In All that She Carried: Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, Tiya Miles dives deep on one object currently on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC.
While the archival record is thin, Miles builds out the world these women lived in beautifully. Miles’s writing, which is both clearly based in significant scholarly research and quite readable, offers a lesson for historians on how to contend with gaps in the archival record. Indeed, even Ruth, the woman who embroidered her grandmother’s story onto the sack, is something of an archivist: ensuring that Rose’s love for her daughter would remain tied to the object she lovingly packed her before their separation. Through Miles diligent research she is able to pretty confidently identify Rose and Ashley, the things we really want to know cannot be found in the enslaver’s archive. Ruth then, counters this archive with the stories she learned from her grandmother, who passed this object down along with it.
Miles also looks beyond the historian’s toolkit to help her readers imagine Rose, Ashley, and Ruth. The literary and historical imagination she uses frees us as readers, and Miles as a historian, from the enslaver’s archive. She is able to sketch the love which filled the sack as neatly as she sketches the history of the pecan tree (one of my favorite chapters). Ultimately though, it is the materiality of the sack which is so persistent. Its survival, and the survival of the embroidery which marks it as a precious object, allows it to carry the weight of the story embroidered on it.
For our own project purposes, Ashley’s Sack demonstrates the power of objects to move visitors. One curator at Middleton Place mentioned to Miles that she took to leaving tissues near the sack’s display, and even while reading the book I was at times moved deeply by all that this sack has carried throughout its lifetime. In my own career, I have seen many a visitor moved to tears over linen canvas. Museums and public history sites allow visitors to experience (within limits) the physicality of the past- to imagine the hands that held the musket or packed handfuls of pecans into the sack. There are few opportunities to do so in such accessible ways without the material culture. There is just something about seeing the object which cannot compete with an image or a description.
While it is doubtful within this semester that our food truck project will turn into a physical exhibit complete with objects, the potential is certainly there. Food trucks are such a feast for the senses- the sounds, the smells, the taste of the food- all of these elements contribute to what a food truck is. It is exciting to imagine the possibilities which a physical exhibit could offer, especially if food truck owner operators were to feel comfortable lending Temple objects precious to them or their businesses.