All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, A Black Family Keepsake (BookTube Prize for Nonfiction - Group G)

 Winner of the National Book Award, this book is my biggest surprise and ultimate favorite read for this round of judging. This is a fantastically readable and tight textile/material-focused history that follows a specific sack passed down between three generations of Black women prior to the Civil War and following the turn of the century. Miles is a fabulous writer and extremely thoughtful historian, and I was highly impressed by the reading of history that she brings us within this book.

    As a work of history, I was struck by the author’s “positionality” statement during the introduction of the book where she describes her interest in telling this story, and the framing devices and theories that underpin her reading of the sack as a historical object alongside a number of historical, literary, and artistic sources. I have not read much history that includes “positionality” statements, but I am familiar with them from ethnography (anthropological writing). It makes sense for them to join the history field which can too often be written like pure fact when it is often analytical speculation.

    This book is very metacognitive in nature, and almost reads as part guidebook on how to begin to decolonize the practice of history within the United States. Miles problematizes the ways in which historical objects and historical materials are treated, who they are owned by, and how they are discussed. After Ashley’s Sack (the object) is given to Ashley by her enslaved mother Rose, this heirloom is handed down from Ashley to her granddaughter Ruth who embroiders the sack with the story told to her by Ashley (her grandmother). The sack enters the historical record after it is found by an antiques collector and purchased by a historical collection related to a local plantation, a painful irony that is not missed on Miles, and that she directly questions and addresses within the book.

    Miles brings in historical threads discussing settler colonialism and the enslavement of indigenous peoples, the capitalism that led to a major increase in the marker for chattel slavery from Africa, and the specific context that surrounded the emotional moment in which Rose prepared and provided this sustenance and comfort to her child when they were being sold away from each other.

    This book receives full marks for all areas of review, but the thing that pushed it over the edge for me is that it feels groundbreaking in its thorough and masterful retelling of this history. Miles uses thoughtful and specific techniques for exploring history that is undocumented or clouded behind biased documentation. Pulling from slave narratives, bills of sale and other slave owner business records, legal records, and even pulling in modern situations with similar implications, the author engages in what she calls a “diagonal reading” of the documents to understand what may be intentionally or unintentionally obfuscated in the original documents. In additional to re-viewing history through these lenses, Miles is intentional in how she frames this re-viewing. By exploring all the ways in which people can turn themselves into knots to avoid viewing slavery as an evil, she ultimately delivers some painful and important readings of our present moment, even tying the evils and impacts of slavery to the current devastation and long-term impacts of global climate change.

    Tiya Miles is skillful and creative in what feels like decolonization work surrounding this history, and — at the end of the day — this book is also both beautiful and incredibly interesting in its subject matter. While there are academic references, I do still think a layperson would gain much from this text and it would likely be a good introduction to why perspective is so important in the practice of “unearthing” history.