Marketed as non-fiction, this book reads more like a poetic exploration of what might have been. Starting with a sack found in a second hand shop, Miles uses information they can link to it as well as inferences about what they can’t to weave a possible narrative about the owner of this object. Creative and lyrical in it’s telling, it didn’t feel like true non-fiction. While I learned a lot about antebellum Carolinas, the book was in actuality less about the sack and the owners than it was about life for Black Americans from the early 1800s to the early 1900s. Thanks to netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

All That She Carried by Tiya Miles is about the journey of Ashley’s sack and the stories it held. The sack originated as a grain sack with a few special items curated by her mother Rose and given to Ashley right before she was sold at a slave auction at only 9 years old. The sack survived slavery, war, migration, and time and was handed down through generations of women. Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth in 1921, knew it important enough to hand embroider her family’s history onto this sack with the following words so that we can’t forget the struggles they endured:

“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 my Love always
she never saw her again
Ashley is my grandmother

— Ruth Middleton, 1921”


This book was powerful in not only learning about Ashley’s sack but also about filling in more details that were lost in its history AND in exploring the similar stories of unfree people, especially women in the South during the time of slavery.

Here are some examples that stood out to me from the book:

- Hair was seen as a symbol of power, so many unfree people were controlled through the mistreatment of their hair (cutting of, covering of, not allowing hairstyles, or care of). Giving a braid of hair to Ashley would have been seen as empowering.
- Clothing was important in distinguishing who was free and not free; clothing became a form of expression and protection, especially since slave clothing was often thin and didn’t fit well. The dress Rose gave Ashley was a way of protecting her.
- Objects held important symbolic representations (personal lock of hair from mother showed protection/empowerment, beads from mothers as most valued possession showed love); slaves didn’t own much so these few things had immense value through the stories and representations that they held such as the pecans that were both seeds and food for substance.
- These were real, true stories of families torn apart. Children were sold from mothers as Ashley was from her mother Rose, which is where this sack has its roots. This was normalized and seen as okay.
- Heartbreaking as to how normalized it was for unfree women to be treated a sexual slaves on top of everything else they were put through. We should all be horrified.

These women in this family created a visual and written record of all these things, horrific and beautiful. Love can carry us through terrible things but as humans we absolutely must do better so that things like this don’t have to happen again to families where daughters are ripped from their mothers.

Thanks to Netgalley, publisher and author for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Such a powerful book. We purchased a copy for the library and I am recommending it as a course text for next year.

I fall short on having the words to describe this powerful book. It's essential reading.

“Tiya Miles has written a beautiful book about the tragic materiality of black women’s lives across three generations, through slavery and freedom. This book is for anyone interested in learning about black people's centrality to American history.”—Stephanie Jones-Rogers, author of They Were Her Property

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this book with me. All thoughts are my own.

A fascinating book. With the barest of clues, Miles brings to life people who left no written record and were allowed no freedom.

A beautiful book on the historical connection and importance of objects and how they link us to complex truths of the past. Miles goes beyond the analysis of Ashley’s sack to comment on the condition and endurance of Black women across time. This was a slower read for me, but worth the investment. There are times Miles
repeats or deepens a previous point, which makes this book feel cyclical and like it’s trying to do multiple things. But that’s also the nature of Black history, this fragmented narrative, so Miles honors the work in this way.

Tiya Miles’ unforgettable All That She Carried uses the history of a single object as a focus for an exploration of Black family life during slavery and beyond. The object is the cloth sack with which Rose, an enslaved woman, sent her nine-year-old daughter Ashley off to the new master who had bought her in 1852. The bag’s original contents were both moving and meager— some pecans, a dress worn to tatters, and a braid of Rose’s hair—but its textile gained added meaning when one of Rose’s descendants decorated it with embroidery referencing Rose and Ashley’s story. Miles makes indefatigable use of historical documentation to find and identify Rose and Ashley, but details on the women are of course tragically few. To flesh out their experience more fully, Miles probes the sack’s original contents and the lives of better-documented Black women including author Harriet Jacobs and dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley, both of whom were born into slavery.

At once moving and searing, All That She Carried is a remarkable testament to the importance of Black lives spent unrecorded and enslaved, the endurance of family connections through time's erasures and challenging circumstances, and the power of material objects to communicate emotions, values and beliefs. Though Ashley’s sack is a 19th-century artifact, Miles’ reflections have a timeless resonance. This is a book to read, re-read, and cherish; a book that will make you weep, rage, dream, think, and think anew.

A powerful and important book! I was immersed in the history of these women and their family. Thank you for the opportunity to read and review this book!

