Ideas - Historian Tiya Miles on how a mother's love outlasted slavery

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

A cotton sack from the time of slavery bears the first names of a mother and her daughter, who was sold at the age of nine. Harvard historian Tiya Miles scours the historical documentary record to discover who these women were and reveals their story of love in her book, All That She Carried — winner of the 2022 Cundill History Prize. *This episode originally aired on Feb. 20, 2023.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayed. We begin this episode with a cotton sack. It's old, from the mid-1800s, and embroidered onto it in just ten short lines is a heartening and heart-wrenching story. My great-grandmother Rose, mother of Ashley, gave her this sack when she was sold at age nine in South Carolina. Those spare lines tell us that Rose and Ashley were enslaved. The next two reveal what was in

the sack. It held a tattered dress, three handfuls of pecans, a braid of Rose's hair. three handfuls of pecans, a braid of Rose's hair. In the next line, the words are much larger. This was Rose's last message for her daughter, Ashley. Told her, it be filled with my love always. She never saw her again. Then, near the bottom of the sack, the final two lines, a kind of author's note. Ashley is my grandmother, Ruth Middleton, 1921.

Finding out who Ruth, Ashley, and Rose were, and unraveling the stories contained in that sack, that's what inspired Harvard historian Taya Miles to write her celebrated book, All That She Carried. I first saw the sack in the winter of 2016, and I had been waiting to see it and longing to see it in person for several months. All that she carried has won a raft of awards, including the National Book Award and the Kundal History Prize. Walk me through that moment leading up to seeing the sack when you actually laid eyes on it yourself? This was an incredible moment for me. And it was really so strange because this museum, the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, had just opened. And so I had an opportunity, which to me felt unexpected and moving, of seeing Ashley's sack by myself in a space that was quiet and empty.

So I approached the sack, which was in a protective case, and I was first struck by just how large it is. You can't get that sense from the photographs. This is quite a long textile. I came close to the sack, which was being illuminated by special lights in the gallery, and I read the words, which I had read before, I read the words which I had read before, but at this moment in person, I was completely overtaken by the beauty of this object, by the tenderness of the embroidered story, by the impact of seeing a thing that had been handed down across generations by these genius women, and by the way in which it seemed to encapsulate the entire story of Black enslavement in just a handful of carefully rendered lines. How special to be able to behold it on your own in a quiet space.

What was the overriding emotion, do you think? behold it on your own in a quiet space. What was the overriding emotion, do you think? Oh my goodness, it would be hard for me to pinpoint just one emotion. It felt like a swirl of emotions. It felt like a gut punch, but it also felt like inspiration. It felt like a clutching of the chest, I think that was love I felt very much like the love that Rose said would fill the sack was still present in it and I almost felt as if there was a softening of time as I stood there in front of the sack that there was a way in which the present was moving into the past, and that I, as a viewer, as a reader, was entering into the sack and the space of the sack, the emotional and psychological and historical room that the sack created.

But the historical importance of the sack is thrown into sobering relief against this fact. It was nearly never discovered at all. In 2007, after having been lost for decades and presumably unknown outside of the original family, the sack Rose had packed re-emerged. A white woman discovered the bag in a bin of old fabrics at an outdoor flea market near Nashville, Tennessee. In order to supplement her family's income, the shopper, a mother of three,

routinely bought items and resold them on eBay. She might have done the same with the discolored sack had she not absorbed a few of the words on its surface. Realizing that, quote, she had stumbled upon a precious object, end quote, the shopper offered the vendor $20 for the sack and a bundle of other cloths. She followed the clues on the sack, noted Ruth Middleton's signature, conducted an internet search, and contacted an appraiser. The search led her to Middleton Place, once the home of the

famously wealthy Charleston slaveholders Henry Middleton and Mary Williams Middleton, and now a non-profit foundation. Middleton Place, which owns the sack, is located in Charleston, South Carolina, where Rose and Ashley had been enslaved. Now, put yourself in Taya Miles's position as an historian. You've seen the sack, which you can too, by the way, it's on our website, and you feel compelled, even called, to find out more. But here you run immediately into a problem, and it's a big one. You had only her first name to go on, Rose. How do you even begin your search to find out who Rose was? How do you even begin your search to find out who Rose was?

