What readers think of All That She Carried, plus links to write your own review.

It’s just an old cotton seed bag. But it is truly priceless.

Sometime in the 1850s, Rose, an enslaved woman in Charleston, South Carolina, gave the bag to her nine-year-old daughter, Ashley, on the eve of her being sold away from her family to another South Carolina plantation. It contained a tattered dress, three handfuls of pecans, a braid of Rose’s hair, and all her love. The two never saw each other again. But the story of little Ashley being ripped away from her mother and her mother’s attempt to make sure the child knew she would always be loved by giving her this sack of useful items and whispers of her kisses and hugs, is the premise of this exceptional book.

Written by Harvard historian Tiya Miles, this is an extraordinary testament to Black family love and history. In 1921, Ashley’s granddaughter, Ruth Middleton, who inherited the precious sack, embroidered fewer than five dozen words on it that told not only its history, but also the tragedy of slavery.

Without knowing anything more about the sack or the people who owned it, Miles has written a timeless book for the ages that tells its own chronicle of love, handiwork, and the power of story, all the while putting on full display the cruelty, degradation, and horror of what it meant to be a slave.

Miles quotes Civil War historian Stephen Berry as saying of the sack, "It is the world’s shortest slave narrative, stripped down to its essence, sent back to us through time like a message in a bottle."

Prodigiously researched and magnificently written, this book takes readers down the deep, dark hole of slavery with a special focus on what it meant to be an enslaved woman in South Carolina in the mid-1800s. While very little to almost nothing is recorded about Rose and Ashley, Miles uses the stories of other enslaved women who lived similar lives to illuminate what may have also been true for Rose and Ashley. And what Miles discovers about Ruth brought a smile to my face after all the tears.

A brilliant melding of the scholarly and the personal, this book is a masterpiece. It is impossible not to be deeply affected by it. Quite simply, this is essential reading.