#tiya miles

Top 10 Books of 2025

Corn-based and leafy green–intensive Indigenous diets fused with African American cooking that relied on sweet potatoes, black-eyed peas, and pork to form a fundamental part of Southern regional culinary culture. Black women became expert basket weavers, most notably along the Carolina and Georgia coasts, using Native American plant preferences, even as Black men likely learned to build dugout canoes from Indigenous men. Enslaved Black people used local plants as herbal medicines in accordance with Indigenous knowledge, and both groups developed a rich and perhaps mutually informed folklore centering on trickster rabbit stories. Enslaved Black and Native Americans produced a distinctive pottery style known by archaeologists as colonoware. Many of these earthen vessels, which have been discovered on Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia estates, are marked with hybrid circle and cross symbols believed to be reflective of West African, Native American, and Christian religious beliefs.

Madame Delphine Lalaurie is consistently described as “mad” and “insane” in published treatments of her history. In the garret of her urban mansion, she is said to have committed the vilest acts of sadistic lunacy. But instead of Madame Lalaurie being a rare type of slave mistress in a rare type of slave society, historical evidence suggests that she was among many in the New Orleans area and greater South who treated African Americans like chattel, and often brutally so. Entertaining stories of the haunted house on Royal Street depend on the vilification of their central character, Madame Lalaurie, whose guilt absolves New Orleans slaveholders in the past and the New Orleans tourist industry in the present from responsibility for committing or sensationalizing acts of racialized violence.

Authors Jason Mott and Tiya Miles Win 2021 National Book Awards for Fiction and Non-Fiction

This place of the unrepresentable, the unknowable, and, in the language of Toni Morrison, the “unspeakable,” is where the slave lives. It is where a  slave  woman  named  Doll  Shoeboots  lived  until  her  old  age.  Unlike Harriet Jacobs, though, who told her unknowable story in her own words, Doll did not write. A record of Doll’s interior life, her ruminations and fleeting  thoughts,  might  reveal  something  of  her  world  to  us.  But  like millions of other slave women, Doll left nothing behind that attests to her character, her strategies and ideologies, the quality of her days and years. The available sources on Doll’s life are a reflection of that life itself—limited, ambiguous, and fragmented. To write about Doll, then, is to pay tribute to her life, a life that would otherwise be lost to history. But do not be lulled. To write about Doll is also a wholly inadequate exercise. For every scrap about her past that I have scavenged and reconstructed here might just as well have been captured by a chapter of blank, white pages. “O virtuous reader! You never knew what it was to be a slave.”