All That She Carried

by Tiya Miles

  61. “The morality”: Quoted in Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 86.

  62. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 137–44. See also Cooper, A Voice from the South, 62–63, 140–41.

  63. Mary Church Terrell, The Progress of Colored Women (Adansonia Publishing, 2018), 9. See also Cooper, A Voice from the South, 9–47.

  64. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham made the now-classic argument that the politics of respectability served as a weapon for these women organizers in their bid for community defense and racial betterment. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 192, 227. See also Darlene Clark Hine, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 109–28. For a rereading of clubwomen’s engagement with respectability among other political tactics, see Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).

  65. Mamie Garvin Fields with Karen Fields, Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir (New York: Free Press, 1983), 9.

  66. Fields, Lemon Swamp, 21. Fields explains that this woman she called “Grandma” was actually her maternal step-grandmother. She never knew her maternal birth grandmother, who was deceased.

  67. Fields, Lemon Swamp, 199. Melnea Cass, transcript, Black Women’s Oral History Project, OH-31; T-32, Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, 68–69.

  68. Fields, Lemon Swamp, xvi.

  69. Fields, Lemon Swamp, xx. The historian Michele Mitchell demonstrates how aspiring and middle-class Black women of this time period used domestic material culture such as Black dolls, books about racial improvement, and photographs of Black families to reinforce an intertwined ideology of acceptable gender roles and racial uplift. While she does not discuss embroidery or textiles passed down between mothers and daughters, objects like these would have fit into this domestic material ideal. Dolls, of course, also had fabric elements. Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny After Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 178, 179, 194.

  70. Parker, Subversive Stitch, 151; “absolute innocence”: 166; “still and silence”: 167; “loophole”: 167.

  71. Ulrich, Age of Homespun, 40.

  72. Parker, Subversive Stitch, 205. Bryan-Wilson, Fray, 14, 1. Julia Bryan-Wilson also notes the use of embroidered banners by British suffragists in the early 1900s as a means of broadcasting women’s dignity and making their demand for the vote seem less threatening; Fray, 9.

  73. Betsy Greer, a knitter, coined the term “craftivism” in 2003 or 2004 (sources differ). Bryan-Wilson, Fray, 25. Stephanie Buck, “Women Craftivists Are Reclaiming Domesticity as a Quiet Form of Protest, Timeline, November 22, 2016, timeline.com/​craftivism-art-women-82cf1d7067c8.

  74. E. Tammy Kim, “The Feminist Power of Embroidery,” The New York Times, May 27, 2019. See also the Instagram project Tiny Pricks, curated by Diana Weymar. In this project, started as a response to Donald Trump’s presidency, artists stitch lines of cultural and political commentary onto vintage fabrics, signifying, Weymar writes, “warmth, craft, permanence, civility, and a shared history” in a “tumultuous political climate.” See Instagram.com/​tinypricksproject/.

  75. Kim, “Feminist Power of Embroidery.” Julia Bryan-Wilson offers an interesting and similar analysis of the iconic photograph in which Sojourner Truth is shown sitting and knitting with white yarn: “Truth might have so carefully deployed knitting because it could have been seen in several ways, as a nonthreatening demonstration of her aptitude for domestic work, a reassuring sign of her femininity, and as an assertion of her strident activism and creative self-production”; Fray, 8.

  76. Grandeur Preserved: Masterworks Presented by Historic Charleston Foundation, loan exhibition for the 57th Annual Winter Antiques Show, January 21–30, 2011.

  77. Mark Auslander, “Tracing Ashley’s Sack,” Cultural Environments blog, January 7, 2016, note 3, culturalenvironments.blogspot.com/​2016/​01/.

  78. Sampler scholars Jennifer Van Horn and David Stinebeck note the collaborative nature of embroidery samplers—between girls and teachers, as well as between girls and female relatives. In this way, in addition to her tight, verselike lines, Ruth’s inscription echoes the sampler. For detailed readings of several girls’ samplers, see Van Horn, “Samplers.” David Stinebeck argues that samplers showcasing poetic verse should be examined as part of the tradition of American literature. Sampler poems range from popular to original verse but, he says, were “rarely individually conceived.” David Stinebeck, “Understanding the Forgotten Poetry of American Samplers,” Journal of Popular Culture 52, no. 5 (2019): 1183–99, 1184, 1186. Also see the NEH-funded Sampler Archive project, a collaboration between the University of Oregon, the University of Delaware, and the Sampler Consortium; http://samplerarchive.org/​about.php. Ruth’s attention to a “complex set of relations” inclusive of ancestors and even the unborn (given that she may have been pregnant when she began the craft project) suggests an alignment of her sense of identity with that of other Black women of the early twentieth century, as detailed by LaKisha Simmons in her study of oral histories from the 1930s. Simmons, “Black Feminist Theories of Motherood and Generation,” 319.

