Ever since narratives of the enslaved began to be published in the 18th century, writers have wrestled with how to convey the visceral brutality of slavery without robbing the subjects of their humanity. But how, especially in nonfiction, is it possible to imagine that caged world in the absence of first-hand accounts? On plantations, a literate population was considered a threat, and in America laws were passed to prohibit the enslaved from reading and writing. Apart from a few written testimonies by women such as Harriet Jacobs, who escaped and bore witness, there has been an immense silence.
The Harvard historian Tiya Miles has taken a bold and innovative approach to this problem in All That She Carried, a bestseller when it came out in the US last year, now published for the first time in Britain. The story begins in South Carolina in 1852, with a stark description of the dread that would have been familiar to every enslaved woman: “Rose was in existential distress that fateful winter when her would-be earthly master, Robert Martin, passed away.” Rose had no agency over her future and knew what was coming: the auction block that would separate her from her nine-year-old daughter, Ashley, for the rest of their lives.
Almost a century ago, the author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston lamented that the history of slavery was still constructed largely from the primary sources of enslavers: journals, manifests, diaries and bills of sale. “All these words from the seller,” wrote Hurston, “but not one word from the sold.” All That She Carried finds a way to give voice to the wordless by using a mundane, domestic object – a cloth sack and its contents – to thread an extraordinary tale through the generations. Miles writes that when Rose considered her daughter’s fate, she “gathered all of her resources – material, emotional, and spiritual – and packed an emergency kit for the future”. The heart swells as one reads that, in 1921, almost 70 years later, Ruth Middleton, the great granddaughter of Rose – who’d headed north in the Great Migration from South Carolina to Philadelphia – embroidered the following lines on the sack:
My great grandmother Rose
Mother of Ashley gave her this sack when
She was sold at age of 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
Ruth’s actions were an example of what Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, in The Age of the Homespun, calls the “enduring habits of possession, and mnemonic power of goods”. The cotton sack was a family treasure and signifier of hope and resilience. Miles contrasts its ability to conjure silenced memories with the marble monuments of Confederate generals that were erected “to bury a nation’s sin”.
Following Ruth’s death in 1942, the sack vanished. Miles tells how it was discovered in 2007 by a white woman at a flea market near Nashville, Tennessee, who quickly realised she had “stumbled upon a precious object”. An online search led her to Middleton Place, a nonprofit foundation that was once the home of extraordinarily wealthy slave holders, Henry and Mary Middleton. Infuriatingly, Ashley’s keepsake found its way back from Philadelphia to South Carolina when the shopper donated it to Middleton Place – a return to the scene of the crime, as it were. It’s presently on loan to the Smithsonian Institution.
Like a literary detective or lawyer, Miles sets out to trace the narrative of the women whose lives were bound by the sack. It is introduced as the most important evidence, almost in the way of a courtroom exhibit, since official records are inadequate: Rose and Ashley’s enslaved lives only merited two perfunctory entries in their enslaver’s ledger.
She ably conjures plantation life in the antebellum south, drawing on memoirs and other narratives of the enslavement, such as Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), to fill out Rose and Ashley’s stories.
Miles’s descriptions are often prefixed with qualifying words: “‘imagine”, “perhaps”, “is it too much of a stretch?” The recurring speculations and suppositions might cause some historians to wince. But Miles’s great achievement is her ability to wield an extraordinary empathy, closer to the German Einfühlung from which the English word derives – an act of feeling into, of projecting oneself into another body. Time and again, she introduces painful scenes with “picture this”, and we, the readers, do just that, even as we instinctively turn away from what we might see. She is mindful, too, of the danger of slipping into pornographic depictions of the violence endured. “Our review of the scene will stop here,” she writes on the brink of describing an enslaver’s act of sexual violence.
The book successfully invokes a toxic period in American history with powerful reflections on the artefacts – all now lost – placed in Ashley’s sack and listed on its front: the braid of Rose’s hair; the tattered dress; three handfuls of pecan nuts. And then, of course, the “whispers of love”. Working her way through each in turn, Miles explores the cultural significance of each item.
The braid of hair is the most unusual object, according to the author, and perhaps the most symbolic. It offers “a glimpse into Rose’s beliefs about spirit power, transcendent connection”; she concludes that the mother’s hair was meant to enliven the sack with her spirit.
The tattered dress that Ashley would have to make do with was a coarse, poor quality garment of “Negro cloth”, a badge of slavery. Miles argues that sumptuary laws – dictating what unfree women could wear – were born of the plantocracy’s fear of the enslaved getting above their station, and thereby of appealing sexually to white men.
The three handfuls of pecans surprise Miles, as the nut was an expensive delicacy, but it could also be foraged – a regular practice among enslaved people, she notes, who gathered food and poached for their own survival. Finally, the whispers of love are, without doubt, an expression that death shall have no dominion over Rose; she will continue to have a permanent presence in her daughter’s life.
The contents of the sack clearly represented a mother’s devotion. They challenged the slaveholders’ disregard for both mother and daughter, evident in the ledger which merely listed the named property of Robert Martin, and the monetary worth of Rose ($700) and Ashley ($300) when they were put on display on the auction block.
Miles marvels at the way Ruth managed, through her embroidered intervention – made even more affecting by its Haiku-like brevity and concision – to transform Ashley in this story from a cowed victim to empowered witness. Ultimately, like the sack itself, All That She Carried “stands in eloquent defence of the country’s ideals by indicting its failures”, and reads as a continuation of the thread that embroidered Rose’s sack: “of love made manifest in the preservation of things passed on”.
• All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake is published by Profile (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer buy your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
