All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack and a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles, and: On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed

Abstract

Reviewed by: All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack and a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles, and: On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed Catherine Clinton All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack and a Black Family Keepsake. Tiya Miles. New York: Random House, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-9848-5499-5, 416 pp., cloth, $28.00 On Juneteenth. Annette Gordon-Reed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1, 152 pp., cloth, $15.95. A few years ago I began labeling my graduate course "Civil War and Emancipation," in recognition of the turn within the academy, with scholarship rippling outward into a more diverse audience and perhaps trickling down into textbooks and curriculum. A slow, deliberate change from the days of the Civil War centennial—as the 1960s was an era of racialized conflagrations, and a national commemoration fraught with competing, explosive agendas. By the Civil War sesquicentennial in 2011–15, the destruction of slavery was acknowledged as a major war aim of the federal government. During the past half century, historians of nineteenthcentury America escalated the debates over war's cause and effect to include the significance of Emancipation and the struggles during and after Reconstruction by former slaves and Black Americans seeking rights and citizenship. This new era has yielded a bounty of important, prizewinning work. A large contingent of Civil War scholars are engaged in including Black perspectives and African American resources to reshape the era. During this same transformative turn, women have come to the forefront, both as scholars of the slave experience and as a dynamic topic within Black history: African American women in slavery and freedom. When I dipped my toe into the Civil War field during the 1980s after being immersed in African American history during the '60s and women's history during the '70s, little did I imagine the creative and interventionist ways these fields might meet to create an era of intersectionalism. However, there were clearly visionary scholars at work, paving the way. These two new books by Tiya Miles and Annette Gordon-Reed herald an era of metanarrative, whereby prizewinning authors challenge the fallacy of objectivism. Their bracing, interrogative [End Page 217] accounts allow readers to experience the full powers of their intellects and narrative gifts. Surely the bevy of prizes won in 2021 by Thavolia Glymph's The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (from the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Society of Civil War Historians, and the Southern Association for Women Historians, among others) signals the way Civil War studies is seeking important new terrain to bring this burgeoning field into alignment with the twenty-first century. Tiya Miles's new volume, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack and a Black Family Keepsake, follows a productive parade of impressive books, including a novel (The Cherokee Rose). Miles's historical talents were evident from her first monograph, Ties That Bound (winning the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize in 2006) to her 2017 Dawn of Detroit (awarded the Frederick Douglass Prize), receiving a MacArthur Fellowship (2011) along the way. Her scholarship has always been praised as meticulous, and she earns accolades for her prose style, which is characterized as both "luminous" and "accessible." In the story of Ashley's sack, we are given layered lessons about the historian's craft. How does one approach an object? What are the objectives for the story to be told? What is the value of speculation? How does the empowerment of context supply content when no particulars are evident, when no evidence is forthcoming? Miles patiently pieces together her story as brilliantly and creatively as the recovered sack deposited at Middleton plantation. It is not just an object for a repository, but the beginning of a journey for Miles—who takes the family history of the ancestor Rose, who lovingly prepared this cotton bag for her nine-year-old daughter Ashley's sale and departure. Ripped away from her home, from her family—with a tattered dress, three handfuls of nuts, a lock of her mother's hair, and the...