Book Club: All That She Carried

October’s Monday night book club selection is All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by historian Tiya Miles. 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 shortly before the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother & sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, as well as objects, art, & the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, & the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States.

Meet at the library to discuss; copies available at the library in regular, large print & audio CD as well as via Libby in eBook & eAudio.