The Story of "Ashley's Sack": A Family Heirloom in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture
FAIN: FZ-256478-17
Tiya Alicia Miles
Regents of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1382)
Research and writing of a book about African American women’s
experience, as revealed through an embroidered cotton bag passed down through
generations of enslaved and free women.
This proposed public history book project, The Things She Carried: A Meditation on “Ashley’s Sack,” aims to present the unexpected story of a unique material artifact: an embroidered plain cotton sack from the 19th century given to an enslaved daughter from her mother and then passed down by the women of the Middleton family as a testament to their history in slavery and freedom. The item, called Ashley’s Sack, is now on display in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The purpose of this project is to use this beautiful and wrenching artifact that has already arrested the attention of many to tell interlocking stories about black women’s history, American history, and public history that draw out the themes of love, loss, and rescue. This book will explore the many embedded historical and cultural meanings of the sack in a form that is intellectually revealing, accessible, and lyrical.
Associated Products
"This Sack": Reconstructing Enslaved Women's Lives Through Objects, Gregory Lecture, University of Georgia (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: "This Sack": Reconstructing Enslaved Women's Lives Through Objects, Gregory Lecture, University of Georgia
Abstract: When the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in the fall of 2016, it contained among its trove of displayed artifacts an object called Ashley’s Sack (on loan from the Middleton Place Foundation of Charleston). Attributed to this object -- a plain cotton seed bag -- is a mysterious and dramatic history. The sack was bestowed as a gift by an enslaved black mother to her enslaved black daughter at the time of their separation through sale in antebellum South Carolina. Embroidered with the narrative of this event by a descendant who inherited the item, the bag now functions as a record of slavery and story of family survival. Ashley’s Sack is at once a material object, archival source, and narrative text that sheds new light on black women’s creativity, practicality, and perseverance. In addition, the object's use and transferal across time and place inspires reflection on the themes of slavery, love, loss, memory, testimony, and historical methods. This lecture will focus on the recovered seed sack and its meanings, with a focus on how we can employ the materiality of objects to access the interiority of enslaved women's lives.
Author: Tiya Miles
Date: 10/25/2019
Location: Seney-Stovall Chapel, Athens, GA
The Materiality of Slavery: What Is Passed On, Opening Panel, Columbia University 1619 & Its Legacies Symposium (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: The Materiality of Slavery: What Is Passed On, Opening Panel, Columbia University 1619 & Its Legacies Symposium
Author: Tiya Miles
Abstract: My talk for this panel presented Ashley's Sack in relation to a question posed by Toni Morrison's narrator in Beloved: what is and what is not to be "passed on" by African Americans who experienced slavery and their descendants?
Date: 09/26/2019
Textile as Text: New Ways of Reading the History of Black Women in Slavery, Presidential Plenary Panel, at the MLA Conference (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Textile as Text: New Ways of Reading the History of Black Women in Slavery, Presidential Plenary Panel, at the MLA Conference
Author: Tiya Miles
Abstract: When the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) opened in the fall of 2016, it contained among its trove of artifacts an object called Ashley’s Sack. This singular item of African American material culture is displayed in the Slavery and Freedom gallery of the museum. My comments for the plenary session of MLA’s Textual Transactions themed conference will focus on this seed sack and its stories. In my preliminary and exploratory interpretation of this rare and beautiful thing, I will address how we have characterized the experiences of enslaved black women through a reliance on slave narratives as our principle texts and raise questions about how our understanding might change and expand if we looked for and spent time with different kinds of textual testimony. My talk will explore what counts as text, how we might read the stories of enigmatic textual things, and how certain things – particularly textiles – are tactile carriers that prompt extraordinary transactions of emotion, meaning and memory.
Date: 01/02/2019
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Book)Title: All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
Author: Tiya Alicia Miles
Year: 2022
Primary URL:
https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=1984855018Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry (1984855018)
Publisher: Random House
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 1984855018