All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake, by Tiya Miles (2021, 385 pp). Non-fiction.

In this winner of the 2021 National Book Award, Harvard historian Miles tells the story of a tattered sack found in a Nashville flea market in 2007.  Ashley's Sack is a work of historical sleuthing: using archival material, conjecture, and known history, Miles traces the story of the sack back to a South Carolina planter whose slaves were sold in 1852, and then she "unspools several narrative threads" to construct a story of a mother and daughter separated by slavery and the generations of women who followed them. Fans of this book include historians Jill Lepore, Annette Gordon-Reed, and David Blight, the recent biographer of Frederick Douglass.  Lepore describes Ashley's Sack as a history told with "brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness."

Location: The Lockwood Apartments party room (ground floor), right beside the Village office on E St. SE.