.”

https://tiyamiles.com/books/all-that-she-carried/