Briefly Noted

“Briefly Noted” — From The New Yorker Books section: “This powerful history of women and slavery revolves around a nineteenth-century cotton sack found at a flea market in 2007, now on view at the Smithsonian. An enslaved woman named Rose gave it to her daughter Ashley when she was sold and they were separated. As Miles tries to add to this information, embroidered on the sack by Ashley’s granddaughter, she finds that reconstructing marginalized histories “requires an attentiveness to absence as well as presence.” She uses the item and its contents—a tattered dress, a handful of pecans, and a braid of hair—to explore the lives of Black women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and her meticulous research ultimately reveals the probable origins of the keepsake’s former owners.” The New Yorker. Published July 26, 2021.