Monthly meeting of North Parish book/movie group

Please join us for the North Parish book/movie group.  We meet on the fourth Wednesday of the month from September to June. For more information and to obtain a Zoom link to the meetings, please email BookClub@northparish.org.

January’s book selection is All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles – 385 pages, 29 copies in library system, 3 holds Sitting in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture is a rough cotton bag, called “Ashley’s Sack,” embroidered with just a handful of words that evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love passed down through generations. In 1850s South Carolina, just before nine-year-old Ashley was sold, her mother, Rose, gave her a sack filled with just a few things as a token of her love. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter, Ruth, embroidered this history on the bag–including Rose’s message that “It be filled with my Love always.” Historian Tiya Miles follows the paths their lives and the lives of so many like them took to write a unique, innovative history of the lived experience of slavery in the United States. As she follows Ashley’s journey, Miles metaphorically “unpacks” the sack, deepening its emotional resonance and revealing the meanings and significance of everything it contained. All That She Carried won of the National Book Award in 2021 for Nonfiction.