All That She Carried

by Tiya Miles

  At times in this book, I select shorter words or word combinations for the sound or rhythm in the sentence rather than performing linguistic acrobatics to avoid using the word “slave” or “owner.” Preferred racial and category terms change over time, and sometimes morph rapidly. While I fully support the evolution of preferred language regarding sensitive racial terms or other categories of identity, I also wish to reserve room to employ our full lexicon within the bounds of respect and settled discourse, to convey the full scope of my meaning as smoothly as my imperfect pen will allow. In this effort, I am practicing at my letters much like the maker of a needlepoint sampler. There will surely be spots that make you wish I had ripped out the stitches and started again, and for this I ask your forbearance.

  LITTLE SACK OF SOMETHING: AN ESSAY ON PROCESS

  This has been a tale of a powerful object touched by three women whose lives might have been lost to history: Rose, a visionary; Ashley, a survivor; and Ruth, a storyteller. Ordinary in their time among the roughly four million Americans caged by slavery, the women of this story are extraordinary in our time for their production and preservation of a rare object imbued with the memory of slavery’s shadow. The story of the bag and of their family ripples out like salted waves off the coast of Lowcountry South Carolina, flowing into the histories of African America and the United States of America, a beleaguered race and a benighted nation both searching for ways to the light. Like no other artifact in African American material culture, this story cloth captures the emotional texture of Black women’s lives during and after slavery and reveals the staying power of love across time—past, present, and unfolding.

  While my journey with this story ended here—at a meditation on love and our carrying capacity as human beings for bearing the burdens of trauma as well as the gifts of fortitude—I entered the project serendipitously through the doorway of environmental history, which opened into still more doorways of material culture studies and cultural theories about how things function in human society. Once I began to see the layered shape of the project, I applied for funding from the Public Scholars program at the National Endowment for the Humanities. The award I received carried explicit expectations for public relevance and would add yet another layer to the project, compelling me to write with the interests of a public audience in mind and to strive toward translating the practices of scholars in the historical profession for that readership. The unusualness of the sack likewise pushed me to write an accounting of it that reaches for (but cannot attain) a parallelism with the object in form as well as spirit, which meant assembling and cinching together various kinds of source materials and attempting to craft history in a poetic mode that goes to the marrow of our human experience. The resulting book is many things at once: a public history, an object history, and a study of Black women’s lives inspired by environmental understandings that all that we can trace and discover in human existence derives in some way from sources natural and material.

  Ecologies and Rootwork

  I did not see Ashley’s sack coming in the winter of 2016. I certainly could not have predicted that I would first hear about it from a scientist in the Lowcountry South. I was attending a symposium about the environmental history of the Georgia coast held in Savannah and hosted by the Ossabaw Island Foundation (for the preservation of coastal nature), an event that attracted hundreds of teachers, researchers, and state employees. I just had shared my research on the spiritual role of water to the enslaved people of the Georgia coast, culminating in the tale of Igbo Landing at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, where, according to the narratives of formerly enslaved people interviewed by employees of the Georgia Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration (or WPA), their ancestors leapt off a slaving ship (or out of a rice field, or away from a whipping—oral accounts vary) and flew back home to Africa. It was an unusual lecture for this gathering of science instructors, naturalists, and environmental historians, given my focus on ghosts and oral history, but the audience filled the auditorium and overflowed into a secondary room, eager for a discussion about the meeting grounds of nature and narrative. Many audience members embraced this story, standing to tell of their personal experiences at Igbo Landing, where one woman said she used to hear murmurs, perhaps echoes of enslaved voices, rising from the deep-water creek.1 Among them was Ben Goggins, a retired marine biologist and a local columnist for Savannah Now, who asked me after the talk if I “knew” Ashley’s sack. Before departing, he insisted that I had to see it.

  Beatrice Jeanette Whiting’s sewing exercise book, ca. 1915. “Exercise 24: Needle-book. One strip of canvas 21/4 by 41/2. Red zephyr. Tapestry needle.” For our consideration of the associations between words and stitches, books and sacks. Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

  That evening in my hotel room, I was surprised to find an email from Ben Goggins; it included a link to an article he had written a few weeks prior. Ashley’s sack, his piece explained, was a cotton bag given by an enslaved mother, Rose, to her enslaved daughter, Ashley, on the eve of the daughter’s sale in South Carolina. The Middleton Place Foundation of Charleston held the rights to the artifact, and a historical interpreter there, Jeff Neale, had recently traveled to Savannah to share news of the object’s temporary loan to the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Four days later, another missive appeared in my in-box. This time Ben reflected on the rising tides around his sea island home due to climate change and included a link to a CBS news story on Ashley’s sack. The article included a photograph of the bag, a dingy white cloth discolored by patches of dirt or blood and seared with punctures. Sentences formed from scrupulous stitching trailed across the cotton weave, an embroidered story of the item’s heartbreaking origins in a family’s forced division. Below the last sewn line, the handiwork was signed in thread: “Ruth Middleton 1921.”2

