by Tiya Miles
Quilts
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Harriet Powers, Pictorial quilt. 1895–98. In this multicolored story quilt featuring biblical and climatic events, master quilter Powers depicts a cosmological vision of choice and consequence, all overseen by the Eye of God (pictured in the top row, square four, with Eve, the serpent, and Adam). Her textile, like embroiderer Ruth Middleton’s, speaks simultaneously of kinship (the children of God, people, and animals) and distance (the acts of disobedience, selfishness, and greed that necessitate divine sacrifice).
Photograph by Tiya Miles, 2019
Great-aunt Margaret’s quilt with pink-and-green floral pattern and blue polka-dot backing and hem. Ca. 1920s–1940s, Mississippi. Margaret Stribling, a lay quilter, appears to have fashioned this covering out of mixed fabric remnants. While the quilt contains no words, it holds the memory of a family story of survival and persistence. African American women across a range of locations and experiences—and, indeed, American women of all backgrounds—used cloth to express artistic visions and familial bonds.
Letitia Huckaby
Letitia Huckaby, Halle’s Dress. 2009. The patchwork layering of heirloom fabrics invokes a quilted aesthetic. A photographic print of the Huckabys’ daughter, Halle Lujah, lines the hem, imprinting legacies of family directly onto the surface of the garment. Passed between hands, Rose’s gift of a dress to her daughter prompts us to think about what touches, marks, and smells lingered on the garment well after their separation.
Marianne Boesky Gallery, photograph by Object Studies
Sanford Biggers, Selah. 2017. Abstract husk of an African sculpture with its arms raised in a position of prayer. The sculpture’s name, Selah, comes from the Hebrew word appearing at the end of Bible passages, signaling a pause. In the cutting and readorning of geometric heirloom fabric patterns, Biggers asks viewers to pause to consider the patchwork history each quilt calls forth. Viewers of Ashley’s sack are similarly called to pause and contemplate the many prayers breathed in Ashley’s name, and the countless twin prayers unnamed.
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Eli Leon bequest/ESTATE OF ROSIELEE TOMPKINS. FULL CAPTION IN PERMISSIONs ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
Rosie Lee Tompkins, Untitled. 2004. Fifty-two “yo-yos,” or quilting appliqués that resemble small seed sacks, are assembled in free-form lines next to crosses to represent the age of the quilter, Rosie Lee Tompkins, born Effie Mae Martin. Tompkins, being a deeply religious woman, found power in numerology and combined Bible verses with other personal dates, such as her own birthday (9-6-36) or addresses. Because Tompkins imagined each cloth sack as its own colorful prayer, her improvisational quilt-making techniques remind us of Ruth’s embroidery and Rose’s quick assemblage for Ashley’s journey.
Hair
Deja Milany, photograph by Darryl DeAngelo Terrell
Deja Milany, Undone. 2020. Milany braids synthetic hair into burlap, a material often used for sacking, in a bending and uneven pattern. Like the fragile skeins that form the knit of kinship, the rows of braids leave trails of loosely falling curly hair in some places, while elsewhere tight plaits hang outside the frame. The versatility of the chosen fibers, burlap and hair, as carrying materials illuminate potential motivations behind Rose’s gifts.
Marianetta Porter
Marianetta Porter, Found. 2015–16. Braided hair, letterpress printed paper. Poem reads “Found / In a bible / tucked discreetly / behind a nail / in the spine / a single braid / clipped from a child / sold off / to unknown traders.” An unthinkable loss and a desire to remember similarly inspired Rose, and comforted Ashley on her journey.
Photograph by Angela Hennessy
Angela Hennessy, Mourning Wreath. 2017. Synthetic and human hair, artist’s hair, found hair, 24K and imitation gold leaf on copper sheet, enamel paint, chain, steel frame, and cement base. The braid that once graced the sack Rose gave to Ashley prompts us to ask, How can hair tie the living to the dead? At the intersection of African and Victorian mourning rituals, Hennessy weaves a garland of synthetic and human hair, turning intricate braids into a portal to the ancestral realm.