Well, I would say that I began, and I think that any of us should begin in doing this kind of research with a sense of gratitude that we have anything at all. Because we have to remember that these are people, Rose, Ashley, others who were enslaved, who were never supposed to be remembered as far as the dominant culture was concerned. They were purely disposable. And so the fact that we have a notation about Rose on this wonderful textile is nearly miraculous. So starting from that point of gratitude meant that I had the inspiration and the energy and the feeling of momentum to move forward and to try to search the records of South Carolina with the patience that that task required. the patience that that task required.

To find Rose, we must fish for her in this wild current of records, casting out the widest, most delicate net. To find Rose, we must drag for her, combing the rivers of South Carolina, intent on a mission of historical rescue. We search because we must remember. We seek because we need to find. We are duty-bound, as Alice Walker writes,

to carry the ancestors. But first we have to track them in the documentary briar patch of the past. When did you think that you had likely found the right rose? Oh, months later now. Months later and several trips to South Carolina archives later. Trying to track down rose meant trying to identify this single person who had a name that was actually quite common among enslaved women in the mid-19th century in South Carolina. How common? Oh, there were dozens of roses that came up in the records that were being held in the state archives,

in various museums, in college archives, in plantation archives. And these roses were not listed with surnames because, of course, many enslaved people did not have surnames. They didn't have the benefit, the privilege, the right of being able to retain that connection to their natal family. That was one of the objects of enslavement, to separate people from their families and from their heritage. And so that meant that there was an array of roses. There were so many women named Rose popping up in the records. And what I had to try to do was to find a Rose who appeared in the same record with someone named Ashley. Because Ashley, it turned out, was a very uncommon name among enslaved people.

There were only three Ashleys that I found in the South Carolina records next to dozens and dozens of roses. And there was only one place, Nala, where a rose and an Ashley appeared in the same record in the time period that fit the story that Ruth Middleton had sewn on the sack. Do you remember that moment when you realized that? Oh, yes, I remember that moment. I mean, I was in Columbia, South Carolina, looking through these old heavy books, Nala, these old leather-bound worn books that had been started hundreds of years ago,

flipping through transactions that showed the movement of property, all kinds of property. And in these transactions, there was a record of a man who had died and his estate was being inventoried, and his estate included a Rose and an Ashley. When I saw this, my heart seemed to have stopped. My heart dropped to the ground because this really had to have been them. There were no other records like this of a Rose and an Ashley around the right age in South Carolina who had been owned by the same enslaver. That enslaver was a wealthy man named Robert Martin. In the 1850s, he owned a countryside plantation just outside of Charleston and a shishy manor home within the city itself.

Moneyed men like Robert Martin found ways to set themselves apart. They purchased corner lots on higher ground with robust sea breezes, installing water control systems that flushed their waste downhill to their poorer and colored neighbors, and surrounded their large parcels with stout brick walls, encaping with an earlier Charleston architectural practice. These men erected virtual country estates inside the northern part of the city, creating a Charlestonian architectural form known as the plantation-style suburban villa. Rather than mimicking the slender sideways orientation of Charleston's oldest planter homes in the single-house style by the bay, the suburban villa strutted out broad

and brash toward the street. These homes, built from the 1830s through the 1850s, were wide and open-armed, with verandas facing forward, grand exterior entry staircases, and rows of elegant pillars making for a dramatic curbside presence. They mimicked the look of 18th-century plantation mansions, bringing the country into the city and declaring the owner's desired, and at times realized, planter status. Status meant everything to the owners of these urbanized plantation manors, many of which still featured their stately brick walls and filigreed iron fences.

