by Tiya Miles
A heart-rending letter written by a man sold away from his family reflects this understanding of the material, social, and psychological importance of things. “My Dear,” Abream Scriven penned to his wife, Dinah Jones, in the fall of 1858, “I want to Send you some things but I donot know who to Send them by but I will thry to get them to you and my children….My Dear wife for you and my children my pen cannot Express the griffe I feel to be parted from you all.”10 Abream hoped that these things he possessed and touched, when received and held by his family members, could help fill the gulf of sadness that separated them. In another missive, dictated by an enslaved woman in Missouri named Ann to her husband, Andrew Valentine, a soldier in the Civil War, things represented remembered ties and a vision of freedom. “You do not know how bad I am treated,” she related. “They are treating me worse and worse every day. Our child cries for you. Send me some money as soon as you can for me and my child are almost naked. My cloth is yet in the loom and there is no telling when it will be out….Do not fret too much for me for it wont be long before I will be free and then all we make will be ours.” Ann concluded the message to her husband with this postscript: “P.S. Send our little girl a string of beads in your next letter to remember you by.”11
Elizabeth Keckley, the formerly enslaved dressmaker to Mary Todd Lincoln, emphasized the relationship between memory and things at the close of her memoir: “Every chair looks like an old friend. In memory I have travelled through the shadows and the sunshine of the past, and the bare walls are associated with the visions that have come to me from the long-ago. As I love the children of memory, so I love every article in this room, for each has become a part of memory itself.”12 For Keckley, the things she owns and lives with seem to store her memories, releasing them to her when she seeks them out while triggering emotions of affection, melancholy, and determination. This may, in fact, have been similar to the ensemble of emotions that flooded Ruth Middleton’s chest when she touched and inscribed her grandmother’s sack. Things awakened memory and inspired feeling as well as action. Keckley felt moved to recall and write with the aid of the things in her room. Ruth felt moved to stitch the sack and list the things once packed inside it. For each of these survivors of slavery or its legacies (and, indeed, for all of us), things possess the ability to house and communicate “the incorporeal”: emotions like love, values like family, states of being like freedom.13 And more than that, Elizabeth’s walls and Ashley’s sack may have felt alive and actively present to their caretakers. There is a sense in these women’s reminiscences of a “spiritual imaginary of matter,” a mental and even metaphysical space in which things incorporate, maintain, and release a psychic or spiritual quality.14
In their writings quoted above, formerly enslaved people mention hard, relatively durable things such as chairs, walls, and beads (the last item being a recurrent one that Black as well as Indigenous enslaved people sought and gifted to one another), but they also touch on textiles, as did many of the enslaved in interviews and narratives published from the 1840s to the 1930s.15 Fabric—like the cloth still unfinished in the rungs of Ann Valentine’s loom—stands out for its symbolic resonance in the history of African American women, enslaved or free, and women across boundaries of race and class.16 Ann chose this cloth, and the process she undertook in making it, to convey to her husband the poverty of her domestic circumstances and also to lift his spirits with a vision of hope for their future. The cloth she wove was as fragile as their lives and stretched thin like their familial connections. Yet one day that cloth would be complete and counted as the family’s property, softening the financial hardship they endured. And we can imagine, if that day came and Ann Valentine did finish her cloth, that she may have handed it down to the child she mentions in her letter. That child, and that child’s children, might have used the cloth from Ann’s loom as a table or bed covering into the 1900s, recalling through the object, through its warmth and its worn-in softness, the story of their family’s love and persistence.
