All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, written by Tiya Miles and published in 2021, is the story of the artifact known as Ashley’s Sack, a cloth pouch owned by three generations of enslaved women and embroidered with their story. The nonfiction narrative follows the three women: great-grandmother Rose, who packed the sack; her daughter Ashley, who received it from Rose; and Ruth, Ashley’s granddaughter, who embroidered the tale of her great-grandmother’s experiences on the sack in 1921. The text is an exploration of the history of American slavery, focusing on the experiences of women and girls. The book addresses themes such as Material Culture as Documentation, Black Women’s Resilience, and Social Responsibility for Marginalized Experience.

All That She Carried is a National Book Award winner and a New York Times bestseller; it was also named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, and Publisher’s Weekly. Miles is a professor of history in African American, Indigenous, and women’s studies at Harvard University, and All That She Carried is her sixth book.

This guide is based on the Random House paperback edition published in 2022.

Content Warning: This guide contains discussions of human trafficking and enslavement, anti-Black racism, graphic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse that are found in the source text.

Summary

Tiya Miles was first inspired to investigate the artifact known as Ashley’s Sack when traveling to Savannah, Georgia, to participate in a conference. When colleague Ben Goggins informed her of a textile bearing connections to enslaved women from the Charleston Lowcountry area, Miles was fascinated by its origins. She applied for a public history grant to facilitate her research and began tracing the sack’s origins and the women central to its story, beginning with an enslaved woman who packed a precious inventory of survival items for her nine-year-old child who was to be sold away from her.

In 2016, Miles began her research into Ashley’s Sack, a medium-sized antique cotton tote found in a bin with other assorted textiles at a Nashville flea market in 2007. At the time that Miles began investigating its history, it was owned by the Middleton Place Foundation and exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Embroidered on Ashley’s Sack was the inventory contained therein and the story of what happened to the woman who packed it (Rose) and the child it was packed for (Ashley), the grandmother of the sack’s embroiderer (Ruth Middleton).

All That She Carried is broken into seven chapters, a prologue, introduction, and epilogue. It traces Rose and Ashley to the estate of Robert Middleton, a wealthy Charleston planter whose death precipitated the liquidation of his estate and the sale of Ashley away from her mother. Miles follows the trail of historical records, locating Ruth Middleton and her daughter Dorothy in Philadelphia in 1921 and examining the contents of the sack and the historical contexts and cultural significances that contribute to its meaning. Miles attempts to trace Ashley’s life after receiving the sack, examining the challenges faced by enslaved women and children during the antebellum period. Although the historical record is sparse, Miles uses what little evidence exists to reconstruct Ashley’s possible experiences and the ways she might have held onto her mother’s love through the sack.

Next, Miles discusses Ruth’s decision to embroider the sack with her grandmother’s story in 1921. Miles contextualizes this act within the early 20th-century movement of Black women seeking to preserve family histories and cultural heritage in the face of ongoing racial violence and marginalization. She also considers the standards that governed white women’s behavior during the Victorian era and discusses how these values were reflected in Black women’s lives, including preserving the memory of loved ones by cutting a lock of their hair.

Finally, the text reflects on the importance of remembering and honoring the stories of enslaved women like Rose, Ashley, and Ruth. Miles underscores how objects like the sack can serve as vessels for intergenerational memory, carrying forward the legacies of those who endured unimaginable hardships but continued to fight for their dignity and humanity.