Tiya Miles

This is the possible story of a sack that was given to 9 yr old Ashley from her enslaved mother Rose when she is being sold away from her in 1850s South Carolina. It is now on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. It originally contained a tattered dress, pecans, and a braid of Rose's hair. Each of these is given a multitude of possible reasons for being included based on the historical knowledge of slave history. Much is assumption because records are scarce, but there was years of research into the suppositions that are likely correct about the who and when, but the reasoning for why are guesswork. It was an interesting overall history.… (more)

Historian Tiya Miles explores how the experience of outdoor life shaped the lives of influential 19th and 20th century women such as Harriet Tubman and Louisa May Alcott. Miles points out to readers that women faced fewer social restrictions in the outdoor world, and some women saw the outdoors as a way to push against the boundaries that constrained them.

I’ll remember this book for two reasons. First, Miles unearthed several eyewitness accounts of the Leonid meteor shower of 1833, including Tubman’s. Many observers believed they were witnessing the apocalypse. Secondly, Miles devotes most of a chapter to the Fort Shaw women’s basketball team and their demonstration of women’s basketball at the St. Louis World’s Fair. I had just recently finished a novel partly set at an Indian boarding school, and this book provided a deeper dive into an unusual aspect of the history of Native American boarding schools.… (more)

This disappointing book did not live up to its name, nor did it really live up to how it was described in retail descriptions. The book did not really celebrate women who were pioneers in outdoor recreation. Instead it focused on authors, an Indian girls boarding school, and activists, but she did very little to prove her thesis that the outdoors shaped them. She didn't even do a great job showing how they challenged a nation. The best thing about this book was that it was short! Her bibliographical references and bibliographies may prove useful to others.… (more)

In 2007 at a Nashville yard sale what appears to be a very old cotton sack is found among other odds and ends of cloth. On this bag is this embroidered inscription:

“ My great grandmother Rose
mother of Ashley gave her this sack when
she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina
it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of
pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her
It be filled with my Love always
she never saw her again
Ashley is my grandmother
— Ruth Middleton, 1921”

Based on the last name embroidered on the bag, the finder donates it to the prestigious Middleton Place Foundation in Charleston, SC, a museum of an antebellum plantation.

Eventually it comes to the attention of historian Tiya Miles. She uses the very sketchy slave records of Middleton Plantation to try to trace Rose and her daughter Ashley (an unusual name for an ‘unfree’ person as Miles calls the enslaved). Although these names do not occur in the Middleton records, she does find them among the records of a nearby slave holder.

There are not many facts to be found. The genealogical line of the woman who did the embroidery died out two generations later without heirs. The contents of the sack are gone; it is empty.

And so Tiya details what she can find, speculates on events, and fills the book with details such as what this bag may have originally held, the only types of cloth unfree people were allowed to use for clothes, the meaning of wild pecan trees to Native people in the area, and the use of hair strands twisted into various ornaments for remembrance. Because of the paucity of facts available, at times she seems to be stretching points as she gives symbols to the colors of the embroidery Ruth Middleton used.

And yet, this empty sack and the story of the frightened nine-year-old girl sold away from her grieving mother never to see each other again, thoroughly captured my imagination. The sack is now on loan to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History – one of very few documented possessions of the unfree who, generally, weren’t allowed possessions. It’s a story that documents a moment in time but is witness to people untraceable earlier than this event and unknowable regarding the lives of both giver and receiver. It is totally searing and illuminates the atrocity of slavery.… (more)