All That She Carried by Tiya Miles *****

In All That She Carried, historian Tiya Miles tells the story of a cotton sack embroidered with this story: “My great grandmother Rose mother of Ashley gave her this sack when she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina [1853] it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her It be filled with my Love always she never saw her again Ashley is my grandmother Ruth Middleton 1921”

Because there is little in the historical record of the enslaved people, this cotton sack is important. It hangs in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), in Washington, D.C. The author tells the story behind this artifact.

This book recounts the experience of African Americans whose lives were mostly under-recorded or misunderstood.

Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times by Elizabeth Wayland Barber is a wonderful book about the history of textiles—spinning, weaving, and sewing. All That She Carried continues the history of fiber arts.

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,”

Since the historical record contains so little, the author augments the story of Rose, Ashley, and Ruth with stories of other people in similar situations whose story has survived.

In unfolding the story of these women, the brutality of life for African Americans both before and after the Civil War is presented in excruciating detail.

Over and over the authors highlights how African American are excluded and missing from the historical record. For example, plantations had stores, which were often the only place enslaved people could spend what little money they acquired. The ledger books from this store document how they spent their money (almost 2/3 on cloth, clothing, and sewing supplies) and, thus, what was important to them. How many of these books that were maintained for centuries across the South survived? Six!

“[South] Carolina “planter-politicians” presided over the most undemocratic society ever sustained in this country.”

African American economics following the Civil War. “In a context in which schoolteachers measured among the elite, domestic servants with steady employment could be counted in the Black middle class. Those with steady employment and strong moorings in organized community life enjoyed a kind of stability that contrasted greatly with the hand-to-mouth lifestyles of many unemployed and poverty-stricken Black Philadelphians.”

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