One State / One Story: "All That She Carried" by Tiya Miles

A Community Read About the Power of Family History

Explore a poignant story of resilience and of love passed down through generations of women against steep odds. "All That She Carried" honors the creativity and fierce resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties even when official systems refused to do so.

Join us for a community read of the 2024 One State / One Story book, All That She Carried by Tiya Miles. Meet your neighbors and discuss the power of family history against all odds. Copies of the book are available for readers while supplies last. 

About the Book: In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis, the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few precious items as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley’s survival. 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.” Ruth’s sewn words, the reason we remember Ashley’s sack today, evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love passed down through generations. 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 to follow the paths of their lives—and the lives of so many women like them—to write a singular and revelatory history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States.

The search to uncover this history is part of the story itself. For where the historical record falls short of capturing Rose’s, Ashley’s, and Ruth’s full lives, Miles turns to objects and to art as equally important sources, assembling a chorus of women’s and families’ stories and critiquing the scant archives that for decades have overlooked so many. The contents of Ashley’s sack—a tattered dress, handfuls of pecans, a braid of hair, “my Love always”—are eloquent evidence of the lives these women lived. As she follows Ashley’s journey, Miles metaphorically unpacks the bag, deepening its emotional resonance and exploring the meanings and significance of everything it contained.

One State / One Story: All That She Carried/Freedom Over Me is presented by Indiana Humanities in partnership with the Indiana Center for the Book and the Indiana State Library as part of Indiana Humanities’ Advancing Racial Equity Project, supported by Lilly Endowment.

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