by Tiya Miles
While no place was safe for African Americans in post-emancipation South Carolina, the worst of these abuses took place in the rural interior stretches of the state where lucrative plantations were located. Even as late as the 1920s, South Carolina memoirist Mamie Garvin Fields (whose recollections about an ingenious way of fanning rice to catch loose grains we described in the preceding chapter) recounted visiting a plantation in an isolated pocket of South Carolina. There, in her words: “They still had slavery. S-L-A-V-E-R-Y.”6
Mamie Garvin Fields had been born to a middle-class Black family of preachers, carpenters, and homemakers in South Carolina in the 1880s. She was, however, just two generations removed from racial captivity. Her grandparents had been enslaved in rural South Carolina, and her grandmother was lost to the family when their owner moved her to evade Sherman’s incursion during the Civil War. Fields had become a teacher and community organizer by the time she made this observation. A respected member of her community, she had been asked by a medical doctor to accompany him on house calls as a cultural liaison of sorts. The doctor treated an isolated Black population engaged in farm work for wealthy townspeople as well as domestic work for local officials (such as the postmistress) at minimal pay. Fields observed that this Black community had been denied the privileges of freedom and purposefully separated from the outside world. Their former owner sequestered workers behind six locked gates, blocked their access to telephones, vehicles, and mail, kept them hungry on meager rations, and terrified them with threats of beating and jailing.7
The chaos of large-scale war, guerrilla assaults, and stringent restrictions on mobility legalized in Black codes surely touched the lives of Ashley and her circle of kin. Each tumultuous moment might have caused successive separations, across which it became even harder to maintain family ties. Tracing a solid line forward in time from Ashley in 1853 to Ruth in 1921 through documentary records proves impossible. And Ruth Middleton does not name her mother on the sack, resulting in a lost generation in our paper-and-cloth trail. Nevertheless, Ruth asserts her own place in this ancestral line, and Ruth herself does appear in a series of vital records, government documents, and newspaper announcements in the early to mid-1900s. Picking up the thread with Ruth, we can trace her birthplace and parentage and, from there, backstitch a path to the woman she called “my grandmother.”
Ruth Middleton was born to Rose (also known as Rosa) Clifton Jones and Austin Jones in Columbia, South Carolina, around the year 1900 (various documents date her birth to 1897 and circa 1902). This would have made Rosa Jones Ashley’s daughter or Austin Jones Ashley’s son. Given the cultural tradition of naming children after loved ones, especially in this period, it seems more likely that Ashley gave birth to Rosa, naming the girl after her own lost mother, Rose.8 If Rosa Clifton was born around 1880, as census records indicate, Ashley would have been in her mid-thirties at the time. By then Ashley had survived not only enslavement and familial separation but also wartime violence and the accompanying societal upheaval. She had seen Black men rise to state political office in South Carolina during the period of Reconstruction, but also the reconsolidation of white power, the hardening of legal segregation, and violent rebukes of Black political and economic advances by the end of the century. Ashley lived her life out in the cotton midlands of South Carolina, where she had been held captive as a girl. Her daughter Rosa was born in this same region during a terrifying moment that the esteemed historian John Hope Franklin has called the “long dark night” of African American history.9
After nearly ten years, federally enforced congressional reconstruction ended when a political compromise intended to reconcile the North and the South secured the presidency for Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Following the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, rural areas became even deadlier for Black residents. Women were vulnerable to sexual assault by white men in the homes of their employers as well as their own homes, where members of the KKK and other vigilante groups sought to instill terror through physical intimidation and abuse. Black women, men, and children were beaten, raped, shot, lynched, and burned out of their homes as political strategy and as sport. Ashley may have been among the thousands of African Americans who abandoned the countryside for southern cities in the last decades of the 1800s, seeking greater safety from racist attacks prevalent in the relatively isolated woods and plantation lands, as well as better work conditions. Perhaps she brought her daughter Rosa with her to the capital city of Columbia and made a first home there with other relatives. Or maybe Rosa undertook the move on her own, hazarding the risk of leaving a familiar rural landscape and life behind.
