All That She Carried
Book description
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * WINNER OF THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE
'A remarkable book' - Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
'A brilliant exercise in historical excavation and recovery' - Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello
'A history told with brilliance and tenderness…
Why read it?
4 authors picked All That She Carried as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Taking only names and a few verses stitched onto a cotton sack discovered at a flea market near Nashville, Tiya Miles uncovers a stunning story of love, resilience, and triumph in the lives of family members who carried this cotton sack out of slavery.
This National Book Award Winner is not to be missed, not only for its powerful storytelling, but for the tools it teaches about reaching back into history and recovering lives otherwise consigned to oblivion.
From Gregg's list on recovering lost histories.
The sack in question, currently exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, bears a haunting embroidered inscription that one scholar has called “the shortest slave narrative in history”:
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 Love always she never saw her again Ashley is my grandmother.
Who were Rose and Ashley? Why did Ashley give Rose this sack? What were the meanings…
From Benjamin's list on making you rethink 19th-century America.
A National Book Award winner, this amazing book by a Black historian traces the life of a single object—a cotton sack dating to the 1850s, given by an enslaved woman named Rose to her daughter Ashley—handed down through three generations of women whose lives unfold within the continuous every day “war” of slavery and opppression.
Mothers and daughters, whose bonds survive Civil War and a peace that does not free them, defy separation and continue against all odds. All That She Carried, among all the books I read as research for my Civil War-era novel, stands out for its imaginative…
From Jayne's list on mothers and daughters and the trauma of war.
Winner of the national book award for non-fiction, this magnificent book brings the reader into the heartbreaking, but common occurrence of mother child separation. These separations happened quite frequently during the child trafficking practices of slavery in the United States.
The mother, Rose, provides her daughter, Ashley, with tokens and tools in a hand-crafted sack that she carries with her when she is wrenched from her mother in a slave sale. The truth of Roses’ love and loss reverberates and ripples through several generations of one black American family.
This book made me recall family keepsakes I have not thought…
From Judith's list on the power of memory to heal racial trauma.
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