All That She Carried

by Tiya Miles

  This confrontation with the archive and the call to stretch sources like textiles raises a narrative imperative that I borrow from the incisive theorist Saidiya Hartman: to write history “with and against the archive.”9 It also raises questions about where to turn when the archival ground collapses beneath us. How do we discover past lives for whom the historical record is abysmally thin? What materials should we use as sources of information? Should we attempt to interpret odd sources, particularly material things that deviate from the norm of traditional document-driven historical scholarship?

  Beatrice Jeanette Whiting’s sewing exercise book, ca 1915. “Exercise 3(b): On this exercise, a garment bias, machine stitching and half back stitching are taught. Materials: Unbleached muslin 4½ by 7 inches. Red thread number 50. Needle number 8.” For our consideration of the bias-grain method of archival research. Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

  Evidence, or the lack thereof, presents a particular challenge for the study of Black women, women of color, and women on the whole as groups that have been socially disempowered and therefore often overlooked by the keepers of records and the intellectual architects of archives. Indeed, as the historian Jill Lepore has encapsulated the problem in relation to the wide scope of American history: the “archive of the past…is maddeningly uneven, asymmetrical, and unfair.”10 Researchers working in pre-twentieth-century records who care about Black lives are often left with the disparaging theorizations of slavery’s apologists and the cold notations of plantation diarists. What we might call the blood documents generated by the life of a “slave”—birth notations, food rations, clothing and blanket distributions, physician bills, bills of sale, death data—routinely confront researchers in Black women’s history and the history of slavery. Blood documents, like the blood diamonds on today’s jewelry market, were produced at the expense of real lives.

  Where written records leave gaps, we can look for material traces as historians of the environment have done. Lauret Savoy, a memoirist, environmental studies scholar, and descendant of enslaved and Indigenous people in Virginia, mourned how her enslaved “ancestors disappeared” into dull lists and anonymous graves. Rejecting the disciplinary expectation of reliance on written records, Savoy chose to follow the “trace,” which she defines as memory and loss “inscribed in the land.”11 In order to reconstruct the experiences of her ancestors, she travels to the places where they lived and interprets the built environment (like plantation houses and slave quarters) and the natural environment (like waterways and rocks) in conjunction with personal and family memories. In this method that makes space for physical remnants and memories, Savoy joins with other historians, particularly of Native America and the environment. Traces, sometimes called echoes, are often unseen and untapped reserves that can provide us with deeper information.12

  Endeavoring to reconstruct any history, but especially the histories of the marginalized, requires an attentiveness to absence as well as presence, to traces of the past as much as documentary evidence of events. A trace might be defined as a material, a memory, or even an artistic imagining, as the poet Elizabeth Alexander suggests. “The historian,” Alexander writes, “laments caesuras in the historical record; the artist can offer deeply informed imagining that, while not empirically verifiable, offers one of the only routes we may have to imagine a past whose records have not been kept precious.” In the case of Ashley’s sack, a hearsay seed sack is an imperfect historical record but also a valuable trace that can be prompted to reveal worthwhile information. The “artifact,” Alexander finds, is another kind of “record,” another route to “history.”13 We need to be mindful, the art historian John Michael Vlach concurs, “of the artifact’s value as historical evidence.”14 In doing so, we join in the twenty-first-century revival of a vibrant interdisciplinary method of historical study from the 1970s and 1980s that turned to material objects, arts, and crafts as a means to fill out the woefully inadequate “archive” of slavery.15

  To interpret this mixed bag of traces that is Ashley’s sack, I have tried to identify aspects of the object’s makeup as well as particular words in the text of the embroidery where focused thought might loosen the threads into larger meanings.16 This approach is in play, for example, when I touch on what Ruth has stitched into remembrance and continuance (a family sustained by love) and stretch that material into the space she has left unspecified (a regional and national culture of human diminishment). Ashley’s sack opens up in the light of this elasticized view. Having to burrow into the cloth, to make do with its evidentiary limits, pulled me toward a mode of associational thinking of the kind archaeologist Alexandra Chan suggested, in her study of an eighteenth-century New England plantation, when writing that “artifacts are metaphorical expressions of culture.”17 An object like Ashley’s sack invites us to consider the interlaced cultural worlds of African American, Native American, and European American life, and of southern and northern experience, in the time periods when it was used. The artifact might also inspire, and did for me, invigorated ways of conceptualizing and communicating contemporary cultural efforts, from responding to the emergencies of our times to doing the work of history. We might, for instance, see this sack (or any sack) as a metaphor for vibrant historical research and writing. Packing a sack requires gathering and combining select items and then allowing those things to mix and mingle. New combinations and ideas emerge from that process, formed of the innate vitality of loosely composite parts now linked. Borrowing from philosopher Jane Bennett, we can think of these configurations—these histories—as assemblages, odds and ends that together produce a special kind of synergy.18

