Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 281

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake," by Tiya Alicia Miles.

We forget that love is revolutionary. The word, cute and overused in American culture, can feel at times like a stuffed animal devoid of spirit or, worse, like a dead letter suitable only for easy exchange on social media platforms. But love does carry profound meanings. It indicates the radical realignment of social life. To love is to turn away from the prioritization of the ego or even one’s particular party or tribe, to give of oneself for another, to transfigure the narrow “I” into the expansive “you” or “we.” This four-letter word asks of us, then, one of the most difficult tasks in life: decentering the self for the good of another. This is a task for which we need exemplars, especially in our divisive times. Here in these pages, we take up a quiet story of transformative love lived and told by ordinary African American women—Rose, Ashley, and Ruth—whose lives spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, slavery and freedom, the South and the North. Their love story is one of sacrifice, suffering, lament, and the rescue of a tested but resilient family lineage. 

By loving, Rose refused to accept the tenets of her time: that people could be treated as property, that wealth was a greater value than honor, that some lives had no worth beyond capital and gain. Hers is just one telling example of refusal from the collective experience of enslaved Black women, who practiced love and preserved life when all hope seemed lost. Even when she relinquished her daughter to the slave trade against her will, Rose insisted on love. Despite and during their separation, Rose’s value of love prevailed. The emotional bond between mother and daughter held longevity and elasticity, traversing the final decade of chattel slavery, the chaos of the Civil War, and the red dawn of emancipation before finding new expression in the early twentieth century just as a baby girl, the fifth generation of Rose’s lineage, Ashley’s great-granddaughter, was born.

I inherited my great-aunt’s quilt when my grandmother passed away, more than fifteen years ago. The quilt was for my grandmother, and is for me, a treasured textile. It seems to have absorbed into its fibers the intangible essence of a past time. When I gaze at the vibrant colors of this quilt (including stains of an ancestor’s blood), I see my grandmother as a girl and imagine the faces of her kin. I feel each syllable of that many-eyed monster, Mississippi—a place where heat, terror, and love intertwined. The story of Margaret saving the cow fused with the quilt’s material. The most traumatic event of my grandmother’s childhood is embedded in it. The history of Africans in America is brutal, but we have made art out of pain, sustaining our spirits with sunbursts of beauty, teaching ourselves how to rise the next day.

The lack of information about Ruth Middleton’s ancestor Rose is enough to stop the heart. But as difficult as it will be for us to identify Rose with the use of historical records, images, maps, the Internet, and freedom of movement at our disposal, it would have been exponentially harder for Rose and Ashley to reunite once they had been split apart by sale. Yet throughout the course of their separate lives, mother and daughter did not forsake each other. Nor did their descendant Ruth consign a vanished ancestor to anonymity. Rose vowed to always love Ashley and pressed that promise into the sack. Ashley passed that promise down, along with the object and the story of its origins. Ruth reinforced their bond by stitching their story onto the bag. Despite the external devaluation of their family ties, evidenced by forced sale and absence in the formal written record, these women valued one another as kin and understood the transcendent worth of lineage.

For generations of Black people dispossessed of their freedom, belongings held a deep emotional valence, representing not only dreams but also ties to the people with whom one belonged by choice, as opposed to those to whom one belonged by force. In this way, things linked kin together, materializing family members’ devotion even across insurmountable distance.

Rose and Ashley surely knew the value and weight of the burden they carried: the responsibility to envision a future and bear it forward through harrowing times. By assembling the bag and its contents, Rose turned fear into love, committing herself to a fight for life. In toting the sack and its story, Ashley realized Rose’s radical vision of Black persistence. In embellishing the cloth with her foremothers’ tale, Ruth committed this episode to family history and American history. And now that the sack is in our hands, we cannot forget its layered lessons. Horrible things take place. Nevertheless, survival is possible. Hope can gain ground, and generations can be sustained. When we bear into the future the full knowledge of our past, we walk with hearts unfolded. We recognize the brutality of our species and as well the light in our spirits. We see that nothing is preserved, and no child or grandchild is saved, without brash acts of love and wild visions of continuance.