But as Taya Miles points out, these walls and fences were meant less to keep intruders out than to keep enslaved people in. Owning slaves was yet another sign of elevated status. But Robert Martin's ascendancy was cut short when he died in 1852. His death would prove catastrophic for Rose and Ashley. When an owner died and his or her estate was reorganized, liquidated, or apportioned out to heirs, enslaved people suffered. Like ancient slaves for whom burial alongside precious goods

with deceased pharaohs and priestly chiefs was customary, modern slaves of the American South in the mid-19th century could expect a kind of death with the master's earthly departures. They were made dead to one another through quick sales and forced separations that could lead to relocation deep within the cotton South. We know from the words they have left behind in narratives and letters that slave mothers lived in a shadowland of constant, scathingly rational fear. Rose would certainly have wondered what fresh evils Brother Martin's passing portended for those she knew and loved. Rose's worst fear was realized when Ashley was

forced to be auctioned off. Now put yourself in Rose's position. She had very little time, was just about to lose her daughter, and had to make some crucial decisions. What did Rose value enough to save, pack, and carry? How does she turn her vision of what mattered in life into action? The things Rose gathered for her daughter, according to the memory of her great-granddaughter, indicate her thoughts and guiding principles. The inscription on Ashley's bag contains a list that is nothing less than a prescription for survival. It allows us to appreciate what women in bondage deemed essential, what they were capable

of getting their hands on, and what they were determined to salvage. We save first that which we value most. Rose was determined to rescue her daughter. She understood, as did other Black women with their backs against a wall, that survival for future generations meant fusing whatever one had together, the material and the emotional,

making love. When Rose was preparing the sack, she included, as you mentioned, three handfuls of pecans for her daughter, Ashley. I was amazed to read that pecans had much wider significance beyond just being a nourishing food item. They're a luxury item? I was amazed too. I really had no idea. I have done research on the South before. I've traveled to the South many times. My family's originally from the South. And pecans were just ubiquitous. They were everywhere. And I thought that they grew naturally across this entire terrain. But I learned during the research for the book that, in fact, they were only native to the old Southwest region, and they grew in Texas, they grew down into Mexico, but not in the southeastern part of the United States, which is where Rose lived.

How would Rose have had access to a luxury item? Well, that's the question, right? that question, which came from finding out that pecans were not native to South Carolina, opened up whole new ways of trying to understand Rose's position. Because before I knew that pecans were not native to the Southeast, I did understand from the records that Rose was being put to work doing domestic labor within a house. But what was she doing in that house wasn't clear at all. It wasn't notated in the records. But for Rose to have gotten access to not just food, but to a luxury food item,

indicated that she probably was a cook. And she also would have been someone who had the opportunity, the ability perhaps, to stash away some of the food items that she procured for the people who enslaved her. You write about how enslaved women would come up with ingenious ways and smart ways to get extra food for their families, like they were when they were threshing rice, for example. Can you paint that scene for us? One of the ways that they did this in the southeastern part of the U.S., where the production of rice was very prevalent, was that they would use these large baskets for their work of sifting the shell and the skin off of the rice that they were growing and producing for their enslavers. And they would sift those baskets over open skirts.

They would try to catch the rice in the extra fabrics that they were wearing, or catch rice in their aprons, or catch rice in their shoes shoes and then go back to their cabins and let those extra fabrics down and have rice for their family. Ashley, Rose's daughter, was sold at just nine years old. Why would a child so young be sold separately from her family? Well, this sale took place in the 1850s, be sold separately from her family. Well, this sale took place in the 1850s, and this was a critical period in the history of enslavement in the United States. This was a time when the practice of enslavement was expanding out of the Southeast, so the areas of those original 13 the 13 English colonies, into Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi and Texas.

