THIS TATTERED SACK CARRIES FORTH ENSLAVED WOMEN’S STORIES.

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

I’m a memoir junkie. So being on Oprah’s List of 2022 memoirs, I thought that “All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake” would be the author, Tiya Miles’s story.

It was, in a way; metaphorically, the story represents the lives and history of all Black women, past, present, and future.

A poignant story of resilience and of love passed down through generations

Right before the sale of her nine-year-old daughter Ashley, an enslaved woman named Rose quickly packed a cotton bag with a few precious items as a token of love and to try to ensure the girl’s survival.

Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered her family’s story on the bag, her sewn words, the reason we remember Ashley’s sack today. Inspired by this timeless keepsake, historian Tiya Miles delicately unearths these women’s obscure presence in archival records to follow the paths of their lives—and the lives of so many women like them.

Brilliantly, the search to uncover this family’s story is part of the story itself. For where the historical records fall short, Miles uses objects and art as equally important sources to tell the revelatory history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States.

A countercompilation of lives that ordinary archives suppress.

The contents of Ashley’s sack— a tattered dress, handfuls of pecans, a braid of hair, “my Love always”—are extraordinary evidence of the lives these women lived. As she follows Ashley’s journey, Miles explores the meanings and significance of everything the bag contains.

I despaired, yet rejoiced all at once. Paying homage to women’s stories, I pass it on.