by Tiya Miles
Copyright © 2021 by Tiya Miles
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Permissions Acknowledgments can be found on this page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Miles, Tiya, 1970- author.
Title: All that she carried: the journey of Ashley’s sack, a black family keepsake / Tiya Miles.
Other titles: Journey of Ashley’s sack, a black family keepsake
Description: New York: Random House, 2021. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020051688 (print) | LCCN 2020051689 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984854995 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984855008 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Women slaves—South Carolina—Biography. | Ashley (Enslaved person in South Carolina) | Mothers and daughters. | Women slaves—Southern States—Social conditions—19th century. | Slaves—Southern States—Family relationships—History—19th century. | Middleton, Ruth Jones, 1903–1942—Family. | African American women—Biography. | African American women—Family relationships. | Memory—United States.
Classification: LCC E445.S7 M55 2021 (print) | LCC E445.S7 (ebook) | DDC 306.3/620820975—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051688
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051689
Ebook ISBN 9781984855008
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Belina Huey
Cover art: Lauren Singleton
ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue: Emergency Packs
Introduction: Love’s Practitioners
Chapter 1: Ruth’s Record
Chapter 2: Searching for Rose
Chapter 3: Packing the Sack
Chapter 4: Rose’s Inventory
Chapter 5: The Auction Block
Chapter 6: Ashley’s Seeds
Chapter 7: The Bright Unspooling
Conclusion: It Be Filled
Carrying Capacity
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Sampler: A Note on Terms
Little Sack of Something: An Essay on Process
Notes
Permissions Acknowledgments
By Tiya Miles
About the Author
Love and empathy, together, lead to justice.
—Jonathan L. Walton, A Lens of Love, 2018
Fear, too, is crucial to love.
—Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love, 1994
PROLOGUE:
EMERGENCY PACKS
I think we should make emergency packs—grab and run packs—in case we need to get out of here in a hurry.
—Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993
Rose was in existential distress that fateful winter when her would-be earthly master, Robert Martin, passed away. The place: coastal South Carolina; the year: 1852. We do not know Rose’s family name, or the place of her birth, or the year of her death. Such is the case with the vast majority of African and Indigenous American women who were bought, sold, and exploited by the hundreds of thousands. But we can be sure that Rose faced the deep kind of trouble that no one in our present time knows and only an enslaved woman has seen. Rose knew that she or her little girl, Ashley, could be next on the auction block, the cold device enslavers turned to when their finances faltered.
Ripping families apart was a common practice in a society structured by—and, indeed, dependent on—the legalized captivity of people deemed inferior. And sale could not have been the end of Rose’s worries or the worst of her fears. She must have dreaded what could occur during this relocation and after: the physical cruelty, sexual assault, malnourishment, mental splintering, and even death that was the lot of so many young women deemed slaves. Rose and Ashley’s life together, already encased by swales of suffering, could be torn asunder in a matter of moments with the stroke of a pen. Their lives apart portended even worse without the bonds of family. Rose adored this daughter and desperately sought to keep her safe. But what could safety possibly mean in a place, at a time, when a girl not yet ten years old could be lawfully caged and bartered? What would Rose do to protect her child? What could she do as an unfree woman with no social standing, political power, economic means, or cultural currency positioned in the trenches of unpredictable and insurmountable difficulty?
The kind of fix Rose was in—life-threatening and soul-stealing—was one that Black women like her had continually encountered over more than two centuries of life in America. It was a fix articulated by the few enslaved women who managed to escape and tell their stories in the nineteenth century and, later, by Black women thinkers and artists who drew sustenance from the writings of these cultural ancestors in the generations that followed, including our own. How does a person treated like chattel express and enact a human ethic? What does an individual who is deeply devalued insist upon as her set of values? How does a woman demeaned and cowed face the abyss and still give love? Rose’s actions, outlined in a single and unusual text and barely preserved for history, give us a sense. When the auction block loomed on her little family’s horizon, Rose gathered all of her resources—material, emotional, and spiritual—and packed an emergency kit for the future. She gave that bag to her daughter, Ashley, who carried it and passed it down across the generations.
Rose possessed inner strength and creativity even as calamity struck. Saving another’s life meant acting despite despair, and she dreamed up means of survival as well as spiritual sustenance.1 Surely Rose felt that what she did was far too little, much too late. Surely she feared that a battered bag would not matter enough in the end. But Rose pressed on, matching the mettle of an entrenched slave society with a glimmering will of her own. And although we cannot know exactly how events unfolded, we can conclude that Rose’s gift did affect her descendants’ lives, no matter how inconsequential her act of packing may have felt in the moment. For, three generations later, a great-granddaughter of hers, Ruth Middleton, created a remarkable “written” record attesting to Rose’s deed. Ruth’s chronicle is evidence of a long-term effect that Rose herself would never see: her female line would continue against all odds, and her will to love would be carried forward.