Rosa Clifton Jones’s trajectory reflected that of many Black women in the first generations born after slavery. Her experience, and theirs, points to the extraordinary nature of ordinary Black women’s lives. Rosa and her peers lived between a “backdrop” of violence and a foreground of “banal racial prejudice” as they moved through public and private spaces that reaffirmed a separate and denigrated status for their race. Rosa made her living through household labor, as did 90 percent of African American women in 1900.10 Domestic work was the primary form of employment open to them. In a large city like Columbia, Black women performed any number of household service jobs, including “general” domestic labor and the more specialized tasks of cooking and laundering. In 1909, a woman named Rosa appears in the Columbia city directory as a cook and the wife of Austin, a deliveryman. They shared a home with another man on Laurel Street. The couple likely lived there as boarders; working-class African Americans who had recently migrated to cities often shared living quarters to afford rents on low wages. A year later, when the 1910 census was taken, Rosa and Austin resided on the University of South Carolina campus, where they worked as “servants” and were raising a young family: daughter Ruth, age seven; son Claud, age two; and daughter Mary, age one.11
We know these things about Rosa Jones: she worked hard, had versatile skills, and managed to keep her children under one roof at least for a time. Rosa died in 1916, when Ruth was just about thirteen, following the death of Austin a few years prior.12 Ruth may have inherited the heirloom sack not long after the census of 1910 was taken. And the story of the sack was conveyed to Ruth, it would seem, by Ashley herself. The narrative perspective that Ruth assumes in her embroidered inscription omits Rosa while highlighting Ashley, suggesting a close connection with this grandmother. Ruth’s even stitches assert a strong possessive reference to Ashley, and, importantly, Ruth describes this relationship in the present tense, indicating current time. “Ashley is,” Ruth sewed on the sack, “my grandmother.”13 Along with the bag and whatever materials had been preserved inside its depths, Ruth inherited her grandmother’s story of trauma and transcendence.
STORYTELLING, SEWING, AND HEALING
To tell the story of one’s own life is to change that life, as telling is an action that can revise one’s relationship to the past. Perhaps this is something a younger version of Ruth Middleton intuited as she listened to her grandmother Ashley speak of slavery days. By describing past painful events, the speaker begins to move beyond them, while not denying that they occurred and inflicted scars. And telling is not a unidirectional process. Psychological research indicates that those who listen to such stories participate in the teller’s evaluation of difficult events. The process of telling enacts change for the speaker/writer and for the listener/reader who empathizes with the narrator, affirming their experience through the mirror of feeling.14 Through this process, the speaker confronts past difficulties in the company of another, gaining greater distance from the trauma and moving toward an interpretive synthesis that can bring emotional relief, even as the listener learns from the teller’s experience in a rehearsal of life’s potential challenges.
What is more, telling may have become a way for Ashley, as well as Ruth, to move beyond the constraining role of a victim and take up the empowering stance of a wi
tness. Perhaps they felt, as the novelist Gayl Jones reflects through the eyes of her narrator, the lineal descendant of two generations of Black women enslaved and sexually abused by the same man, their master and master/father: “We got to burn out what they put in our minds, like you burn out a wound. Except we got to keep what we need to bear witness.”15 Novelists often display a knack for revealing the depths of interior life. Psychological studies indeed find that telling of traumatic experiences in repetitive fashion over time helps the speaker gain emotional and analytical control, decreasing the pain of the event in memory and yielding understanding that brings greater peace. As the teller repeats the story, a means of making sense of it, the traumatic tale becomes shorter and more succinct.16 Bearing witness, then, may be the most effective way we know of carrying the weight of the past in order to arrive at generative resolutions.