All That She Carried is a painful and historical story about a slave mother and her nine-year-old daughter. The mother's name was Rose and upon finding out her daughter Ashley was going to be sold, Rose prepared a sack for Ashley to carry with her as she moved through the interstices of slavery. Inside the sack were a dress, a handful of pecans, and a braid of Rose's hair. Once the sack was passed from mother to child, Rose never saw her daughter again.
Rarely is slavery framed through the lens of family separation but Harvard historian Tiya Miles is blunt about what happened to black women in bondage. Their children were stolen without an apology. They suffered the consequences of thievery.
The sack Rose gifted her daughter was a 19th-century example of maternal love and hope. Over time, the sack would shepherd black women throughout their lives, from slavery to Reconstruction, to Jim Crow. When Ashley's granddaughter Ruth was in possession of the sack, she embroidered the ancestral story of her family.

"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 my Love always
she never saw her again
Ashley is my grandmother
Ruth Middleton
1921"

Tiya Miles takes the reader on a tragic journey of rice and brown bodies, slavery's brutalities, and the despair of mothers when their children were sold. Miles's painstaking authenticates every step of Ashley's journey, from mother to daughter to granddaughter to great-granddaughter Ruth as she explores the nuances and peculiarities of the slave trade in Charleston, South Carolina where the story takes place.
We also learn that Ashley's Sack was an exhibit for five years at the National African American Museum of History and Culture in Washington, D.C.. Its placement was a tale of persistence and bewilderment.
In the year 2007, Ashley's sack was discovered in a flea market bin by a white woman who purchased it and then had it authenticated. She offered it to Middleton Place Foundation for a small sum, who in turn loaned it to NAAMHC.
The story of Rose and Ashely left me both speechless and redeemed. In public spaces, black mothering is met with derision and lecturing. Empathy is often absent as black mothers are condemned for misunderstood behaviors instead of embraced. for their survivorship. Their generational trauma is often mocked as if the world has forgotten children stolen from black mothers, or children forced upon them by rape; it hardly matters anymore. In effect, Dr. Miles has, in this beautiful accounting, returned the legacy of loving to black mothers as she illustrates the ruinous and catastrophic decisions forced upon them. In despair, black mothers prioritized their children's well-being and set aside their immediate suffering, as if they understood the day would come when they would be vindicated.

ALL THAT SHE CARRIED by Tiya Miles is subtitled "The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake." For some reason, I pictured this as a companion to the award-winning Rachel Field's Hitty: Her First One Hundred Years. No; ALL THAT SHE CARRIED is a non-fiction work written by a MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient who is currently a professor of history at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The text is more scholarly and adult oriented, although it, too, uses an object to convey history: Rose gave the sack to her daughter, Ashley, in the 1850s when the then nine-year-old was sold to a different owner. Miles unflinchingly relates stories of slavery, family separation and connection, Reconstruction, and the Great Migration, focusing in part on a great-granddaughter who embroidered the sack with its story in the 1920s. ALL THAT SHE CARRIED received starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal (noting "YA crossover appeal"), and Publishers Weekly. Read or listen to an excerpt on the publisher’s site.

Links in online review:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/606278/all-that-she-carried-by-tiya-miles/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/books/review-all-that-she-carried-ashleys-sack-tiya-miles.html

I haven't totally finished All That She Carried. I don't currently have the time to dedicate as much consideration and focus as I want to for this history. I'm intrigued by the differences in the history telling, the story and reliance on emotion as a critical element of understanding who women are historically, and appreciating the position we've placed them in through the failures of our record keeping. I want to learn more about the historical context of this artifact and the women it held together in love. I'll come back to it!

This book is an astonishing piece of scholarship. With an artifact that had ultimately very little known about its provenance, the author was able to find a great amount of information. But more than that was the deep investigation into the significance of each aspect of the artifact, the sack itself, the practice of embroidery, what the items inside the sack would have meant to enslaved (or unfree as the author often calls them) people, as well as the setting of South Carolina during the historical period when the sack would have been given from mother to daughter. It's an incredibly moving, thorough, and thought-provoking tribute. While it can be very difficult to read about the horrors of slavery, I think this book does a fantastic job of demonstrating how being witness to a horrific story can be the loving act that helps lift people up. It's what the sack itself represents. I would count this as required reading for people who like to read about textiles and handicrafts.

This is a meticulously researched history of a flour sack and it's travels between 3 African American women during slavery. Because there are so few personal accounts and records of enslaved people, the author made some generalities and assumptions when it came to specifics which I found disappointing. I respect her choice because the bigger picture is slavery, specifically SC's plantation economy. It portrays the horrors and cruelty of
the black folks and their resilience very realistically.
Thanks to net galley, the publisher and author for the ARC of this book.
3.25

How do you tell the story of a woman who it’s only listed on inventory lists as chattel? Rose is an enslaved woman who realizes her daughter is about to be sold off from the plantation and that she would likely never see her again. She gives Ashley a sack with a few precious items and that is their last connection. Ashley‘s granddaughter later embroiders the story on the sack. Decades later it is found bundled with rags in a thrift store. This is not a novel, the story is told through meticulous research and educated assumptions. Miles does an amazing job applying to gather whatever else she can find and illustrating it with pictures and documents.

