by Tiya Miles
The story behind this heart-breaking book began when Rose, an enslaved woman in 1850s South Carolina, gave her young daughter, Ashley, a sack containing among other items a braid of hair and a handful of pecans on the eve of Ashley's sale to a different owner. Rose embroidered it with a message of love that endured. Award-winning historian Tiya Miles traces the sack’s journey over the generations until it reaches its current home in the Smithsonian Institution. Miles employs the story of the sack to offer Americans a unique, innovative history of the lived experience of slavery in the United States.
See the Jones Library Antiracism Book List for recommended titles for all ages.