Tiya Miles > Quotes

“Things become bearers of memory and information, especially when enhanced by stories that expand their capacity to carry meaning.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Be someone's muse.”
― Tiya Miles

“As one historian of slavery and capitalism concluded: “The number of enslaved migrants who made it from the depths of the cotton and sugar frontiers all the way to the free states probably numbered under a thousand during all the years of slavery. That amounts to one-tenth of 1 percent of all forced migrants.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Historical visibility is everywhere related to social power.”1 It is a madness, if not an irony, that unlocking the history of unfree people depends on the materials of their legal owners, who held the lion’s share of visibility in their time and ours. Captive takers’ papers and government records are often the only written accounting of enslaved people who could not escape and survive to tell their own stories. The wealthier and more influential the slaveholder, the more likely it is that plantation and estate records were kept and preserved over centuries in private offices and, later, research repositories. As the richest U.S. colony for a span of time prior to the Revolutionary War and a nexus of economic growth into the nineteenth century, South Carolina has more than its share of these tainted but crucial, documents.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“The history of Africans in America is brutal, but we have made art out of pain, sustaining our spirits with sunbursts of beauty, teaching ourselves how to rise the next day.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“For women, cloth also tended to represent the work of their hands, the female branches of family trees, and notions of the feminine ideal. Passing on a textile, then, symbolized women's ability, creativity, and continuance.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“And my grandmother wrapped the moment up in a silk sleeve of artful story.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Thomas Garrett pressed Harriet on an occasion when she had come to visit, saying God told her Garrett had money for her next rescue. He asked whether “God never deceived her?” because he had received no such funds. Tubman proclaimed, “No!” And according to Garrett, the mystery cash soon arrived.[”
― Tiya Miles, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People

“Brown, a scholar of the recent past, agree on this: our foremothers wove spiritual beliefs, cultural values, and historical knowledge into their flax, woolen, silk, and cotton webs. The work of their hands can lead us back to their histories and serve as guide rails as we grope through the difficult past.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“even as the listener learns from the teller’s experience in a rehearsal of life’s potential challenges. What is more, telling may have become a way for Ashley, as well as Ruth, to move beyond the constraining role of a victim and take up the empowering stance of a witness.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“This impulse to preserve past knowledge by hitching narrative explanation to items exhibits what Ulrich calls the 'mnemonic power of goods.' Things become bearers of memory and information, especially when enhanced by stories that expand their capacity to carry meaning.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“...these women valued one another as kin and understood the transcendent worth of lineage.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“preserve past knowledge by hitching narrative explanation to items exhibits what Ulrich calls the “mnemonic power of goods.”3 Things become bearers of memory and information, especially when enhanced by stories that expand their capacity to carry meaning.4 And if those things are textiles, stories about women’s lives seem to adhere with special tenacity, even as fabrics, because of their vulnerability to deterioration and frequent lack of attribution to a maker, have been among the last kinds of materials that historians look to in order to understand what has occurred, how, and why.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Harriet Jacobs described southern slave society as “a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and it makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation.”45 Rose may have agreed with Harriet about the interpersonal rot endemic in a society built on slavery. Rose may have thought a great many things about her condition and the state of her social world that we cannot quite access.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“By scripting a family history onto the bag that was core to the story, Ruth accomplished two crucial feats: she succeeded in attaching a special story to a precious object, permanently joining them together so that neither would be forgotten, and she entered her family’s humble sack into the written record from which histories of the nation are made. Ruth turned the story she had heard through the years into a remarkable document, a written record with the cultural power to augment history.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Ruth’s intellectual work of interpreting Rose and Ashley’s story and her handiwork in stitching it onto the sack in color produce a composite object of arresting visual and emotional impact. A testament to the national past fashioned of many thinning threads, it has an effect subtler yet more moving than the stone monuments built for pro-slavery statesmen and Confederate generals that have been widely contested in recent years. Those memorials, erected to bury a nation’s sin, were made to be larger than life to command a presence in national memory. At the same time, though, Confederate monuments undermined the aspirational principles of America’s founding: freedom, equality, and democracy. Ashley’s sack makes no such pretense to vainglory. It does not have to. A quiet assertion of the right to life, liberty, and beauty even for those at the bottom, the sack stands in eloquent defense of the country’s ideals by indicting its failures.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“And if those things are textiles, stories about women's lives seem to adhere with special tenacity, even as fabrics, because of their vulnerability to deterioration and frequent lack of attribution to a maker, have been among the last kinds of materials that historians look to in order to understand what has occurred, how, and why.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Ruth turned the story she had heard through the years into a remarkable document, a written record with the cultural power to augment history.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“As with any archive, we cannot presume that this sack bears straightforward, unassailable facts. Using the object responsibly as a source for historical inquiry means asking questions of it and, as uncomfortable as it might feel, maintaining a willingness to poke holes into it. Placing this artifact in conversation with other sources and considering its various historical contexts can help us test its reliability in the service of historical understanding as well as the search for “symbolic truths” that transcend hard evidence and speak to the intangible meanings of our collective human lives. 10”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Michigan is still home to one of the most extreme human containment systems in the United States. Its prison population has increased by 450 percent since 1973, and the state maintains a higher rate of imprisonment than most countries. African Americans are the largest incarcerated group by far in Michigan, with a total population of 14 percent and a penal population of 49 percent. Latinos and Native Americans are incarcerated in Michigan at rates equal to their population percentage. However, white Michiganders, who make up 77 percent of the general population, are underrepresented in the prison population at 46 percent. Racialized sentencing policies have much to do with these statistics. Historians Heather Ann Thompson and Matthew Lassiter, the founding codirectors of the Carceral State Project at the University of Michigan, point to "draconian" state legislation that by the 1990s included the infamous "lifer laws," which exacted life terms for narcotics possessions of over 650 grams and extinguished the opportunity for parole. As men and women were thrown behind bars for nonviolent offenses in the 1980s through the early 2000s, Detroit neighborhoods were gutted, children were orphaned, and voter rolls were depleted.”
― Tiya Miles, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“the safest place to be is in the will of God.”[9]”
― Tiya Miles, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People

