Ashley's Sack

January 5, 2016 8:46 AM

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
posted by Countess Elena (20 comments total)

This is horrifying, in a deeply touching way. The lock of hair, and the presumed reason Rose included it, is absolutely heart-breaking.
posted by OrangeDisk at 9:13 AM on January 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

This AP article from 2007 about the sack's discovery fills in some of the details, including how a timely dream about a little girl and a fistful of pecans persuaded the discoverer not to auction it off on eBay.
posted by orthicon halo at 9:13 AM on January 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

And there go the waterworks here my desk.

I cannot fathom how we humans could once have been so $&%#@! cruel to each other. But all I have to do is look at the news and then I realize we continue to be so cruel. And then reading about historians screaming in awe over these relics that were born in cruelness, it just seems so tone-deaf to me. (I know it's their job, but still. I'm just emotional.)
posted by kimberussell at 9:15 AM on January 5, 2016

reparations reparations reparations reparations. reparations. no amount of reparations is enough, but: REPARATIONS.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:18 AM on January 5, 2016 [11 favorites]

> I cannot fathom how we humans could once have been so $&%#@! cruel to each other. But all I have to do is look at the news and then I realize we continue to be so cruel. And then reading about historians screaming in awe over these relics that were born in cruelness, it just seems so tone-deaf to me. (I know it's their job, but still. I'm just emotional.)
posted by kimberussell at 9:15 AM on January 5 [+] [!]

Also keep in mind that there's a very good chance that Rose had been repeatedly raped by the man who stole her daughter away from her.

I can fathom how we humans could once have been so fucking cruel to each other. I can fathom it because we haven't paid reparations yet. This history's not over until we have made as many material amends as we can possibly make, even though that will never, ever be enough.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:20 AM on January 5, 2016

While the abandoned dishes gleam in lifeless rooms, the grace of Rose so robbed is that her love exists in a riot of quiet splendor for each succeeding heart to discover across time.
posted by Oyéah at 9:50 AM on January 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

I find something slightly creepy about the way that this was back on display in the plantation house of the girl's original owners. I think the National Museum of African American History and Culture is a better home for it.
posted by Azara at 10:05 AM on January 5, 2016 [19 favorites]

What a lovely and heartbreaking memento. The humbleness of it is power. I can't wait for the National Museum of African American History and Culture to open in DC. The building is looking fantastic and reading that objects like this will be in it, with appropriate explanation, is very encouraging.

I cannot fathom how we humans could once have been so $&%#@! cruel to each other.

It's worth contemplating because it's part of our American heritage. If you're white and not a recent immigrant, there's a good chance your family is responsible for some of this cruelty. And the consequences of that cruelty are still playing out today in places like Ferguson.

In the particular case of the sale of Ashley, separating her from Rose, it is because the evil people who sold the 9 year old girl did not consider her a human being. She was property, livestock. See also this history of American slave husbandry (from a recent link on MeFi).

The particular cruelty in my family's history I'd like to understand better is the murder by lynching of Ted Smith in Greenville Texas on July 28, 1908. I know the date because there's a souvenir postcard (warning; image of burned dead man). White people in the early 1900s were so proud of lynching black men there were frequently postcards.

My great-grandparents lived in Greenville in 1908. White people, town folks, he was an educated professional. Was he at the lynching? Did he approve? Are they in the crowd in that postcard? I got thinking about these questions after reading an article about the lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia. They made souvenir postcards too. One thing the article notes is that in 2000, someone made a list of some of the lynching participants. I wonder if such a list could be constructed for Greenville? Would my great grandparents be on it?

The motto of Greenville, TX was The Blackest Land, the Whitest People. They displayed that proudly on a banner over the center of town through the 1960s. These are my people.
posted by Nelson at 10:32 AM on January 5, 2016 [10 favorites]

Weeping. It's impossible to rank the horrors of slavery, so many of them are absolute. But if it were possible, the selling off of family members would have to rank close to the top. We have to try to be better than this.
posted by alms at 10:47 AM on January 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

We can start "trying to do better than this" by making material amends to the families of the victims of the genocidal regime that governed our country until well after the Civil War. In America, when we really mean to do better, when we've really turned over a new leaf, we prove it with money.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:16 AM on January 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

It's worth contemplating because it's part of our American heritage. If you're white and not a recent immigrant, there's a good chance your family is responsible for some of this cruelty.

About 30 years ago a relatively distant member of my family was heavily into genealogy. Some of it's really tremendous; the name is quaker, there's still some family lands in PA. Then there's our branch, that ends up in KY in the early 1800s. There are these light allusions to being 'traders', and there's the ridiculous level of racism in the generation that was very old when I was very young, the lack of awareness of so much of my family scares me.

I can not wait to visit this museum. I hope I can convince some of them to go with me.
posted by DigDoug at 11:24 AM on January 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

There will never be reparations in this country. There is too the illusion that it was the South and slavery that is referred to when we read or talk about slavery and the Civil War. Partially true. But it was the stealing of the land by the American govt. from the Indians, the northern financing of cotton crops, the newly formed industrial age in Britain and the world-wide cotton trade that caused slavery to explode in numbers. Cotton was the oil of its time. And slavery was the mechanism for providing, processing, and distributing cotton world-wide.
posted by Postroad at 11:31 AM on January 5, 2016

I always thought my family were relatively recent immigrants, say 1800s plus, but a recent dive in Ancestry.com shows family in the Northern Neck of Virginia in the 1600s-1700s, and into North Carolina in the late 1700s-early 1800s. (Who knew I could go back to my 10th great grandfather? Holy cow.) Chances that they were involved in slavery somehow are at least average, right? From what I can see, we have been in the Americas for 500 years. That means we were also complicit in the genocide of Native Americans. It's a sobering thought.
posted by corvikate at 11:33 AM on January 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Mod note: Couple of comments deleted. Let's not have a "reparations: yea or nay" debate in here, we've had it before and it's not actually the subject of the article.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:56 AM on January 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Chances that they were involved in slavery somehow are at least average, right?

You can find this out directly. All pre-Civil War censuses include at least household-level information on slave ownership. The 1790 Census, for example, included a count of slaves per household. By 1850, the Slave Schedule of the Census included number of slaves by age, sex, color, and occasionally first names.

From these sources, I know for a fact that at least two of my great-grandparents (one on the maternal side, one on the paternal) descend from families that owned slaves. This also in spite of family lore of recent immigration (true of 1, maybe 2 of 8 great-grandparents). This information has not been particularly welcomed by most family members, as it directly belies their claims that our family never benefited from slavery. I suspect many other white Americans would unearth similar conveniently forgotten truths about their own families if they did a little digging.
posted by palindromic at 12:02 PM on January 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

And then reading about historians screaming in awe over these relics that were born in cruelness, it just seems so tone-deaf to me. (I know it's their job, but still. I'm just emotional.)

And they were emotional too? I don't think screaming with wonder, reverence and fear is detached or tone-deaf. Awe does not mean "delight".

The woman who said that she screamed in awe is African American, BTW.
posted by oneirodynia at 1:01 PM on January 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

> I find something slightly creepy about the way that this was back on display in the plantation house of the girl's original owners. I think the National Museum of African American History and Culture is a better home for it.

I favorited that comment at first, but now think that having it in the plantation house helps remind visitors there how the house came to be.
posted by anadem at 2:59 PM on January 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

Also, holding captive workers was far more prevalent in the northern states than we tend to be aware of ("At one point in time, New Jersey had as many as 12,000 slaves") - this gets obscured by the types of historial records people use/reference/make inferences from - tax records and that sort of thing might not record an enslaved person unless they were an able-bodied male between 16 and 45 or something similar, and someone might tactically hold only captives outside that demographic in order to avoid being taxed on them.

I find something slightly creepy about the way that this was back on display in the plantation house of the girl's original owners.

a) I skimmed, but I don't think that's the case? Todd said he thinks it unlikely that Rose and Ashley actually lived at Middleton Place.

b) I think it's fantastic that it is there - enslaved Africans and enslaved-Americans-of-African-descent are so often erased from history in the US (and elsewhere), which is particularly noticeable and puzzling and offensive in plantation sites, which are often presented as idyllic, peaceful, beautiful places without reference to coerced labor and often referring to things being done or built by servants. Annihilation while living, annihilation in death - un-human-ing, unmaking, invisibling - it continues, it is ongoing. And there is so little in the way of artifacts that belonged to enslaved people, so little that is persistent in the archaeological record or that have survived as heirlooms - so little to help us understand the life histories (at the individual end of the scale) or culture (looking at larger groups) of millions of people who built America, who were responsible for so much of its wealth in economic and cultural terms.

I mean, yeah, I agree it's creepy, but it's creepy because our past is creepy. Telling the story is so necessary, though.

But yeah obvs I'm also pleased it's going to be on display at a national museum for lots of reasons.
posted by you must supply a verb at 3:04 PM on January 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

This story is so moving. At the moment when her humanity is being most deeply attacked, the mother takes that most humanity defining action, affirming a transcendent love that reaches across space and time and she delivers it in an old burlap bag. It's amazing. And her love has loved on, forever and ever. I can still feel it now.
posted by alms at 7:09 PM on January 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

(me)I find something slightly creepy about the way that this was back on display in the plantation house of the girl's original owners.

a) I skimmed, but I don't think that's the case? Todd said he thinks it unlikely that Rose and Ashley actually lived at Middleton Place.

The article said : "Todd said he thinks it unlikely that Rose and Ashley actually lived at Middleton Place. The Ashley River Road plantation was the Middletons’ family seat, but their wealth derived from working plantations, including three along the Combahee River in Colleton County, and it’s possible the mother and child lived there, he said."

I interpreted that to mean they thought that Rose and Ashley weren't house slaves, but probably worked on one of the other Middleton properties.

Looking at the Middleton Place website, there seems to me to be too much of "look at our beautiful gardens and amazing house and heirlooms" and not enough "this was all built on burning injustice and utter human misery".
posted by Azara at 12:02 PM on January 6, 2016 [2 favorites]