Sonya Clark, collection of Susan Cummins
Sonya Clark, Heritage Pearls. 2010. In molding Black hair into jewelry, Clark values hair as one might value a pearl: precious, a gemstone to be inherited and bestowed from generation to generation. Far from a position of lack, hair is cast as an exquisite gift. So, too, was Ashley’s sack an heirloom, passed down between generations, lost and found again amid other treasures, the hair inside a pearl in its own right.
Sonya Clark
Sonya Clark, Skein. 2016. Clark wraps locks of human hair from an anonymous woman to resemble a skein of yarn. As curly hair is more vulnerable than straight hair to the stresses caused by sun, water, sweat, and grooming, the “dreading” or “locking” of hair is often done as a way of protecting and strengthening textured hair. Implied in the size of Clark’s skein is the health of the hair used, as well as its ability to endure as a fiber material for the production of art, mirroring the care and endurance of Black family bonds in the midst of extreme stressors.
Michelle May-Curry is the project director of the Humanities for All initiative at the National Humanities Alliance and is a PhD candidate in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Her scholarly and curatorial work has appeared in two art exhibitions, in Detroit and Havana, Cuba, in partnership with the Carr Center and Carrie Mae Weems.
To my Grandmother Alice, Grandmother Lillian, Grandmother Cornelia, Grandma Bertha, Great-grandmother Ida Belle, Great-grandmother Rachael, Great-grandmother Missouri, Great-grandmother Anna Christian, Great-aunt Margaret, and to all of the greats and grandmothers whose handiwork made our survival possible
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My life is richer for having encountered the bottomless sack that was handled and fashioned by Rose, Ashley, and Ruth. I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars program and its officers for making this journey possible. I have had the opportunity to learn from and work with many giving people as I wrote. Conversation partners along the way fundamentally influenced the shape and tone of this book through their wise feedback and insights. For their dogged genealogical detective work, I thank genealogists Jesse Bustos-Nelson, a Charlestonian from birth and a librarian by training, and Hannah Scruggs, a public historian and specialist in enslaved descendants’ research at the Robert Frederick Smith Explore Your Family History Center at the NMAAHC. For engrossing exchanges about textiles and writing, I am deeply grateful to literary scholar Megan Sweeney, at the University of Michigan. To Lisa Brooks, Lauret Savoy, and Sadada Jackson, I am appreciative of our conversations about places, things, and their spirits; your work is inspirational. To Emily Lavelle, you are a steadfast supporter of my writing life and a sensitive yet acute reader; thank you for being there. To Cathleen Cahill, Martha Few, and Lauren Feldman, I am thankful for our conversation during a Berkshire Conference meeting at Johns Hopkins University about the characteristics of archives. To Kendra Field, Sarah Pinto, and participants in the Tufts University Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Defamiliarizing the Family: Genealogy and Kinship as Critical Method,” I thank you for planning and joining a set of generative conversations that kept this project simmering even as the novel coronavirus terribly disrupted our year together. I gave early talks on this project at the University of Georgia and at Columbia University. I extend a heartfelt thanks to all of those who shared incredible ideas about the sack at UGA: my host Stephen Berry, Claudio Saunt, Reinaldo Román, James Brooks, and so many other members of that warm community. At Columbia, I am particularly grate
ful to Celia Naylor, Marisa Fuentes, Michelle Commander, Rashauna Johnson, Kellie Jones, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Karl Jacoby, and Robert Gooding-Williams.
Presentations at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center, Environment Forum (housed in Mahindra), Environmental History Working Group, Hutchins Center, and History Department in 2019–20 afforded me crucial feedback and new challenges that tested and strengthened the work. I am grateful to everyone who attended these sessions and offered their thoughts, including (but not limited to) Ian Miller, Robin Kelsey, Joyce Chaplin, Andy Robichaud, Kate Brown, Michaela Thompson, Sidney Chalhoub, Dan Smail, Sunil Amrith, Ju Yon Kim, Susan Lively, Hannah Marcus, Liz Cohen, and the lifesaving woman who suggested that I reread Parable of the Sower. I am especially grateful to President Emerita Drew Gilpin Faust, who took the time to attend the Mahindra Center talk and kindly sent me a book (and made my new job possible). I was touched by the generosity of William (Ned) Friedman, director of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard, who confirmed for me that pecan trees can be grown from the nut and planted pecan seeds for me. To Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and all of the 2019–20 Hutchins Center Fellows, especially Imani Uzuri, Bakari Kitwana, Mireille Miller-Young, and Traci Parker, I offer a special thanks for your affirmation of the invisible value of this book.