And this meant that enslaved people were going to be moved as well. They were going to be picked up wholesale and forced to relocate. These dark human trains of the shackled and surveilled moved across southern roads with increasing frequency in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s as cotton plantations spread westward. White men on horseback with whips and guns guarded the valuable cargo. Along the way, these middlemen of the domestic trade took sexual advantage of vulnerable girls and women, vended people to eager buyers, and transported the suits of new clothes that the prisoners would be forced to wear once they reached the selling floor of a market. This was actually quite a traumatic time for enslaved people,

quite a traumatic time for enslaved people. And we know this from interviews that were done with enslaved people who survived into the 1920s and into the 1930s and had their stories recorded in a national project called the Federal Writers Project. In some of these interviews, those who had been formerly enslaved remembered that as children, when they were forced west, they felt that they were nobody. They felt that they were all alone. They felt that they were severed from their past ties of kinship and of friendship.

So how frequently would it have been that a single child that young, like Ashley, would have been sold? It would have been not uncommon. I will put it like that. Because one way that we have tended to think about slavery, and in fact, I think we have tended to want to sugarcoat the history of slavery, is that we've told ourselves that people might have been sold, but they would have been sold together. It wouldn't have been family separated. It wouldn't have been children who were sold. And one reason we think that is because enslavers themselves,

during the period of enslavement, once they were coming under strong criticism by abolitionists in the 1830s and after, and then after the Civil War, after the American Civil War, when memoirs were being produced that were attempting to romanticize the plantation past, they attempted to soften or cover over some of their most egregious practices, and that included the selling of children. So there were rules that said children couldn't be sold under a certain age, and yet children were turning up in the records under that age, and Ashley is one of them. Ashley was sold not far from the world she had known as a young child. The fast-running rivers, the remaining stands of magnificent pines, and the scarred soil where they used to grow, and the acres of ghostly white-blossomed cotton might have been hauntingly familiar. She might have at first remained fairly close to her mother in terms of physical distance,

but Rose may have been sold herself soon after Robert Martin's death. Before 1853 and 1857, a woman named Rose passed away in a Charleston slave pen. passed away in a Charleston slave pen. You write hauntingly about the auction block. The auction block was a real thing. We sometimes forget this. We allow the physicality of a rock worn smooth by time and the press of bare stolen feet to slip from our awareness. But these mundane things, a concrete block, a wooden set,

a hollow stump, were props for the ritual dehumanization of a people. The rock or stump functioned like a department store window where the human commodity is put on display, raised up, and set apart. Some

of them, a block of stone or a wooden stump, have worn tracks or spaces where human feet once stood. I spent a lot of time trying to think about and to feel, really, what the auction block meant and how to convey that meaning. And this is because, I don't know, I think we get used to things, Nala. We get used to things in our everyday life. We get used to objects in our physical environments, and that familiarity begins to erode the significance of those words or those objects. We hear about the auction block. We see those words written in slave

narratives and in histories of slavery and in records of enslavement. And in some places in the U.S. South and the North, we have the physical relics of auction blocks still there on the landscape. And we have just forgotten their meaning, or we have forgotten to care about their meaning. And so I really wanted to just stop and pause before the notion of the auction block, before the physical object of the auction block, and to try to let it sink in for me and to communicate that sinking in feeling. Is there one that, you know, that you have come across that best conveys that picture that you want us all to hold in our heads? I think the auction block that most impressed me was the one that is on display in the Smithsonian.

