How an embroidered cotton sack filled with three items would become the shortest slave narrative in existence.

Picture a woman named Rose, Black and enslaved on a South Carolina plantation, pre-Civil War times. Any day now, she will be separated from her nine-year-old daughter, Ashley, soon to be put on the auction block. She prepares something for their parting, a sack filled with very specific items that will come to tell a profound and moving story of motherly love and protection.

As an historic artifact, a relic from an unconscionable time in U.S. history (that reverberates acutely more than a century later), nothing quite like what has come to be known as “Ashley’s Sack” exists. We have archives of recorded history and slave narratives, which help piece together the living conditions and brutality, both physical and mental, enslaved people endured.

But a simple embroidered cotton sack, unearthed in a Nashville flea market in 2007 takes on the power of what’s been deemed “the world’s shortest slave narrative” in Tiya Miles’s extraordinary book, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.

When Ashley’s mother sent her off, never knowing if she’d ever see her daughter again, she chose items for the care package that clearly meant something. Generations later when Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth memorialized the stained white satchel she’d inherited by

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

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