152. All that She Carried
Transcript
Megan: This is Megan Reed from the Preservation Technology Podcast and I am here with...
Tiya Miles: Tiya Miles.
Megan: Thank you so much for being with us. We're here to talk about your book, “All That She Carried.” Can you briefly describe to our listeners what the book's about?
Tiya Miles: “All That She Carried” is the history of an artifact and the people who used this artifact and cherished it over the years and across the generations. The artifact is an antique cotton sack that was produced in South Carolina around the 1850s. It was used by an enslaved woman named Rose, to try to care for and support her daughter through an incredibly difficult time in both of their lives, which was the sale of Rose's daughter, Ashley, during the period of the domestic slave trade in the United States. Rose packed this sack with various items that she thought her daughter Ashley would need to be able to survive the separation from her mother and to persevere into the future.
Megan: You did a lot of heavy research and background into Ashley's sack. Can you describe how you were able to search for Rose?
Tiya Miles: I'd like to back up and fill listeners in on how I even knew to try to identify this woman. This sack is incredibly special because it is not only a bag, it is also an artifact, an object, a piece of material culture that is also a work of art, also, a text. In the book, I talk about it as being poetic. It's like a poem because a descendant of Rose and of Ashley, named Ruth Middleton, told the story on the sack itself. She picked up her needle. She picked up different colored spools of thread, and she sewed sentences onto the sack. So this bag becomes a document in many ways. In that embroidered inscription, Ruth Middleton names Rose, who is her ancestor. She also names Ashley, who is her grandmother. She talks about the separation of the mother and the daughter. She talks about that terrible sale, and she lists all the things that Rose packed into the sack.
So that's how I knew that I needed to look for Rose. There are no surnames on the inscription above the signature. There aren't really specifics beyond the fact that it took place in South Carolina, and all those details needed to be filled in in order to reconstruct the history and to tell the story. I started looking at records that have to do with enslavement in South Carolina -- enslaver's records because unfortunately, that is where information about enslaved people is most likely to be found. I was looking at the records at the South Carolina State Archives and also in a wonderful digital archive that was crowdsourced and is available online.
I searched for the name Rose in all these records across all these plantation documents that were onsite in South Carolina (the physical documents), and also that had been digitized. I learned through that search that the name Rose, was a common name for enslaved women in the mid-19th century. There were dozens of Roses. Ashley, as it turned out, was a very uncommon name. Ashley was, at this time, more of a masculine name than a feminine name. It was a name that tended to be given to white men. It was the name of a river in a certain part of South Carolina. So with Rose being a very common name, Ashley being a very unusual name for enslaved people, especially enslaved women, I then knew that I was looking for a Rose and an Ashley who might appear together on the same document. I did find that. I found just a couple of examples of Rose and Ashley together, and some of those examples were not in the right time period, which then ended up pointing to a particular Rose and a particular Ashley.
Megan: You also mentioned trying to find Rosa Jones, which is I believe Ashley's daughter. How was that?
Tiya Miles: On the embroidered sack, there are only three names. The name of Rose, the original mother, who packed the sack, There’s the name of Ashley, her daughter who received the sack, and the name of Ruth Middleton, who was a granddaughter and great-granddaughter who saved the sack, preserved the sack, and sewed the inscription onto it.
Ruth Middleton is the recorder. I talk about her as an oral historian in the book. She's the person who makes this story accessible to us. For whatever reason, she did not choose to inscribe her own mother's name in the sack. Ruth's decision not to include her own mother's name on the embroidered inscription left a gap. And the challenge then was to try to identify who stood in that gap. Luckily, time had passed, and record keeping was more helpful because Rosa could be identified in census records. We must say, as I mentioned in the book, that there are places in the reconstruction of this family line and of this history, where I had to make educated guesses. In the book, I always let readers know when I feel more certain or when I'm making an educated guess, when I'm relying on primary sources, and when I'm relying on secondary sources.
