Tiya Miles, Ph.D., Author: It's quite a dramatic object.

It is soiled, it's stained, it's been ripped and torn.

It's been patched with love over time.

And, of course, it tells this incredible story of a separation of a mother and a child, and the love between them that lasted forever.

Marcia Franklin, Host: Coming up, I talk with historian and National Book Award-winning author, Tiya Miles, about how a seemingly simple object can bring untold history alive.

That's "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference."

Stay with us.

Announcer: Major funding is provided by the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Franklin: Hello and welcome.

I'm Marcia Franklin.

In 2007, a woman made quite a discovery at a flea market in Tennessee.

In a bin of rags, she found a long sack.

Embroidered on it was a poignant message.

Understanding that what she had was of historic significance, she donated it to a local museum.

It turned out that the sack dated back to the 1850's and had belonged to an enslaved girl named Ashley.

The embroidery on it told part of her story.

But when historian and Harvard professor Tiya Miles saw the sack, she knew she wanted to try and tell the rest of the tale.

Miles' book, "All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack," would go on to win a National Book Award.

I sat down with Professor Miles at the 2024 Sun Valley Writers' Conference to talk about her own journey to bring this history into the light.

We also discussed two of her other books: "Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation," and "Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and The Faith Dreams of a Free People."

Take a listen.

Franklin: Well, welcome to Idaho.

I understand this is your first time here.

Miles: It is and thank you for the welcome.

Franklin: Well, it's great to have you here.

You have been very busy.

You won the National Book Award in, it was 2021, right?

For "All That She Carried."

Then right on the heels of that, so to speak, "Wild Girls" in 2023.

And then hot off the press, we've got "Night Flyer," about Harriet Tubman.

What keeps these fires going?

Miles: (Laughter) Franklin: What's compelling you to -- you know, you're juggling teaching, you're a writer, you're a mom...so where's the fire coming from?

Miles: Right.

Well, I am all those things, as you say, Marcia, and I always try to underscore that, you know, it's a challenge.

It's really hard to make choices about time, you know, to work every day on a project.

But I feel really driven to tell these stories, because I think that they are really important to the many challenges we're facing right now.

And you know, during Covid, many of us who had the privilege were actually at home a lot more.

And I was at home with my kids doing school from home, and I started to think about themes that have been on my mind for a long while, but that felt kind of "differently visible."

And I just wrote like mad.

So that's how "Wild Girls" came to be.

Franklin: I'd like to talk about "All That She Carried," if you don't mind, even though it's not the most recent book, because I think both the themes and how you wrote it inform your future works, your works after that.

Miles: Oh, absolutely.

All these books are interconnected.

Franklin: Yeah, great.

Well, "All That She Carried" is about a seemingly small item, a sack.

And it was found at a flea market.

But it isn't just any old sack.

And there were words embroidered on it that contained multitudes.

And I'd like you -- I'm sure you know these by heart, these words -- but if you could read them out loud, that would be wonderful.

Miles: Oh, sure.

So this is an embroidery on the cotton sack, which was done by a descendant of the woman who originally packed it.

And it says, "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.

Told her it'd be filled with my love, always.

She never saw her again.

Ashley is my grandmother.

Ruth Middleton, 1921."

Franklin: Just amazing.

And just hearing you read it, it's emotional for me as well.

I have seen it.

I saw the sack when it was at the National Museum of African American History and Culture… Miles: Mm-hmm.

Franklin: …and -- right after it opened.

Miles: Yes.

Franklin: And it was really a centerpiece, so to speak, of the collection.

It's not there right now.

It was there for I think maybe six years or something like that.

It's back in South…Charleston?

Miles: It's back in Charleston at the new… Franklin: In Charleston.

Miles: …African American International Museum.

Franklin: But you know, I, as I was telling you before we came on camera, it's, it's really one of the main objects that I remember about that museum.

I know that people sometimes when they look at it, they cry.

