Told her It be filled with my Love always / she never saw her again / Ashley is my grandmother / Ruth Middleton / 1921įrom there, she traces the likely lineage of this unlikely object - a bit of cotton that might have crumpled into dust, but instead carried a whole family’s legacy - and puts both what she learned and what might have been into this riveting book, which just won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Miles, a Harvard historian and MacArthur fellow, had little definitive information about a simple embroidered sack found at a flea market in 2007, other than what it said: 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. The stories of enslaved Black Americans are still far too scarce, lost to time by a nation indifferent to more personal aspects of the experience.
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