  My unexpected interlocutor had been right. Seeing the sack, experiencing its material nature, changed everything. The image, haunting as any story about the people who could fly, stole a beat from my heart. This object was dazzling in its immediacy, devastating in its story, and stunning in the simultaneity of gut responses it elicited. I had been studying Black history for over twenty years. I had visited African American museums, stared unbelievingly at leg chains and neck irons, but no remnant from those dark times had arrested my spirit quite like this one. It was, as the senior curator at Middleton Place Foundation, Mary Edna Sullivan, would later tell me, “visceral.” She described observing people bursting into tears while viewing the bag and mentioned her repeated offering of tissues. “I cry when I read it aloud,” Tracey Todd, then vice president at the Middleton Place Foundation, confided to Ben Goggins.3

  I did not cry at first while staring at the photograph that night. Perhaps I was too stunned. I had never before viewed a visual record of slavery so riveting, so disquieting, so gorgeous in its ghostly presence that it seemed to “hail” me, or call me to perform an action, as feminist theorist Robin Bernstein has said about the power of certain things. This unassuming sack on the screen in my hands was an invaluable heirloom, for the descendants of the Black Middleton family and for a composite African American family ceaselessly in search of its tangled roots. Invaluable—but vulnerable to the vagaries of circumstance. The sack’s survival seemed miraculous, given the fragile nature of its organic material as well as “the diminutive value accorded the historical relics of black American Life.” I understood why Goggins had led me here and felt a surge of gratitude for his opening of a door. The tale of the salvaged cotton sack combined nature, spirit, and transcendence, akin to the story of enslaved resistance at Igbo Landing. Floating across our email exchange was an implicit link about things of beauty under threat (oceans, islands, lives, families) and in need of rescue (human and perhaps divine). I enlarged the image on my screen, the better to absorb Ruth’s words, and lost myself in their waves of grief an
d oceans of meaning.4 My first reaction was some form of reverence, tempered later by research. Gradually, I attempted to uncover the meanings of the cloth by joining environmental studies, the means by which I had learned of it, to African American studies, slavery studies, women’s history, and material culture studies. A primary way of connecting these fields that I seized on was positioning the story of this physical thing created and carried by Black women as a “parable of resilience,” one of three approaches to aligning the work of public history with the spirit of restoration ecology articulated by the historian David Glassberg. By writing history as “collapse” parables, “sustainability” parables, or “resilience” parables, Glassberg suggests, scholars can “intervene responsibly in the memory streams of human communities” and thereby meaningfully contribute to a public reckoning with climate change. “Parables of resilience have the most value for public historians,” he argues, “since properly told they neither romanticize the past nor imply that it’s too late to avoid a pre-determined dystopian future.”5

  I began thinking about the sack in earnest during the spring of 2016, when I first traveled to Middleton Place plantation. Within a year, I got my first startling look at the object while visiting the recently opened Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. That visit and an awe-inspiring tour with curator Mary Elliott led me to apply for funding to write a book about the sack. The National Endowment for the Humanities granted me funding and moral support under the aegis of its (fairly new at the time) Public Scholars program, which aims to foster the production of scholarship intended for public audiences. Work created with grant funds are meant to serve the public good by presenting new questions for a public readership and by translating current ideas of scholarly inquiry for a range of readers beyond academia. It seemed to me that this special textile was the kind of object and subject that was capable of doing this work, and I am grateful to the staff members and reviewers of the NEH, whose support first signaled to me that I had a feasible project and buoyed my courage in pursuing it.

  After receiving positive news about this grant, I contacted Mark Auslander, whose brilliant online articles about the sack were critically important to my research. I learned from Mark that he was also writing a book and planning a major event with descendants he had identified. Nevertheless, he was open to hearing about my plans, noting that he might have expected that more people would take up this compelling subject. I am grateful to Mark for his scholarship and also for his acceptance of an invitation from me, Megan Sweeney, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, where he spoke not about the sack but about a moving contemporary textile project: his work, as the director of the Michigan State University Museum, with survivors of sexual violence and their parents, to preserve the teal ribbons they tied around campus trees to mark their experience and strength.

  After my research was well under way in 2018, I moved with my family to a different town and started a new job. While I parted from treasured friends and colleagues at the University of Michigan, I entered a novel space that profoundly influenced this project. I joined the History Department at Harvard just as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was retiring, and I inherited her cozy first-floor office (with a tall window looking out at a taller evergreen tree), as well as several books from her shelves and a heavy crate of inventories from a historic Massachusetts house museum. With the sack on my mind, I gravitated toward Laurel’s books on textiles. I then reread her book The Age of Homespun, in my own collection. I am convinced that it was the silent surround of her books and her space that led me to think so consistently about the sack as a textile and about the role of the material in African American women’s history.

