The stained cotton sack dates back to the mid-1800s. From 2016 to 2021, it was displayed at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, on loan from Middleton Place, a historical landmark in South Carolina.
According to the description embroidered on the sack by a Ruth Middleton in 1921:
“My great grandmother Rose
mother of Ashley gave her this sack when
she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina
it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of
pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her
It be filled with my Love always
she never saw her again
Ashley is my grandmother.”
The sack induced so much weeping at the Middleton that curators had to supply tissues near the exhibit.
The story of the sack is part of a new book, All That She Carried, by historian Tiya Miles who freely acknowledges it is not a traditional history, but rather one that “leans toward evocation rather than argumentation, and is rather more meditation than monograph.”
But the provenance of the material and the author’s research methods are less the point for me.
Rose’s sack seems to have been preserved and passed down for several generations, before turning up in a bin of fabric scraps at a flea market in Nashville in 2007. The movement from mother to daughter, ancestor to progeny, sparked a thought: what would I find in a sack given to me by my mother and her mother before her? What offerings did they tuck into the sack of legacy I carry?
My mother died when I was 17 years old. So little of my life was spent with her, but so much of her mothering was indelibly stamped in that short time.
Both my parents were raised by people other than their parents. My mother was raised with a cousin by their spinster aunt. In the warped moral tradition of the times, because my grandmother was not married to her daughter’s father, she was not permitted to touch her child. My mother told me she was nearly 20 before she hugged or kissed her own mother.
As a consequence, my mother was the exact opposite – kissing and petting me, sitting entwined in a single chair as we read or watched TV, standing inside her coat buttoned around me as we waited for the bus on winter mornings.
So when I think of what would be in a sack pressed into my hands by my mother as her parting gift to me, first I would find a tactile, warm and embracing love.
Both my grandmother and mother were teachers. In fact, my mother was my first grade teacher in a school she co-founded. When I got a little older, I sometimes assisted her in class. I have the clarity, precision and patience required to instruct effectively that she taught me.
Every Saturday, my Guyanese grandmother baked for the week – raisin cakes, bread, a dessert called pone. I remember standing beside her, my floured hands wrist-deep kneading dough; clapping the hot roti as it came out of the skillet; watching her pour another portion of rum on the black cake fermenting in the cupboard until Christmas. In the sack is food and touch and nourishment.
Since I read about the sack, I’ve spent the last several days ruminating on what other necessities for the road of life are bequeathed to me from my matrilineal line of which I am not fully cognizant. They surface in my mind like diamonds buried in sand. I realize I am wealthy beyond measure.
