In September 2019, a water-stained cardboard box arrived at the Atlanta History Center, part of the estate of Dorothy Williams, who had died at ninety-seven. The box sat in the archives for three weeks before Marcus Thompson, a graduate intern, began cataloging its contents. Inside, he found a formal studio portrait dated 1899, taken by the Jay Petan Studio of Atlanta. It showed three Black women: a mother seated in an ornate chair, her two daughters standing on either side, all in dark, modest dresses.
The expressions were serious, typical of the long exposures of the era. Marcus assigned the photograph a catalog number and prepared to move on. Then he noticed the hands. The women’s hands were not posed in the usual relaxed manner of family portraits.
They were held at deliberate angles, fingers arranged in precise configurations. The mother’s right hand rested on the arm of the chair with thumb, index, and middle fingers extended, while her ring and pinky fingers touched her palm. The daughter on the left held both hands at waist level, palms facing each other but not touching, fingers spread in a measured pattern. The daughter on the right had one hand near her collar, fingers formed in what looked like an intentional gesture.
Marcus had spent two years studying African-American history, particularly the post-Civil War South. He spent four hours comparing the hand positions to historical references, then called Dr. Patricia Hayes, the center’s chief historian. She arrived within twenty minutes.
At sixty-two, Dr. Hayes had spent four decades studying resistance movements and coded communication systems used by enslaved and newly freed people. She examined the photograph in silence. Then she saw the hands.
Her professional curiosity turned to intense focus. She pulled up her phone and compared the hand positions to scanned pages from historical documents: crude drawings of hand signals with annotations in faded ink. “Do you know what the Underground Railroad was? ” she asked Marcus.
“Of course. The network that helped enslaved people escape to freedom before the Civil War. ”
“Before and after,” she corrected. Most people believed the Underground Railroad ended in 1865 with emancipation.
But the violence had not stopped. Lynchings, forced labor contracts, and Black codes had created new forms of legalized oppression. Some networks continued operating in secret, helping families escape to safer territories. The hand signals in the photograph were conductor signals, ways operators identified themselves and communicated information.
Most had never been photographed, only passed down through oral tradition and written descriptions. Dr. Hayes called Dr. Leonard Washington, a historian at Howard University who had spent fifteen years researching coded communication systems used by formerly enslaved people.
He arrived two days later. Studying the photograph, he decoded the message. The mother’s hand position, thumb, index, and middle finger extended with the ring and pinky folded, was the safe house marker. The specific finger configuration indicated how many days a person could stay safely.
The daughter on the left, with her palms facing each other approximately twenty centimeters apart, was giving a distance measurement: the next safe point was roughly twenty meters away. The daughter on the right, with her fingers near her throat in a specific position, was signaling danger. The two extended fingers specified the type: law enforcement or bounty hunters. The three women had encoded an entire warning into a family portrait: safe house available, next point is twenty meters away, beware of law enforcement.
Dr. Washington also recognized the photographer’s name. Jay Petan had appeared in testimonies from formerly enslaved people as a sympathetic Atlanta photographer who would take portraits and sometimes add people to images who were not actually present during the exposure, creating documentation for people who needed new identities. The women were not just posing for a family portrait.
They were creating a document, a map that could be shared with other members of the network. Why 1899? The year was one of the worst for racial violence in Georgia’s history. Lynchings were at their peak.
The convict lease system was in full operation, with Black men arrested on false charges and forced into labor camps that were often worse than slavery. The Underground Railroad had not ended. It had evolved. Instead of guiding people north, it helped families relocate to safer Black communities, hid people fleeing false accusations, and moved children away from areas where they would be forced into exploitative labor contracts.
The next step was identifying the women. Dr. Hayes contacted Dorothy Williams’s grandson, James Williams, who lived in Savannah. He arrived the following week carrying a small wooden box worn smooth by generations of handling.
His grandmother had told him that someday someone would ask the right questions. Inside the box were three items: a small leather journal with pages yellowed and brittle, a silver locket containing a tiny photograph, and a folded piece of cloth embroidered with symbols. The journal’s first page bore the name Clara. The mother in the photograph was Clara, with her daughters Ruth and Esther.
The embroidered symbols matched the hand signals from the photograph. The locket contained a second photograph: the three women standing outside a modest house with a distinctive red brick chimney. The women were known in their community as healers and midwives. But their real work was something else entirely.
The journal entries were cryptic, yet patterns emerged: references to visitors in the night, notes about journeys completed safely, lists of supplies purchased in quantities far beyond what a family of three would need. One entry from May 1899 read: “Three souls departed Thursday last, made it to the second house without incident. Sent word ahead. ”
Dr.
Washington recognized the house from oral histories. It was called the Potter’s house, a place in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood where people could find help. That was not a nickname. It was Clara’s name: Clara Potter.