As a pliable and fragile type of thing, fabric uniquely conveys psychic meanings hinted at in Ann Valentine’s desperate correspondence. The constituent parts of a textile—filaments woven, knitted, or fused—are countless elements made into one. Fabric therefore represents the connectedness of many threads that together create a whole cloth. It weakens over time through repeated use, washing, and sun exposure, lending it a quality of delicacy requiring care. Because of this innate multiplicity and natural fragility, cloth has stood for people across time and cultures. It symbolically represents our own bodies, our temporal lifelines, and our social ties to one another. The association between fabric and human life is only strengthened by our propensity to drape our days and nights in this material. At birth, in death, during sickness, and through religious ritual, we coexist with fabric. We wrap our bodies and our most intimate moments inside textiles, which accounts for the emotional effectiveness of projects like the 1980s collaborative AIDS Quilt. Requiring caretaking and at the same time providing solace, “textiles are often mobilized in the face of trauma, and not just to provide needed garments or coverings but also as a therapeutic means of comfort, a safe outlet for worried hands, a productive channel for the obsessive working through of loss,” explains one art historian.17
Fabric is a special category of thing to people—tender, damageable, weak at its edges, and yet life-sustaining. In these distinctive features, cloth begins to sound like this singular planet we call home. Cloth operates as a “convincing analogue for the regenerative and degenerative processes of life, and as a great connector, binding humans not only to each other but to the ancestors of their past and the progeny of their future,” fiber artist Ann Hamilton has written. “Held by cloth’s hand,” she continues, “we are swaddled at birth, covered in sleep, and shrouded in death. A single thread spins a myth of origin and a tale of adventure and interweaves people and webs of communication.”18 For women in particular, the primary weavers in many (though not all) traditional as well as modern societies, cloth has evoked all of this and more as a manifestation of “female power.”19
Beatrice Jeanette Whiting’s sewing exercise book, ca. 1915. “Exercise 25: A Piece of Checked Gingham.” Here the young sewer, who would later become a home economics teacher, practiced working a piece of gingham into the form of a small sack. Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
In the basement gallery at the NMAAHC, at the time of this writing, an old cloth sack hangs in a hallway of the unfathomable: scenes and sounds of human sales on American streets. The fabric unfurls in a weighty cascade encased in a chest-high, vertical box beside a boulder once used as an auction block, a video rendition of the poem “The Slave Mother,” by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and words stenciled onto the wall listing the monetary value of individuals long dead. This is a portal of horrors, almost too much for the modern-day viewer to bear. Visitors who encounter the sack tend to linger here, perhaps allowing Ruth’s spare words to penetrate their invisible shells. “Sometimes you have to be quiet with it,” Mary Elliott, co-curator of the slavery exhibition advised as she led me through the buried channel one cold winter day in 2017. “And you may hear voices.”20
We have Rose, Ashley, Rosa, Ruth, and Dorothy to thank for allowing us to listen in on their family’s story, and we have a host of caretakers to thank for an incredible rescue of African American material culture evident in the preservation of this sack. We can see in this enigmatic relic dense wrongs of injustice and a deep well of human resilience. Ashley’s sack, and other “shards, wrecks, [and] rags” of Black material culture possess what NMAAHC curator Paul Gardullo has called “transformational power” to convey “the most important meanings for us and our nation.”21 Those meanings will surely differ in my mind and yours, but perhaps we can agree that this sack marks a spot in our national story where great wrongs were committed, deep sufferings were felt, love was sustained against all
odds, and a vision of survival for future generations persisted. This is knowledge worth preserving. Even as the sack itself belongs to Rose and her descendants, the “custody of the memory” should be borne by all of us.22 As we near the end of our journey, we hold a bag both empty and full, around which our many hands find the space for joining.
Rose and Ashley surely knew the value and weight of the burden they carried: the responsibility to envision a future and bear it forward through harrowing times. By assembling the bag and its contents, Rose turned fear into love, committing herself to a fight for life. In toting the sack and its story, Ashley realized Rose’s radical vision of Black persistence. In embellishing the cloth with her foremothers’ tale, Ruth committed this episode to family history and American history. And now that the sack is in our hands, we cannot forget its layered lessons. Horrible things take place. Nevertheless, survival is possible. Hope can gain ground, and generations can be sustained. When we bear into the future the full knowledge of our past, we walk with hearts unfolded. We recognize the brutality of our species and as well the light in our spirits. We see that nothing is preserved, and no child or grandchild is saved, without brash acts of love and wild visions of continuance.