And this is because that block was placed right next to Ashley's sack when it was on display there. The juxtaposition was absolutely chilling. And that block became, in a sense, a stage, a context, a surround for the story on Ashley's sack. Ashley Sack. And I will say that another very powerful auction block in the United States that we don't think of in that way is Thomas Jefferson's very famous, very stately home, Monticello. Enslaved people, many of them, a large group of them were sold on the steps of that home, which means those steps became an auction block. And there are places like this all around the United States where people were sold, where potential buyers came to stare at them, to touch them, to examine them, to demean them, to objectify them. And we walk past them all the time. We walk past these places all

the time, not feeling the impact of that history. Ashley was not alone in this grueling passage on the block, but even surrounded by others who shared her circumstances, she must have been emotionally isolated. We might picture her clutching a grimy cotton sack with all her mother had to give stowed away inside its folds. She might even have used the swatch of cloth as a shield from probing stairs. Is it possible to ask you for any sense of what the process of being sold might have looked like from Ashley's point of view? Well, it's a difficult question to answer because we don't have any records from Ashley's point of view. to look at the reminiscences of women who had been enslaved as girls, who were able to tell their stories or to write their stories later on in their lives. And what we know from people like this, such as Elizabeth Keckley,

who became the dressmaker for Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's wife, that these separations were horrendous. They were like an ending of life for these children, the moments when they happened. These children, they cried, they tried to cling to their parents, they felt that the world was dropping out underneath their feet. They were so confused and overwhelmed. They were terrified of what happened next to them. And then they had to try to put their lives back together

while being completely confused, overwhelmed, and terrified. Since the inauguration of the transatlantic slave trade in the late 1400s, through the acceleration of the American domestic slave trade in the early 1800s, until today, Africans and people of African descent have borne a crisis of mother loss. It might even be said that the search for true belonging and the quest for relational repair lie deep at the heart of the modern Black psyche. You're listening to Ideas. Ideas is a broadcast and a podcast

heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find us on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder.

Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short-sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. Taya Miles was awarded the 2022 Kundal History Prize, administered by McGill University in Montreal, for her book, All That She Carried. I was in Montreal to help present the award to her. Next up, please help me welcome Taya Miles.

Great to meet you. Congratulations. The jurors remarked what a remarkable job you did despite the fact, despite the dearth of documentation available. I wonder if you could relate some of the lessons you learned in telling history when there is so little documentation to the story you're trying to write. One of the most important things I learned was that the experiences of people who have been marginalized to write their own records, to tell their own stories, are extremely difficult to access. And if we want to tell those stories, we have to be willing to take risks. What kind of risks? Well, we have to be willing to look at unconventional sources, for one,

which is what I did in this book, and which was actually quite scary for me at the time to think about trying to write a book that was centered on an old bag, literally an old bag, a 19th century cotton sack that was used for agricultural purposes. The sack was also used for other purposes. It was a kind of survival kit that an enslaved mother prepared for her daughter, who was about to be taken from her. My great-grandmother Rose, mother of Ashley, gave her this sack when she was sold at age nine in South Carolina. It held a tattered dress, three handfuls of pecans, a braid of Rose's hair.

In a situation like this, would the tattered dress, when it was time for Ashley to go on the auction block, would that dress that Rose gave to her have taken on an extra significance? It could have. The dress was very important in all kinds of ways, matered and being fully covered like white women had. And so they were always exposed and always exposed to a sexual gaze which might be directed to them. They were also then blamed for that exposure. They were accused of being sexually loose, of being wanton, of being Jezebels was the term, of seducing white men into sexual encounters, when in fact it was they who were being exposed because they weren't provided with the kind of clothing they needed.

So a dress was something, an object that could serve as a protective barrier, as a shield against those roving eyes on the auction block. In a vicious cycle of mistreatment and slander, black women's revealing dress became evidence of their hypersexuality and the attestations of slaveholders and travelers. Rose would have recognized, too, the difference a dress could make to a girl always in danger of bodily exposure and abuse, and hence prioritize giving a dress, perhaps the only extra change of clothing she had, to Ashley. perhaps the only extra change of clothing she had to Ashley. This gives me a chance to say something, Nala,

that I have found very, very interesting in recent months. And that is that the inscription on the sack, which talks about a tattered dress, may have a different meaning than the one I arrived at in the book. Oh, wow. So I read the tattered dress as meaning what it seemed to say, that the dress was torn, it was shredded, that it was in poor condition. But I received an email from a reader who is a knitter and an embroiderer, and she pointed out to me that the word tatting, T-A-T-T-I-N-G, means working with lace in a certain way or producing lace that is thickly woven.

