by Tiya Miles
MAKING LOVE
Aptly called a “revelation” by a museum interpreter at the Middleton Place plantation, Ashley’s sack illuminates the contours of enslaved Black women’s experiences, the emotional imperatives of their existences, the things they required to survive, and what they valued enough to pass down.15 For without their possessions, Black women, like any other people, could not sustain or express their lives. Although it may seem counterintuitive at first, attention to material things, especially ones elaborated by words or pictures, opens a route to accessing intangible feelings and desires that can evade the documentary record.16 Humans are composite beings, made of matter and infused with spirit. We have always collected, created, and surrounded ourselves with material objects in order to express that inner ineffability. “The things we interact with are an inescapable part of who we are,” as one historian of the environment has put it, and hence things become our “fellow travelers” in this life.17 The physical traces left behind therefore allow us to glimpse what our forebears found worthy of making and keeping, and what, by implication, they held dear.
What did Rose value enough to save, pack, and carry? How did she turn her vision of what mattered in life into action? The things Rose gathered for her daughter, according to the memory of her great-granddaughter, indicate her thoughts and guiding principles. She sought to immediately address a hierarchy of needs: food, clothing, shelter, identity through lineage, and, most centrally, an affirmation of worthiness. The wise values upheld by Rose reverberate across the testimony of African American women from the slavery era. Rose’s kit was, by all evidences, one of a kind, but she shared with other women in her condition a vision for survival that required both material and emotional resources. Rose supported Ashley’s life through the collection and storage of stuff: a dress, nuts, a lock of hair, and the cotton tote itself—things shaped by the intermingling of southern nature and southern cultures. Rose then sealed those items, rendering them sacred, with the force of an emotional promise: a mother’s enduring love.
The inscription on Ashley’s bag contains a list that is nothing less than a prescription for survival. It allows us to appreciate what women in bondage deemed essential, what they were capable of getting their hands on, and what they were determined to salvage. We save first that which we value most. Rose was determined to rescue her daughter. She understood, as did other Black women with their backs against a wall of entrenched dehumanization and impoverishment, that survival for future generations meant fusing whatever one had together, the material and the emotional: making love.18 The work of Rose’s hands, as captured by her great-granddaughter’s words, illuminates the importance of materiality as well as emotionality to Black women’s survival strategies.
You can sense by now that this is not a traditional history. It leans toward evocation rather than argumentation and is rather more meditation than monograph. As science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin has previously said about the novel, a work of history could be conceptualized as a sack. “A book holds words,” Le Guin explains. “Words hold things. They bear meanings.”19 This book bears meanings about the burdens of being human in an inhumane world; about the treasures, traumas, and capacities we inherit and carry; and about the means we have at our disposal for recalling and acknowledging the assembled wisdom of ancestral women. Chapter 1 introduces Ruth as the intellect behind the cloth record and sets the stage of colonial South Carolina, the place Ruth names as the scene of the crime. Chapter 2 confronts the devaluation of women like Rose in the records of American slavery and asks how we can recover the ignored and dispossessed. Chapter 3 ponders Rose’s act of packing and discovers how her deliberate movement and carefully selected items were a claim for motherly love and familial continuity. Chapter 4 examines the dress Rose packed, exploring the things enslaved women cherished and unveiling how they used personal objects like clothing to protect dignity and reinforce relational ties. Chapter 5 explores the emotional world of the slave mother against the backdrop of the auction block, which hoisted Charleston and the South Carolina interior to heights of untoward luxury. Chapter 6 uncovers a survival culture rooted in nature, including the pecans inherited by Ashley after sale set her adrift. Chapter 7 follows the sack bearers after the Civil War, exploring women’s stories of trauma and healing as exemplified by Ruth’s embroidery. The Conclusion weighs the value of things, including textiles and sacks, to African American history and American imaginings of the future.
Beyond the trinity of Rose, Ruth, and Ashley, a circle of Black women writers and storytellers will emerge in these pages. Some, like Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Keckley, may be familiar as authors of classic slave narratives assigned in college classrooms; others, like Louisa Picquet, Eliza Potter, Melnea Cass, and Mamie Garvin Fields, are lesser-known figures with equally revealing stories. Harriet Jacobs, a survivor of slavery in North Carolina who executed a painstaking plan to free herself and her children, is the author of one of the most analytically sophisticated slave narratives in the genre. Elizabeth Keckley, an enslaved woman from Virginia taken to North Carolina and St. Louis by her owners, was a dressmaker for First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln and an autobiographical writer of the Civil War years. Louisa Picquet lived a harrowing existence of serial sexual abuse in several states. Nevertheless, Picquet persisted in loving the family torn from her in slavery, as well as the children that she conceived with her enslavers. She told her story in print form to purchase her mother’s freedom. Eliza Potter, a self-professed fine artist of hairdressing and lay historian, plied her craft as a free Black woman in Cincinnati and points south while publishing a tell-all memoir about her wealthy slaveholding clients. Melnea Cass, a community organizer and women’s club leader in Boston, had moved north with her family during the first wave of the Great Migration and contributed to the shaping of a mutually supportive and politically conscious Black urban community. South Carolinian Mamie Garvin Fields taught school, co-founded a club for Black women in Charleston, and published a memoir with her granddaughters that exemplifies, in full-length book form, the relationships between telling, hearing, and preserving Black family stories.20
Each of these authors professed a deep and committed love for their own families, for captive Black people, and for the principle of ethical action rooted in relationship. Together, these women and many others whose voices emerge in slave narratives, interviews, and letters create a chorus of corroboration for Rose, Ashley, and Ruth’s tale, which illuminates separation, survival, and love as core features of Black women’s experience.21 Because formerly enslaved women regularly veiled the worst of their trials and the most private of their feelings, especially regarding the sexual atrocities that the tyranny of slavery encouraged, we will also turn for emotional context to contemporary Black women writers, whose literary representations in fiction and poetry approach an affective realm beyond the reach of historical accounts.22 The women leading our way in these pages are the lineal ancestors of families whose migration spans from South to North, cultural ancestors of a Black racial family rocked by the hardships of history, and national ancestors of a broader American family whose social, economic, and political roots are buried in the mire of slavery. And as much as we are one human family that knows the feel of growing dread and shattered hope, they are the emotional ancestors of us all.