“The greatest threat that slaves faced was separation from their families,” wrote the maverick Black feminist scholar Barbara Christian, more than thirty years ago.23 This “specter of separation,” known intimately by our unfree forebears, plagues us now in qualitatively different but no less important ways as hatred and discontinuity shadow our present social and political worlds.24 We agonize as immigrant children are torn from parents by government agents, as politicians and the public toss aside common civilities, and as our species quickly peels away the climatic constancies of the Pleistocene epoch on our home planet. Separation, distance, enmity, and loss seem to be hallmarks of our time. What is our answer to this threat, at once immediate and existential? Will we throw in the towel? Or will we pack an emergency sack and make every effort we can dream up to save our children and right our wrongs?
In the tear of humanity that was chattel slavery, Rose made an old thing new and passed it on to Ashley. Rose’s creation was fashioned of fabric, echoing women’s histories dating back to ancient times. Her crafted object consisted mainly of fibrous materials (a dress, plant matter, braided hair) and was later embroidered with colored thread in keeping with a story-cloth tradition. Even more deeply rooted and resonant of women’s handiwork is Rose seizing upon a bag as her response to slavery’s claim. The sack, even before cloth, was most likely a woman’s invention, created for the essential and everyday tasks of carrying life: toting seeds, foodstuffs, tools, and newborn babes, the articles of existence that fell most readily into women’s domain for our ancient ancestors.25 Rose’s sack was made of cotton grown by unfree people, produced by a poor and possibly enslaved working class in a factory, secured by a chain stitch eerily symbolic of the forced-labor ethos of the era, and intended to serve a mammoth agricultural industry that enriched an elite master class at the expense of those who made the sacks. That Rose took all of this in hand and renewed the sack’s original purpose feels mystically fitting.
Ashley, the inheritor, then became a standard-bearer for the survival of her kin. We might even see Ashley as a mythic heroine: the seed carrier who totes a sack and plants new story lines. Much of our cultural lore lionizes male heroes wielding weapons of death, but an alternative archetype exists in history and myth the world over. The novelist Ursula Le Guin describes this second sort of protagonist as a gatherer instead of a hunter, a collector of wild plants rather than a shaker of spears. This alternative figure totes a bag as her principal object and tells stories as her primary mode of communication. While traversing the long, golden land, she “carries a sack, a bag, a sling, something to collect and carry home oats or potatoes from the field.” When she returns to her people, she tells the story of her journey to encourage their own walks on the land in a cyclical fashion that has no end. As a gatherer of things, the seed carrier provides for the sustenance of physical life; as a teller of tales, she sustains emotional and spiritual resilience. She invests in continuation—of the person, family, fields, and planet. Her stories, like seed bags, carry on.26 The sack carrier is the conveyor of new possibilities, but the sack, Le Guin reveals, a “thing that holds something else,” is the actual hero of human ascent. She reminds us that a book is a sack; a medicine bundle is a sack; a house is a sack; a church is a sack; even a museum is a sack. We must add, too, that the earth is a sack. All are containers for carrying.27
Elizabeth Keckley was adept at telling colorful anecdotes that unveiled the intimacies and politics of life in the Lincoln-era White House. Among these stories is her account of Abraham Lincoln’s first encounter with a colloquial term familiar to Blacks but unfamiliar to him. The Civil War was raging when this curious exchange took place. The president and his traveling party, including Mrs. Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckley, had arrived at Petersburg, Virginia, soon after the fall of Richmond in 1865. A little Black boy in the crowd, “ragged” in personal appearance, offered to “tote” the president’s belongings. When Lincoln asked the meaning of the word, the boy replied, “To tote um on your back,” leading Lincoln to understand that “when you tote a thing, you carry it.” Confused about this usage, Lincoln turned to Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts to ascertain the etymology of the word. Sumner replied, according to Keckley, “Its origin is said to be African. The Latin word totum, from totus, means all—an entire body—the whole.” Befuddled and maybe a bit annoyed, Lincoln objected to the disjuncture that he perceived between the two meanings his friend imparted. Sumner supported Lincoln’s view, agreeing that there was a conflict between the Latin root meaning “whole” and the African usage “to carry, to bear.” The European and African sources, these great men decided, were at odds.28
This earnest exchange between the elder statesmen on the meaning of “tote” in Black culture struck Elizabeth Keckley as humorous. The men saw two definitions standing in opposition, but perhaps the dressmaker appreciated an inner resemblance. Containers hold any and all things together in place and over time, instantiating whole, new, unexpected creations. Carrying a sack of these laden things, despite the weight of the burden, means bringing this hidden potential for new kinds of wholeness with us. “Tote” is, remarkably, a noun and a verb, a thing and an action. Can we commit our imaginations—like Rose, Ashley, and Ruth once did—to packing the sacks, carrying the seeds, and stitching the story cloths of tomorrow? All of our past, what we have valued and what we have undervalued, must be brought along this way, tucked and pressed inside the shelters of our story sacks. For, in our collective quest to survive with peoples and planet held intact—nothing is immaterial.
Ashley’s sack, back. The rear view of the sack packed by Rose, carried by Ashley, and embellished by Ruth shows the care invested in the family keepsake over time. Notice the many meticulous patches in the form of tight geometric shapes: squares, rectangles, and a small circle. Courtesy of the Middleton Place Foundation.
Carrying Capacity
Michelle May-Curry and Tiya Miles
This visual essay, “Carrying Capacity,” draws on contemporary art by Black artists to read Ashley’s sack not only as a historical object but also as a textile, a poem, and a work of art. As a textile, Ashley’s sack reminds us of the many ways Black people have used the fiber arts to stitch together themes of family and ancestral ritual. As a written message for future readers, Ruth’s and Rose’s words are at once poetry and prayer. As an heirloom layered with carefully chosen, colorful embroidery, the sack itself finds echoes across the contemporary art landscape as artists turn and return to visions of inheritance and the natural world. That Ashley’s sack still has the capacity to carry these multiple needs for viewers is further testament to Rose’s ability to provide resources for a journey she could only imagine. So, too, do artists equip us wi
th tools for the road ahead. They expand our perception of the sensorial environment that Rose, Ashley, and Ruth navigated and that we have inherited, an environment that is quickly changing before our eyes. They remind us to not only see but to touch, smell, and taste our way through these changes, as those before us have and those after us will.
Sacking
Middleton Place Foundation
Ashley’s sack. Brown for the past, red for love, green for the future. Timeworn stains on fraying fibers (perhaps dirt, perhaps blood) frame words in the abstract shape of a heart. Ruth’s stitchery on Rose’s medium brought forward through time by Ashley invites contemplation of the fabric of family.
Kelly Taylor Mitchell
Kelly Taylor Mitchell, Up River. 2018. Letterpress on handmade paper with smells of peanut. Printed at Minnesota Center for Book Arts in 2018. Mitchell uses sensorial tools to reimagine rites and rituals of the African diaspora—poems with a scent memory, paper made of flax, milkweed, and abaca. What might Ashley’s sack have smelled like?
Letitia Huckaby, photograph by Ryan Michalesko
Letitia Huckaby, Sugar and Spice (Suffrage Project). 2018. Huckaby uses a vintage cotton picking sack as a canvas for a pigment print of her daughter holding a sign saying, “Enough.” The image is reminiscent of Norman Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With, which depicts Ruby Bridges on her first day of school. Like Ruth and Rose, Huckaby imprints the seed sack with her own family story.