All That She Carried

A desperate mother gives her child all she can before they are separated: a cotton sack with a handful of nuts, a tattered dress, and a braid of hair. Little Ashley was sold away from her mother but somehow held onto and cherished that bag. Later, her granddaughter embroidered that story of a mother’s love onto the bag.

I never knew where this story would take me because it’s not a history book or a family story like any other. The author takes this one sad and beautiful object and asks us to think about motherhood, Black hair, women’s art,… show more.

This is a biography of familial resilience, both personal and national. I love this book because it remedies one of modern history's most deafening archival silences by giving enslaved Black women a voice.

Deftly, Tiya Miles paints a portrait of revolutionary generational love using a plain cotton bag. Ashley’s mother, Rose, gave her this sack right before Ashley was sold away from her in 1850s South Carolina. An African-American legacy of strength and creativity is literally embroidered on this sack by subsequent generations, serving as an archive of Black women’s experiences.

After reading this book, visit the artifact itself at… show more.

Miles made me demand more of history. She writes a fascinating tale of love and belonging based on sources outside formal archives.

The book warns us about the dangers of blindly accepting traditional ways of writing history. It reminds us that we must seek new approaches to representing the past if we ever hope to tell broader, more truthful stories.   

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.

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… show more.

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… show more.

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… show more.