When Ruth Middleton took her needle and embroidered part of her family history onto a cloth sack that had been passed down through generations, she recounted a moment of cruelty and resilience. A descendant of people who had been owned in South Carolina, Ruth herself had left the state in the 1910s, moving northward to Philadelphia. From the early twentieth-century North, Ruth looked back toward the 1850s South -- to the lives of her great-grandmother Rose and grandmother Ashley. In a brief ten-line account she told of how Rose, who was enslaved in Charleston, had one day received the most excruciating news: her nine-year-old daughter, Ashley, would be sold. Ruth focused on how Rose responded to this news. In the face of tragedy, Rose went about packing a sack with "a tattered dress," "3 handfuls of pecans," and "a braid of Rose's hair." She gifted it to Ashley, telling her the bag would be "filled with my Love always" (p. 5). The sack and all it held would continue to link Rose and Ashley well after this moment, even though, as Ruth disclosed at the end of her account, the mother and daughter never saw each other again.

Historian Tiya Miles has written a remarkable book about the story of this cloth sack and the lives of the three Black women (Rose, Ashley, and Ruth) who made, preserved, and remade it. In seven gorgeously written chapters, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, A Black Family Keepsake explores what the sack meant for Rose and Ashley within the confines of slavery in 1850s South Carolina; the significance of Ruth's choices to recount her family history through embroidery, on cloth, and at a particular time (around 1920) in Black history; and the way, at the start of the twenty-first century, the sack entered the public archive (first exhibited at Middleton Place and, since 2016, at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, where it is on loan).[1] At the intersection of material studies, the history of slavery, and Black women's history, All That She Carried is a marvelously insightful book that will no doubt interest specialists and nonspecialists alike.

Miles's book is part of a broader scholarly interest in the material world of antebellum slavery that, over the past few decades, has explored the place of objects and the built environment in the lives of enslaved people and illuminated the more specific history of enslaved craftspeople. In the last thirty years, such scholarship has been especially animated by questions about identity, selfexpression, relationality, and racial power and resistance. Subjects of study have included enslaved people's clothing and hair, their realm of possessions, the architecture that shaped their experiences, the images they exchanged and destroyed, and the material life of the homes they created in bondage and freedom.[2] Diverse in subject matter, this work is guided by the principle that physical objects -- from enslaved Black people's dresses to the iron spikes enslavers added to the fences of their Charleston townhomes -- both reflected and shaped the history of antebellum bondage.

All That She Carried shares this conceptual approach but also distinguishes itself through its sustained attention to the thoughts and emotions of specific enslaved individuals and their descendants. Miles strives to shed light on the facts of these women's lives, suggesting, for example, how Rose and Ashley were likely separated when Ashley was shipped from their enslaver's Charleston manor home to a cotton plantation one hundred miles inland. But it is Miles's foray into the inner domain of idea and feeling that is particularly striking, especially since Rose and Ashley never penned a slave narrative. Here, as Miles compellingly suggests, "attention to material things, especially ones elaborated by words or pictures, opens a route to accessing intangible feelings and desires that can evade the documentary record" (p. 19). In other words, Miles wants to know how the creation, uses, and materiality of the sack offer a winAll That She Carried shares this conceptual approach but also distinguishes itself through its sustained attention to the thoughts and emotions of specific enslaved individuals and their descendants. Miles strives to shed light on the facts of these women's lives, suggesting, for example, how Rose and Ashley were likely separated when Ashley was shipped from their enslaver's Charleston manor home to a cotton plantation one hundred miles inland. But it is Miles's foray into the inner domain of idea and feeling that is particularly striking, especially since Rose and Ashley never penned a slave narrative. Here, as Miles compellingly suggests, "attention to material things, especially ones elaborated by words or pictures, opens a route to accessing intangible feelings and desires that can evade the documentary record" (p. 19). In other words, Miles wants to know how the creation, uses, and materiality of the sack offer a window into the inner worlds of Rose, Ashley, and Ruth.

This attention to interiority is most evident in the sections on Rose, the central figure in All That She Carried. In chapters 3, 4, and 6, Miles unpacks the significance of Rose's act of packing and the things Rose packed. She aims to shed light on Roses's fears, hopes, and values in the face of the slave trade. "Rose likely had a sense of her assigned value as judged by her owner," Miles states, and then asks, "But what of Rose's own list of things? What might it tell us about her scale of values?" (p. 128, emphasis added). Miles grounds her answers to these questions in a broad reading of sources about enslaved women, including the narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Louisa Picquet. In Rose's inclusion of pecans, Miles sees her striving to sustain Ashley materially, through objects with a high nutritional value. Through the gift of the dress, Miles writes, "Rose insisted on Ashley's right to bodily protection and feminine dignity," at once referring to the protection Rose hoped this item would offer a girl against sexual assault as well as the role of clothing as a vehicle through which Black women had long expressed their style and worth (p. 131). And Rose's gift of a braid of hair, Miles asserts, should be seen within a slave society in which enslavers sought retribution against enslaved Black women by cutting their hair. Since enslaved women subverted such bodily violations when they cared for their hair, Rose's exchange of her braid offered Ashley "proof of the kind of selfregard, self-care and mutual aid that sustained life in captivity" (p. 115). Ultimately, Miles suggests that the contents of the cotton bag reveal what mattered most to Rose at this time of tragedy: sustaining Ashley materially and emotionally, through food, clothing, reminders of familial love, and assertions of worthiness.

All That She Carried points the way forward for research on the role of material culture in American slavery and its aftermath. One of the vital contributions it makes is to deepen our understanding of how enslaved people coped with the harsh realities of the internal slave trade. Thanks to the work of such scholars as Dylan C. Penningroth (The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South [2003]), we have learned much about the contours of enslaved people's possessions. But we have only begun to grasp how they used objects such as clothing to endure forced separations from their loved ones. Miles contextualizes Rose's "emergency kit" within the harrowing history of the internal trade, but she rarely uses the term "resistance," instead opting for the framework of resilience. To what degree do we see other such stories of resilience? In what other ways did people who were owned exchange their own possessions at moments of sale, and to what effect? Moreover, in what ways did other Black families pass down objects through generations and into the twentieth century, as Ashley did with her sack? Might we conceive of Ruth's embroidering as one piece of a broader story about the place of family relics in the private remembrance of slavery? The fact that All That She Carried sparks such queries -- which one might pursue through the Works Progress Administration's interviews of formerly enslaved people in the 1930s or Doc South's collection of slave narratives (https://docsouth. unc.edu/) -- is a testament to the vibrancy of Miles's book.

At its core, All That She Carried is guided by a proposition that scholars of material culture have only begun to pursue: that "material objects," as Miles writes, "can help us to assemble rich histories of the marginalized" (p. 24). There is little doubt Miles makes good on this proposition, offering a model of cultural analysis and elegant narration as well as a profound meditation about Rose, Ashley, Ruth, and the sack that connected them.