And she said that the word tatting or tatted could have been misremembered or written a little bit differently as tattered on Ashley's sack. And if that's the case, it might mean that the dress Rose packed was not tattered as in torn, but was tatted as in embellished with a special kind of thick lace. Did that send you off on a whole new search? Oh my goodness, Nala. I mean, it just, it was incredible because one of the things it did was, once again, it illuminated the richness and the depth and the possibility in this object, the sack, and all the things that were packed within it, and also the possibility and potentiality of what it is that Rose was doing and what Rose was thinking. I want to talk about one of the items in the sack. Rose gave Ashley a braid. Why hair and not something else, would you think? The braid of Rose's hair has got to be

the most moving item in the sack because the braid was so significant to Rose as hair would have been significant to Black women as a larger group. This is another case in which Black women were, because of the conditions of their enslavement, really denied the chance to take care of themselves, denied the chance to spend time caring for their bodies. They had to steal that time back from the enslavers who had stolen their time. And so late in the evenings and on Sundays, Black women would get together and do one another's hair. They would clean it, they would twist it, they would braid it, they would cover it in all manner of colorful cloth that they found beautiful, and they would do this as a form of caretaking of themselves and others. By packing a braid of her own hair, Rose was conveying to Ashley, I think, the importance of caring for yourself and caring for others,

even when everything in your world tells you that you don't matter. The other thing that struck me that you read into a possibility of what that braid means is, let me read it back to you, laying claim to the very body that her deceased master and living mistress would have called their property. And it was a while into the project when I realized that, because I'd been thinking about the parade in many ways. I was researching the ways in which Black people who would have been spiritual experts, leaders in their communities around spiritual practice and ritual, would have used hair in the tokens and talismans that they made to protect people. He requested those. And it was months, you know, probably even a couple of years into the research on hair being used in those ways that it occurred to me to try to picture Rose taking that action. Rose taking that action. I mean, I just paused and tried to imagine Rose in a space, perhaps the kitchen, cutting her hair. And when I saw that image in my mind, I realized in a different way what she was doing. She was taking back the right to alter the body that was, of course, her own, but that was claimed by her enslavers by law as belonging to them. When she cut her braid, she was saying to them,

I don't belong to you. I belong to myself. I belong to my daughter. Perhaps if she was religious, belong to myself. I belong to my daughter. Perhaps if she was religious, and I think she probably was, she may have thought, I belong to my God, but not you. So in harvesting that braid, it was an act of resistance. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I love that you used that word, harvest, Nala. It's your word, actually. I didn't use that. No, I didn't use that word. Did I? Yes, that is from the book.

Wow, I forgot that I used that. But, well, thank you for giving that word back to me because I think that what Rose did there was so beautiful and almost biblical and absolutely fruitful. The sack into which Rose put the three handfuls of pecans, the tattered or tatted dress, and the lock of her hair was handed down on a timeline that defines contemporary America,

from slavery to emancipation to reconstruction and to Jim Crow, going from South Carolina northwards to Philadelphia, where Ruth Middleton embroidered those ten lines in 1921. You can see the sack on our website, cbc.ca.ideas. One of the striking things about it is that the top lines were done in brown thread. The middle line, indicating Rose's love for Ashley, is in red. And the bottom three lines are in green. So what was she saying by using the different colors that she used? What do they mean? Well, it is likely the case that Ruth Middleton

