I’ve read this book before for my class on Managing Public History, but rereading this book after what I’ve learned and experienced in the American Material Culture class gave me a further appreciation for the story. I don’t want to deconstruct the objects inside the sac in this blog, as I would be rehashing or doing a disservice to how Tiya Miles tells it. This story interestingly moves through time and keeps the reader interested in knowing more about this sac.
One of the questions that come to mind about this is how objects can evoke emotions. This sac was passed through three generations of black women, each woman embuing it with a story. Especially Ruth who would go on to embroider the sac with its history. The emotion that emanates throughout this is love. A mother assembles a sac for her daughter before they are separated, and packs it with useful and meaningful objects, a dress, some pecans, and a braid of hair. Rose packed these for her daughter and the love she felt for her daughter Ashley is something I carried with me the whole time while reading. Love can be found throughout the text, as well as physically on the sack that Ruth embroidered.
Ruth embroidered the bag with the story of the family and pictures a few pages into the book. After working on making my own sampler I started to appreciate this act more. Needlework is more time-consuming than I ever imagined, and Ruth took the initiative to record how Rose gave this bag to her Daughter, Ashley, and how now Ruth the granddaughter of Rose has the bag. This bag is interesting as it establishes its history on the object itself, of course, more can be explored about it such as where the material came from and so on, but the bag itself becomes an archive of the family’s story. Even though it has so few words to it, by studying it and tracing its story Tiya Miles explores the lives of women whose lives typically aren’t archived, collected, or stored. Tiya Miles reads against the archive materials as she works to trace Rose and find out more about her.
Tiya Miles includes pictures throughout the text such as an embroidered map and other embroideries. The way she shows objects and discusses them is captivating. I was unfamiliar with hair being used in art but seeing the works in the section Ashley’s Seeds was beautiful and each included a small description. Inclusions such as this make the book that much better for me. At no part in this text does the story feel like it’s dragging, I felt compelled to read more. The sack as an object and its construction continued throughout the story, so anyone interested in material culture would enjoy this. At the end of the book Tiya Miles discusses how there’s been a resurgence in traditional arts and crafts.
Ruth recorded her family and turned and Tiya Miles explains how she turned an object into a document through her needlework. Ruth recorded the oral history of her family and worked hard to preserve and protect this sack that has been with her family for generations. In doing so, she created an archive using a family object. Tiya Miles said that she hasn’t found any other objects like this in her search. Black women have been excluded from archives, as both Tiya Miles wrote about and Marisa Fuentes in Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. If you haven’t read this book yet, you are doing yourself a disservice. I actually had to get this back from my friend a few weeks ago in preparation for class.
