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

“With these words of a granddaughter, mother, sewer, and storyteller imbued a piece of fabric with all the drama and pathos of ancient tapestries depicting the deeds of queens and goddesses. She preserved the memory of her foremothers and also venerated these women, shaping their image for the next generation. Without Ruth, there would be no record. Without her record, there would be no history. Ruth’s act of creation mirrored that of her great-grandmother Rose. Through her embroidery, Ruth ensured that the valiance of discounted women would be recalled and embraced as a treasured inheritance.”

Miles draws a strong metaphorical thread between Ruth’s embroidery of Ashley’s Sack and the historically pervasive tradition of storytelling by women through the depictive elements in women’s textile arts dating back to ancient cultures. Miles emphasizes Ruth’s essential contribution to the sack’s relevance; had she not embroidered her family history on it, perhaps it would have not survived to be represented in the collection of a museum dedicated to African American history in the 21st century. Ruth’s own history is thus rendered as just as integral to the sack’s legacy as that of her grandmother and great-grandmother.

“As multiple things rolled into one, Ashley’s sack is an extraordinary artifact of the cultural and craft productions of African American women. […] As with any archive, we cannot presume that this sack bears straightforward, unassailable facts. Using the object responsibly as a source for historical inquiry means asking questions of it, and as uncomfortable as it might feel, maintaining a willingness to poke holes into it. Placing this artifact in conversation with other sources and considering its various historical contexts can help us test its reliability in the service of historical understanding as well as the search for ‘symbolic truths’ that transcend hard evidence and speak to the intangible meanings of our collective human lives.”

Miles acknowledges that thorough historical research methods necessitate questioning both the claims of Ashley’s Sack itself and the importance of drawing upon primary source material to inform the study of this artifact. A measure of incredulity was required of Miles due to the obscurity of the sack. Navigating through the significant gaps in representation of African Americans in the historical annals, Miles incorporates the personal histories of several Black women whose experiences illuminate the realities they held in common with women like Rose, Ashley, and Ruth.

“While free men have historically owned and passed down ‘real’ property (especially in the form of land), women have typically had only ‘moveable’ property’ (like furniture and linens—and, if the women in question were slaveholders, people) at their disposal. Although American women possessed a limited form of property, they used that property intentionally to ‘assert identities, build alliances, and weave family bonds torn by marriage, death, or migration.’”

Ashley’s Sack is remarkable not only for its survival as a delicate textile despite its use and travels since the 1850s, but also because enslaved African American women during the period of its creation and transfer to Ashley were historically deprived of the right to amass an abundance of personal property. Those objects they did possess were precious to them and held significance beyond their utility. Though the experiences of African American women are the focus of Miles’s study of the sack, she often addresses the experiences of white women in the commonalities that women shared regardless of their racial identity.

“But this textile does more than reflect its viewers’ submerged worries and innate sympathies. It stands in for a series of facts that are common knowledge but are not often consciously examined or fully absorbed: the brutality of American slavery, the ugliness of lovely places like the Lowcountry South, the invisible hand of planter authoritarianism, and the triumph that is Black love. Ashley’s sack is not so simple as it seems, nor so saccharine. This object that barely survived the one hundred plus years since its original manufacture and transport across urban, rural, state, and regional lines is complex, forceful, resplendently symbolic, and a dramatic form of synecdoche—a part standing in for the whole.”

Since it has been exhibited, first at Middleton Place and then in New York and at the Smithsonian, the sack has encouraged viewers to confront the visceral realities of the enslaved experience. Miles emphasizes the relative rarity of an object like Ashley’s Sack in the body of historical artifacts, especially those accessible to the public. In the presence of Ashley’s Sack, the enormity of what it represents overwhelms viewers with emotion, and Miles here suggests that its importance is intrinsically tied to its ability to evoke new layers of human understanding.

“The sack still carries a burden of layered power relations, but it also contains within its preservation history a model for repurposing that past and for regenerating relationships as we engage in work of shared purpose across racial and regional lines.”

In this passage, Miles refers to the process through which Ashley’s Sack was first acquired by Middleton Place and was eventually installed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Miles attests that it is indelicate and unjust that Middleton Place should have ownership, authority over the display of, and control of the narrative accompanying Ashley’s Sack. Though Middleton Place’s purchase of the textile was entirely legal, the moral and ethical questions of its custodianship remained. Miles attests that there is vindication in the sack’s movement to the more proper place of exhibition in the National Museum of African American History and Culture and that this change of hands should be an example of how artifacts should be treated in the future.

