20/11/2025
This 1879 photo seems sweet — until experts discover something disturbing about the enslaved young
I found the photograph on a cool October morning at Lakeside Market in Richmond, Virginia—a place where old coins, Civil War bullets, and yellowed postcards crowd together on rickety folding tables. Fog still drifted low over the James River, and the vendors were only beginning to arrange their wares when I saw it.
At first glance, the cabinet card seemed ordinary: two women seated on a carved stone bench, surrounded by soft-focus foliage. The image was crisp, unusually so for something taken in 1879. The women sat close together, smiling gently—almost intimately.
One woman was white, dressed in a formal Victorian gown with lace at her collar. The other was Black, wearing a simpler dark dress with a stark white collar. Their hands rested near each other on the bench, close enough that their knuckles nearly touched.
The image radiated warmth. Friendship. Sisterly affection.
Then I turned it over.
On the back, written in faded brown ink:
“Miss Katherine Hartwell and Lily — Richmond, Virginia. June 1879.”
Beneath that, added in pencil much later:
“They said she was like family. Look at Lily’s wrists.”
I studied the photograph again, this time under a vendor’s magnifying glass. Only then did I see the faint scarring—barely visible—on the Black woman’s wrists.
Not fresh wounds.
Not accidents.
Old injuries.
𝗗𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗹𝗼𝘄 👇
https://ludi.feji.io/blog/this-1879-photo-seems-sweet-until-experts-discover-something-disturbing-about-the-enslaved-young-ho-5sj
