Book Review: All That She Carried — the extraordinary history of a mother’s gift
Tiya Miles traces a simple cotton sack across generations of enslaved women to tell a powerful story of love and survival
In 2007, at a flea market near Nashville, Tennessee, an extraordinary object was discovered among a bin of old fabrics. It was a cotton sack, dating back to the mid-19th century, rather threadbare and unremarkable bar a moving and intimate hand-stitched inscription documenting a mother’s love:
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
The historical record is typically written by those with power. In the case of the antebellum South, that generally means white, male slave owners. In its poignancy and detail, Ruth’s account, painstakingly embroidered on to fabric — the line “It be filled with my Love always” emphasised by bright red thread, the “Love” bigger and bolder than all the words surrounding it — is a powerful dissenting narrative, “a baseline rebuttal to the reams of slave-holder documents that categorized people as objects”, as Tiya Miles puts it in her sixth book, All That She Carried, published to great acclaim in the US in 2021.
As this extraordinary study goes on to show, it’s also a means by which to illuminate the experiences of millions of enslaved people whose voices have been silenced.
Traces of Rose and Ashley are all but nonexistent, but Miles doesn’t allow this to discourage her. A Harvard history professor who specialises in recovering the lives of Native Americans, African Americans and women, she is well versed in what she calls the “obfuscations” of the archive. This is not “a traditional history”, she warns her readers in the introduction. “It leans toward evocation rather than argumentation and is rather more meditation than monograph.”
If this might hint at a lack of scholarly rigour, it’s misleading. Not only is the book grounded in extensive and diligent research, but Miles’s argument for turning to a writing practice inspired by the work of the African-American cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman — one that uses imaginative licence in the face of archival gaps — is entirely convincing.
As such, she is unafraid of evocative language. Ashley’s “tattered” dress is, she says, a “fabric scar, a second skin, a shield [ . . . ] a sign of women’s lives frayed by slavery but nevertheless resplendent with beauty”. Neither does she shy away from poetic allusion. She envisions Ruth as a “storyteller” who “imbued a piece of fabric with all the drama and pathos of ancient tapestries depicting the deeds of queens and goddesses”.
Such artistic forays are always tethered to fact, and Miles employs speculation with impressive restraint and precision. Combing the records that do exist, she constructs portraits of Rose and Ashley in the shadows, reflections and elisions of what has been documented; triangulating existing records of the lives of other slaves both male and female (though obviously with an emphasis on the latter) in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, to fill in the blanks.
Most important, though, is the sack itself, an archive all its own — “at once a container, carrier, textile, art piece and record of past events”, which today belongs to the Middleton Place Foundation in Charleston, South Carolina. Miles structures the book around a close reading of it and its contents — long since removed, of course, but the list provides “a nearly unparalleled opportunity for insight into the lives of enslaved women”.
We get a history of the cotton trade; a consideration of the strict categorisation of the kinds of materials enslaved people were permitted to wear; a reflection on the food they ate (or weren’t allowed to eat); and the symbolism of hair, “a medium through which captors and captives fought for corporeal as well as psychological control” — a shorn female slave’s head was a sign of punishment.
Miles also discusses the value of the personal possessions of those who are considered property, and the broader trauma of mothering “under the constant shadow of loss”. When children like Ashley were sold off as chattel, it was part of a mother’s job to arm their child as best they could against this “private apocalypse”. Ruth’s very existence, of course, is proof that Ashley did endure, even though Miles can’t say for sure what happened to her.
Her impressive academic credentials aside, it takes a visionary mind to do what Miles has done in All That She Carried. First and foremost, this book pays homage to the lives of Ashley and Rose. But Miles has also managed to transform “the unspeakability of slavery’s humiliations and corrupted relationships” into a work that stands as a testament to the humanity enslaved people were so brutally denied.
— By Lucy Scholes. Read the review as it appears in the Financial Times.