“It is a madness, if not an irony, that unlocking the history of unfree people depends on the materials of their legal owners, who held the lion’s share of visibility in their time and ours. Captive takers’ papers and government records are often the only written accounting of enslaved people who could not escape and survive to tell their own stories.”

As Miles details her process of researching the sack and identifying the Rose and Ashley named in its embroidery, she expresses the frustration over needing to rely upon documents that pertain to their enslavers’ lives in order to find any evidence of them in the written record. Their lives obscured by their legal attachment to their enslavers, Ashley and Rose are overlooked by the scant legal recordkeeping in the years of Reconstruction and Jim Crow segregation that followed emancipation. It was rare that enslaved people found themselves in a position to record their experiences from their own perspective.

“The urban estates functioned like prisons, with every white person a virtual warden. The walls could double as weapons, too, when spangled on their upper edges with sharp barbs of broken bottles placed at the master’s direction. […] Walls barricading family homes from the sight lines of the streets prevented freedom of moment and escape, and revolt by enslaved people and, more subtly but just as ominously, veiled the sights and sounds of physical and sexual abuse.”

Though the atmosphere of Charleston, South Carolina, with its historic architecture and charm, has made it both the beloved hometown of Lowcountry South Carolinians and a destination for millions of visitors annually, Miles attests that the Charleston so beloved by so many is a romanticized vision of a place with a history of tremendous cruelty. In reference to the 18th- and 19th-century homes giving the city much of its distinctive character, Miles reminds readers that these residences were structured with control and imprisonment in mind. Behind the aesthetically pleasing and architectonically valuable elements of these structures lurks the reality of their histories, often intentionally obfuscated even in the 21st century.

“The refined men, or fathers, at the heads of these estates eschewed the outright brutality of previous generations of patriarchs, preferring to enact their will through the pull of mutual obligation and emotional manipulation, as well as by bestowing perks in exchange for desired behavior. Their method for exacting compliance often devolved, however, into psychological or physical punishment. […] In addition to being culturally familiar to the many South Carolina elites who borrowed the cultural practices of British high society, the ethos of paternalism legitimized slavery by suggesting that the slave order was organic and right.”

Miles reminds readers that the cruelty endured by enslaved people was not limited to verbal and emotional abuse or physical degradation and violent assaults. Their suffering also included being subjected to enslavers’ subtler, more insidious practice of eliciting behavioral control by feigning beneficence and kindness and imposing social expectations meant to make enslaved people feel their constraints were part of the natural, intended order of a hierarchical status that enslavers believed to be their birthright.

“Rose’s packing highlights an essential element of enslaved women’s experience. Black women were creators, constantly making the slate of things necessary to sustain the life of the family […] Black women fashioned and gathered things into emotional nets that affirmed their love for self and others, channeling visions of perseverance through the work of their thoughts and hands, often at their own risk.”

Under the conditions of slavery, enslaved people had to make a concerted effort to preserve those few personal possessions they were able to acquire given the limited resources and allotments available to them. To cope with these scarcities, Black women used their talents and ingenuity to craft and improve upon what they did have available to them, and in so doing they showed their care and devotion to those people they sustained with the articles they provided for their family groups.

“Hair was a medium through which captors and captives fought for corporeal as well as psychological control. Since slaveholders claimed the right, by law, to the bodies of the people they owned, they sometimes sought to demonstrate their right by dictating their hair length. By caring for and claiming their hair as a part of their own bodies that they should have the right to treat as they wished, enslaved Black women like Rose took this sense of self-possession even further when deciding to part with a braid of her hair, a piece of herself, by choice. When Rose clipped one of her braids for Ashley, she was passing on proof of the kind of self-regard, self-care, and mutual aid that sustained life in captivity and even sometimes brought to beleaguered souls moments of pleasure in bodily adornment.”

In giving Ashley a lock of her hair, Rose entreats her daughter not only to remember who her mother was, but to remember who Ashley herself is. Rose was both exercising her autonomy over her own body and participating in a variation of the Victorian tradition of remembering the departed through keepsakes of their hair, which were often worked into jewelry and art. These tokens were gifted to loved ones as a tangible connection to the giver or cut from the bodies of those who had died as a memento mori, or remembrance of the dead.

“Rose may have believed these to be her last words on the eve of a parting that could have the same effect as a death. If so, we might dwell on the notion that the sack was a kind of living will, an expression of what Rose intended for her daughter to do in the case of relentless limbo: carry on with the armor of love.”