  The account I have offered in this book, this “little sack of something,” is not final.19 Interpretations of the past never are nor can they be. While the past itself does not change, the production of history—our studied scrutiny and reconstruction of the past—always shifts over time, sometimes blooming with our discovery of new sources and formulation of fresh questions, and sometimes buckling from the weight of cultural transformations. Indeed, as these pages go to press, preparations are being made to transport Ashley’s sack from the nation’s capital back to Charleston. There, in the aged interiors of Middleton Place plantation, or in the modern galleries of the city’s International African American Museum, this time-tested tote will grace more lives and make new histories. After only five years spent drawing near to this textile, I cannot claim to know Rose, Ashley, Ruth, or their families intimately. But I take heart from their example of an ethic of bequest, love made manifest in the preservation of things passed on.

  NOTES

  Prologue: Emergency Packs

  1. My thinking on love was influenced by Jonathan L. Walton, A Lens of Love: Reading the Bible in Its World for Our World (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018), 38, 42. In writing these prefatory pages, the notion of “love-craft” as fashioned and applied emotion in response to urgent trouble occurred to me as an oppositional kind of idea to statecraft and perhaps as a kindred idea of witchcraft, as in the making of something magical through belief, materials, and the spoken word.

  2. This is the kind of hope philosopher Jonathan Lear articulated when writing about the destruction of traditional Crow Indian culture by U.S. military and colonial violence. A disposition such as this requires, Lear avows, “imaginative excellence” and a will to reach “toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.” Novelist Junot Díaz repurposed Lear’s concept when writing about the election of Donald J. Trump to the U.S. presidency in 2016: “Radical hope is our best weapon against despair, even when despair seems justifiable; it makes the survival of the end of your world possible.” Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 117, 103. Junot Díaz, “Aftermath: Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America,” New Yorker, N
ovember 21, 2016.

  Introduction: Love’s Practitioners

  1. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; repr., New York: HarperCollins Perennial Classics, 1998), 14. Hurston’s precise quote, a line spoken from Grandma to Janie, is: “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see. Ah been prayin’ fuh it tuh be different wid you.” Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861, Avalon Project, Yale Law School; avalon.law.yale.edu/​19th_century/​lincoln1.asp.

  2. The story of the cow is a composite from my memory based on the many times my grandmother told it. One of those times, the summer after I had enrolled in a graduate program in women’s studies in June 1993, I wrote it down. We were on her front porch, the perpetual stage for her storytelling. I asked her if she would tell me the story of her life. She started with her birth in 1914, described a move to a new home at age five, described each of her parents in turn, depicted their life on the farm, told the story of expulsion, described meeting her first husband and their early life together, told of the move to Cincinnati in 1941, and dwelled on their poverty in the city and leaving her first husband at the age of thirty-six or thirty-seven due to domestic abuse. The two events or phases of life she stressed most, as measured by the amount of time she spent narrating them, were: the eviction in Mississippi and the economic and social difficulty of life in urban Ohio.

  3. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 149, 418.

