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

“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

“Be someone's muse.”
― Tiya Miles

“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

“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

“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

“...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

“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

“Ursula Goodenough has suggested that there is a singular pair of questions “fundamental to human concern.” These queries probe “How Things Are and Which Things Matter.” The first question, Goodenough says, is an inquiry into cosmology, while the second is an exploration of morality.”
― Tiya Miles, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People

“In the third decade of the twenty-first century, we face our own societal demons, equal in some respects to the system of slavery that would finally be slayed. The world feels dark to us, just as it must have for Rose, and like Rose, we can’t know what will happen. We think it a fantasy that we might rescue our children’s futures, or revive our democratic principles, or redeem our damaged earth. In our moment of bleak extremity, Black women of the past can be our teachers. Who better to show us how to act when hope for the future is under threat than a mother like Rose—or an entire caste of enslaved, brave women who were nothing and had nothing by the dominant standards of their time yet managed to save whom and what they loved? Rose and her long line of descendants realized that salvation depended on bearing up to the weight and promise of their baggage”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“By the time Rose was subject to the Martins’ authority, in the early 1800s, South Carolinians of the upper classes had long adopted a frame of mind, often referred to as “paternalism,” that allowed them to feel that slaveholding was morally right and even benevolent. Inspired by their cultural roots in European feudalism, in which lords and serfs related on unequal but accepted terms, elites believed in the correctness of a hierarchical social structure that they understood as being not only natural but also ordained by God. To them, the world was strictly ordered, with a proper place for everyone in it: a select few at the top would dominate and take responsibility for a vast mass of dependents below. In this”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“She sought to immediately address a hierarchy of needs: food, clothing, shelter, identity through lineage, and, most centrally, an affirmation of worthiness.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Rose was in existential distress that fateful winter when her would-be earthly master, Robert Martin, passed away. The place: coastal South Carolina; the year: 1852. We do not know Rose’s family name, or the place of her birth, or the year of her death. Such is the case with the vast majority of African and Indigenous American women who were bought, sold, and exploited by the hundreds of thousands. But we can be sure that Rose faced the deep kind of trouble that no one in our present time knows and only an enslaved woman has seen. Rose knew that she or her little girl, Ashley, could be next on the auction block, the cold device enslavers turned to when their finances faltered.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Requiring caretaking and at the same time providing solace, “textiles are often mobilized in the face of trauma, and not just to provide needed garments or coverings but also as a therapeutic means of comfort, a safe outlet for worried hands, a productive channel for the obsessive working through of loss,” explains one art historian.17 Fabric is a special category of thing to people—tender, damageable, weak at its edges, and yet life-sustaining. In these distinctive features, cloth begins to sound like this singular planet we call home. Cloth operates as a “convincing analogue for the regenerative and degenerative processes of life, and as a great connector, binding humans not only to each other but to the ancestors of their past and the progeny of their future,” fiber artist Ann Hamilton has written. “Held by cloth’s hand,” she continues, “we are swaddled at birth, covered in sleep, and shrouded in death. A single thread spins a myth of origin and a tale of adventure and interweaves people and webs of communication.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Without Ruth, there would be no record.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Steeped in a teeming religious surround, the young and astute Minty Ross seems to have been poking a stick into this same philosophical thicket. Minty’s first question—“Why should such things be?”—probed the rationale for slavery, functioning as a cosmological inquiry into the genesis and development of human relations of bondage. “Would there be deliverance?,” her second question, asked whether the infraction of slavery was significant enough, and whether her people were precious enough, for God to take action.”
― Tiya Miles, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People

“South Carolina's history, punctuated by the sale of little children, might be read as a cautionary tale about how a self-centered ruling class could rely on racial prejudice in the service of unchecked capitalism and to the detriment of moral character.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Let us turn to Harriet Jacobs for guidance in imagining. Jacobs masterminded her family’s escape from North Carolina to New York. From her room in the home of an employer in upstate New York in the 1850s, Jacobs penned a penetrating memoir of social critique. Hers was the first autobiography by a Black woman to reveal the insidious culture of sexual harassment and assault in slavery as well as to confront the gender double standard between white women and Black women in Victorian society, which always categorized Black women as impure. She expressed, pointedly, that those who have not experienced legalized bondage can never know “what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another.” We cannot enter the consciousness of a girl born into slavery who matures to give birth into slavery and can have no reasonable hope of rescue.30 We cannot know Rose, but we can draw on the resources at our disposal—documents, cityscapes, architectural records and the built environment she inhabited, slave narratives, and Ruth’s inscription on the sack—to picture the woman she might have been and summon the shape of her daily life.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“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

“Around the year 2000, women began to reclaim knitting and sewing circles as spaces of solidarity, to use handiwork as a social connector and form of giving, and to make political commentary through craft in a movement termed “craftivism.”73 A knitting wave gave rise to the “pussy hat”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“wove spiritual beliefs, cultural values, and historical”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Though necessary to the work of uncovering the past, archives are nevertheless limited and misleading storehouses of information. While at times imposing and formal enough as to seem all-encompassing in their brick, glass, and steel structures, archives only include records that survived accident, were viewed as important in their time or in some subsequent period, and were deemed worthy of preservation. These records were originally created by fallible people like you and me, who could err in their jottings, hold vexed feelings they sometimes transmitted onto the page, or consciously or unconsciously misconstrue events they witnessed. Even in their most organized form, archived records are mere scraps of accounts of previous happenings, "rags of realities" that we painstakingly stick together in order to picture past societies.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Somehow, as the reading public has internalized narratives about American national and regional pasts, we have forgotten that Detroit is ancient, that Detroit is indigenous, and that Detroit has a long-standing black presence. We have misplaced the knowledge that most of the Midwest was French…We have never deeply considered the reality that slavery existed even in the Midwest…and in Canada where a ‘mythology’ of a black ‘haven’ holds sway.”
― Tiya Miles, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits