All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

The historian Tiya Miles uses a single object to tell a story of slavery in the 19th-century United States. Ashley’s sack is a cloth bag that Rose, an enslaved woman in South Carolina, gave to her nine-year-old daughter, Ashley, when the two were sold to different owners and permanently separated. It held a tattered dress, a lock of Rose’s hair and three handfuls of pecans.

The sack passed down the family to Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth, who in 1921 embroidered it with its history. With almost no direct records of Rose or Ashley, Miles draws on the sack’s contents, accounts by other enslaved people and historical scholarship to portray them.