In the winter of 2013, a curator at the Boston Museum of African American History was cataloging a donation of nineteenth-century photographs when she paused over the ninth image in the stack. It showed two young Black women seated side by side in a Philadelphia studio, their expressions calm, their dresses formal, their fingers intertwined in what looked like a sisterly gesture of affection. The curator enlarged the image with modern digital technology and noticed something that made her stop. The position of the fingers was not casual.
It was deliberate, precise, coded. The photograph had sat in archives for a century and a half, and no one had ever given it a second look. Now it was clear that the two women had left a message hidden in plain sight. The anonymous donation had arrived in a weathered box postmarked from Philadelphia with no return address.
Inside were seventeen daguerreotypes, tintypes, and early paper photographs, mostly portraits of Black families from the 1850s through the 1880s. The curator, Dr. Evelyn Harper, logged each image into the museum’s database with careful attention, noting dates, clothing, and studio backdrops. When she reached the ninth photograph, something about the composition made her hesitate.
The two women were clearly sisters, their facial features unmistakably similar. Their hands were clasped together in a specific arrangement: the older sister’s index and middle fingers crossed deliberately over the younger sister’s hand, both thumbs positioned at precise angles. It looked controlled, intentional, like a gesture that meant something beyond affection. Evelyn had studied enough about the Underground Railroad to recognize that coded communication systems existed among abolitionists and freedom seekers.
She spent three days combing through resources on nonverbal communication from the Civil War era, examining quilt patterns, documented hand signals, the language of flowers, and symbolism in hymns. Nothing matched. Then she found a reference in an obscure academic journal from 1987. A historian named Dr.
Laurence Winters had noted in passing that some Underground Railroad operatives developed silent recognition signals, gestures that could be made in public without drawing attention. These signals were never written down, transmitted only through direct teaching, and lost to history when the generation that used them passed away. One letter written by a Quaker abolitionist named Isaac Pemberton in 1864 contained a sentence that made Evelyn’s breath catch. Pemberton wrote: the sisters have perfected a silent tongue spoken with hands alone, which identifies the faithful even in crowded rooms where enemies listen.
The sisters, not a generic reference, but specific individuals known well enough that he didn’t need to name them. The photograph bore the faint studio marking of J. Wilson, photographer, Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, 1863, the same city where Pemberton had been active, coordinating escapes with Black conductors and free Black communities. Evelyn called a colleague at Howard University, Dr.
Marcus Reed, a historian specializing in African American resistance movements. He arrived two days later carrying a battered journal that had belonged to Jeremiah Todd, a free Black conductor who operated in Philadelphia from 1859 until his death in 1867. Marcus had been studying Todd’s writings for years and had always been puzzled by entries that seemed deliberately vague. He opened the journal to a page marked with a red ribbon and read aloud.
Todd had written in June 1863: Met with R and N today. They have learned the silent speech, a crossing of hands, a position of fingers. This will be our recognition in dangerous places. The date matched the year of the photograph, and the description matched exactly what Evelyn had observed.
The initials were a starting point. In the back pages of Todd’s journal, Marcus found a letter written in a different hand, addressed to My dearest Ruth and signed simply N. It spoke of a journey, of danger, of a promise to return. At the bottom was a single line: When you think of me, remember our sign.
It will keep you safe. Ruth and Naomi. The biblical names matched the initials, and the women in the photograph now had identities. With names to work from, the research accelerated.
In the membership register of Mother Bethel AME Church, one of the oldest African American churches in the United States, two women named Ruth and Naomi were listed in 1862 as participants in benevolent work, a common euphemism for Underground Railroad activity. A letter from Lucretia Mott, a prominent Quaker abolitionist, mentioned meeting two remarkable young sisters in Philadelphia in 1863 who had risked everything to guide freedom seekers north. Then Marcus found a federal marshal’s report from August 1863 documenting the capture of a Negro woman approximately twenty years of age who had been apprehended near the Delaware border while guiding a family of freedom seekers. The woman had been returned to Maryland and sold back into slavery.
No name was given, but the date and location fit the route that Todd’s journal indicated the sisters used. The timeline suggested that within months of the photograph being taken, one of the sisters had been captured. A letter written in 1866, discovered in the archives of Mother Bethel Church, was signed by someone named Ruth. It was addressed to all who remember and spoke of a sister who had been lost doing the Lord’s work, who had given her life so others might be free.
Ruth’s letter didn’t name Naomi directly, but the grief made it clear this was a memorial. Evelyn and Marcus worked with historians, anthropologists, and experts in nonverbal communication to reconstruct the meaning of the hand signal. The crossed fingers represented intersecting paths, the routes freedom seekers traveled. The older sister’s hand over the younger’s symbolized protection and guidance.
