Through sheer serendipity, All That She Carried is the third book in a row I’ve read about the place of objects in our lives and memories. The first two were fiction: Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson and The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk. All That She Carried is nonfiction and deals with a grain sack that was given by a Black slave mother to her daughter who was torn from her family and sold. The sack passed through generations from the 1850s through the 1920s when Ruth Middleton embroidered the following on the sack:
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’s hair. Told her
It be filled with my Love always
she never saw her again
Ashley is my grandmother
Author Miles writes very moving story here, but she faced an immense challenge: the lack of records kept during the Black slavery-related diaspora meant entire family histories were lost. Miles could find little on these three women. She, by necessity, fills in with a lot of supposition based on what we do know about chattel slavery in America, much of which is difficult to read and much of which reads as “filler.”
This book made me grateful for the history I have of my own family. My father researched our genealogy back through the 1700s. I have ephemera like the receipt for my grandmother’s first year of college ($320 including room, board, and piano lessons), the receipt for the Percheron shipped from France for my great-grandfather’s horse ranch, dozens of my grandmother’s paintings, a book of poetry in which a great-aunt documented Texas ranch life in the 1890s, and countless other items. My heart goes out to those whose history has been ruptured by man’s inhumanity to his fellow man.
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All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Random House, June 8, 2021) is available through:
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You can read my reviews of Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson here and The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamu here.
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