The family in the photograph was unmistakably African American. The parents and the three oldest children were decidedly black. Their clothes were expensive and well-tailored. Their posture suggested a dignified and wealthy image. The studio backdrop and lighting suggested a grandiose, carefully planned portrait. But the youngest child, sitting in the middle on his mother’s lap, looked white. Not light-skinned, black-skinned. Not mixed-race. White. Even in the sepia tones of the 1890 photograph, it was impossible not to notice the contrast.
The little girl’s skin was noticeably lighter than everyone else in the picture. Her hair, carefully styled with a dark ribbon, looked blonde, almost platinum red. Her small, pale hands rested on the sleeves of her mother’s dark dress. Rebecca had studied historical photography for 15 years. She knew the technical limitations of 19th-century cameras, how aging and chemical processes could alter images, and the common patterns of deterioration in old photographs. This was none of these. The image quality was excellent. There was no sign of retouching, composition, or multiple exposures. The lighting was consistent across all six subjects.
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It was an authentic, unaltered photograph of six people posing together: five black and one apparently white.
Rebecca’s mind raced with possibilities. An adoption, but an interracial adoption by a black family in Georgia in 1897, would have been virtually impossible and certainly dangerous. For some reason, a neighbor’s child was also in the picture, but why would a formal, expensive studio portrait feature someone else’s child, placed so intimately in its mother’s arms? A photographic error? Two separate sessions somehow merged? No. The positioning, lighting, and focus were too precise.
She saved the file and marked it as a research priority. Whatever the photograph was, it wasn’t an ordinary one. It was a puzzle that had apparently baffled everyone who had seen it for over a century, and Rebecca Torres was determined to solve it.
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The photograph itself contained almost no identifying information. The studio sign in the lower right corner was Jay Morrison and Sons Photographers, Atlanta, a well-known studio that operated from 1885 to 1903. The style of clothing and the photographic paper suggested a date between 1895 and 1899. There were no names, written notes, or anything to identify the family.
Rebecca contacted the executor of the estate who had donated the collection. The photographs belonged to Ernest Whitfield, a retired pharmacist who spent four decades collecting African-American historical materials before his death at the age of 93.
“Uncle Ernest never properly cataloged most of the materials,” his niece explained during their phone conversation. “He just collected everything he could find. He always said that too much African-American history was being destroyed or thrown away, so he saved everything he could.”
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Rebecca asked if there were any documents, correspondence, or notes that could identify the families depicted in the photographs. Her niece promised to search through the remaining boxes before the collection was auctioned.
Three weeks later, a package arrived at Duke University. The package contained a handwritten receipt, a studio diary, and a flimsy envelope containing correspondence with clients. The receipt, dated October 12, 1897, read: Washington family, 6 people, formal sitting, 4 prints ordered, $8.50 paid in full. Washington was only a surname, not a first name.
The diary revealed more. On October 12, 1897, at 2 p.m., it read: Washington, proprietor, Auburn Avenue tailoring, commission for family portrait.
Rebecca’s heart beat faster. Auburn Avenue, Atlanta, in 1897, was the center of the African-American community’s economic success, a street where black-owned businesses flourished despite the increasing brutality of Jim Crow laws. If the Washington family had had a tailor shop there, the city records would have identified them.
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He spent the next week delving into Atlanta archives: business directories, tax returns, real estate records, and business licenses. He finally found him. Thomas Washington, owner of Washington and Sons Fine Tailoring, located at 127 Auburn Avenue and founded in 1889.
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