The positioning of the thumbs pointed subtly toward the North Star. It was a complete message compressed into a gesture that could be made in seconds, in public, in front of slave catchers, and no one else would know. The code could be modified to convey additional information: a different angle of the thumb meant danger, fingers interlaced in reverse indicated a safe house nearby, a brief touch of the wrist meant I have people who need passage. It was an entire tactile language, designed to operate in the most hostile environments imaginable.
Records suggested the network Ruth and Naomi belonged to successfully guided hundreds of people to freedom between 1859 and 1865. The photograph served a dual purpose. On the surface, it was a formal portrait. But for those who knew the code, it was also a teaching tool, a way to pass the knowledge to new operatives, to ensure that even if the original practitioners died or were captured, the signal would survive.
The two women had encoded resistance into a family photograph, hidden defiance in plain sight, and trusted that someday someone would look closely enough to see. In August 1863, Naomi had been guiding a family of five, a mother, her three children, and the mother’s elderly father, along a route from Maryland through Delaware into Pennsylvania. It was one of the most dangerous crossings, heavily patrolled by federal marshals enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act and frequented by professional slave catchers. According to testimony later provided by one of the surviving children, they had been betrayed by an informant who sold information to slave catchers for cash.
The family was surrounded in a wooded area south of the Delaware border. Naomi tried to run, to draw the pursuers away from the family, but she was captured within minutes. Only the elderly grandfather escaped, eventually reaching a safe house in Philadelphia, where he told Jeremiah Todd what had happened. Todd recorded the incident with stark brevity, then added a line that revealed the depth of the tragedy: Ruth knows.
She will not speak of it, but the light has gone from her eyes. Naomi was returned to Maryland, sold to a plantation owner, and disappeared into the records of slavery. For Ruth, the photograph took on a new meaning. It was no longer just a teaching tool.
It was the last image of her sister as a free woman. Ruth kept the photograph for the rest of her life. When she died in 1889, it passed to her niece, who kept it hidden in a trunk for decades. The photograph survived wars, fires, relocations, and the slow erosion of memory.
Ruth continued the work alone after Naomi’s capture. She remained active in the Underground Railroad until the end of the Civil War in 1865. Even after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, she continued helping formerly enslaved people navigate the dangers of Reconstruction. She worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau, taught literacy classes, and organized mutual aid societies in Philadelphia’s Black community.
In 1870, she opened a small boarding house for Black women arriving in Philadelphia from the South, providing refuge and support for hundreds of women. She ran it until her death in 1889 at the age of sixty-eight. Her obituary described her as a woman of great dignity and faith, but made no mention of the Underground Railroad, the silent code, or the sister she had lost. When Evelyn and Marcus presented their findings at a historical conference in 2014, they showed the photograph on a large screen, pointing out the hand position, the backdrop symbols, the precision of the composition.
When the presentation ended, a seventy-three-year-old woman in the back row stood and asked if she could see the photograph up close. Her name was Clara Bennett. She believed Ruth might have been her great-great-great-grandmother. Clara had grown up hearing stories about a woman in her family named Ruth who had done the Lord’s work during the Civil War era, and a sister named Naomi who died young helping others.
She had assumed it was family mythology. But the genealogical records she provided traced her lineage back to a Ruth who lived in Philadelphia and died in 1889. Clara also brought a small wooden box passed down through her family. Inside was a folded piece of paper with a hand-drawn sketch: two hands clasped together, fingers positioned in the exact configuration visible in the photograph.
Below the drawing were the words: Remember the sign. It kept us safe. DNA testing confirmed the connection. Clara was a direct descendant of Ruth.
In 2015, the Boston Museum of African American History opened a permanent exhibit titled Silent Language, Codes of Resistance in the Underground Railroad. At its center was the photograph of Ruth and Naomi, enlarged and restored, with detailed explanations of the hand code, the network they belonged to, and the fates that awaited them after the photograph was taken. Beside it were Ruth’s quilt, Clara’s family heirlooms, excerpts from Jeremiah Todd’s journal, and letters from abolitionists describing the silent speech they had witnessed but never fully understood. The photograph had opened a door, revealing a hidden dimension of resistance that had been erased from mainstream history.
Clara Bennett became a regular presence at the museum, volunteering as a speaker and educator. She would stand beside the photograph of her ancestors, demonstrate the hand signal, and end every talk the same way: they wanted us to remember. They left this message so we would know what they did, who they were, and what they stood for.
And now we do.