This is one of those books that will stay with you, turning over in your mind, with bits and pieces resurfacing at unexpected times. The meditative approach makes this feel much less "academic" while maintaining scholarly rigor. Aka non-academics will like this too! It also contributes to this process of the book returning in fragments.

The introduction was a bit off-putting for me, but once the focus turned to the subject itself - a sack owned by an enslaved woman that once held a dress, pecans, and her mother's love - the meditative approach fit perfectly. Like many here, I learned a lot about pecans, and many other things. But I also put together knowledge that had been oddly separate in my head that these new pieces illuminated even more. For one example - Yes, I knew that enslaved people were given the worst cloth to use for their own clothes, and often not enough of it. Many used homespun that the enslaved people had to make themselves. I knew that cotton on plantations was for export, often to the North, and that then the finished cloth was sold in the South and elsewhere. How had I not considered the market forces in clothing the enslaved, the existence of a "negro cloth," and how that parallels with things like prison uniforms? If you dont have similar background knowledge, Miles effortlessly guides you, but there is still something here for those familiar with much of the material.

Academically speaking, in addition to those studying antebellum America, enslavement, etc, etc, this is great material for a discussion of history as memory and memory as history, a methods class, how to use methods from other fields as a historian (art history for a start), negative spaces in the record, gender history, and so many more.

So what I wanted from this book was not what was being offered. That is my fault and please accept my review and rating in that framework. I wanted the story of three women who were connected through a seemingly inconsequential piece of material. Instead, the sack is used as a framework to present the life of an enslaved person. Broad generalities were used and a lot of assumptions were made and I felt the view being portrayed became a bit romanticized. Not that Ms. Miles presented a life of wonder for these people, but by assigning significance and intent to certain actions, the reader gets what may be an inaccurate view. But again, this goes back to needing to make broad assumptions due to the lack of historical information regarding people who were brought here against their will and forced to support the economy of the privileged.

Ashley's Sack is a simple bag originally made to house seeds. Constructed in, possibly, the 1840's, it has gained significance as a display in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, a symbol of the lives of enslaved women, and the proof of a mother's love. Much of the history of the Sack is speculation in that Rose, Ashley's mother, cannot be personally identified due to the lack of records, but Rose represents millions of women who were not considered by their owners as other than property, thus being cruelly separated from their families. Ashley however held onto that Sack, and as a grandmother herself, inspiring Ruth, her granddaughter, to embroider the words that have set this article apart, noting that it was packed with a tattered dress, handful of pecans, braid of Rose's hair, and her mother's love. Much about history of slavery (hard to read throughout), the importance of pecans, needlework and even hair. Quite a few illustrations, some lovely, many disturbing. No matter how much I read about this subject, it never fails to shock, sadden, and anger me.

A very interesting book about a grain/seed sack and three Black women who persevered in America. One of the challenges of Black history is that there are alot of things we do not know because of the lack of records. If only we had time machines. When records did not exist, Miles had to speculate what might have occurred between Rose and Ashley based on what we know about slavery from other historical records and studies. The sections of the book that I found most interesting was Miles's coverage of the items (dress, pecans, hair, and love) that Rose put in Ashley's sack and their possible significance based on what they meant to enslaved people. Overall good book, fans of Black history, genealogy, and family heirlooms will enjoy it.

This was such a poignant book. We live in a society where we give lots of importance to materialistic things, so it’s fascinating to explore how a single such item can convey the traumatic history of a whole group of people. While talking about how a single bag was passed down through generations, the author manages convey to us the horrors of enslavement, how the lives of enslaved women were for decades, and how difficult it was for them to even own something, let alone pass it down, when they themselves were considered property. Add to it the fact that families were separated very often, it’s truly a story of resilience that the author narrates to us here.

Very compelling and engaging read and I would definitely recommend to readers who would love to read books about African American history from different perspectives.

This book is hard to classify, it isn't historical fiction, it's not exactly case study, but it is definitely profound, excellently researched, and well-written. It reminded me a little bit of the Hare with the Amber Eyes, in that a work of artisanal craftsmanship is studied minutely and its painful relational history expounded upon. The black family keepsake, Ashley's sack, is lovingly examined here and its journey is imagined based on a mass of factual information surrounding a matrilineal line from Rose to Ashley to Ruth.

I love that author Tiya Miles incorporates her own family's history in the beginning, and then expertly goes on to incorporate multiple examples of archival textile artefacts she calls "mythohistories," from quilts to dresses and needlework, including beautiful photographic inserts. But don't mistake this for a compendium of cultured feminine lady-arts, Miles pulls no punches discussing white supremacist rule or whimsy, and other Anti-Black associated factors that "would take two more centuries to tighten and fully mature into the zealous arguments of nineteenth-century scientific racism and the vehement policies of twentieth-century American Jim Crow." This is a book about a sack, but it's also about feminism and the strength of women, and America's brutal racist history.