Rose couldn’t know how things would turn out, but she held fast to a vision. She saw her daughter alive and provided for her into the future, a radical imagining for a Black mother in the 1850s. Rose’s daughter, Ashley, realized that vision by surviving, and her great-granddaughter, Ruth, preserved their history by stitching sentences onto the surface of the sack. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, we face our own societal demons, equal in some respects to the system of slavery that would finally be slayed. The world feels dark to us, just as it must have for Rose, and like Rose, we can’t know what will happen. We think it a fantasy that we might rescue our children’s futures, or revive our democratic principles, or redeem our damaged earth. In our moment of bleak extremity, Black women of the past can be our teachers. Who better to show us how to act when hope for the future is under threat than a mother like Rose—or an entire caste of enslaved, brave women who were nothing and had nothing by the dominant standards of their time ye
t managed to save whom and what they loved? Rose and her long line of descendants realized that salvation depended on bearing up to the weight and promise of their baggage. We should, too.
Embroidered work bag. Unknown maker, England or United States, 1753, wool, linen, silk, and cotton, 1960.1123, bequest of Henry Francis du Pont, courtesy of Winterthur Museum.
Just as Rose and Ashley found on their forced journeys through slavery’s landscape, there is no safe place of escape left for us. The walls of the world are closing in. We need to get out of here in a hurry. We need to get out of these frames of mind and states of emotion that elevate mastery over compassion, division over connection, and greed over care, separating us one from another and locking us in. Our only options in this predicament, this state of political and planetary emergency, are to act as first responders or die not trying. We are the ancestors of our descendants. They are the generations we’ve made. With a “radical hope” for their survival, what will we pack into their sacks?2
INTRODUCTION
LOVE’S PRACTITIONERS
In African American life black women have been love’s practitioners.
—bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love, 2001
We forget that love is revolutionary. The word, cute and overused in American culture, can feel at times like a stuffed animal devoid of spirit or, worse, like a dead letter suitable only for easy exchange on social media platforms. But love does carry profound meanings. It indicates the radical realignment of social life. To love is to turn away from the prioritization of the ego or even one’s particular party or tribe, to give of oneself for another, to transfigure the narrow “I” into the expansive “you” or “we.” This four-letter word asks of us, then, one of the most difficult tasks in life: decentering the self for the good of another. This is a task for which we need exemplars, especially in our divisive times. Here in these pages, we take up 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. Their love story is one of sacrifice, suffering, lament, and the rescue of a tested but resilient family lineage.
By loving, Rose refused to accept the tenets of her time: that people could be treated as property, that wealth was a greater value than honor, that some lives had no worth beyond capital and gain. Hers is just one telling example of refusal from the collective experience of enslaved Black women, who practiced love and preserved life when all hope seemed lost. Even when she relinquished her daughter to the slave trade against her will, Rose insisted on love. Despite and during their separation, Rose’s value of love prevailed. The emotional bond between mother and daughter held longevity and elasticity, traversing the final decade of chattel slavery, the chaos of the Civil War, and the red dawn of emancipation before finding new expression in the early twentieth century just as a baby girl, the fifth generation of Rose’s lineage, Ashley’s great-granddaughter, was born.
Just as remarkable as this story of women who dared to insist on love is how we have come to know about it. Rose’s testament, as told by Ruth, is preserved on an antique sack that once held grain or seeds. Traces of the abused and adored, the devalued and the salvaged, the lost and the found accrue in this one-of-a-kind object. A mother bears the sacrifice of her daughter; a daughter carries on amid unspeakable loss; a descendant heaves the harrowing tale into the twentieth century; and we have the chance to be the better for its arrival here on our doorstep. Through the medium of the sack, we glimpse the visionary fortitude of enslaved Black mothers, the miraculous love Black women bore for kin, the insistence on radical humanization that Black women carried for the nation, and the immeasurable value of material culture to the histories of the marginalized. Although Black women have been treated like “the mules of the world,” in the words of writer Zora Neale Hurston, this sack bears them up as at times exemplifying, to borrow Abraham Lincoln’s phrase on the precipice of the Civil War, the “better angels of our nature.”1
Ruth Middleton’s embroidery on Ashley’s sack, a gift from Rose. Courtesy of the Middleton Place Foundation.
Ruth Middleton, a lineal descendant of Rose, embroidered the lines that follow on what Ruth identified as the original cotton sack Rose packed.
