Next Book: All That She Carried by Tiya Alicia Miles
This book won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award in 2021. The author is an historian and a genius grant recipient. It's a bit academic in its approach but the tale of a sack that an enslaved mother gave to her enslaved daughter when their owner died and the mother was certain her daughter would be sold is engrossing. The sack is in a museum and Miles did what the curators couldn't. She tracked the sack's history and the meaning of everything associated with the sack. It contained a bit of hair, handfuls of pecans and a ragged dress and "her love always," as a descendant later embroidered on the sack.
We meet on Aug. 25. FYI, Michelle is the next book picker and Janine is after her.
From Amazon:
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
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