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While working on this manuscript, I often turned to colleagues who regularly sew and presented my tangled knot of questions. To one of them, a close friend who makes her own wardrobe, studies prison garb, and writes about family relations as fabric, I put a query that arose as I contemplated Ruth’s embroidery: “In sewing, is there a name for the space between the stitches?” My friend considered this for a beat before answering no and leaving me to settle for my own gangly phrasing.23 The story of Ashley’s sack that I endeavor to tell in these pages bares its thin spots and holes while simultaneously showing how material ob
jects can help us to assemble rich histories of the marginalized. This book follows an odyssey set in motion by one Black woman whose ideals and actions, as recalled by her great-granddaughter, shaped a family’s perseverance against the odds. It is a cautionary tale about the personal pain and collective price exacted when a society devalues what is precious. And it is an invitation for those who would honor histories of the lost to embrace the spaces between the stitches.
RUTH’S RECORD
My great-grandmama told my grandmama the part she lived through that my grandmama didn’t live through and my grandmama told my mama what they both lived through and my mama told me what they all lived through and we were suppose to pass it down like that from generation to generation so we’d never forget.
—Gayl Jones, Corregidora, 1975
Then I found the slave lists. There were bundles of them, in thick sheaves, each sheaf containing a stack. When a rice planter handed out shoes, he wrote down the names of who got them. To pay taxes, he made an inventory of his human property. If he bought fabric so people could make clothes, he noted how many yards were given to each person. When a woman gave birth, the date and name of the child appeared.
—Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family, 1998
As a young woman with modest means and few prospects, Ruth Middleton transformed her life by moving north. Taking a leap into the unknown as a Black woman in the 1910s required tremendous courage. Ruth was still a teenager at the time, living in Columbia, South Carolina, and laboring as a domestic. She may have already met her future fiancé, Arthur Middleton, a South Carolinian from Camden and a tiremaker by trade.1 And she would have known from what she heard and saw, and perhaps from incidents in her own life, that the South was still a dangerous place for African Americans at the start of the new century. The first generations to be born to freedom found few job opportunities beyond the agricultural work their forebears had done, risked indebtedness in the sharecropping system, and faced public humiliation as well as unpredictable violence in everyday life. Perhaps Ruth and Arthur evaluated their situation and determined that only drastic change would better it. For they, like so many other African Americans fed up with the dusty prejudice of the South, packed their retinue of things and traveled northward seeking safety and opportunity.
Ruth and Arthur made this move amid the uncertainty of World War I and a deadly flu epidemic, joining what historians have called the first wave of the Great Migration, which would, by the 1970s, reshape the demography and political landscape of the entire United States. African Americans, who had predominantly lived in the rural South, relocated in the hundreds of thousands to the urban South, urban Midwest, urban West, and urban North in search of physical security and economic opportunity. Half a million of these travelers relocated to northern cities in the period when Ruth uprooted herself, between 1914 and 1920. They pulled up stakes, packed their bags, and left behind all they knew and many whom they loved.2 Those who departed must have faced tough decisions about which items they could afford to bring along on the journey and which things they would give away or abandon. Practical objects like skillets and skirts, cherished things like handmade quilts, and valuable items like tools and books might each have been scrutinized, weighed, and considered. We have no inventory of a great migration of things that accompanied African Americans northward and westward. Ruth Middleton’s case stands as a precious exception.
When Ruth arrived in Philadelphia around the year 1918, she brought along the cotton sack that Rose had prepared for Ashley. Ruth’s attachment to the textile reflects an important aspect of women’s historical experience with things. While free men have historically owned and passed down “real” property (especially in the form of land), women have typically had only “movable” property (like furniture and linens—and, if the women in question were slaveholders, people) at their disposal. Although American women possessed a limited form of property, they used that property intentionally to “assert identities, build alliances, and weave family bonds torn by marriage, death, or migration.”3 A New England–born white woman in the colonial era, for example, cherished a passed-down painted chest not only for its function but also for the ways in which the object connected her to her women forebears, reinforcing a sense of belonging not to male ancestors but to a line of women. Ruth Middleton, who would take her husband’s name upon marriage, as was the American legal custom, also took her foremother’s sack as she traveled north. And one day, when she was herself on the verge of motherhood, Ruth decided to annotate it.