  4. For the sake of readerly ease and writerly fluidity, I will generally use the terms “thing” and “object” interchangeably, although a field of academic inquiry referred to as thing theory and new materialism studies differentiates between their definitions. I follow the lead of historians Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Ivan Gaskell and their co-authors, museum studies scholars and practitioners Sara J. Schechner and Sarah Anne Carter, in adopting the wider use of the terms “object” and “thing” as interchangeable. However, as the gender studies and cultural studies scholar Robin Bernstein explains, the difference between an object and a thing is the thing’s active ability to stand out in human awareness above and beyond the many objects that surround us. Bernstein also compellingly defines the special quality of the thing as its ability to “hail” people, or compel them into action. Literary critic Bill Brown was probably the first in that subfield to mark this distinction when he described things as possessing an assertiveness and “unspecificity” lacking in the object and explained that one cannot straightforwardly peer through a thing as through a window. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 1–22, 3, 4. Philosopher Jane Bennett developed this difference, pointing to the strange vitality of the thing in relation to human experience and specifying that an object transforms into a thing “when the subject experiences the object as uncanny.” The historian of science and Indigenous studies scholar Kim TallBear has pointed out that what she calls an “indigenous metaphysic”—a theory and orientation to the world that emphasizes human relationship to places and understands the interconnectedness of all things (animate and inanimate) and sees anything as potentially “vibrant material”—long pre-dates thing theory. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Ivan Gaskell, Sara J. Schechner, and Sarah Anne Carter, eds., Tangible Things: Making History Through Objects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2. Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 72, 73. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 2. Also see Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter,” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (June 2004): 347–72. Kim TallBear, “Beyond the Life/Not Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and the New Materialisms,” in Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, ed. Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017), 191, 195, 199.

  5. For an excellent analysis of ways in which the commemoration of women’s needlework, especially pieces produced in the colonial period, have romanticized that past and covered over race and class differences, see Martha R. Miller, The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 3, 93–94, 216–22.

  6. Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years; Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 149, 229, 230, 153, 154.

  7. Barber, Women’s Work, 299, 23.

  8. Elsa Barkley Brown, “African-American Women’s Quilting: A Framework for Conceptualizing and Teaching African-American Women’s History,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 929.

  9. For a discussion of the AIDS Quilt as an archive, see Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 226.

  10. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 11.

  11. This object history appreciates, as archaeologist Jane Spector spelled out, the necessity of building a narrative and at the same time offering alternative story lines of possibility. Jane D. Spector, What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1993), 18.

  12. Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 1, 4–7, 78. The terms “the bias” or “bias grain” refer to a line cutting diagonally across the horizontal and vertical grains of a piece of fabric.

  13. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (June 2008): 1–14, 4, 12, 14. By “counter-histories,” Hartman points to histories that oppose past dehumanizing or invisibilizing historical narratives. By “trans-temporal,” I mean an interpretive positionality that crosses time periods when seeking to understand and render the rippling meanings of slavery. See also Saidiya Hartman’s definition of “the time of slavery,” as “the relation between the past and the present, the horizon of loss, the extant legacy of slavery, the antinomies of redemption…and irreparability,” in “The Time of Slavery,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 757–77, 759. The historian LaKisha Simmons offers another rich description of how time takes an alternative shape for Black women, a quality she calls “a Black sense of time.” Simmons argues, in her study of Black mothers’ loss of infants, that Black women collapse “notions of time, space, and generation” in their understandings of self and family. She offers a definition of “Black feminist relationality as always in conversation with the dead and with the past.” LaKisha Michelle Simmons, “Black Feminist Theories of Motherhood and Generation: Histories of Black Infant and Child Loss in the United States,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 46, no. 2 (2021): 311–35, 318, 319.

  14. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 29.

  15. Jeff Neale, “Ashley’s Sack: A Humble Object of Revelation,” Davenport House Museum, Savannah, Ga., December 2016.

  16. Human feelings and desires do change over time in expression, intensity, and cultural allowance, but many of these we share across time, circumstance, and status. For an intricate analysis of the social and psychological revelations afforded by the study of objects, see Jennifer Van Horn, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2017). Also see the equally compelling Bernard L. Herman, Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2005).

  17. Timothy J. LeCain, The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (New Y
ork: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 21.

  18. The history of emotion is a field of historical studies that has seen greater emphasis in the past decade. Interdependent with psychological studies, this field explores human emotions of the past and whether they are trans-historical or transcultural (“universal”), specific to cultural moments and time periods (“contingent”), or, most convincingly, a combination of the two. Scholars in this field employ a range of sources, including written, visual, and sensory (i.e., smell). Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, Emotions in History series (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), 5, 293–95. Heather Williams, the first academic to publish about Ashley’s sack, is also one of the few historians to probe the emotions of slavery as a history of emotions. Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). David Blight also closely considers feeling and psychology in his biography of abolitionist Frederick Douglass: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018). Martha Hodes’s history of the nation’s reaction to Abraham Lincoln’s death focuses on the emotion and culture of mourning: Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

  19. Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove, 1989), 169. Le Guin writes: “A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”