My great grandmother Rose
mother of Ashley gave her this sack when
she was sold at age 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
With these words a granddaughter, mother, sewer, and storyteller imbued a piece of fabric with all the drama and pathos of ancient tapestries depicting the deeds of queens and goddesses. She preserved the memory of her foremothers and also venerated these women, shaping their image for the next generations. Without Ruth, there would be no record. Without her record, there would be no history. Ruth’s act of creation mirrored that of her great-grandmother Rose. Through her embroidery, Ruth ensured that the valiance of discounted women would be recalled and embraced as a treasured inheritance.
The stained antique fabric once grasped in Ruth Middleton’s hands now hangs in an underground case at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), in Washington, D.C. The artifact, which is on loan from its current institutional owner, the Middleton Place Foundation in Charleston, South Carolina, immediately takes hold of those who view it. Ruth’s intellectual work of interpreting Rose and Ashley’s story and her handiwork in stitching it onto the sack in color produce a composite object of arresting visual and emotional impact. A testament to the national past fashioned of many thinning threads, it has an effect subtler yet more moving than the stone monuments built for pro-slavery statesmen and Confederate generals that have been widely contested in recent years. Those memorials, erected to bury a nation’s sin, were made to be larger than life to command a presence in national memory. At the same time, though, Confederate monuments undermined the aspirational principles of America’s founding: freedom, equality, and democracy. Ashley’s sack makes no such pretense to vainglory. It does not have to. A quiet assertion of the right to life, liberty, and beauty even for those at the bottom, the sack stands in eloquent defense of the country’s ideals by indicting its failures.
The sack crystallizes the drama of a region and a nation torn apart by the moral crisis of human sale and forced separation. But it also possesses a quality so tangibly intimate and personal that it filters a light of remembrance on the viewer’s own familial bonds, leading any of us to ask what things our own families possess that connect us to our past and to wonder what we might gain from the contemplation of that connection. Such is the capacious nature of Ashley’s sack that it can call hearts to attention while also speaking to local, regional, and national histories. Although the bag’s material contents have long been lost, its essential provision—love of a mother for her daughter—still remains. Every turn in the sack’s use—from its packing in the 1850s, to its tending across the dawn of a century, to its embroidering in the 1920s—reveals a family endowment that stands as an alternative to the callous capitalism bred in slavery. In the face of the base commercialization of their own bodies, these Black kinswomen cared for one another, preserving the next generations by provisioning their perseverance and remembering the past generations who defended their right to life. As the women in Rose’s lineage carried the sack through the decades, the sack itself bore memories of bondage and bravery, genius and generosity, longevity and love.
STORY CLOTHS
My own grandmother’s voice travels across warm breezes on a hilly side street in Cincinnati, Ohio. I am nine years old, or twelve
and a half, or twenty-one.
“Lord only knows what we woulda done if she hadn’t saved that cow.”
Grandmother has told this story countless times to me, her rapt audience of one, and to other women relatives in private moments over the years. Her dark eyes peer at me with the light of love behind her oversized men’s glasses, the sort that come cheapest with her Medicare plan. She does not need glamour or fanfare. The red brick porch of the Craftsman cottage is her stage. She sits on her lounger with the metal frame, its pillows changed out many times and now mismatched in shape and pattern. Her skin is the honey of bees’ combs, soft as crepe and just as creased. Her hair is a wreath of pressed cotton, once black, now white. A sleeveless, pale blue shift drapes to her calves, exposing ankles swollen from a lifetime of domestic labor in others’ homes and agricultural labor on others’ farms. She leans back and folds her hands across the broad moon of her belly, which birthed six babies in Mississippi and seven more in Ohio. In the summertime, she keeps a cool drink on the ledge of the porch wall—lemonade or sun tea sealed in a Mason jar. She reaches for the cooling liquid, wets her lips, and continues. She is my first storyteller, the one who tends me when I am sick, the one who bakes my favorite rice pudding. She is my beloved.
“If it wasn’t for my sister Margaret,” my grandmother preaches, “we woulda had nothin’ left.”
This was the defining story of my grandmother’s childhood in Mississippi. It told of a fragile family and a brave Black girl. My maternal grandmother, Alice Aliene, was born in Lee County to a mother much younger than her father. Her father, Price, was tall as an oak, with bark-dark skin. He had “eyes like an eagle’s,” to hear my grandmother tell it, which she claimed he got from a “half-Indian parent.” Price had been born into slavery’s last days. He told my grandmother, and she told me, that he had been sold away from his mother. Maybe this is why the 1870 federal census lists Price as an eight-year-old alone, with no guardian or family.