  79. Jones, Corregidora, 14.

  80. The parallelism between Ruth’s use of red for her quotation and Jesus’s words printed in red in the Bible has been noted by academics from different fields. Mark Auslander was the first to publish this observation, in his article “Rose’s Gift.” The historian of Native America James Brooks raised this point in a public comment following a lecture I delivered: Tiya Miles, “ ‘This Sack’: Reconstructing Enslaved Women’s Lives Through Objects,” University of Georgia, Athens, October 24, 2019. And the African American studies scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., noted the same when he served as facilitator for another lecture of mine: Tiya Miles, “ ‘A Tattered Dress’: Reconstructing Enslaved Women’s Lives Through Objects,” Hutchins Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., February 19, 2020. Auslander makes note of the sense of Black English in Ruth’s writing, a readily apparent feature in this line’s use of the verb “be”; Auslander, “Rose’s Gift.”

  81. Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior: Essays (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2004), x.

  82. Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years; Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 127, 91, 114, 161, 162.

  83. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 276–78. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 206. Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), Kindle loc. 823. Another striking use of red fabric in African American folk culture is more uniformly menacing. The historian Michael Gomez recounts how formerly enslaved people on the South Carolina coast retold stories handed down about the capture of their ancestors for the slave trade in West Africa. In these tales, slave catchers used red cloth in the form of a handkerchief to lure unwitting victims onto slave ships; thus red was the color of warning and trickery. Gomez also notes, importantly, that textiles were the major item of value exchanged for captive Africans during the transatlantic slave trade (that is, Africans were usually sold for cloth). Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 202, 200, 205.

  84. It is interesting to consider Ruth’s inclusion of this list in relation to an argument that the women’s studies scholar Brittney Cooper makes about what she calls the practice of “listing” among Black women intellectuals and activists of the late 1800s and early 1900s. “Listing” in Cooper’s formulation is “a long practice…in which African Americ
an women created lists of prominent, qualified Black women for public consumption.” Cooper then uses a fabric metaphor to explain the purpose of this practice: “to constitute a critical edge, without which the broader history of African American knowledge production would unravel.” Cooper, Beyond Respectability, 26.

  85. I am grateful for a casual conversation with Keith Vincent, a literary scholar, a haiku expert, and the chair of the Department of World Languages and Literature at Boston University, in which I learned these elements of the haiku and made a connection to the sack in the fall of 2018.

  86. Keith Vincent gave me the idea that Ruth is welcoming Rose through these words, resulting in a metaphysical kind of reunion. Mark Auslander also uses “reunion” to describe the joining of the women on the surface of the cloth. Auslander, “Rose’s Gift.”

  87. Nicole Sealey, Ordinary Beast (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 55.

  88. Ulrich, Age of Homespun, 141.

  89. Mark Auslander also notes this shift of colors in the thread on the sack and offers a moving reading, including the green at the end as a representation of “enduring and regenerative connectedness” and of “spring after the death of winter.” Auslander, “Rose’s Gift.”

  90. Ruth Middleton, Certificate of Death, File No. 9389, Registered No. 1352, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Health Bureau of Vital Statistics. Census and death certificate records give slightly varying birth dates for Ruth Middleton: 1902, 1903, and 1905. Her birth date in this reconstruction is approximal. She passed away on January 20, 1942. The death certificate gives her age as thirty-five. She was buried in Eden Cemetery. I have tried to identify lineal descendants of Dorothy with the help of a genealogist. If I have overlooked any evidence or missed the existence of descendants, I extend my heartfelt apology.

  91. Mark Auslander states that Dorothy Middleton, Ruth Middleton’s daughter, may have died in a nursing home in a suburb of Philadelphia (Wyncote), where her things would have been packed up and disposed of. Auslander, “Rose’s Gift.”

  Conclusion: It Be Filled

  1. Ira Berlin, Steven F. Miller, and Leslie S. Rowland, “Afro-American Families in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Radical History Review 42 (1988): 90, 110.

  2. Pamela Newkirk, A Love No Less: More Than Two Centuries of African American Love Letters (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 3.

  3. Kendra Field, “Things to Be Forgotten: Time, Place, and Silence in African American Family Histories,” Q & A response following her lecture, Little Berks symposium, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, Mass., June 7, 2019. For a thoughtful exploration of one Black family’s incredible collection of photographs that did survive, see Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “History in the Face of Slavery: A Family Portrait,” in Ilisa Barbash, Molly Rogers, and Deborah Willis, To Make Their Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes (Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum Press, 2020).

  4. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Ivan Gaskell, Sara M. Schechner, and Sarah Anne Carter, eds., “Introduction: Thinking with Things,” Tangible Things: Making History Through Objects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2, 5, 8. Also see Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 73.