Miles: mm-hmm.

Yes.

Franklin: Talk about what happened to you when you first saw it, because it was very interesting.

Somebody at an environmental conference you were attending mentioned it to you.

They listened to your speech, and they came up to you afterwards and said, "Have you heard of this object?"

which was still down South, right?

Miles: Right.

Franklin: And you hadn't, and you went and took a look at it.

And what were your sensations?

Miles: Well, I'm not surprised that this is the thing you remember from your visit to the museum, because it is just quite stunning to look at and to be in the presence of.

And I had seen pictures of it before I saw it in person.

But seeing it in person is a wholly different experience, because you feel as if you're in the presence of an object that has kind of an intimacy, a vibrancy, even a memory of a story that is embroidered on the cotton itself.

And you and I are calling it a sack, you know, which it is.

But I think when we use that descriptor, we're not giving people a full sense of what the object is like, because it's not a little bag that you carry your lunch in; it's a really long piece of cotton.

It's so long that when it's on display, the embroidered section is shown to the front, and the back of the cloth just unfurls to the back.

So it's, it's quite a dramatic object.

It is soiled, it's stained, it's been ripped and torn.

It's been patched with love over time.

And of course it tells this incredible story of a separation of a mother and a child and the love between them that lasted forever.

Franklin: Yes.

Miles: So it feels like it pulls you in.

Franklin: It does.

It absolutely does.

Thank you for describing it more fully.

And what it was was a sack that a mother handed to her child knowing that the child was about to be sold.

Miles: Right.

Franklin: And she would potentially, and in fact never did see her again.

Miles: Right.

Franklin: But that sack remained in the family and then somehow ended up disposed of.

And a person found it at a flea market who fortunately realized that it was, it was a material object of great importance.

Tried to figure out where it was meant to be, uh, donated to a plantation of all things, but still it was meant to be found.

Miles: Yeah.

Franklin: And so, ultimately the people there, you know, put it on display and it got a broader audience and found the home that it needed at the Smithsonian for a while.

So, kudos to the woman who found it, who does not want to be known.

Miles: Right.

That's right.

She wishes to remain anonymous.

And it's such a special story that she was a flea market shopper who came across a bin of old rags.

And the whole bin was marked at $20.

She was looking through, she saw the sack, she probably flipped it over and read it and thought, "This is something that is incredible."

And then she rushed to pay for it before the vendor realized, you know, what he had.

Franklin: You know, um, this could have been just a short book about the object and trying to maybe trace who the people who are listed on it came from.

But it is not a short book.

It is a heavily researched, heavily detailed book in which you use the object to kind of drill down into -- or maybe we can use an analogy of thread, these different threads that you pull in -- of what the sack was made of and what that means, how these objects were used in the fields, the thread, the color of the thread, um, the objects that were in it, the pecans, the lock of hair, or the braid, the dress.

Each one of those is expanded upon so that we have a fuller picture of what was happening potentially at the time.

Why did you want to do that?

Why did you want to take apart basically every object in the sack the way that you did, and give us a description of what you, how you felt that braided into the story?

Miles: Well, when I first came into contact with the sack, I was so captivated by it that I felt that I had to write a book.

I just felt, you know, pulled, called, to write a book about it.

And at that time, I think maybe being a little too overconfident, I thought that I'd be able to reconstruct the lives of the woman and the girl mentioned on the sack.

I thought I could do a very straightforward historical project.

And then I went looking for the records and realized that there was very little written about them or preserved about them.

And that the major source, actually the most detailed and telling source that I was going to have about these women's lives, was the sack itself.

So that realization utterly transformed the project.

I had to lean into the material culture artifact.

I had to look at it many a time, think about it in all these different ways.

And that's when I began to realize the incredible richness of the thing.

And my mind started going in all these different directions of the ways that I could ask new questions of it, connect it up to things I had read in the past, connect it up to new areas of inquiry for me, such as food studies.