“she decided she would repurpose a sack as a parachute. It would tie together mother and child while gently lowering that child down to a new and dangerous patch of ground.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“But I know after twenty-five years of studying Black women’s history, and my grandmother must have known from experience as she told me the story back then, that a Black woman was better off hidden than smart when white men came calling in pre–civil rights Mississippi.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“For grandmother and grandchild both, “interpreting and reinterpreting the past [was] crucial for survival, strength, and carrying on.” 17 How apt, how perfect, as if a fabrication of the story itself, that the “carrying on” enacted through Ashley and Ruth’s exchanges is attached to an actual carrier in the form of the cotton seed sack?”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Evidence, or the lack thereof, presents a particular challenge for the study of Black women, women of color, and women on the whole as groups that have been socially disempowered and therefore often overlooked by the keepers of records and the intellectual architects of archives.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Every scholar of early Black or Native women’s history, and the history of slavery, must confront the conundrum of the archives. Embarking on a search for evidence to verify the text of the sack compelled my turn to the traditional historical archive in these pages, notwithstanding its gruesomely violent episodes and unnervingly silent gaps.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“luminous pragmatism.[20]”
― Tiya Miles, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People

“she confronted the particularly grave danger of sexualized bodily harm.”
― Tiya Miles, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People

“There are bound to be errors in this book, and they are mine. I regret that even with the help of two able genealogists, I was unable to identify living descendants of Rose. If I have offended the spirits of Rose, Ashley, Rosa, Ruth, Dorothy, or their descendants in any way, I offer my apology. If I have contributed to love and life in any way, I offer my gratitude for the opportunity. Thank you to the ancestors for their company and forbearance. Thank you to the descendants for carrying on.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“This loss of the material traces of history, which stands alongside a multitude of other losses in African American experience, has grave ramifications for well-being. Human values and human relations have been expressed and revealed through things for as long as we have been painting on cave walls and making tools. We come to know ourselves through things, cement community ties through things, think with things, and remember what is important to us with the aid of objects. 4 Beyond”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake