by Tiya Miles
The answer is fit for an episode of PBS’s Antiques Roadshow.11 In 2007, after having been lost for decades and presumably unknown outside of the original family, the sack Rose had packed reemerged. A white woman discovered the bag in a bin of old fabrics at an outdoor flea market near Nashville, Tennessee. In order to supplement her family’s income, the shopper, a mother of three, routinely bought items and resold them on eBay. She might have done the same with the discolored sack had she not absorbed a few of the words on its surface. Realizing that “she had stumbled upon a precious object,” the shopper offered the vendor twenty dollars for the sack and a bundle of other cloths. How much might the sack be worth? She followed the clues on the sack, noted Ruth Middleton’s signature, conducted an Internet search, and contacted an appraiser. The search led her to Middleton Place, once the home of the famously wealthy Charleston slaveholders Henry Middleton and Mary Williams Middleton and now a nonprofit foundation. After a series of conversations with foundation staffers, a dream about the women whose names were on the sack, and perhaps reflection on being the mother of her own nine-year-old daughter, the flea market shopper donated the bag to Middleton Place in exchange for a lifetime membership and a very small sum.12 “I happened to field the initial call from the donor and hear her description of the sack and how she found it in a rummage sale,” Tracey Todd, the president and CEO of the Middleton Place Foundation, said. “And I’ll never forget, after several weeks and numerous calls, the feeling when she decided to donate it to MPF. We knew it would be one of the most important artifacts owned by the Foundation.”13
The Tennessee shopper’s incredible find is an inspiring example of what historians have called “dazzling things” that “sometimes show up in ordinary places.”14 Like many flea market collectors, she had a keen eye for the rare possibilities of things categorized as rubbish. Her perception was matched months later by the duo of Middleton Place curators who took on the task of interpreting the donated sack. Although the remarkable textile belonging to an enslaved girl named Ashley bore only ten lines of embroidered text, the many layers of the sack’s makeup—material, historical, and emotional—had myriad stories to tell. Who had manufactured it? Who were the people named on it? Why had this family been torn apart? And how had the bag survived for more than a century in the shadows? Pinning down specifics about the object’s origins would take three years, and research is ongoing more than a decade later at Middleton Place and at museums and universities around the country.15
Mary Edna Sullivan, a textile specialist, and her senior colleague at the time, Barbara Doyle, a handwriting enthusiast, scrutinized the now long-empty bag. Sullivan chose the name for the object, emphasizing Ashley’s role in the family. The curators’ description reads like this:
Ruth Middleton (dates unknown)
Ashley’s Sack
Charleston, SC
Ca. 1850, sack; 1921, needlework
Plain-weave cotton ground; cotton lock stitch fabrication; three strand-cotton embroidery floss, back-stitch embroidery
H. 29 11/16 x W. 15 3/4 inches
Sacks made of plain-weave cotton, like this example, were manufactured for flour, seeds and other food staples beginning in the late 1840s with the invention of the industrial sewing machine. Unlike stitching by hand, the double locking chain stitch produced by the machine made a seam strong enough to hold heavy contents. Constructed in the same way, Ashley’s sack had seen much use by the time Ruth Middleton added her inscription; the numerous worn spots had been reinforced with rectangles of cloth carefully hand-sewn in place.
Searches through surviving Middleton family probate records from the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have revealed at least nine enslaved women named Rose; however, no Ashley has come to light.16
The curatorial team had pinned down dates and details of the bag’s construction, but their probe of plantation records led to inconclusive findings about its origins, and the women behind the names on the sack remained out of reach. The foundation’s gaining possession of the artifact had been, like the rescue of the textile itself, a flash of luck.
The mysterious sack had only recently been placed on display in the reception hall of the Middleton Place manor home when curators for the NMAAHC embarked on a southern tour in search of objects for their collections. It was 2009, and the new museum had not yet been built on the National Mall, when Middleton Place curators showed the Smithsonian curators the salvaged sack. The Smithsonian obtained the object on a long-term loan from the Middleton Place Foundation, which maintains ownership. This sack, an artifact with a cat’s nine lives, was preserved for history through a serendipitous series of nearly missed connections and occurrences.17 Smithsonian curator Mary Elliott explained that the fabric has been dated to the 1850s and is presumed to trace back to the Ashley River area of South Carolina but not directly to the Middleton Place plantation. Tracey Todd acknowledged as much: “We treasured the sack because of its story and its interpretive value, much more than any specific connection to the Middletons of Middleton Place. We always took the position that a direct link may or may not exist.”18
The Middleton Place Foundation possesses the sack because of an assumed link between Ruth Middleton and the wealthy Charleston family. And perhaps there is a genealogical link, as the anthropologist Mark Auslander has suggested, between Ruth’s husband, Arthur Middleton, and an enslaved person at Middleton Place.19 Because of the shared name, the sack went on display in the library of the restored guest wing (or “flanker”) of the Middleton Place plantation, a national historic landmark and popular southern tourist attraction. Awash in bronze brick and greenery, Middleton Place calls to mind grand manor homes in the English countryside of Jane Austen novels. It is a place replete with pink azaleas blooming along stone pathways and silvery Spanish moss draping from sprawling oaks. The supple bends of the Ashley River ribbon the edge of the property. Dirt paths lead to stone ruins and delicate reflecting ponds shaped like butterfly wings—ponds that enslaved people dug by hand out of steaming, mosquito-thick mud banks. These pools are among the many luxuries exorbitant wealth bought in Charleston, one of this country’s richest towns in the era of the American Revolution, due to the rice and cotton profits of legalized slavery.
While the butterfly pools rippled outside, the cotton sack hung inside was an open rebuke to slavery’s harms. The textile was displayed at the plantation from 2007 to 2010 before making a debut in New York City, which had itself been a slaveholding hub on par with Charleston in eighteenth-century colonial America. In New York, unfree people of African and Indigenous descent were routinely traded and held in the households and businesses of entrepreneurial merchant elites. At the New York Winter Antiques Show in 2011, Grandeur Preserved: Masterworks Presented by Historic Charleston Foundation, the less than grand cotton sack drew long looks and torrents of tears.20 Upon its return to the Charleston plantation, the sack went on display again until it was selected in 2015 for the collections of the Smithsonian. On loan from Middleton Place, the sack went into storage and was later unveiled among a host of other treasures at the NMAAHC’s grand opening in the autumn of 2016.21
The butterfly-wing-shaped reflecting pools at Middleton Place plantation, hand-dug by enslaved people, border the main house grounds and the Ashley River. Photograph by Tiya Miles.
This object was a marvel despite its lack of physical luster. It moved the emotions of viewers; so many of them succumbed to sobs that Middleton Place curator Mary Edna Sullivan fell into the habit of handing out tissues beside the display.22 The powerful pull of the sack lay in the way it personalized and also materialized every parent’s and child’s worst fear, telling an intimate account of one family’s separation and survival through direct language and an approachable, familiar medium. As the Civil War historian Stephen Berry succinctly put it in a conversation we once had about the sack: “It is the world�
�s shortest slave narrative, stripped down to its essence, sent back to us through time like a message in a bottle.”23
The allure of the sack existed in its form as well as its story: the seeming simplicity of a utilitarian object; in its function: the protection of a vulnerable child; and in its elaboration: the neatly stitched words of a hobbyist’s needle. This bag elicited a sense of sentimentalism like no other object at Middleton Place or a high-culture antiques show, and certainly not in the archival documents chronicling slavery from the perspective of enslavers. The sack seemed, in fact, to possess a kind of purity—of original intention, expression, and form—that made it both mesmerizing and distinctive.24
But this textile does more than reflect its viewers’ submerged worries and innate sympathies. It stands in for a series of facts that are common knowledge but are not often consciously examined or fully absorbed: the brutality of American slavery, the ugliness of lovely places like the Lowcountry South, the invisible hand of planter authoritarianism, and the triumph that is Black love. Ashley’s sack is not so simple as it seems, nor so saccharine. This object that barely survived the one hundred plus years since its original manufacture and transport across urban, rural, state, and regional lines is complex, forceful, resplendently symbolic, and a dramatic form of synecdoche—a part standing in for the whole.
The textile was exhibited for years inside a plantation house, exposed to the scrutiny and projected feelings of mainly white tourists. In a coincidence that makes this chain of events even more uncanny, the small sum that the Middleton Place Foundation exchanged for the sack, not accounting for inflation, nearly matches the price of Ashley’s ascribed value in Robert Martin’s estate inventory of 1852: $300. How would Rose have taken the news of this unexpected outcome? What would Ashley have felt at the sight of her survival pack on display? What would Ruth Middleton say if she knew who now possesses her hand-sewn story of slavery’s emotional toll? The irony here might feel like tragedy, or even betrayal, to these women. This heirloom, passed down by Black women through the last generations of midnight slavery and first generations of twilight freedom, traveled all the way north to Philadelphia only to be sent down south again, right back to the unholy city where its story most likely began. From the moment the bag departed from the Black Middleton family in the mid- to late 1900s, most of its caretakers and interpreters have been white. Shouldn’t we be uncomfortable with this chain of possession, with a contemporary market in Black heritage items and the “circulation of slavery relics in modern-day museums”?25
The complicating dynamics of race in processes of museum collecting, philanthropy, and stewardship become, like all the phases of this artifact’s rich history, part of the story of the sack. The same is true in a consideration of the fabric work of the legendary African American quilter Harriet Powers, who did not want to part with her intricate quilt that relayed Bible stories through cut and sewn pictures. As a formerly enslaved woman in rural Georgia struggling alongside her husband to acquire and hold on to a parcel of land for the livelihood of their family, Powers reluctantly sold what was possibly her first full-sized picture quilt to a white collector and artist, Jennie Smith, around 1890. Powers was disinclined to part with this quilt and did so only at her husband’s urging, due to their financial distress. When Powers delivered the quilt to Smith by way of an oxcart, she held the “precious burden in her lap encased in a clean flour sack, which was still enveloped in a crocus sack.”26
It is not through Powers’s intentional will that her quilts wound up on display in two of the country’s most renowned museums: the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (which owns the Bible quilt) and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (which owns what is referred to as the Pictorial quilt, featuring Bible stories as well as local events). At the same time, it was the desire to possess Powers’s art and experience the romance of what it represented (about racial difference, gender, and religious faith) on the part of wealthy and connected white women that protected those pieces for posterity. And Powers did maintain influence over future interpretations of her art by carefully relating her own artistic intentions orally. Collector Jennie Smith, herself an artist and teacher, recorded minute translations of each visual square, certainly told to her by Powers. A New England minister who received Powers’s second quilt as a gift from a group of white women at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University) wrote down Powers’s account of each picture in sentences that hold a hint of her speech and on index cards that mimic her quilt block form. To further the understanding of her work and preserve her interpretations of it, Harriet Powers left keys to her quilts. We can think of Ruth as having done something similar with her inscription on the sack, a key to the story of her foremothers. Like Powers, Ruth conveyed meanings through words attached to her creation and, while never intending to share that work with the world during her lifetime, left a bountiful gift.27 Her words turn the key in the lock of history’s door.
This undated portrait of master quilter Harriet Powers accompanied her transcribed oral description of the squares on the Pictorial quilt when it was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Note the detail of the artist’s scalloped apron embellished with the sunburst or starburst shapes that are also found on her surviving quilts. Photograph courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Harriet Powers described her quilt squares to purchasers, who wrote her intended meanings down. This quilt key transcribed on paper cards, together with a portrait of the artist, accompanied Powers’s quilt featuring Bible scenes and local events when it was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the mid-1970s. The quilt had been owned by the family of the Reverend Charles Cuthbert Hall, who received it as a gift in 1898 and displayed it in the family’s summer house in Westport Point, Massachusetts. Photograph courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Ashley’s sack was touched by many hands as it wove its way through two centuries to finally appear before us. It was likely produced in a cotton factory in the 1850s. It served the utilitarian purpose of carrying seeds or raw foodstuff for who knows how many before it came into Rose’s possession. Rose packed the bag with items from her environment, things that had been grown, harvested, or sewn by different individuals. Ashley received the bag from her mother and may have shared its contents with others, allowing them to press their fingers into the tensile fibers. She then made it all the way to freedom with that sack as her companion and managed to pass the item down to her daughter and granddaughter. Ruth embellished the bag with thread, stitching it tightly to its story, before passing away and passing it on. Unknown strangers in Pennsylvania and Tennessee (and perhaps places in between) shifted the sack from box to vehicle and into a flea market booth. A shopper discovered it, paid a merchant for it, took the fabric bag in hand, and forwarded it on to Middleton Place. Foundation board members received the textile and promised to steward it. Curators tended, inspected, and preserved it. Scholars researched, analyzed, and wrote about it. And now this item, having passed through countless fingers and imaginations (including yours and mine), hangs on the wall in a grand national institution. Saving this sack so that it could arrive at a point where we can together reflect on its meanings has required an all-hands-on-deck ethos despite the complications of racial politics. The sack still carries a burden of layered power relations, but it also contains within its preservation history a model for repurposing that past and for regenerating relationships as we engage in work of shared purpose across racial and regional lines. This is surely the same inclusive value needed to carry us forward in the challenging decades and centuries ahead.
Rather than being anomalous in its former display in a plantation house parlor or its current display by the cultural arm of a federal government that once condoned slavery, perhaps Ashley’s cotton sack is exactly where it should be housed at our precise moment in time. Perhaps Mary Edna Sullivan, in naming the object, intuited tha
t there was something productive in the abutment of the words “Ashley” and “sack,” a sound or a sense when the syllables rubbed against each other on a breath. Sack of ashes, sacrifice, circle of fire, funeral pyre. It is not a far stream-of-consciousness stretch to arrive at sackcloth, a coarse textile woven of goats’ hair used by those in the Old Testament to express contrition for their sins. Perhaps the Middleton Place plantation wore Ashley’s fabric like a sackcloth, a quiet testament to its founders’ wrongs of the past. And now the nation bears witness to this sackcloth in its virtual temple of public learning, the Smithsonian Institution, on the National Mall. The suffering and persistence of Black people, and of Indigenous people, made this country possible, shaping its cartographic boundaries, social structures, wealth distribution, founding documents, and everyday interactions in profound ways that can still be traced.
The sack Ruth embroidered in the 1920s is evidence of a Black matriline with staying power, a triumph that should have been impossible, given the conditions and logic of slavery that intended the loss of ties between mother and child. Rose, Ashley, and Ruth Middleton lived hard lives, chased by outsized threats and immediate terrors that many of us can barely imagine. “The sack,” the historian Heather Williams has written, “was a repository for their memories of vulnerability and grief.” But the object also contained within it inspiration for social renewal, when, “in a new generation, Ruth Middleton embroidered an inscription that carried the story beyond the immediate family” in its ultimate preservation and public display.28
