Using the bold approach of historian Tiya Miles to illuminate the lives of enslaved people

An enslaved mother faces permanent separation from her nine-year-old daughter who is to be sold. She hurriedly places some items in a sack – a lock of her own hair, some pecan nuts, a tattered dress. The daughter, Ashley, keeps the sack and passes on its story to her children. Ashley’s granddaughter immortalises the story by embroidering it onto the sack itself. This is the story that historian Tiya Miles discovered and chose to research. Developing a method which she called ‘informed imagining’, she used other sources to try to imagine how and why the gift might have been made, and what it reveals about experiences of the enslaved. In this article, history teacher Terry Graham shares his experience of using the work of Tiya Miles to introduce his Year 8s not only to the story of Ashley’s sack but to Miles’s methods...