litcritreader 's review for:

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

3.0

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I wanted to like this book better than I did. It traces, or attempts to trace, the likely origins of a cotton sack gifted to a young enslaved girl when she was about to be sold away from her family. The sack is retained by family members for at least three generations, when the text of an abbreviated slave narrative is embroidered on the fabric by a descendant. Given the fraught origins of this artifact of material culture, I expected the book would pull me in and keep my attention. And, parts of it did engage me as a reader. Since there is so little factual information that can be known about the sack or its owners, the author uses diligent research to uncover contextualizing information about the culture as well as contemporary examples. All of this extraneous material was interesting, but I think what I objected to was the overgeneralizing of the gathered information, supposing that the sack's owner felt or thought in ways that there is just no evidence of. Miles, in using this information, frequently second-guesses her comparisons by asking if it's too much of a stretch to believe that a certain thing, because it was true for a contemporary, is also true for the bearer of the sack. Each time she asks, I felt myself answering that yes, it was too much of a stretch. I hoped she would stick more to the facts.