Tiya Miles
Tiya Miles is from Ohio, "the heart of it all," though now she spends summers in her husband's native Montana. She is the author of All That She Carried (which won a National Book Award for nonfiction and more), and of three prize-winning works of history on the intersections of African American and Native American experience. Her forthcoming book, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, will be out in June 2024, right on the heels of her short but sweet exploration of childhoods in nature: Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation (September 2024). Her debut dual time period (historical-contemporary) novel based on her early career research, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, was revised with new scenes and released as a paperback original by Random House in June 2023; check out the new version! She has also published a study of haunted plantations and manor homes in the South that reads like a travel narrative. (And she is as surprised as you are that two of her books focus on ghosts!) Her newest book, just out from W. W. Norton, is Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation. Tiya's favorite activities are reading good books while her three teenaged kids write stories together in the background, spending time in old houses, walking along forest trails, and drinking hot chocolate. She is currently working on a history, a novel, and essays about climate change and historic sites. Check out her Substack: Carrying Capacity, for news and updates! https://tiyamiles.substack.com/
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
Tiya Miles
In a display case in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture sits a rough cotton bag, called Ashley’s Sack, embroidered with just a handful of words that evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love, passed down through generations.
In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose gave this sack filled with a few precious items to her daughter, Ashley, as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley’s survival as well. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language—including Rose’s wish that “It be filled with my Love always.” Now, in this illuminating, deeply moving new book inspired by Rose’s gift to Ashley, historian Tiya Miles carefully unearths these women’s faint presence in archival records and draws on objects and art, to follow the paths of their lives—and the lives of so many women like them—in a singular and revelatory history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States.
All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and of love passed down through generations of women against steep odds. It honors the creativity and fierce resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties even when official systems refused to do so.
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