Megan: You identified there are three objects that Ruth mentioned that were in the sack. Can you tell our listeners what those objects were and how you used that to describe the identity of Ashley in that time period, and how you used to identify what their way of life was?
Tiya Miles: There weren't very many documents that pointed directly to Rose and Ashley, and to their story. Like many enslaved people, they did not have the ability, the capacity, the freedom to create or to preserve a cache of papers that would tell us about their lives, and so the sack itself, and the inscription on the sack that Ruth Middleton sewed, really became my major source for trying to identify them, for trying to interpret their lives, for trying to understand what they valued and what they cared about. By focusing on the sack as the source, I was able to open the reconstruction of that past out into various contextual directions.
The inscription says that Rose packed a tattered dress, three handfuls of pecan, and a braid of Rose's hair for Ashley. So those were the physical material things she packed. The inscription on the sack also tells us that Rose packed her love for Ashley. The word love is the centerpiece of the inscription, beautifully sewn in large red letters. When I was doing the research and writing the book, I tried to think about each of those items, and then to share how it was that enslaved people might have gotten ahold of those items, how they may have used those items, how they may have interpreted those items themselves and assigned meaning to them.
To offer one example, the dress is evocative as one of the things that Rose packed because enslaved women didn't have the capacity, the ability, the freedom, or the resources to possess a large wardrobe that they could choose of their own accord . Instead, they were assigned a certain amount of fabric per year. They were given a very small number of clothing items. They were never provided with enough clothing by their enslavers to keep them covered and warm throughout the seasons. By the end of a year, enslaved people's clothing would be worn, torn, stained. They wouldn't have shoes. They wouldn't have the items necessary to protect their bodies, so clothing was a very important category of material goods for enslaved people.
I write about how enslaved women recognized that clothing was sort of a battlefield in which there was a wrestling match going on having to do with human dignity. Their enslavers intended to provide them with the cheapest, most minimal amount of clothing as a way to demean them and to classify them as belonging to a certain category; the category of the enslaved, the category of people who didn't deserve to have beautiful, durable, comfortable, well-fitting clothing.
Enslaved women fought against this by doing all they could to quietly or secretly attain fabric on their own. Sometimes they would stay up all night making clothing for themselves or for their children and families. They would embellish this clothing, and they would then dress themselves on Sundays when they were going to church in articles of clothing that they had made that expressed their artistry, and their care for themselves and their family members.
So by packing a dress for Ashley, one of the things I think Rose was saying, is: you are worthy of care. You are worthy of love. You are worthy of being covered in a fabric, and dressed in an item that was selected for you. There are other ways in which I talk about clothing as well in the book, in relation to the vulnerability and exposure of enslaved girls and enslaved women, and how important clothing was or could have been as a barrier for them, protecting them from the views of people who would be attempting to buy them on an auction block, from overseers, from enslavers who meant them harm, and especially from people who might wish to exploit them sexually.
Megan: My final question to you is did you ever think your book would be such a success that you would win so many awards for it, and that is now on the top eight books for the National Trust of Historic Preservation books about preservation?
Tiya Miles: I am astounded and so honored by the attention the book has garnered, by the recognition that the book has garnered, which shined the light on these women who preserved their own lives, and preserved this sack, and preserved the story which we can now all share in. Back when I started the book, Megan, I wasn't sure I could even finish it because I didn't know if there was going to be enough material. To now see the book having such a wide readership is such a gift.
Megan: We have a project going on about documenting slave cabin and tenant farming houses across, and we were actually at St. Simon's Island documenting, and people came up to us like, "Have you read this book? You really need to just read this book." So that's when we first heard about it. We're like, "Okay, we got to read it."
Tiya Miles: That's wonderful. That's wonderful to hear.
Megan: Thank you so much, Tiya. That was great. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, and thank you so much for being with us.
Megan Reed speaks with Tiya Miles about her book "All that She Caried" and Tiya's deep dive into the history of an object to tell a family's story.