  5. Sarah Anne Carter, “Objects as Portals,” in Ulrich et al., eds., Tangible Things, 164.

  6. Robin Bernstein defines the special quality of certain things as an ability to “hail” people, get their attention, or call them into action. The actions she most explores are various kinds of performances. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 73. Jane Bennett discusses the ability of things to act on people, especially as parts of assemblages. She calls this quality “thing power” and suggests that it is most easily realized or felt during childhood. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 6, 21. Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter,” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (June 2004): 348, 351, 353, 358. Bill Brown differentiates between an object and a thing in his essay introducing “thing theory,” noting that things behave in distinctive ways: “lurk[ing]” in shadows, occupying liminal and “excessive” positions, and suddenly “assert[ing] their presence and power.” Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1, Things (2001): 1–22, 3, 5.

  7. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 13, 112, 122.

  8. See Kim TallBear’s definition of an “indigenous metaphysic” that pre-dates Euro-American theories of new materialism. 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. Also see Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Intelligence of Plants,” On Being, National Public Radio, February 25, 2016, onbeing.org/​programs/​robin-wall-kimmerer-the-intelligence-of-plants/.

  9. Kathleen M. Hilliard, Masters, Slaves and Exchange: Power’s Purchase in the Old South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 7, 14.

  10. Newkirk, A Love No Less, 7.

  11. Newkirk, A Love No Less, 9.

  12. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 330.

  13. Sarah Anne Carter, “Objects as Portals,” in Ulrich et al., eds., Tangible Things, 165.

  14. Davíd Carrasco, “The Ghost of Love and Goodness,” in Goodness and the Literary Imagination, ed. Davíd Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2019), 121. In this statement, Carrasco is describing Toni Morrison’s literature and the way in which she “infuses nature with the supernatural.”

  15. Beads carried symbolic importance for African Americans and Native Americans as religious charms, artistic materials, and modes of communication. For examples of enslaved people’s desire to obtain and gift beads, see John Sella Martin’s account discussed in chapter 4. See Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 221. Also see Hayley Negrin’s dissertation, “Possessing Native Women and Children: Slavery, Gender and English Colonialism in the Early American South, 1670–1717” (PhD diss., New York University, 2018), 102; here Negrin summarizes an eighteenth-century account of a white Carolina trader, Phillip Gilliard, who captured a Native woman for sexual slavery and “whipped her and her brother for accepting a few beades from her.” For more on beads as protective charms, see Maude Southwell Wahlman, “African Charm Traditions Remembered in the Arts of the Americas,” in African Impact on the Material Culture of the Americas: Conference Proceedings (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, 1996), 5. Also see Amy L. Young, “Religion and Ritual Among African American Slaves During the Antebellum Period in Kentucky: An Archaeological Perspective,” in African Impact on the Material Culture of the Americas, 3–4. Young notes the prevalence of beads—particularly blue beads—recovered at multiple archaeological sites of slave dwellings; Wahlman points out that blue beads were thought to have especially protective properties.

  16. Laura F. Edwards, “Textiles: Popular Culture and the Law,” Buffalo Law Review 64 (2016): 195, 207.

  17. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 215, 217. Also see Julia Bryan-Wilson’s analysis of the quilt as archive, Fray, 226.

  18. Ann Hamilton, Habitus (Philadelphia: The Fabric Workshop and Museum, 2017), 5.

  19. Jane Schneider and Annette B. Weiner, “Introduction,” in Cloth and Human Experience, Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 3, 21.

  20. The historian Nancy Bercaw was co-
curator, with Mary Elliott, of this exhibition.

  21. Paul Gardullo, NMAAHC, email exchange with Tiya Miles, February 19, 2018.

  22. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018), 153.

  23. Barbara Christian, introduction to Dorothy Sterling, Black Foremothers: Three Lives, 2nd ed. (New York: Feminist Press, 1988), xxiv.

  24. 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), 13.

  25. Drawing on the work of archaeologists and anthropologists, women’s studies scholar Elizabeth Fisher argues that the carrier bag was an early and essential human tool likely developed by women, who used it in gathering and carrying infants. Elizabeth Fisher, Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society (1979; repr., New York, McGraw-Hill, 1980), chapter 7: “The Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution,” 56–61. Ursula Le Guin describes the sack as “the tool that brings energy home”; see “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” in her Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 167.

  26. I owe my introduction to this concept of the seed carrier as alternative hero to literary and film scholar Kirk Sides, and my introduction to Kirk Sides’s work to environmental historian Martha Few. Kirk Sides discusses the seed bag carrier figure, borrowing from Ursula K. Le Guin, who borrows from Elizabeth Fisher. Sides argues that the adoption of ways of storytelling capable of narrating crisis is a necessity, as these stories carry the seeds for Afro-futurist visions in an apocalyptic age of “planet-death.” Kirk Bryan Sides, “Seed Bags and Storytelling: Modes of Living and Writing After the End in Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi,” Critical Philosophy of Race 7, no. 1 (2019): 107–23. Sides also gives workshops on this topic with his collaborator, the poet and literary critic Tjawangwa Dema. Kirk B. Sides, “Seed Bags and Storytelling: Modes of Living and Writing in the African Anthropocene,” Anthropocene Storytelling: Ecological Writing and Pedagogies of Planetary Change, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, April 18–19, 2019. Ursula K. Le Guin, “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.”