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

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, sumptuary laws were passed that included provisions for the garments enslaved people were permitted to wear and possess. The clothing was made of what was known as “Negro cloth,” a term encompassing the approved linens, cottons, and wools intentionally fabricated at a lower grade for their exclusive use. Manufacturers in the north specialized in the production of these textiles for sale to enslavers, but more often enslavers had designated facilities on their plantations for the production of these textiles. A small subset of enslaved women received advanced training in sewing, piecing cloth, and embroidery, but most had experience with basic spinning and weaving.

Enslaved women were assigned the task of toiling in sweltering conditions in weaving rooms for extended hours, creating the garments that relegated them and their peers to their degraded social role. These garments were meant to immediately indicate to all in the wearer’s presence their status as an enslaved person, designated as separate and lesser than anyone not confined to such uniforms. These garments disintegrated quickly, and enslaved people had to wait for long periods before replenishing their meager wardrobes; plantation owners and managers distributed allotments of clothing resources on a typical schedule of only one to two times per year.

Quickly worn away to rags under the demanding conditions of enslaved labor, scant clothes provided a presumption of sexual “access” to enslaved women and reinforced the sexualized perceptions of Black women, particularly in “an era that prized gentility and modesty through dress” (155). This prejudicial social concept existed in sharp contrast to the expectations and experiences of white women during the same period. These beliefs about African American women included the assertion that they were hypersexual in their appetites, a notion enforced by the perception of their availability, one imposed on them by lack of adequate clothing.

Plantation stores that carried these goods controlled the options of what enslaved people could purchase and recouped the money that enslaved people made for themselves, bringing it right back to the plantation coffers. Enslaved people defied clothing laws and expectations often, creating custom garments with found or acquired resources and often purchasing garments and accessories when they had the means.

The ability to take pride in their hair was a dignity commonly denied to Black women; their bodies being the property of their enslavers, Black women often had their hair forcibly shorn or were forced to cover it. In keeping with the preoccupation with Black women’s bodies during this period, Black women’s hair was a battleground on which their enslavers asserted their dominance and used punitive measures to cope with their jealousies. Shearing an enslaved woman’s hair was often a punishment for perceived wrongdoing, and hair that was too similar to that of white women or believed to attract attention was also cropped as enslavers attempted to manage their emotional responses to Black women’s bodies. Rose’s act of cutting off her braid to include in Ashley’s Sack is a gesture of righteous autonomy over her own body, but it also has connections to Victorian hairwork, an art at the height of popularity in the 1850s to the 1890s. As a vehicle through which to connect to and remember loved ones, precious keepsakes of cut hair were treasured, preserved in lockets and frames and rendered into intricate works of visual art.