All That She Carried
Page 40
27. Le Guin, “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” 168.
28. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 167–68.
Little Sack of Something: An Essay on Process
1. Tiya Miles, “The Spirits of Dunbar Creek: Stories of Slavery in Coastal Ghost Tourism,” Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture: Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast, February 18–20, 2016, Coastal Georgia Center, Savannah. The revised presentations from the symposium have been published. See Tiya Miles, “Haunted Waters: Stories of Slavery, Coastal Ghosts, and Environmental Consciousness,” in Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture, ed. Paul S. Sutter and Paul M. Pressly (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017).
2. Ben Goggins, “Looking for Pearls: Ashley’s Sack, Davenport Dolls Give Insight into Lives of Slaves,” Savannah Now, January 28, 2016, savannahnow.com/article/20160128/LIFESTYLE/301289786. “Artifacts That Will Send a Chill Down Your Spine: A CBS Team Shows the Most Moving Artifacts of African-American History Collected for a New Museum in Washington,” February 28, 2016, cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-presents-preserving-the-past/. Jeff Neale, “Ashley’s Sack: A Humble Object of Revelation,” Davenport House Museum, Savannah, Ga., December 2016.
3. Tiya Miles, interview with Mary Edna Sullivan, November 13, 2018, Middleton Place, Charleston, S.C. Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 73. Todd quoted in Goggins, “Looking for Pearls.”
4. “Diminutive value” quote: Pamela Newkirk, A Love No Less: More Than Two Centuries of African American Love Letters (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 3.
5. David Glassberg, “Place, Memory, and Climate Change,” The Public Historian, Vol. 36, No. 3 (August 2014): 17–30, 25–26.
6. Nell Irvin Painter, “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting,” in U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 146.
7. By “fugitive inventory,” I am referring to the lists of things and values—written on the page, or cloth, or heart—by unfree people seeking to repel the will of the master class through mobile or transitory acts of creative resistance.
8. Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 1, 78.
9. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (June 2008): 12.
10. Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton: 2018), 38.
11. Lauret Savoy, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2015), 1, 2. It is worth noting that Savoy is an environmental historian as well as a creative-nonfiction writer. Historians of the environment are experienced at enlisting a material historical method that allows for hunting and gathering sources beyond the page. I embraced this approach in my exploration of the sack, turning to physical things in the world, like textiles, foodstuffs, buildings, needles, and landscapes, in addition to written pages (which are also material things, but rarely treated as such). Environmental historian Hayley Brazier has ably articulated the way in which, “as logophiles, historians understand the past through documents that tell us a story of the human experience. But we often forget the physicality and tangibility of our ancestors.” “Documents,” she continues, “cannot provide scale and sensation.” Hayley Brazier, “Practicing in Place,” Environmental History Field Notes 1, April 8, 2016, environmentalhistory.net/field-notes/2016-brazier/.
12. In his study of the Haitian Revolution, which doubles as a theory of history, Caribbean anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot describes the remaining “facts” of the past as traces and notes that “the production of traces is always also the production of silences.” Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995; repr., Boston: Beacon, 2015), 29. In his use of “traces” and “echoes,” deep historian Daniel Lord Smail refers to any items that lend information about the past. He emphasizes natural and material things like fossils and pollen because these have often been devalued, but he also includes memory and manuscripts, noting that some traces are more instructive than others. Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Human Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 6, 49, 48, 52, 59. Christine DeLucia, a historian of Native America and colonial America, uses the term and concept of “trace” frequently in her study of King Philip’s War. While she searches for and analyzes traces of past lives and events on the landscape, she also cautions against an overreliance on material traces at the expense of memory. She reminds readers that material traces are not self-evidentiarily factual; they, like memories, are filtered through layers of interpretation. She suggests, as well, that physical traces can ignite “memory-sparks” that are just as valuable for historical interpretation. Christine M. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 17–18, 40, 146. The phrasing that came to my mind here, “ghostly matter,” is surely influenced by Avery Gordon’s book Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). For a discussion of historical texts as traces, see Amy J. Elias, “Metahistorical Romance, the Historical Sublime, and Dialogic History,” Rethinking History 9, nos. 2–3 (2005): 159–72, 168.
13. Elizabeth Alexander, Black Interior: Essays (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2004), x.
14. John Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), ix. Vlach’s book is based on a 1978 exhibition held at the Cleveland Museum of Art that later traveled to several museums. The major categories of craft exhibited and discussed included basketry, musical instruments, wood carving, quilting, pottery, boat building, blacksmithing, architecture, and graveyard decoration.
15. See Vlach, Afro-American Tradition. I am referring here to what seems to be a resurgence in interest in material history among historians of slavery. For instance, see Amy Murrell Taylor’s Embattled Freedom, in which she emphasizes “material reality” as a major thematic. Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 12, 18. See also a forthcoming special issue titled “Enslavement and Material Culture” in the Winterthur Museum journal, Winterthur Portfolio 54, no. 4 (Winter 2020). As I note elsewhere, Stephanie Camp is to be credited with revealing the richness of various materialities, including embodiment, geography, and cultures of personal adornment, in the study of enslaved women’s lives; Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
16. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 1, 78.
17. Alexandra A. Chan, Slavery in the Age of Reason: Archaeology at a New England Farm (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 4.
18. I was influenced in this notion by science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin’s discussion of the novel being like a sack. Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 169. Le Guin writes: “A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” For a definition of assemblage in new materialist theory, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 23–24. For a description of “vibrant material” with cultural and spiritual energy, see 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), 195, 197.
19. I am quoting Sharla Fett, quoting a
woman describing her conjure bag in a WPA interview transcript. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 102, 229.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Beacon Press: “Old Regions Recipes for Thanksgiving Pies, Pecan Pie” from The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro by The National Council of the Negro Women, copyright © 2000 by The National Council of Negro Women. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.
Marie Brown Associates, Inc.: “Pecan Pie” recipe from Vibration Cooking, or The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl by Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970) 91, 94. Copyright © 1970 by Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor. Reprinted by permission of Marie Brown Associates, Inc.
Kensington Publishing Corp.: “Pecan Crisp Cookies” recipe from The African-American Heritage Cookbook: Traditional Recipes and Fond Remembrances from Alabama’s Renowned Tuskegee Institute by Carolyn Quick Tillery (Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996), copyright © 1996 by Carolyn Quick Tillery. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Kensington Publishing Corp. www.kensingtonbooks.com.
Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC: “Nut Butter Balls” recipe from In Pursuit of Flavor by Edna Lewis with Mary Goodbody, copyright © 1988 by Edna Lewis. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Simon & Schuster, Inc.: “Pecan Wafers” recipe from A Good Heart and A Light Hand: Ruth L. Gaskin’s Collection of Traditional Negro Recipes by Rusk L. Gaskins, copyright © 1968 by Fund for Alexandria, Virginia. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and the Estate of Rosie Lee Tompkins: Image of quilt on the sixth page of the insert, Rosie Lee Tompkins: Untitled, c. 2004, quilted by Irene Bankhead (2007), printed cotton, polyester, woven wool, velour, cotton flannel, wool, cotton embroidery, and other fabrics with cotton muslin backing, 40-½ x 53 inches. Bequest of The Eli Leon Living Trust, 2019.72.55. Photographed for the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive by Benjamin Blackwell. Reprinted by permission of University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and the Estate of Rosie Lee Tompkins.
By Tiya Miles
All That She Carried
The Dawn of Detroit
The Cherokee Rose
Tales from the Haunted South
The House on Diamond Hill
Ties That Bind
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tiya Miles is a professor of history, a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Her book The Dawn of Detroit received the Merle Curti Award in Social History, the James A. Rawley Prize in race relations, the James Bradford Biography Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction, an American Book Award, and a Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Miles is also the author of Ties That Bind, The House on Diamond Hill, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, and Tales from the Haunted South, a published lecture series.
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