  This project took root at a southern environmental studies conference, and it has grown in light of a series of later public presentations and exchanges. I first presented the research at a Modern Language Association conference in 2019. As part of the “Presidential Plenary: Textual Transactions” panel, I was fortunate to hear thoughts on my project from Kim Hall, a quilter and a Black studies, feminist studies, and Shakespearean scholar. Hall’s comment “I’m frustrated because I don’t know how to talk about love” stuck with me, as did her speculation that Black scholars recovering “love in the archive” could allow for the recovery of love in Black lives. A visit to the History Department at the University of Georgia in Athens (quilter Harriet Powers’s hometown) showered me with insights at a critical point in my thinking and allowed me to see, in a suggestion by the Civil War historian Stephen Berry, that the shape of Ruth’s embroidered text may loosely resemble a heart. Participating in the Columbia University–Barnard College symposium “1619 and Its Legacies” also yielded incredible exchanges and brought me into generative contact with the art historian Kellie Jones, who urged me to think harder about artistic comparisons with the sack, an exercise that seeded the exhibit-like shape of the color images insert. Also at the Columbia event, Robert Gooding-Williams made a lasting impression on this project when he took me aside to offer the sharp observation that the name “Ashley’s sack” narrows the scope of inquiry and suggests that this story is about just one person. His influence inspired my attempt at more inclusive language throughout the book, especially around the notion of collective and cultural descendants, rather than strictly lineal descendants.

  Presenting this work for the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research transformed how I viewed the enterprise. While joking that I had clearly gone “deep into the textiles,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., suggested that I needed to tunnel my way back out because I had what I needed to finish the book. Hutchins Center fellows urged me to focus on the supernatural, spiritual, and creative aspects of the work, insisting that this project had the chance to revivify an inner calling in the field of African American studies to feed the soul, a calling that had been lost amid the pressures of the academy to adopt objectivist stances. Because of them, I am letting the book go in this difficult season when we are all facing traumatic change in the form of the novel coronavirus (and despite a canceled final research trip to South Carolina in the spring of 2020). I hope this story of women who creatively, actively, and courageously confronted the worst will help shore up our resolve as we reimagine what life can look like in the aftermath of the virus and political vitriol.

  Also due to the Hutchins fellows’ encouragement, I have allowed myself to thread this book through with references to the spiritual realm of life, which was, in fact, central to the survival of many enslaved African Americans, and still is to many of their descendants. The Hutchins fellows’ comments brought back to mind poignant words spoken by Kim Hall at the 2019 MLA Conference—about how “conviviality and love take a back seat in Black studies.” We want to change that. As I write these lines and reflect on her words, I am thinking about how historical work may in some way resemble rootwork, in its effort to gather meaningful materials for the purpose of revealing information about social relations that might yield results.

  Traces and Archives

  With this project, I sought to answer a series of questions: What is the story of this cloth? Who were the mothers and daughters that touched it? What compelled Black women to struggle in defense of life in a system that turned mere existence into hardship? How did they maintain their will across generations in bleak times? And what can Black women’s creative response to the worst of circumstances teach us about the past and offer us for the future?

  Pursuing the answers to these questions would depend on the availability of evidence. Every scholar of early Black or Native women’s history, and the history of slavery, must confront the conundrum of the archives. Embarking on a search for evidence to verify the text of the sack compelled my turn to the traditional historical archive in these pages, notwithstanding its gruesomely violent episodes and unnervingly silent gaps. Where that archive of written documents offers distortion by rendering enslaved people as objects wh
en they are even present at all, I attempted to see “the hidden truths of slavery,” in the words of the historian Nell Irvin Painter, by peering between and beyond the lines of the written records.6 Here I employed an interpretive method articulated by Marisa Fuentes that proposes reading archival documents “along the bias grain,” which refers to the angled line across a swath of fabric where a natural give already exists. A diagonal reading of documents looks beyond what seems straightforward and feels for the stretch in the scholar’s materials, the leeway that more likely reveals hidden interiors and obfuscated realities. I practiced this, for example, in my reading of Robert Martin’s estate inventory, which I stretched to consider how his financial investments reverberated in the world of Black people until I began to imagine what a fugitive inventory might look like and realized that I had one in hand, in the form of Rose’s gift list.7 Evocatively, but perhaps not unexpectedly, this method devised by a woman historian takes up cloth as a metaphor, describing a practice of reading documents to access the lives of enslaved women as if these papers were bolts of fabric. In the stretch of the cloth exists a certain kind of gleaning, and, in that gleaning, a more capacious kind of knowledge.8