Ashley's Sack: How Historian Tiya Miles Traced an Enslaved Family Through One Cotton Bag

Around the 1850s, in South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose learned that her daughter Ashley was to be sold. She packed a cotton sack for her: a tattered dress, three handfuls of pecans and a braid of her own hair — and, as the family's account puts it, her love. Generations later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth Middleton took needle and colored thread and embroidered that story onto the sack itself, with the word love at its center in large red letters.

The historian Tiya Miles made the sack the subject of her book All That She Carried, and talked about the work with Megan Reed on the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast (episode 152), produced by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT). What follows is a summary of that conversation.

A bag that is also a text

To Miles, the sack is several things at once: a bag, an artifact of material culture, a work of art — and a document, because Ruth Middleton wrote on it. Her inscription names Rose, her ancestor, and Ashley, her grandmother; it tells of the sale that separated them and lists what Rose packed. Miles describes Ruth as the family's recorder, a kind of oral historian, without whom the story would be out of reach.

Finding Rose and Ashley

The inscription gives no surnames and no details beyond South Carolina. So Miles turned to the records most likely to mention enslaved people — enslavers' records — at the South Carolina State Archives and in a crowdsourced digital archive online.

Rose was a common name for enslaved women in the mid-19th century; the records held dozens. Ashley was the opposite: rare for an enslaved woman, and at the time more often a white man's name, and the name of a South Carolina river. So Miles looked for a Rose and an Ashley on the same document. Only a couple of records paired them, and setting aside those from the wrong period led her to one particular Rose and one particular Ashley.

One gap remained. The sack names only three women — Rose, Ashley and Ruth — and Ruth did not stitch in her own mother's name. By then record keeping had improved, and that woman, Rosa, could be found in census records. Miles is candid that parts of the family line rest on educated guesses, and says her book tells readers when she is sure, when she is guessing, and whether she is relying on primary or secondary sources.

What a dress meant

With so few documents about Rose and Ashley — enslaved people rarely had the freedom to make or keep papers — the sack and its three objects became Miles's main source, each one opening onto how enslaved people obtained such things, used them and gave them meaning.

The dress is her example. Enslaved women did not choose their own clothes. They were issued a set amount of fabric a year and a few garments, never enough to keep them covered and warm through the seasons; by year's end clothing was worn, torn and stained, and many had no shoes. Miles describes clothing as a battleground over dignity: enslavers gave the cheapest, scantiest clothing as a way of marking people as enslaved, and women resisted — acquiring fabric quietly, sewing through the night for themselves and their children, embellishing what they made, and wearing it to church on Sundays. Clothing also mattered as protection for girls and women exposed on the auction block and to overseers and enslavers who meant them harm, including sexual exploitation.

Packing a dress, in Miles's reading, was Rose telling Ashley that she was worthy of care and love.

A book that found its readers

Miles told Reed she had not been sure there would be enough material to finish the book, and was astonished by its reception. It won many awards and was named among the National Trust for Historic Preservation's top eight books about preservation. Reed's team first heard of it while documenting slave cabins and tenant farmhouses on St. Simons Island, when people kept telling them to read it.

Sources

Based on "Podcast 152: All That She Carried," the Preservation Technology Podcast, National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, National Park Service — Megan Reed's interview with Tiya Miles about her book All That She Carried; the National Park Service page is a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words.