How a cotton sack and a mother's love outlasted slavery
Harvard historian Tiya Miles is the 2022 Cundill History Prize winner for her book, All That She Carried
*Originally published on February 21, 2023.
At a glance, it doesn't look like much. A creased cotton sack over 150 years old, patchy and discoloured. But it's an astounding historical artifact, containing the stories of three women, whose lives in turn embody the defining history of the United States, from slavery, to Emancipation, to Reconstruction, to Jim Crow.
It's also the basis of a stunning work of history by Tiya Miles, whose book All That She Carried has won multiple awards, including the 2022 Cundill History Prize.
The first few embroidered lines are spare, yet heart-wrenching:
My great grandmother Rose
mother of Ashley gave her this sack when
she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina
They tell us that Rose and Ashley were enslaved. But apart from that fact and their first two names, not much else. That's where Harvard historian Tiya Miles enters the picture. In 2016, she had her first viewing of the sack when it was put on display in Washington, D.C.
"It felt like a gut punch," she told IDEAS host, Nahlah Ayed. "It felt like a clutching of the chest… and I almost felt as if there was a softening of time as I sat there in front of the sack. That there was a way in which the present was moving into the past and that I, as a viewer, as a reader, was entering into the sack and the space of the sack, the emotional and psychological and historical room that the sack created."
Finding Rose and Ashley
Then began months of painstaking research to find out who Rose and Ashley were.
Professor Miles scoured the records, finding that the name "Rose" was extremely common, but "Ashley" much less so. Last names were denied to enslaved people as they were considered property, not people.
When the moment came that she saw the two first names together among the records of a particular slave owner in Charleston, South Carolina, she knew she'd finally found them.
"My heart dropped to the ground because this really had to have been them. There were no other records like this of a Rose and an Ashley around the right age in South Carolina, who had been owned by the same enslaver."
Then there were the contents of the sack to figure out: the three handfuls of pecans, the "tattered" dress, and the braid of Rose's hair.
The braid of Rose's hair is the most moving item in the sack.- Tiya Miles
Pecans
Pecans may seem an odd choice for a mother to have given her child who was about to be taken from her — and odder still since they were a luxury item in 1850s South Carolina. But their rarity is precisely what helped Miles to learn more about Rose.
"For Rose to have gotten access to not just food, but to a luxury food item, indicated that she probably was a cook."
To have given the pecans to her daughter would have been an extraordinary, and transgressive, act of kindness. She took from the master and gave to her daughter, not just one handful, but three — following a long line of enslaved people's techniques to supplement their diets, such as surreptitiously catching grains of rice in the folds of their clothing while threshing.
The braid
Then there's the braid Rose included in the sack.
For Miles, "The braid of Rose's hair is the most moving item in the sack." The reason: it was a gesture of both love for her daughter, and resistance to the institution of slavery itself.
"I just paused and tried to imagine Rose in a space, perhaps the kitchen, cutting her hair. And when I saw that image in my mind, I realized in a different way what she was doing — which is: she was taking back the right to alter the body that was, of course, her own. But that was claimed by her enslavers by law as belonging to them when she cut her braid. She was saying to them in a symbolic way and an unspoken message: 'I don't belong to you. I belong to myself. I belong to you, my daughter.'"
The dress
Enslaved girls and women were perpetually at risk of being sexually exploited and abused. The clothing they were given would often be too ill-fitting to cover them according to mid-nineteenth century standards of modesty. So giving Ashely a dress, knowing that her daughter would be put on an auction block to be examined by prospective buyers with their prying eyes, was Rose's way of protecting her child.
There may have been more to the dress as well: it may not have been tattered, in the sense of being ripped. The intended word may well have been "tatted" — given that Ruth Middleton was probably a relative novice at embroidery.
As Miles points out: "The word 'tatted' could have been misremembered, or written a little bit differently as 'tattered' on Ashley's sack. And if that's the case, it might mean that the dress Rose packed was not tattered — tattered as in torn — but was 'tatted' and embellished with a special kind of thick lace."
And if it were a tatted dress made by Rose herself, it would underline the lengths to which she went to safeguard her child.
Love
The way Tiya Miles sees it, "love is at the centre of this story" — love between and among generations of Black women: Ruth, Ashley and Rose. It's also prominent in the central line of the sack, with the word itself stitched in a brilliant red:
It be filled with my Love always
"Ruth put the word 'love' in the middle of her embroidery. She rendered it in red. She used a capital letter, which she only uses at the beginning of sentences, or for proper nouns in this embroidery. So she's telling us that love is core. It is key.
"It is essential to the story. And she might also be telling us, or suggesting, that love has a kind of life of its own."
A fitting end
Recuperating the stories of Rose, Ashley and Ruth brings us closer to history as it was experienced by those who lived through it. It's not "official" history; it's ground-up, not top-down. And given that the sack has survived this long is close to miraculous.
Miles concludes All That She Carried on a note that blends the historic with the poetic.
"Rose's sack was made of cotton grown by unfree people, produced by a poor and possibly enslaved working class in a factory, secured by a chain stitch eerily symbolic of the forced-labour ethos of the era... That Rose took all of this in hand and renewed the sack's original purpose feels mystically fitting."
*This episode was produced by Greg Kelly.
For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.