was a novice embroiderer or someone who had not taken up the craft for a very long time. But what she was able to do was to embroider her sentences in a shape that, if we look closely, seems to echo a heart. Some of her lines are in brown, and I think she was perhaps suggesting a sense of roots of history with that color. Toward the end of the embroidery, she uses green, which might be an indication that she was thinking about the future. And in fact, she had just become the mother herself in this period when she embroidered the sack. herself in this period when she embroidered the sack. A mother of a daughter, which is very important to the story and to the continuation of the line that she was stitching onto a sack when she named Rose and when she named Ashley. And then there is this brilliant use of the color red in her thread. Red appears in the middle of that shape that could be a heart that appears in the

line, when Ruth sows, it be filled with my love always. This line would have been very important to her. It seems to have been quoted speech if we read the embroidered text closely, because right before that line, the text says, quote, told her. Then we get that sentence. And of course, the word love is associated with passion and feeling, and so is the color red. And very importantly, Ruth Middleton was a member of a Black church in Philadelphia. She would have been familiar with the way in which the words of Jesus were rendered in red in the King James Bible. And she might have been thinking about that example when she decided to render Rose's quoted speech in red.

And so I can't help asking, given all of that, she wrote the word love with a capital L. Love is at the center of this story. And Ruth tells us that. Ruth put the word love in the middle of her embroidery. She rendered it in red. She used a capital letter, which she only uses at the beginning of sentences or for proper nouns in this embroidery. So she's telling us that love is core. It is key. It is essential to this story. And she might also be telling us or suggesting that love has a kind of life of its own in the story and on this sack, that love has an energy and an animacy, just as Rose did and just as Ashley did. By assembling the bag and its contents, Rose turned fear into love, committing herself to a fight for life.

In toting the sack and its story, Ashley realized Rose's radical vision of Black persistence. In embellishing the cloth with her foremother's tale, Ruth committed this episode to family history and to American history. And now that the sack is in our hands, we cannot forget its layered lessons. Horrible things take place. Nevertheless, survival is possible. Hope can gain ground, and generations can be sustained. When we bear into the future

the full knowledge of our past, we walk with hearts unfolded. We recognize the brutality of our species and as well the light in our spirits. We see that nothing is preserved and no child or grandchild is saved without brash acts of love and wild visions of continuance. I want to talk about the way you, Taya Miles, writes history. So often, whenever the historical record is blank on what happened with Rose or Ashley or Ruth, you find analogies, you know, as you mentioned, other stories by people in their position to

suggest what plausibly could have happened so you don't say what isn't known you don't assert that but you don't just kind of shrug your shoulders and say well the record stops here to use your words you work in that hazy space between probably and certainly so rather than just the dearth of sources i I want to get at the motivation, like the impact is like a residue of possibility. What made you take on that kind of approach? There are a couple of reasons, probably more than that, that lead me to do this work in the way that I do. And one is I'm interested in trying to understand the lives and experiences of people who were enslaved in the past. These are people who don't have records that have been

left behind that we can access. So we either have to leave their stories by the wayside or find new ways of coming closer to them. I have not been willing to leave their stories by the wayside or to only see them from a cold distance. And that's one of the reasons I write and research the way that I do. But there's another one too, Nala, that I feel, I don't know why, but I just feel like I want to tell you this. I don't really talk about this, but I think that the work of doing history,

attempting to understand what happened in the past, people's lives in the past, is really critical to what we're facing right now. And because of that, I sometimes go so far as to choose the topics I write on, the topics of my books or essays or articles, based on how I think that particular event or person in the past can speak to our needs of today. And how does Rose, Ashley, Ruth speak out to me as an emergency responder. She was someone who found herself in one of the worst circumstances that we can imagine. She didn't have the right to possess herself.