As Rose intended, Ashley’s Sack did become a kind of will: When Ruth embroidered the story of her grandmother and great-grandmother’s parting, the story of its conveyance reached through time to cement itself in the mind of their descendant. As Rose certainly dreaded, this exchange did mark the last time mother and daughter would ever see one another. Miles shares the stories of enslaved people during the period of slavery and through Reconstruction who desperately tried to maintain contact with the loved ones they had been separated from, which proved terribly difficult, even in those rarer cases when an enslaved person knew where their relative had been taken.

“Enslaved people undertook feats of great imagination, courage, and grit to acquire the materials needed to sustain and cushion their existence. Making things, receiving things, having and using things or their own had immediate purpose as well as deep symbolism. Having things also undermined the logic of slavery in a society in which it was formally illegal for ‘property’ to own property. As possessors of stuff, Black people demonstrated personhood, reflecting dignity inwardly to themselves and outwardly to others.”

In taking ownership of their own belongings and becoming creative in crafting and accessing items they could use to improve their circumstances even marginally, enslaved people commanded the respectability that accompanies having one’s own property. Enslaved people used the skills they honed to express themselves and their autonomy through material elements, improve upon the harsh and austere conditions in which they were generally forced to live, and provide for those in their family groups. This often meant harvesting discarded items from the enslavers’ household or making objects out of natural materials, customizing their dwellings and adding whatever comforts they could.

“Enslaved people were keenly aware of these psychological tricks—of clothing meant to demean the wearer and gifts in-tricks—of clothing meant to demean the wearer and gifts intended to extort labor as well as to ensure loyalty. The fortunate few who escaped slavery and wrote autobiographies of life behind the southern lines often reflected on their hatred of slave dress and the social work it performed. These writers knew exactly what was at stake: that slave clothing was a uniform of inferiority, a method for simultaneously enforcing bodily deprivation and social degradation.”

Clothing for enslaved people was intentionally manufactured to immediately communicate the status of the person wearing these garments as an enslaved person, and with affordability for the enslavers who purchased them in mind. Most clothing that enslaved people possessed was from allotments doled out by enslavers at infrequent intervals. These garments were not designed with durability and dignity in mind, and many enslaved women endured the humiliation of existing in near-nakedness because of the ill-fitting and threadbare articles of clothing they were forced to wear.

“With such transformative rewards to the psyche and spirit, it is no wonder that Black women took risky measures to shake off the stain of Negro cloth and shapeless tunics. Even in the most frightful circumstances, they hunted for items of clothing and clung to the pieces they acquired with fierce protectiveness.”

In packing a dress, even a tattered one, among the articles that she sent along with her daughter, Rose was preparing her child for an existence that would entail depravation and lack of available resources. The provision of an article of clothing represented not only the practical aspect of providing protection and warmth from the elements, but also a shield from those who might try to harm and exploit her. The particular details of the dress are not disclosed by Ruth, but it is possible that this garment was a cast-off dress Rose repurposed from discarded items in the Charleston household, perhaps at great risk.

“By the 1850s, after Rose had given birth to Ashley, Carolina was once again scaling the heights of slave-produced profit. Money flowed into planters’ pockets and merchants’ coffers not only from rice, but from cotton, the crop that had spurred the industrial revolution in England. […] Slavery continued to underwrite the wealth of this place, and most free white residents discounted the immorality of it by insisting that Black people were inferior and therefore destined to serve others. They told themselves that this unequal system actually bettered the lives of the enslaved.”

Miles emphasizes how the wealth those in the South Carolina Lowcountry amassed during this period was directly derived from the exploitation of enslaved people. Whether through the profits that enslavers made in the sale of their crops or through the lease of enslaved people to other enslavers for profit, or through the sinister slave market itself, the affluence these enslavers enjoyed and the privilege associated with their lifestyles were the product of centuries of systemic abuse. A pervasive and deep-seated belief on the part of the majority of white Southerners was that the position they commanded for themselves at the top of the social hierarchy was rational and ordained by the natural order. These social mores constituted the historical context in which the selling of a nine-year-old child away from her mother was an unremarkable occurrence, considered a business transaction rather than a human rights violation.

“From the perspective of a Black family made more vulnerable by the growth of the cotton industry, the 1850s would have been a terrible time for an owner to die, potentially thrusting the family members into the market. If master or mistress saw reversals of health or fortune at this moment, Black families would, more likely than most, suffer the heartbreak of separation. In the years just before the Civil War, more than two million unfree women, men, and children were yanked from their home places and thrown into a whirling market that landed them elsewhere in their states or across state lines. Ashley was one of them. […] In these southwestern ‘frontier’ lands where newcomers to the slaveholding classes sought fortunes in cotton, the established customs of eastern formality and restraint, such as they were, fell away.”

