Ever since narratives of the enslaved began to be published in the 18th century, writers have wrestled with how to convey the visceral brutality of slavery without robbing the subjects of their humanity. But how, especially in nonfiction, is it possible to imagine that caged world in the absence of first-hand accounts? On plantations, a literate population was considered a threat, and in America laws were passed to prohibit the enslaved from reading and writing. Apart from a few written testimonies by women such as Harriet Jacobs, who escaped and bore witness, there has been an immense silence.
The Harvard historian Tiya Miles has taken a bold and innovative approach to this problem in All That She Carried, a bestseller when it came out in the US last year, now published for the first time in Britain. The story begins in South Carolina in 1852, with a stark description of the dread that would have been familiar to every enslaved woman: “Rose was in existential distress that fateful winter when her would-be earthly master, Robert Martin, passed away.” Rose had no agency over her future and knew what was coming: the auction block that would separate her from her nine-year-old daughter, Ashley, for the rest of their lives.