We can imagine the process of transmission and transferal, of confrontation, evaluation, and gradual healing that the speech of a grandmother like Ashley to a grandchild like Ruth begins. And rather than a single moment, we should picture many such moments, as the story stitched onto the sack conveys a rhythm of familiarity as well as the compression of key events that often occurs as traumatic tales are retold over time. We can imagine that in telling and retelling the tale of past traumas to her granddaughter, Ashley became better equipped to process the pain for herself. We can anticipate that in receiving words from a relative with whom she empathized, Ruth was also strengthened and emboldened by the knowledge of her ancestors’ willpower. For grandmother and grandchild both, “interpreting and reinterpreting the past [was] crucial for survival, strength, and carrying on.”17 How apt, how perfect, as if a fabrication of the story itself, that the “carrying on” enacted through Ashley and Ruth’s exchanges is attached to an actual carrier in the form of the cotton seed sack? The bag held the memories of Ashley’s tale until the time came when Ruth was ready to retell, interpret, and record it. Perhaps the very form of Ruth’s inscription on Ashley’s sack—the brevity and concision—is the result of many tellings across time that enabled a successful interpretive process.
Telling can be a cleansing, a clearing of the old wounds in preparation for the bandaging that can be found in relations of love. Telling is meditative, a process that slows time down, leads us into ourselves, and allows us to drag what we find out into the open. That motion of piercing into the inside, grasping what has been buried beneath, and circling back again to the outside has the shape of a loop, or a stitch. Is it any wonder, then, that sewers find stitching meditative, too? The inward and outward motion, the bringing together of loose ends, the making of something new in the process, heals. Such was the case for Ruth Middleton, we can suppose, when she decided, in a land far away from the South of her foremothers, to etch into the annals of history the story of Ashley and the sack.
Ruth’s decision to tell this tale through needle and thread was a choice with significance. She could have selected a sheet of paper and written down the tale of the cotton sack, and perhaps she did sketch out a draft on some page long lost. But in the end, she chose to memorialize these family happenings in fabric, a medium used for millennia “as a vehicle for recording information, such as history or mythology.”18 Cloth is a particular kind of material for relating events of the past: it has traditionally been the craft of women across cultures, and it has held a special place in women’s lives. “Textiles, homemade or store-bought, were a form of female inheritance,” a particularly valued kind of movable property, as the celebrated scholar of women’s material culture Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has explained.19 For women, cloth also tended to represent the work of their hands, the female branches of family trees, and notions of the feminine ideal. Passing on a textile or inheriting a textile, then, symbolized women’s ability, creativity, and continuance.
None of this would have been lost on Ruth Middleton, who must have had some degree of formal education, given her facility with the written word; who had evidently been exposed to the “feminine” art of embroidery; and who clearly possessed a keen mind. By inscribing her foremothers’ story into cloth, Ruth made a series of strong assertions about her family and herself.20 She stood as witness to the existence of the women in her family line, entering their plight and their intrinsic worth as human beings into the written record. She exposed the immorality of slavery and articulated her foremothers’ implicit criticism of the inhumane system that had harmed them. She asserted the fact and perseverance of Black mother love and African American kinship even in a period when families were mercilessly separated. With cloth as surface and embroidery thread and needle as tools, she framed this survival tale as a women’s story, claiming feminine space for her foremothers and for herself at a time—the early 1900s—when the value of Black womanhood was still widely denigrated in American society. She must have shared a sense of the cross-cultural symbolism that fabric carries as a metaphor for tying, weaving, knotting, and binding people together. Ruth united her own life and times with those of her foremothers through this craft project, “sewing together those [who] were torn asunder.”21
Cloth can be magical, archaeologists have argued, in that textile makers around the world have adopted ritualistic processes to “weave” supernatural powers of protection, prosperity, or fertility into fabric through symbolic form or imagery. (The rose, as it happens, is a “very old…symbol of protection” dating back, some classicists argue, to ancient Greek mythology.)22 Would it be too far a stretch for us to consider that Ruth cast her own spell, in a sense, when she metamorphized a tattered sack into a writing surface? Ruth invoked her female forebears, restoring the “(maternal) ancestral lines” made “near extinct” by slavery, and creating a “discursive alternative in which absences become presences in written form.”23 And by writing herself into it, Ruth claimed a place for herself as heir of the magic sack in a long line of women survivors. “To inscribe one’s name on a material object assured some sort of immortality,” writes Ulrich.24 By affixing her version of a family story to the textile that was its subject, Ruth Middleton kept her foremothers alive in memory and linked herself to a living legacy that she could then bequeath.
