All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

When Miles began her process of locating Rose in the historical records available, she encountered the frustrating injustice of being forced to rely on those records kept for and by enslavers to chronicle their lives, rather than evidence left by Black women themselves. The truths of Rose’s own life remain obscured even in the 21st century behind the authority still held over her story by those who enslaved her. Miles engaged in a kind of historical detective work as she combed through the archives of centuries-old paper documents. While the name Rose was commonplace among enslaved women in 19th-century South Carolina, the name Ashley was not. Only three enslaved women named Ashley appear in the archives during the period relevant to Ashley’s Sack, and only one slaveholder owned both an enslaved woman named Ruth and an enslaved child named Ashley at the time of the sack’s production.

Mother and child were counted as part of the estate of Robert Martin, Charleston “factor” turned “planter.” As Miles diligently discloses, while the likelihood is extremely high that this Ashley and Rose are the very same as those memorialized on Ruth’s sack, there is a slim possibility that they are not the same two people. Scholars concur with Miles’s assertion, however, and it is widely accepted in the academic community that has worked closely with Ashley’s Sack that the Rose and Ashley of the Martin estate have been correctly identified as the mother and daughter in question. The wealthier and more influential a planter, the more documentation has typically survived from their personal effects. As a “self-made” planter, Robert Martin, as a kind of nouveau riche planter, is the subject of less thorough documentation, leaving less for Miles to work with as she sought to confirm her findings.

Robert Martin and his family spent most of their time at their home at 16 Charlotte Street in Charleston, South Carolina, the Greek Revival house he built in the 1830s. Martin also owned at least one plantation, known as Milberry Place, named after his wife, Milberry Serena. It was Milberry, as executor of Martin’s will, who began the legal procedure of dividing and liquidating Robert’s estate after his death. In an inventory after his death, Rose is listed as a domestic servant in his Charleston household, her assigned value at $700 indicating that she had some kind of special skill, likely in sewing or culinary arts. Frequently, notations detailing familial relationships between enslaved persons were omitted from enslavers’ estate records, so the lack of mention of Rose as Ashley’s mother does not refute their relationship.

Lists organized by “family” that did exist in slaveholder record books were based on slaveholder conceptualizations of family units and their own priorities; family groupings may have reflected biological relationships or could have been a reference to those living in the same dwellings. Relational groups that were not exclusively biological but rather chosen, close-knit groups of elective family were known as “fictive kin.” Ashley’s paternity is not mentioned in Ruth’s immortalization of the narrative of the sack. Her story bears a matrilineal focus. There is a possibility that Ashley’s father may have been one of the enslaved men living at the Charleston house with Rose. It is also consistent with historically pervasive sexual abuses of enslaved women that Ashley’s father could have been one of the Martins, perhaps even Robert himself, or another white man Rose encountered.

Ashley is not listed among the enslaved people living at the Charleston house; she was living at Milberry Place at the time of Martin’s death. It is likely, however, that Ashley and Rose were able to spend some of their time together; just as property holders like Martin would frequently visit their different residences at intervals during the year, enslaved people were shuttled to different properties within a planter’s estate for various purposes. Although they were separated by location, before Robert Martin’s death it seems that Rose at least knew where her daughter was and could anticipate time spent with her. Her terror at the prospect of losing the meager comfort of at least knowing where her daughter was must have been insurmountable for Rose.