All That She Carried
The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
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- 29,99 zł
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- 29,99 zł
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a “deeply layered and insightful” (The Washington Post) testament to people who are left out of the archives.
WINNER: Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Harriet Tubman Prize, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, Lawrence W. Levine Award, Darlene Clark Hine Award, Cundill History Prize, Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, Massachusetts Book Award
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Slate, Vulture, Publishers Weekly
“A history told with brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
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 for her with a few items, and, 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 sack in spare, haunting language.
Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular 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 love passed down against steep odds. It honors the creativity and resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today.
FINALIST: MAAH Stone Book Award, Kirkus Prize, Mark Lynton History Prize, Chatauqua Prize, Women’s Prize
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, NPR, Time, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Smithsonian Magazine, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ms. magazine, Book Riot, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
It’s incredible how the history behind a single object can speak volumes about history as a whole. Through copious research, historian Tiya Miles tells the gripping, emotional tale of how, in the antebellum South, an enslaved mother named Rose passed a simple cotton sack to her daughter Ashley just before Ashley was sold. Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth Middleton eventually received the precious bag, embroidering it with vital information about its history. Miles plays detective throughout the bag’s journey, uncovering all she can about the family behind it and using their story to explore everything from the Black diaspora to the way female identity in American culture has often been cultivated through possessions. Miles weaves the tale with the soul of a poet, even adding a bit of her own family’s story to the mix. When the bag is viewed at its current home in a museum, patrons often require tissues—and we recommend being similarly prepared as you read All That She Carried.
