About This Case Study

The object is a plain cotton sack. In the 1850s, in South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose packed it for her nine-year-old daughter Ashley, who was about to be sold away from her: a dress, pecans, a braid of Rose's hair. In 1921, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered the story onto the sack in ten stitched lines, ending "It be filled with my Love always." The sack later surfaced at a flea market, entered the collection associated with Middleton Place, and has hung in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture — where the historian Tiya Miles encountered it and built a book around it. No ledger records what Rose felt; no bill of sale records what Ashley carried. The sack does. This case study asks you to take that claim seriously and work a single object, start to finish, as an archive.

Two ideas guide the work. The first is the material archive: the premise, demonstrated by Miles, that things — objects, environments, inherited practices — can be read as records where documents fail, provided they are read with the same care about provenance, purpose, and silence that any document demands. The second is a caution carried over from the unit's method texts: the papers that survive around enslaved lives were mostly the enslavers' — probate inventories, bills of sale — written for the harm they record, so a family-made object is not a supplement to the archive but a counter-record to it. The analytical move is to read the sack as an instrument: to ask what it was made to do, at each of its makings, and what it records that no official document could. You will establish the object, reconstruct its three makers, work it as an archive, and end where it ended — in a museum case.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• "How a Cotton Sack, Passed Down Over Generations, Tells a Larger Story About Slavery." NPR, September 7, 2021. Listen to the segment.
• "How a Simple Cotton Sack Tells an Epic Tale of Loss, Love and Resilience." Smithsonian Magazine, 2021. Read the article.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on care: This material centers the sale of a nine-year-old child away from her mother, and the record of that loss in her descendants' own words. Take breaks as you need them; the exercise never requires more than the sources give.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• Is there an object in your family — or one you have seen in a museum — that carries a history no document holds? What does it record, and how do you know?
• Can an object be a record? What would it take to "read" one responsibly — and what would over-reading look like?

The Exercise

Phase 1: The Object (8–10 minutes)

Establish the object before interpreting it. From the two sources, describe the sack physically in your notes — material, size, condition — and transcribe the embroidered text in full, line by line, preserving its spelling and line breaks exactly. Then note what the embroidery itself establishes: who it names, what it dates, and what it says the sack held. Resist, for now, everything beyond the object; the reading comes next.

For groups: One member reads the transcription aloud while the others check it, word by word, against the sources.

Phase 2: Three Makers (12–15 minutes)

The sack was made three times. Reconstruct each making as an entry on a dated timeline:

1. Rose, 1850s. What do the sources establish about Rose and the sale? Consider what she packed — a dress, pecans, a braid of her hair — and what each item might have had to do: sustenance, memory, touch. What could Rose control in that moment, and what could she not?
2. Ruth, 1921. The embroidery as an act of family history-making: what does Ruth record, and what does she leave out — what happened between the 1850s and 1921 that the stitching passes over? What does it mean that the record is sewn onto the object itself, rather than written on paper beside it?
3. The survival path. From family hands to a flea market to museum display: reconstruct the path the sources give, and mark exactly where it goes dark — the stretches no one can account for. Who kept the sack, and who lost track of it?

For groups: Each member takes one making and briefs the others; assemble the timeline together, dark stretches included.

Phase 3: The Object as Archive (12–15 minutes)

Now make the case study's central claim do work:

• What does the sack record that no ledger could? List three things it documents — an emotion, a choice, a relationship — and, for each, say how it documents them: through words, through the items, through the making itself.
• The documents Miles could find near the sack were mostly the enslavers' paper — probate and sale records — with almost nothing from Rose or Ashley in their own words. What does the pairing teach about what each kind of record holds, and what each is silent on?
• The strain test. What does treating an heirloom as an "archive" risk? Consider both directions: does the word dignify the object, or flatten a love-token into data? And who should get to read it — is a family's record for the public at all?

For groups: Build the three-item list together; then split for the strain test — one side defends "archive," the other presses the risks — and record where you land.

Phase 4: The Museum (8–10 minutes)

The sack now hangs in a case. Close where it ended up:

• From the sources: how do the museum and the coverage frame the sack — what does the public-facing story emphasize, and what recedes?
• What changes when a family archive becomes a public one? Name one thing gained and one thing lost in the move from household to display.
• Write the exhibit label you would hang beside it — fifty words or fewer. Every word you choose is a description decision; choose accordingly.

For groups: Draft labels individually, read them aloud, and assemble the group's label from the strongest line in each.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

The sack records __________ in a way no document could. Working it as an archive changed __________. The hardest thing to hold steady, after this exercise, is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly what the object holds, exactly how it holds it, and exactly where reading it stops being reading.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work the phases in order. The two artifacts to keep are your three-makers timeline from Phase 2 and your exhibit label from Phase 4 — together they are your record of what the object archives and how you chose to say so.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phases 1 and 2 run as checked transcription and split briefings; Phases 3 and 4 are collaborative, with the strain test as a structured split. The closing reflection works well as individual writing after the session ends.

After the Case Study

• The full study: Miles, Tiya. All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. New York: Random House, 2021. Publisher page. The three generations reconstructed at book length, with the method's full apparatus — what could be documented, and how Miles works where nothing could; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The practice for visual and material fragments: Campt, Tina M. Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Publisher page. A method for attending to the quiet frequencies of objects and images made under classification; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The theory of care: Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Publisher page. "Wake work" — care, annotation, redaction — as the ethic this exercise practices in miniature; it appears in the unit's Further Readings.