And I ended up with a project that was multifaceted and layered because of all the different threads that I pulled starting from the sack.

And then it became just a labor of love.

Franklin: And there is genealogy in here.

Historians such as yourself and Mark Auslander and other people have, I think pretty much figured out, don't you think, who?

Miles: Well, I think that we're 99% there.

And one of the things that was really important to me in the research was to keep doing the same set of steps over and over again so that we could have some kind of independent verification.

So Mark Auslander, who is an art historian, did this work first.

And then I did it, following my own trail.

And then I hired a local genealogist in Charleston named Jesse Bustos Nelson, who had done research in that area, in those records for decades, to also do it.

So we actually have three different pathways of research that led to the same conclusion.

Franklin: And tell our viewers what that is, who the little girl was, where she lived, Miles: The mother's name was Rose, as we hear in the inscription.

The daughter was Ashley.

They lived in Charleston, South Carolina.

And because of the person who owned them also owned property in other parts of the state, particularly in the interior cotton growing area, Ashley probably lived separate from her mother for a part of her childhood.

Franklin: And we're talking in the era of?

Miles: In the 1850s, which was a really terrible time for African Americans.

Of course, anytime during the period of enslavement is terrible, but in the 1850s there was a growth in the movement, the forced movement of Black people from the Southeast into the Deep South cotton belts because of the need for labor to work those very rich cotton fields that actually Native American people had recently been forcibly removed from themselves.

So this was a terrible period for enslaved Black people.

Many of them separated from their families.

And that's what happened to Rose and Ashley.

Franklin: Talk about the joy of archival research and these finds.

I mean, you live for it, don't you, in a way?

Miles: Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

I mean, it is an incredible joy.

It really is.

And we hardly ever think about that in relation to our work, especially when our topics have to do with things as terrible as slavery.

But there really is a pleasure in searching for things, in finding things, in finding what you weren't even looking for.

And those "aha" moments are like striking gold.

They are just incredible.

And they can happen when you uncover something new.

But also when you're dealing with something that you've seen many times before, others have seen many times before, and you realize something that's novel within it.

Franklin: What is your sense as a scholar of this time period in particular, about some school districts and states that are saying that there was some positive aspects of slavery, or not wanting to teach some of the details at all?

Miles: It saddens me.

I think it's an awful shame that any of us has to waste time arguing about things like whether slavery was real, whether slavery was bad, whether slavery was extensive.

There are so many other issues that we could be and should be talking about and that we could be and should be helping our students work through.

I, you know, the politics of it breaks my heart.

It really does.

These were real people in the past.

These were real people who lived through real atrocities, who in many cases survived those atrocities to help us build the country that we live in today.

Our students should know about that.

They should know about them.

Franklin: I watched when you won the National Book Award.

It was on Zoom because of the pandemic.

Miles: Right.

Franklin: And you know, just the emotions were pouring out of you.

Miles: I am, I am beyond moved by this honor.

Miles: Oh yeah, absolutely.

Because so much of the history they lived was about being invisible, was about being ignored, was about being devalued.

And my project in "All That She Carried" was to reverse all of that and to say, "No, we must see them.

We must value them as much as they valued one another."

Which they did.

It was just so clear the emphasis on love in the book.

And so in that moment, yes, I was completely shocked.

And it was very strange, because you know, I was just sitting in a room in our house, you know.

Franklin: Looked like it was in the kitchen or something, Miles: The kids were just you know, in the other room watching TV, and I was about to just get off and make dinner.

I actually didn't expect to win at all.

And when I did win, it was of course a joyful moment for me, but especially for Rose and for Ashley and for Ruth, and for all of these women who have been ignored.

Franklin: As I mentioned, you found out about this story at an environmental conference in the South -- where was it?

Miles: Savannah.

Franklin: Savannah, Georgia.

