All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
Tiya Miles
One of NPR’s best books of the year and one of Time’s must-read books of 2021. 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. 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.