In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language.
Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States. All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and love passed down against steep odds. It honors the creativity and resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today
Here’s what the National Book Award judges say about it:
A brilliant, original work, All That She Carried presents a Black woman’s countercompilation of lives that ordinary archives suppress. Tiya Miles’s graceful prose gives us narrative history, social history, and object history of women’s craft through the things Rose gave the daughter she was losing forever. With depth and breadth, Miles offers the visual record of love in the face of the child trafficking atrocities of slavery. This book is scholarship at its best and most heartrending.
Tiya Miles is professor of history and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Miles is the author of The Dawn of Detroit, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, among other honors, as well as the acclaimed books Ties That Bind, The House on Diamond Hill, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, and Tales from the Haunted South, a published lecture series. tiyamiles.com
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“I felt a sense of sadness and a sense of resentment for these women.”
Miles effectively demonstrates the dignity and mystery of lives that history often neglects and opens the door to the examination of many untold stories.
Watch Tiya Miles read an excerpt from All That She Carried at the (virtual) 2021 National Book Awards
Watch Tiya Miles’s acceptance speech at the (virtual) 2021 National Book Awards