“Tiya Miles is a gentle genius. The histories she writes are as deeply feeling as they are brilliantly researched and her writing is both elegant and tender. All That She Carried is a gorgeous book and a model for how to read as well as feel the precious artifacts of Black women’s lives.”—Imani Perry, author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons
“All That She Carried is a moving literary and visual experience about love between a mother and daughter and about many women descendants down through the years. Above all it is Miles’s lyrical story, written in her signature penetrating prose, about the power of objects and memory, as well as human endurance, in the history of slavery. Ashley’s sack carries us into another world as it reveals our own. The book is nothing short of a revelation.”—David W. Blight, Yale University, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
“We live in a world that undervalues, ignores, and erases the work and the humanity of Black women. Ashley’s Sack, as it is known, with its short and simple message of intergenerational love, becomes a portal through which Tiya Miles views and reimagines the inner lives of Black women. She excavates the history of Black women who face insurmountable odds and invent a language that can travel across time. She unearths how Black women fashion for their daughters sacks and words that will carry them into uncertain futures. All That She Carried is a stunning work of history and humanism, and Tiya Miles is one of our most eloquent chroniclers of the African American experience.”—Michael Eric Dyson, author of Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America
“Tiya Miles uses the tools of her trade to tend to Black people, to Black mothers and daughters, to our wounds, to collective Black love and loss. This book demonstrates Miles’s signature genius in its rare balance of both rigor and care.”—Brittney Cooper, author of Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
“Only a brilliant storyteller like Tiya Miles could get Ashley’s sack to speak across the generations. This story, about an enslaved girl’s simple cotton bag and its few embroidered lines, encourages us to pick up our treasured family keepsakes and recognize the love that they contain. Blending urgency, imagination, and poetic prose, All That She Carried is a masterpiece work of African American women’s history that reveals what it takes to survive and even thrive. Read this book and then pass it on to someone you love—it is a fitting tribute to Ashley, her mother Rose, and all those foremothers who endured.”—Martha S. Jones, author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All