MIGRATION, DISRUPTION, AND MEANING-MAKING
Ruth’s tale conjures the life-affirming example of ancestors who survived dire times by marshaling love. These ancestors may have been especially important to Ruth as role models in the early 1900s, yet another dramatically low point in African American history. As Ruth would discover after leaving South Carolina in the 1910s, the urban North was no racial haven. Some white residents in the North vehemently objected to Black progress. They had expressed their animosity publicly in the 1800s when riots aimed at limiting the residency of free Blacks and curtailing their economic accomplishment erupted in cities like Cincinnati (1829) and Philadelphia (1846).25 A preexisting anti-Black prejudice in northern cities and towns expanded and sharpened in the decades of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction, exacerbated by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of poor Black southern migrants. White city dwellers felt threatened by this wave of newcomers, whose color, class, and mannerisms made them easy targets for discrimination in housing and hiring as well as ridicule in newspapers and stage performances. While Jim Crow segregation did not have the same legal bite and seamless structure in the North as in the South, an informal culture of segregation kept Blacks sequestered in poor and increasingly overcrowded neighborhoods and marginalized in public spaces.
The last two decades of the 1800s and first two decades of the 1900s brimmed with racial conflict even as World War I fed economic volatility and political repression at the national level. After the war’s end, the anxiety and resentment felt by many European Americans toward African Americans living among them, competing for jobs, walking the streets, and changing the culture of urban areas trumped patriotic sentiment. Black soldiers who had fought overseas in the conflict faced vocal slurs and violent attacks in their
own cities, perpetrated by whites angered at seeing African Americans in military uniform and pressing for equal rights. Twenty-six deadly race riots broke out across the country in the spring and summer of 1919 (in Charleston, South Carolina; Chicago, Illinois; East St. Louis, Illinois; Houston, Texas; Knoxville, Tennessee; Omaha, Nebraska; and other towns) and in 1921 (the devastating Greenwood Massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma), during which white Americans injured and killed Black Americans and destroyed Black homes and businesses even as incidents of lynching reached record highs in the South.26 “What are the stories one tells in dark times?” African American culture theorist Saidya Hartman asks in a pensive essay about girls on slave ships.27 In the darkness of the late 1910s and early 1920s, Ruth Middleton chose to tell a story of women’s separation, perseverance, and tenderness through an especially intimate material that was at once durable and delicate.28 Her antidote to dark times was a story of time-toughened love, an inheritance from her great-grandmother, the family protector, Rose.
Three pivotal events occurred in Ruth Jones Middleton’s life between her departure from South Carolina around 1918 and her embellishment of the cotton seed sack in 1921. She wed a man from Camden, South Carolina, named Arthur Middleton, gave birth to a baby girl within a year of marriage and during the deadly Spanish flu pandemic, and saw her husband depart for military service in World War I. This frenzy of change in just a few short years would surely have felt overwhelming, especially for a person so young. Ruth was around sixteen when she married Arthur Middleton in the summer of 1918 and when she gave birth to Dorothy Helen Middleton in January 1919. Perhaps the couple elected to marry because Ruth was already pregnant. Her husband was inducted into the military at the rank of private and served overseas between August 1918 and July 1919. Arthur would not have been in the country at the time of Dorothy’s birth. After 1919, existing records do not show the couple sharing a residence. Ruth was a young mother who had given birth during a frightening flu epidemic that hit her new city hard. She was living without her partner against the backdrop of terrifying racially motivated violence across the country and wartime deaths in Europe when she picked up her needle and began embroidering her grandmother’s bag.29