Reviews tagging 'Sexism'

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles

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just_one_more_paige's review

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challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

 
“…lending this textile the feel of an official report equal to any document and standing as a poetic rebuttal to the anonymizing archives of slavery.” 
 
I'd seen this one on the "new books" shelf at our library, but didn't really have an idea what it was about. When it won the National Book Award for nonfiction this past year, I mentally moved it up my TBR. And I decided that Black History Month was the impetus I needed to go ahead and pick it up, meeting my very vague "sooner rather than later" reading goal for it. All that being said though, I have to be honest and admit that I still didn't really have a clear idea what the book was about; I mean I had a general understanding of it as a history of Black women in the Americas, ish, but nothing more than that, as far as central topics/focus. And I am sort of glad about that. It's not my usual style, to jump into a new book with so little information, but in this case, it made my reading experience that much more eye-opening, informative and compelling. 
 
In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose gifts her daughter, Ashley, a cloth sack filled with a few precious items on the eve of her sale and their inescapable separation. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter, Ruth, embroiders a message on that same cloth sack, telling the story of her great-grandmother's gift and immortalizing that history of her family in a tangible way. In All That She Carried, historian and scholar Tiya Miles uses that cloth sack to trace the faint impressions of this line of women throughout history, from what can be found about them specifically to inferences we can make based on accounts from similar women in similar times to how the items included can provide insight to the lives and realities of enslaved women more generally, all laced together with a deeply moving and tender humanity.   
 
My first impression, after finishing this book, was complete awe that so much information and meaning can be gathered and extrapolated from a single item like this, even one with layers of generations involved in its journey. Fascinating and astonishing. My second reaction, close on the heels of the first, was an aching sadness that came from the understanding that so much must be pulled from this one item because there is so little that survives (was allowed to survive) to represent this population, unfree Black women. Thinking about how much this one record carries puts an intense awareness on how little there actually is of these voices, how much is lost to history or told in voices not their own, yet there is profound inspiration in this surviving despite everything. It's a deeply emotional combination of emotions, nurtured by Miles' phenomenal writing, which is both educational and personal in style. All the horror and loss and cruelty mixed with the love and endurance and resilience of humanity all in a single message from a single item, is magnificent and moving. I can understand why this cloth sack, when observed by visitors to the museum(s) where it resides, moves the majority to tears. 
 
Miles explores every aspect of Ashley's sack, including the make/use of the original cloth sack itself, to the items listed as included in Ruth's recording, the threadbare dress and the handfuls of nuts and the lock of Rose's hair and the love it carries with it, as well as Ruth's choice of embroidery (and the colors used) to document the story/keepsake. In addition, Miles provides insight into her efforts in tracking down this specific Rose and Ashley mother-daughter pair, the daily reality that the lives may have looked like, using other primary sources from the time/area as clues, and delving into the various reasons why more records of enslaved peoples' lives do not exist (as in, the many ways they were suppressed or considered not deserving of that kind of legacy). I was fascinated by the variety of fields of study that Miles brought together to create this work, including, in her own words, environmental studies, African American studies, slavery studies, women's history studies, material culture studies, that allow for/give us such a fully detailed historical interpretation of the sack. It is all, the supposition and context clues and educated guesses and inferences, fascinating historical detective work with such little to go on. 
 
I have never really considered this deeply, or perhaps at all, the way that physical items can carry history and story and memory and connection; it's universal in concept and yet given such an individual face within these pages. Seeing the importance of cherished objects in memory and story and representation of incorporeal emotions/feelings, and how much we lose when they are lost (or not allowed to us), was quite affecting as a new idea for me. Specifically, the consideration of the history of women and fabrics as a method of preserving stories across the centuries, the role of “story cloths,” is such a constant, yet I'd never really thought about it in this way before, as a legitimate record of history in its own way, conveying the stories that would otherwise have no recording available (specifically, those stories of women and children and unfree peoples). Similar to the archival "gaps" in history that Clint Smith talks about filling in throughout How the Word Is Passed, in ways that give a individual and personal face to stories that can otherwise lose their humanity to generalities (to the "black-and-white/sepia-toned" aspect that makes history seem farther away than it actually is), Miles uses these types of “imaginative license” to give shape to Rose and Ashley's lives and relationships, using conjecture but basing it in the tangibles and truths we have access to. 
 
Miles presented and unpacked difficult questions of philanthropy and stewardship and conservation and preservation throughout this book as well. She talks about who, historically, has had the power to finance and keep those efforts (white people), even though the history is not their own (but rather that of BIPOC, enslaved, etc.). But she also recognizes the potential for a cooperative future in this shared interest in preservation, if we are purposeful. And that makes you wonder about whose stories we are doing the same suppressing of today (and by wonder I mean, we know) but  further forces us to examine what are we are going to do about it. 
 
I’ll repeat, again, how amazing it was that Miles found so much meaning in so few items, the way every single item meant that much more because the well to pull from is so shallow (literally and symbolically). The depth of history and potential meaning(s) behind each item in question (the nuts, the hair, the dress, the bag, the love, the importance of ‘movable’ property for women/slaves, the choice of textile/ embroidery to record history, being an unfree mother/female/child - separated from family like Rose and Ashley were, as well as abuses/humiliations suffered by those in their specific condition), conveyed hard truths and inspiring endurance in equal measure. They are the traumas and the treasures. This one unassuming object, the central focus of this (accurately) self-described “unusually meditative and evocative” piece of nonfiction, flies with grace and passion in the face of all efforts to repress the narratives of unfree peoples past and present. 
 

 
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