As Indigenous peoples were forcibly removed from their traditional homeplaces by the United States government and relocated to the early iterations of what would become reservations, new territory became available to the white ruling classes. Those interested in expanding the cotton crop westward took full advantage of the opportunity to amass land and establish plantations further in the interior. With this expansion came the sale of enslaved people westward. Rose would have been painfully aware of the possibility that her daughter could be transported hundreds if not thousands of miles away to the even more horrific conditions at these newer plantations.

“Ashley’s sack—her emergency pack, her cloak, and cover, and shield of dignity—was also her memory stone in the trying times to come. She had in it an heirloom, property of her own, a thing nested with still more things and unfathomable uses. In her possession of this item, she shared a link not only with other enslaved people but also with American women regardless of race, since women rarely had rights to land until the twentieth century.”

Miles’s focus is on the experience of Black women in the 19th and 20th centuries, but she acknowledges that some elements of their experiences overlap with those of women of all races in the United States. In this way, Miles reminds readers that the historical contexts of Rose, Ashley, and Ruth are characteristic of periods in which gradients of oppression and disenfranchisement were present, overlapping and multifaceted. Central to Miles’s work is the notion that the custodianship of American history should not reside only in the world of academia but instead should inform how all Americans conceptualize themselves and their moment in time.

“These words Ruth sewed connote the sense, too, of having been spoken aloud and repeated, even as the number three, perfectly exact and strangely parallel to our trinity of main-character women, seems to carry an echo. Rose’s inclusion of a material that could serve as food or as seeds suggests her awareness of nutritional necessity as well as future possibility. Seeds surely have secret lives unto themselves inside their husks, but to humans, their use points to a time beyond the present. We plant seeds with the hope, in the knowledge, that they will grow into something not yet existing in this world. The nuts Rose packed were useful things and also signs with more than one meaning. Even as they nourished Ashley physically and emotionally, they symbolized her ability to take root anew and to grow.”

When Rose packed the sack for her daughter, is it unknown how long she may have had to prepare it. Robert Martin’s cause of death is listed as “brain disease,” but it cannot be determined when or whether Rose knew that Martin’s death was looming. Miles suggests that the pecans that were in the sack may have been chestnuts because they were more ubiquitous and less expensive in the 1850s, and not a luxury item as pecans were. If Rose worked in the kitchen, as she well may have as one of only a few domestic workers in the Charleston household, it is possible she had access to these precious pecan seeds and, knowing their value, chose to send them along with her daughter in the hopes that she might save one and plant it, thus perhaps providing for her beyond the immediate nourishment the nuts would provide. 

“Enslaved girls like Jane and Ashley often did not have enough to eat. They dwelled in a world of deprivation even as they were compelled, as children and then adults, to grow, harvest, prepare, or clear away food from their owners. […] It is no wonder that enslaved children suffered health consequences from poor and insufficient diets. They sickened and died at high rates, particularly under the age of nine, as rations tended to increase when a child turned ten and could do more labor for their owners.”

Miles notes the irony present in the fact that enslaved people were forced to plant, tend, and harvest edible crops but were not provided rations for their own nourishment. In the decades prior to the 1850s, plantation administration allowed enslaved people time at the end of their long workdays to pursue personal tasks like gardening and hunting, but by the time of Robert Martin’s death, no such allotments, meager though they had been, were available. While adults also suffered the consequences of this systemic deprivation, children were especially impacted by the abysmal shortages of food. The infant and child mortality rates among enslaved children were astronomically high as a result. 

“Enslaved people’s constant struggle to stay fed linked them closely to their environments. For them, wild and salvaged edibles—like pecans, as slavery moved westward—were lifelines. Children on plantations became accustomed to scavenging for food, and these quests to satiate appetites could sometimes turn into play. […] Ashley, along with those whose voices fill the pages of slave narratives and interviews, probably had to forage for food and risk correction for doing so, as her mother likely did to provide her with a cache of pecans. […] Here was a way to beat back hunger’s ache, at least for a spell, and to remember her mother, who had cared enough to plan for her sustenance.”

When she packed the pecans, Rose would have been well aware that her daughter was likely suffering from malnourishment. If Rose had been thinking that her daughter was about to embark on a long and arduous journey westward, to the “frontier” plantations, she likely had in mind the fact that pecans were not as perishable as other foodstuffs. Pecans are filled with nutrition, dense in the energy providing nutrients a child requires. They are also quite small. Three handfuls would be mostly undetectable by anyone who might be tempted to steal sustenance from a child.

“The process of telling enacts change for the speaker/writer and for the listener/reader who empathizes with the narrator, affirming their experience through the mirror of feeling. Through this process, the speaker confronts past difficulties in the company of another, gaining greater distance from the trauma and moving toward an interpretive synthesis that can bring emotional relief, even as the listener learns from the teller’s experience in a rehearsal of life’s potential challenges. What is more, telling may have become a way for Ashley, as well as Ruth, to move beyond the constraining role of victim and take up the empowering stance of a witness.”

Miles concludes that there is a high probability that Ashley and Ruth knew one another given the language that Ruth employs in her embroidery, stating “Ashley is my grandmother.” This suggests Ruth’s embroidered text is a recounting of Ashley’s direct testimony to Ruth, a story that Ruth had heard more than once and that resonated with her as a part of her familial legacy. Miles suggests that the telling of this story to her granddaughter was quite possibly a therapeutic process for Ashley, an unburdening of her spirit, and an essential message to be passed down so that her mother’s declaration of love would endure past her mother’s parting sentiments to her. This process would be an example of just one family’s processing of and attempt to heal a kind of intergenerational trauma unique to the Black American experience.

“We can imagine the process of transmission and transferal, of confrontation, evaluation, and gradual healing that the speech of a grandmother like Ashley to a grandchild like Ruth begins. And rather than a single moment, we should picture many such moments, as the story stitched on the say conveys a rhythm of familiarity as well as the compression of key events that often occurs as traumatic tales are retold over time. We can imagine that in telling and retelling the tale of past traumas to her granddaughter, Ruth was also strengthened and emboldened by the knowledge of her ancestors’ willpower.”

Miles suggests that the telling of Ashley’s story was a continuous exchange between a grandmother and her grandchild, which likely took on different elements as Ruth grew older and her relationship with her grandmother blossomed. A story told to a child is often filtered through what their developmental age provides the capacity for them to understand. Ruth at five years old may have known about the sack, but Ruth at 15 years old may have been offered insight and details she could have appreciated with more nuance and insight. These frequent encounters with the events of her grandmother’s sale undoubtedly shaped Ruth’s sense of herself and the legacy she carried with her.

“Attaining these comparatively rarefied skills common to white women of certain classes was a source of pride for Black women who were striving to gain ground in an arena that white women across the class spectrum had long claimed: the ability to maintain domestic spaces of their own for their families. […] In keeping with the gender sensibility of their times, club-women believed that the role of the Black wife and mother stood central to the improvement of the race as a whole. They also aimed to defend Black women against defamation in American public culture, where journalists and correspondents routinely accuse them of sexual immorality, impropriety, and vice.”

When Ruth moved from South Carolina to Philadelphia, she joined thousands of other African Americans participating in the Great Migration, a move to urban areas throughout the United States in the early 20th century. Although Pennsylvania had not been a part of the slave-holding confederacy, Philadelphia, like many other states in the North, harbored its own racist sentiments, which resulted in resistance, prejudice, and violence in response to the influx of new citizens of color. The strong relationships Ruth formed through her involvement in Black women’s social groups and in her church gave her a vibrant social life and an extended support system, as well as a net of protection and defense against this animosity.

“The modicum of things Black families did manage to acquire and hold on to were accorded little value by outsiders. Compared to other groups with a stability afforded by earnings, wealth, or racial privilege, Black people’s possessions were more likely to wind up in dump pits and rag bins as families lost elder members, moved on, or were pushed out during the height of Jim Crow segregation and racially motivated violence. […] This loss of the material traces of history, which stands alongside a multitude of other losses in African American experience, has grave ramifications for well-being.”

Central to the theme of Miles’s research on Ashley’s Sack is its significance as a rare artifact of Black material culture. The sack is not only a living document, but also an object predating emancipation during a time when enslaved people owned very few things. The sack defied the harsh reality of persisting persecution of Black Americans, enduring past the inevitable instability of the Reconstruction period and the Jim Crow-era South. As Miles notes, African Americans in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods were frequently dispossessed of their homes and belongings and even lost their lives, even after they earned the legal right to their own autonomy. That the sack made its way from the Ashley River region of the Lowcountry in South Carolina into Ruth’s hands in Philadelphia and to the Smithsonian to take its rightful place as a piece of American history renders it a harbinger of hope that Black American artifacts may yet exist to be discovered and further enrich the collective understanding of a neglected history.