All That She Carried
Book club discussion to be held on Sept. 16.
From the publisher
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.
Related
📖 Help Me to Find My People by Heather Andrea Williams — The searches undertaken by formerly enslaved people for family members sold away.
📖 In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens by Alice Walker — Essays on the art and creativity through which Black women preserved themselves and their stories.
📖 Beloved by Toni Morrison — A fictional counterpart centered on motherhood, separation, memory, and slavery’s afterlife.
🎥 All That She Carried: A Book Talk with Tiya Miles — Miles discusses the research and imaginative reconstruction behind the book.
🎥 Gee’s Bend Quilters — A PBS Craft in America segment featuring Lucy Mingo and Mary Ann Pettway.
🧵 Ashley’s Sack: How Much Can One Bag Carry? — The history of the sack itself and its journey through museums.
🎨 Harriet Powers: A Story of Art and Faith — A short MFA Boston film about an formerly enslaved woman whose quilts transformed cloth into historical and spiritual testimony.
🎨 Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers — An extensive visual archive with biographies of individual artists and their quilts.
🎵 Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child — A traditional spiritual giving voice to familial separation