Ruth’s fabric testament to Black love and women’s perseverance did not—perhaps could not—exist in any historical archive. Though necessary to the work of uncovering the past, archives are nevertheless limited and misleading storehouses of information. While at times imposing and formal enough as to seem all-encompassing in their brick, glass, and steel structures, archives only include records that survived accident, were viewed as important in their time or in some subsequent period, and were deemed worthy of preservation. These records were originally created by fallible people rather like you and me, who could err in their jottings, hold vexed feelings they sometimes transmitted onto the page, or consciously or unconsciously misconstrue events they witnessed. Even in their most organized form, archived records are mere scraps of accounts of previous happenings, “rags of realities” that we painstakingly stitch together in order to picture past societies.4
Even when compared with the motley rags that make up the archives of history, the nineteenth-century seed sack that we are exploring together here appears particularly threadbare. Ruth’s embroidery is the only definitive primary source detailing the fate of Rose and Ashley.5 In addition, read in a certain mood, Ruth’s verse on the bag can feel more like poetry than reportage. Slight on facts and specifics, the embroidered text states only three names (Rose, Ruth, and Ashley), one place (South Carolina), and one date (1921). None of the sources that scholars typically use to reconstruct histories of slavery directly address this object. No plantation supply log exists that tells of the sack’s manufacture or acquisition. No mistress’s handwritten letter describes an interaction with Rose. No formal bill of sale lists a buyer of Ashley. No published slave narrative describes this family and their travails. The bag dates back to the 1840s or 1850s, but the writing was added in the 1920s. And perhaps most glaringly—and, for the historian, most alarmingly—we have only one person’s word that events took place as described and that the bag was packed with the listed items.
Ruth Middleton, that one person, probably rendered the details as she recalled them. While we can presume that she told the truth as she knew it, Ruth’s version of events was formed, like any other, through the lenses of memory and narrative desire—what she consciously or unconsciously wanted this family story to mean. There is no reason to think that Ruth wrote this story as fiction, given the form she chose (amateur embroidery on a personal object with no commercial value at the time) as well as the first-person voice she used. The intimate, possessive, and immediate tone of the line “Ashley is my grandmother” suggests that Ruth knew this relative and remembered her.6 The tale she stitched for private use was by no indications imagined, and by all reckoning, it was true to Ruth. Still, as a vehicle of historical recovery, memory is at least as fallible as paper records. It is possible, even likely, that Ruth mistook, mis-recalled, or rearranged aspects of her emotional family account. We all do this when drawing out and thinking through memory, a malleable store of information “retrieved even as it is refashioned.”7
Nevertheless, with steady hands we can thread the eye of this needle and ask what Ruth’s record can tell us about Black women, Black families, women crafters, and Black material, as well as social, worlds. By doing so, we refuse to give up on those many people of the past who did not—could not—leave behind troves of documents. To abandon these individuals, the “archivally unknown” who fell through the cracks of class, race, a
nd position, would consign them to a “second death” by permitting their erasure from history.8 It would also mean turning our faces away from fuller, if unwelcome, truths about our country and ourselves. Ruth’s account, subjective and incomplete as it may be, stands as a baseline rebuttal to the reams of slaveholder documents that categorized people as objects. Her list of a dress, a braid, pecans, and whispered love accounts for the things that sustained life, rather than rendering lives as things. If Ruth’s text did nothing else but replace the “slave list” of our cultural script with Rose’s shimmering inventory, it would be enough. Yet Ruth’s cloth chronicle does much more. By recovering, for history, Rose, her life conditions, and her act of love, Ruth sets the record straight.
THE DAZZLING SACK CLOTH
The sack Ruth Middleton embroidered in the 1920s is resplendent with “the power of simultaneous pain and hope.”9 It evidences a persistent Black matriline, a continuation of radical vision that should have been impossible, given the logic and enforcement of American enslavement. What had begun as a mother’s prescient act of provision during those dim years of captivity became “symbolic armor” for the family over time, representing women’s faith in the continuity of kinship, the protection to be found in the promise of love, and the defense of what was most certainly a sacred memory in the face of a national culture of Black parody and debasement well into the twentieth century.10 As a thing fashioned and preserved by generations of African American women, as a woven and embroidered textile that has weathered slavery and the passage of time, this sack itself can claim a stunning survival story. The twists and turns of the bag’s rediscovery and renewal also reveal contemporary racial dynamics obliquely reflective of power relations in play during Rose’s, Ashley’s, and Ruth’s lives and times. When we recognize the value of objects to human identity and to African Americans in particular, as a historically demeaned group forced into captivity and lives of scarcity, it is frustrating, even infuriating, to trace the trajectory of Ashley’s sack that landed it in the collection of a former plantation. How could a priceless object like this wind up in the inventory of a restored estate once maintained by an enslaved labor force and still partly overseen by descendants of its original owners?