Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

All That She Carried – a powerful and important book

All That She Carried by Tiya Miles

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What can a simple sack tell us about the past? As it turns out, an absolutely incredible amount. Sometime in the 1850s, a slave named Rose sent her daughter Ashley out of South Carolina to escape slavery with a sack that contained a tattered dress, 3 handfuls of pecans, a braid of her mom’s hair and love. With these talismanic items, Ashley (who was still a child) was able to escape the hellish conditions of the South to freedom in the North. How do we […]

“It be filled with my Love always.”

All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles

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This book was fascinating, and very different from what I expected. In the 1850s South Carolina, a young enslaved girl, Ashley, was sold away from her mother. Ashley’s mother, Rose, packed a sack for Ashley to take, containing “a tattered dress 3 handfulls of pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her It be filled with my Love always”. Two generations later, Ruth Middleton, Ashley’s granddaughter, embroidered text onto the sack explaining its contents and significance. Miles uses each of the items in the sack, […]



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