Property records confirmed the address. The house still existed, hidden behind a chain-link fence overgrown with kudzu, its red brick chimney partially collapsed but recognizable. When researchers finally gained access, they found a secret cellar beneath the kitchen, its entrance concealed by rotted boards. Along one wall, carved into the bricks, were the same symbols embroidered on the cloth in James Williams’s box.
Along the opposite wall were names, dozens of them, some with dates beside them. Near the bottom, in neater script, was an inscription: “We who were hidden here honor those who hid us. The hands that guided us will never be forgotten. 1899–1903.
”
The cellar was a record of everyone who had passed through the house seeking safety. Cross-referencing the names with census records, church registries, and death certificates revealed the scope of the network. Clara, Ruth, and Esther had helped more than two hundred people over four years. They were not working alone.
They were part of a sophisticated network connecting safe houses across Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina. Each woman’s profession provided cover. Ruth worked as a deaconess, giving her access to travelers without arousing suspicion. Esther worked as a seamstress, creating clothing for people who needed to change their appearance.
Clara’s work as a midwife let her travel freely throughout the county, called to births at all hours, carrying a large medical bag that could easily conceal documents and money. No one questioned a midwife’s comings and goings. The journal decoded further. “Delivered a healthy child” meant successfully moving someone to the next safe point.
“Complications arose” meant danger or close calls with authorities. “Mother and child recovering well” meant someone had reached safety in another city or state. One entry from August 1899 read: “Had to use the old signal to reach JP for documentation. He came through as always.
”
JP was Jay Petan, the photographer. He was providing forged documents. Photographs were becoming common for identification purposes in the 1890s. Petan could create portraits that gave people new identities: a photograph, a name, and suddenly you were someone without a criminal record or a warrant.
His studio burned down in 1904 under suspicious circumstances, and he left Atlanta shortly after. The photograph of Clara, Ruth, and Esther took on new meaning. It was not just a coded message. It was proof of their connection to Petan, documentation of their network, and perhaps an act of defiance: We existed.
We resisted. We mattered. Word of the discovery spread through Atlanta’s Black community. Descendants of the names carved in the cellar wall began reaching out.
Thomas Crawford arrived with a letter written by his great-grandfather in 1900, describing an escape from a rural work camp where he had been imprisoned on false charges. Three women had provided food, clothing, and guidance to Savannah, where he boarded a ship north. Gloria Henderson shared stories of her grandmother, who escaped Atlanta in 1898 as a teenager, pregnant and fleeing an employer who had assaulted her. One of the three women had held her hand through the night and told her she would survive.
The research faced skepticism from some academics who questioned whether the hand signals were truly Underground Railroad codes or simply coincidental poses. Dr. Washington grew frustrated: “If these were white women, their bravery would be celebrated without question. But because they’re Black women who operated outside official channels, suddenly we need impossible standards of proof.
” Others were uncomfortable with the timeline. Accepting that the Underground Railroad continued after emancipation meant acknowledging that freedom did not end the oppression. Dr. Hayes organized a symposium.
James Williams stood before a packed auditorium holding the photograph of his great-great-grandmother and her daughters. “These women risked everything,” he said. “Not for glory or recognition, but because it was right. The proof isn’t just in documents.
It’s in the descendants who are alive today because Clara, Ruth, and Esther refused to stay silent and safe. ”
The symposium became a turning point. National media picked up the story. The Atlanta History Center organized an exhibition titled Hands of Deliverance: The Secret Network of the Post-Emancipation South.
Researchers identified over three hundred living descendants of people helped by the network. Their photographs lined an entire gallery wall, each person holding a sign with their ancestor’s name and the year they had been helped. The city designated the Potter’s house a historic landmark. Restoration turned it into an educational center, with the cellar preserved exactly as found.
On a warm September afternoon in 2021, exactly two years after Marcus first noticed the unusual hand positions, a ceremony was held at the restored house. Descendants of Clara, Ruth, and Esther gathered alongside descendants of those they had helped: over two hundred people spanning five generations. A bronze plaque near the entrance bore the photograph and an inscription: “In this house, Clara, Ruth, and Esther Potter guided more than 200 souls to safety between 1895 and 1903. Their hands spoke when words were dangerous.
Their courage saved lives when silence would have been easier. ”
James Williams stood with his children and grandchildren. His great-great-grandmother and her daughters had lived in a time that tried to erase them. But they had left clues and signs, trusting that someday someone would see what they had hidden in plain sight.
The photograph of three women with carefully positioned hands stood as testimony that resistance takes many forms, and that courage often wears a quiet face. The hands that once guided people to freedom now guide us to remembrance, ensuring that Clara, Ruth, and Esther’s story, and the stories of all those they saved, will never be forgotten.