Ripley County Reads is excited to be taking part in this year’s One State / One Story community read! Indiana Humanities’ One State / One Story program invites Hoosiers to engage deeply with a book as part of a statewide conversation tied to our current theme.
BOOK: All That She Carried by Tiya Miles
Book discussion facilitated by Nancy Durham at Osgood Library at 6:00pm. This is a FREE open to the community book discussion and books can be checked out for reading at: Osgood, Tyson or Batesville Libraries before the discussion to read.
Location: Osgood Library
Time: 6:00pm
This program has been made possible through a grant from Indiana Humanities in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Winner of the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction, Miles’ work dives deeply into the history of a single object: a cotton sack embroidered with a few deceptively simple lines:
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
Ruth Middleton
1921
From the sparse information contained in these carefully embroidered lines, Miles opens up the potential worlds of Ashley, Ruth, and Rose. Her analysis of the sack reveals what we can and can’t know about the past, particularly of Black individuals who were brought here by force and enslaved.
BOOK: All That She Carried by Tiya Miles
BOOK SUMMARY: In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language.