Without the welcome and openness of the staff at Middleton Place and the NMAAHC, I would still be at square one with this project. Thank you to Paul Gardullo for your early encouragement, to Mary Elliott for your personal tour, and to Mary Edna Sullivan and Jeff Neale for your gifts of time, access, and frankness. Thank you to curator Jennifer Swope at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and curator Sara Hume at the Kent State University Museum for teaching me about quilts. I am grateful, as well, to the staff at the American Antiquarian Society and to all of those who shared knowledge during our memorable Historic Charleston trip of spring 2018, especially the food historian David Shields and the garden writer Ruah Donnelly (who asked me this lightning bolt of a question: Had Rose given Ashley the pecans as food or as seeds?). Much of this research was conducted at historic sites, in the pages of slave narratives, and in digital archives. I spent most of my archival research time at the Addlestone Library at the College of Charleston and at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. I am grateful to the archivists there who kindly welcomed and helped me: Harlan Greene, Dale Rosengarten, Mary Jo Fairchild, and Steve Tuttle; I am grateful as well to Grimké Sisters Tour co-founder and guide Lee Ann Bain for an engaging tour and helpful follow-up correspondence. I am likewise grateful to Tamar Gonen Brown at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library for her attentive assistance with adjacent sources for the Ruth Middleton chapter. I am thankful, also, to the librarians and staff at the South Carolina Room of the Charleston County Public Library, the Charleston Library Society, the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, the Avery Research Center, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, who aided me as well as my research assistants. I am grateful for the close reading of a related essay by the editors and peer reviewer of Winterthur Museum’s Portfolio, especially Catharine Dann Roeber, Jennifer Van Horn, and Amy Earls. MLA president Anne Ruggles Gere offered fruitful thoughts about my interpretations of the literary aspects of the sack; for that I am grateful.
I am lucky to have friends and mentors who remind me that what we create in this world we accomplish in many unspoken ways, together. I am grateful to Celia Naylor, Paulina Alberto, Kelly Cunningham, Beth James, Sharony Green, Magda Zaborowska (who introduced me to the work of John Michael Vlach many years ago), Earl Lewis (whose Mellon Foundation convening about slavery and public scholarship in 2016 was pivotal), and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (who should wear a superhero cape). I am grateful to the organizing team of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians 2020, who always inspired with their fierce dedication to telling the stories of women’s pasts: Jennifer Brier, Marisa Fuentes, Stephanie Richmond, Sandra Dawson, Martha Jones, Cathleen Cahill, Martha Few, Shani Mott, and Courtney Hobson. I owe a debt of gratitude to colleagues and friends who read chapters of the manuscript and offered invaluable critiques: Meg Sweeney, Marisa Fuentes, Martha Jones, Jallicia Jolly, Hannah Scruggs, and William (Ned) Friedman. Many individuals knowingly and unknowingly nursed this project along with their suggestions and presence; my thanks to Ben Goggins, Sean Halloran, Mary Kelley, Barbara Savage, Rebecca Scott, Sonya Clark, LaKisha Simmons, Alison Frank Johnson, Kirk Sides, Bobby Donaldson, Lisa McGirr, David Blight, Walter Johnson, Anne Steinert, Rowena McClinton, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Several incredible graduate students conducted research for chapters of this book; my thanks to Dylan Nelson, Michelle May-Curry, and Mary McNeil. I am grateful to Kimberly O’Hagan, Cory Paulsen, and Sylvie Papazian of Harvard’s History Department, who managed my NEH grant funds and permissions payments with care and good cheer. I have been fortunate to work with the skillful and supportive literary agent Deirdre Mullane on three books, including this one, whose lives she tended with care. I am now fortunate to be working with the inspirational literary agent Tanya McKinnon, whose passion for narrating Black experiences and midwifing voices of change reshaped and reinvigorated this book in its final year. My effervescent editor at Random House, Molly Turpin, took a chance on this unusual project, encouraged it with a patience of spirit and clarity of editorial vision, and championed its value at her press. Thank you, as well, to Bonnie Thompson, who copyedited this manuscript with a sharp eye and intentional pen, and to Chris Dodge, who always crafts meticulous and masterful indexes.
As always, my family cheered this project on from its inception. My father, Benny Miles, never failed to ask how things were going with “Sarah’s Satchel” (which, although it is not the subject of this book, fascinates me as a fictive possibility), and my mother, Patricia Miles King, stayed with us during major transitions and challenges over the last two years, helping to care for the kids and making my writing possible. My love and thanks always extend to the people who have to live with the intense creature I become as I struggle with the pages: Joe, Sylvan, Noa, and Nali; I send love and appreciation as well to those family members who offer sustenance from all of the places where they are, especially (but not only) Erin, Erik, Aunt Vanessa, Aunt Deborah, Montroue (a crochet artiste), Sharon (an embroiderer extraordinaire), and, finally, my godfather, Joseph Porter (gifter of pens), and my father-in-law, Joe Azure (maker of prayers), both departed from this sphere in 2020, but not from our memories.
There are bound to be errors in this book, and they are mine. I regret that even with the help of two able genealogists, I was unable to identify living descendants of Rose. If I have offended the spirits of Rose, Ashley, Rosa, Ruth, Dorothy, or their descendants in any way, I offer my apology. If I have contributed to love and life in any way, I offer my gratitude for the opportunity. Thank you to the ancestors for their company and forbearance. Thank you to the descendants for carrying on.
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. On the front of this eighteenth-century utilitarian bag, an unknown craftswoman embroidered a lush floral display. The exhibit note reads, “Large bags that held a variety of plain and ornamental needlework projects were often embellished with embroidered decoration. These could be taken on visits, when groups of friends gathered to chat and stitch.” The Diligent Needle: Instrument of Profit, Pleasure, and Ornament, online exhibit, Winterthur, 2020.
SAMPLER: A NOTE ON TERMS
Over the past decade, historians of slavery have moved toward a shift in language propelled in part by community members’ protest at references to ancestors as “slaves.” This push by readers paralleled a reexamination by scholars seeking to more accurately name historical populations and processes. The term “slave,” common in the literature as recently as five years ago, reduces unfr
ee people to an external categorization that renders them subhuman and makes it difficult to imagine their full lives and subjectivities beyond this reductive classification. More recently, cognates of “slave,” such as “slaveholder” and “slavery,” as well as words that convey unassailed authority, such as “master” and “owner,” and words that blur or romanticize historical roles, such as “planter,” have also come under scrutiny for negating Black humanity and erasing the active violence of those who bought, sold, and legally possessed others. (These discussions have unfolded in a context of African diaspora slavery studies rather than Native American slavery studies, where “slave” and “slavery” are now often used in place of the formerly preferred and arguably softer terms “captive” and “captivity.”) I write this note at the end of the summer of 2020, in which massive protests against anti-Black racism and police brutality shifted the axis of our public culture and set off new conversations about language and power that are still unfolding.
The terms preferred by many writers and readers of African diasporic history currently are “enslaved person,” “enslaved people,” “enslaver,” and “enslavement.” While I agree with the logic and politics behind these changes and often follow suit, I do not avoid the older terms uniformly. I find the words “slave” and “slavery” to be precisely what I mean when I am referring to categories defined and imposed by southern owners of people, to societal as well as legal dictates, and to racial systems of capture. In contrast, I try to select “enslaved” or “unfree” when I mean to designate a person from their perspective, the perspective of their community, or our perspective as researchers and readers. I use established terms from historical study such as “slave society,” which points to places like South Carolina where slavery was the chief engine of the economy as well as the social structure, and “slave narrative,” which points to a literary genre. I also retain the term “slave mother,” which has a particular literary and historical valence, as seized upon by the African American poet, essayist, and suffragist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in her anti-slavery poems of the same title, and as analyzed by Harriet Jacobs in her classic memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