I can't even get my mind around that. She didn't own herself. I can't even get my mind around that. She didn't own herself. She didn't have the right to protect her child. Her child didn't really belong to her according to the laws of her society. And even worse, this child was being yanked away from her and they were both being sent spiraling into an unknown, dim, shadowy, brightening future. That future that they were facing seems a lot like ours. And Rose's choice to stand up against that in whatever way she could, using what she had at her disposal, thinking on her feet, being creative, doing all of this through love, with love, is what I think we need to do right now. Taya, we've talked about Rose, Ashley, and Ruth, and how their gestures were

acts of resistance and resilience. And as you say, as an emergency responder, you yourself reject the notion of telling history through the experience of slave owners themselves or them alone. So let me ask you this. Is all that she carried, your book, itself an act of resistance? You might say that. And people who read the book might also say that. What you just noticed about the way the book is written is an aspect that I came to while I was doing the work.

Notice that the slave holders, the people who held Rose and Ashley as their property, are not central to what I write about or to what I speak about. You probably noticed that I worked to not say their names in our conversation. It's hard to miss that. I didn't used to write histories of enslavement in this way. It took me several books, and really probably this book, to really confront not just the fact that the records are completely slanted toward the record keepers who were the enslavers, but also that we were in many ways reproducing those power relationships by allowing those records,

which tell us about those particular people, to be the center of our stories. You have this term, liberation theology. Is your book a kind of liberation history? Oh my goodness, Mama, I love you. Well, you know what? I love you too. You didn't have to say that, but that sounds great. In a few years, maybe, perhaps, if things go well, and my next book comes out, you will see how prescient your statement was. Your question was. oh my goodness um i i would hesitate to attach that label to my work because

it's quite a grand idea and i'm not i'm not i'm not sure how much any one method can do or any one book or any one discipline can even do to move us toward real liberation and all the meanings that that word might hold. But I do think we have to try. And I did try in this book to be a witness for Rose and for Ashley, for Ruth, to see them, to hear them, and to feel them. And I do think that in some way, that there is a liberatory quality to that, because we're lifting up who they were. We're lifting up their spirits. We're lifting up their persons. up their spirits. We're lifting up their persons. Taya, just to end off, I was in Montreal when the winner of the Cundall History Prize was announced, and I'll never forget the look on your face when your name and your book were announced. I have to say just how beautiful and emotionally honest your acceptance speech

was. honest your acceptance speech was? More than 150 years ago, a woman named Rose found out that her nine-year-old daughter was going to be sold away from her. That daughter's name was Ashley. And Rose probably died not long after her daughter was sold away from her. Rose probably died not long after her daughter was sold away from her. And no one cared about her or knew her name beyond her daughter, beyond her family. And I am so moved and grateful that you are all here tonight to hear her name, That you are all here tonight to hear her name, to hear what a brave thing she did, to hear that she was unwilling, utterly unwilling,

to sacrifice her love for her daughter, her belief in family, her belief in the future, to a horrific system that intended to extract and steal everything from them. I said earlier in the conversation with Nala that I was anxious to write this book because I wasn't sure that I could give an account of this bag and this ordinary woman that scholars would think was worthy of the page. Right now, I feel that that risk has been affirmed in the most incredible way. I'm so just grateful for the recognition. I'm so grateful for coming along with me and believing me when I try to argue that we can find the large and the small.

We can find the magnificent and the miraculous in history. I'm so very grateful to all of you for affirming that. Thank you. I could see, and as we've heard all throughout our conversation today, just how much Rose, Ashley, and Ruth mean to you. Are they part of your life for the rest of your life now? Oh, without a doubt. Without a doubt. I wouldn't have it any other way. They have opened so much for me. They have shown me so much. And they've helped me to find a new path for the ways in which I hope to contribute. So many more things we could say about your book, but then we'd be called biased. It's such a lovely conversation.

Just honored to have spoken with you. Thank you, Taya. It was incredible. No, I feel, I just feel so moved by talking with you. Oh my goodness. Thank you. You were listening to my interview with Taya Miles, winner of the 2022 Cundall History Prize.

Special thanks to Glenn Anderson at WBUR in Boston, and to Daniel Cram and Chloe Rose of the Cundall team who helped make this interview happen. Technical production, Danielle Duval. The web producer of Ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Nikola Lukšić is the senior producer. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.