by Tiya Miles
First published 2021
Historian Tiya Miles centers her investigation on a cotton sack displayed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose filled this bag with precious items and gave it to her nine-year-old daughter Ashley before the girl was sold away from her mother. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered the family story onto the fabric, preserving Rose's words that the sack "be filled with my Love always." Miles uses this artifact as her starting point to reconstruct the lives of Rose, Ashley, and Ruth through sparse archival records, material objects, and artistic works. She traces how these women and countless others like them maintained family connections despite the brutal separations imposed by slavery and the challenges that followed emancipation. The book reveals the resourcefulness of people who created their own systems of memory and kinship when official institutions denied their humanity and family bonds.
Genres: 20th-century, african-american, 21st-century, 19th-century, african-american-historical-fiction, american-history
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, South Carolina
Period: 1850s, Decades Later
385 pages · Hardcover · Random House
Content warnings: slavery