And that environmental theme has carried through your life in many ways, not the least of which is your next book, "Wild Girls," which looks at how the environment influenced some very famous people, you know, Harriet Tubman, Dolores Huerta, Sacajawea – or Sacagawea, however you want to pronounce it.

We don't have a lot of time.

I encourage people to look at the book.

But talk about whether you think that their involvement with the outdoors strengthened each one of these women.

Miles: Well, yes.

The last part of your comment there, Marcia, is exactly the argument of the book.

It's the idea that by spending time outdoors that was not just plentiful, you know, many hours, many days, but that was also intensive, these girls got to ask new questions about themselves.

They got to think about the worlds around them differently.

They got to push themselves and test themselves, and all of that contributed to the women they would become.

And in the first chapter of "Wild Girls," I look at Harriet Tubman and other enslaved girls and also white abolitionist girls, and the ways in which the time they spent outside helped them to become just really intrepid activists.

Franklin: And it's a straight line from "Wild Girls" to "Night Flyer," because this is an expansion, really, truly a big and an intellectual and academic expansion as well, looking at the role of nature in Harriet Tubman's life and in her spirituality as well.

So much has been written about Harriet Tubman.

I mean, I would have trepidation about approaching… Miles: Mm hmm.

Franklin: …a topic that's, you know, where the ground has been plowed, so to speak, over and over again.

Miles: Yes.

Yes.

Franklin: What did you want to do differently that you felt…?

I know you wanted to kind of take her, not take her a notch down, because that's not the right word.

But, but she's kind of… Miles: To humanize her.

Yes, absolutely.

Franklin: I'm sorry?

Miles: To humanize her.

Franklin: Yeah.

Because she's this superhuman figure, and all we really get when we're growing up is you know, these just incredible things that she did.

But as I read the book, I was like, "Really, really?"

And I was really actually embarrassed that I didn't know more about Harriet Tubman.

Miles: Well, so was I.

So was I when I was working on the project, embarrassed that I didn't know more about her.

Or that I didn't perceive, maybe, more about her or understand the depths of her personality.

So I did feel worried about this book, for precisely the reasons you laid out.

But I reassured myself by remembering we have probably, you know, a thousand biographies, 1,001 of Abraham Lincoln and all these various figures, right?

It's okay if we now have seven biographies of Harriet Tubman.

And knew that I wanted to write a book that was not going to be replicating what had already been done.

I wanted it to fill a different kind of niche, to answer different kinds of questions, perhaps, and if at all possible, to help us see Harriet Tubman in a different way.

Meaning as a real flesh and blood young woman, middle-aged woman and older woman who showed the kind of bravery that many of us can't even imagine.

I wanted to try to think about and to figure out and to, and to express how it is that she came to be that person.

And the environmental aspect comes into the book because it seemed very much to me from the sources that her relationship with nature was a sustaining strength throughout her entire life.

Of course, Tubman didn't have a lot of choice of what she did.

She was an enslaved girl.

She was an enslaved young woman.

But even within those constraints, she was able to a certain extent to enforce her will.

So she didn't want to be inside.

So she constantly messed up the weaving.

That's what she did.

She just did it wrong until they put her outside.

The work outside was horrible.

But she learned how to do certain kinds of things so well, that she was then able to convince her owner to allow her to hire herself out, so that she was able to keep a little bit of those earnings.

And then she was starting to work for her father, earning a little bit of money through that.

And she applied all the skills that she had gained through her young adulthood and into her middle age to help people escape from slavery, by reading the woods, by reading the waterways, by reading the skies.

Franklin: You had said that you were trying to change her image from a cartoonish character.

You said, "I too had fallen for this static image of Tubman as Superwoman.

Her bravery, though laudable, seemed to come prepackaged in a box of stock sayings."

And so you, you talk about other women in this book who also had some of the same sensibilities, the spirituality that Harriet did, to show that it wasn't a "one-off," you know… Miles: Right.

Franklin: …that this was something that -- this bravery and especially this eco-spiritualism that you write about, was something that infused other black women at the time, and still does, obviously.

Miles: Right.

It ended up being a twin aim in the book to show that Harriet Tubman was, again, not just the outline that, that we see of her.

That she was multidimensional, that she had great depth to her character.

And also to show that she wasn't a lone hero, as we often tend to think of her.

She wasn't out there in the woods leading people alone, and she wasn't the only person who did this kind of thing.

She was someone who was a fully fleshed-out human being with a very rich spiritual and intellectual and emotional and psychological life, who was a member of a group of people who were experiencing many of those same kinds of, kind of leaps in their sense of self, in their sense of relationship to the God they believed in, that is their faith, and in their sense of what kind of nation the United States should be.

Franklin: And it's called "Night Flyer" because she did so much of her work at night?

Miles: Because she did her work at night.

That she preferred the times when enslavers would not be out.

So that's nighttime and that was the wintertime.

Of course, the hardest times, if we can imagine, to move across vast terrain.

And she also dreamt of herself as a bird.

So there's, there's more than one level to the meaning of that title.

Franklin: I know you wanted to bring her down from mythic status, but I have to say that after I finished the book, she was even more elevated for me.

I mean, the stories in this book about what she went through.

I mean, she had a disability that caused seizures.

Miles: Yes.

Franklin: And she nearly froze, several… Miles: Mm-hmm.

Franklin: …probably many times, doing what she was doing.

Miles: Yes.

Franklin: And she kept at it.

She was, you know, cheated later in life, and charlatans took advantage of her.

Miles: Yeah.

Franklin: And I, I just actually have; she has risen in stature for me.

Seems she's become even more of a Wonder Woman.

I don't know if… Miles: I mean, you know, Marcia, I mean, to tell you a secret, that happened for me, too.

It happened for me, too.

Because the more I saw her as somebody like us, the more I realized, "Oh, what?"

Like, there's no way, no way, that I could come, you know, within, you know, hundreds of feet of what she did.

Franklin: You've said that you, um, "There are compelling reasons for retelling Tubman's story right now."

Why?

Why?

What are, what are the lessons for today's time?

Miles: I think there are so many lessons.

And I'm discovering more and more as I think about the book in retrospect.

When I started working on the book, I was thinking about the environmental theme.

And I thought it was important to offer another narrative based on a person who is really a hero in this country and based on a narrative that's familiar to many people, that can help us to recognize the centrality of our natural worlds.

Without an intact environment and natural worlds, we would not have a Harriet Tubman.

And without a Harriet Tubman, it could be argued we would not have had the end to slavery that we saw in the American Civil War.

And so it's one way to continue to put front and center the preciousness of this earth that we call home.

I also think that her story is really important for ways that we think about religion, faith, and Christianity in this country.

There's been a lot of discussion in recent months about Christian nationalism and about perhaps a narrowness to the people who define themselves in that way and who they view as being kind of real or true Americans.

And in telling Harriet Tubman's story as a faith story, as a story about a Christian woman, I want to also offer a different kind of narrative for a longstanding, deeply-felt Christian faith, to say that there are lots of ways to be a Christian, and we have an example in Harriet Tubman.

Marcia: Well, I thank you for writing that book and the others we talked about.

Thank you so much.

I'm looking forward to reading more of your work in the future.

Miles: Thank you, Marcia.

It's been really such a pleasure to talk with you.

Franklin: You've been listening to Tiya Miles, a professor of history at Harvard University, and an award-winning author.

Our conversation was recorded at the 2024 Sun Valley Writers' Conference.

My thanks to conference organizers for allowing us to tape interviews at their capstone event for nearly 20 years.

If you'd like to watch this interview again or any of the others we've aired, just search for the "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference" playlist on YouTube.

You can also listen to them on your favorite podcast platform.

Thanks so much for watching.

For Idaho Public Television, I'm Marcia Franklin.

[Music] Announcer: Major funding is provided by the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.