All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake is a work of history by Tiya Miles, a historian at Harvard University. The book centers on a worn cotton sack embroidered with a brief family history. In the 1850s in South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose packed the sack for her nine-year-old daughter, Ashley, who was about to be sold away, and decades later Ashley's granddaughter Ruth stitched their story onto the cloth. Because the archives of slavery say little about the inner lives of enslaved women, Miles builds her account around this object and others like it, tracing the women's lives and the world around them. The book explores love, survival and the ways Black women preserved memory and passed on care across generations. It won the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction.