In the autumn of 2019, an estate liquidator working in Grayson County, Virginia, found a small cabinet card photograph in a cedar-lined trunk that had not been opened since roughly 1938. The photograph, four and a quarter inches by six and a half inches, was mounted on stiff card the color of weak tea. Its corners had been softened by 140 years of handling.
The image showed a woman in a black bombazine dress buttoned to the throat, her hair parted severely down the middle and pulled back into a tight knot. On the back, in brown ink in a shaky hand that was not her own, was written the name Alberta Castle Hollinssworth. She was 31 years old in the photograph, and her husband had been dead for seven months.
On either side of her stood her two sons. The older boy, Merritt, was nine. The younger, Jubil, was seven. They wore matching wool sailor suits with wide collars and dark bows, and they stood very still the way children were required to stand before a wet plate camera in 1883. Their mother's hands rested on their shoulders. All three looked directly at the lens with the flat, patient expression of people who had been told not to move.
By every visible measure, it was an ordinary morning portrait — a widow, her children, a record for the family Bible. Then came the wrists.
The photograph came out of a house that had been in the same family since 1861, occupied by three generations of Hollinssworth descendants who had lived and died in the same four rooms. When the last of them, a great-great-niece named Luella Hollenssworth Runan, entered a nursing home at the age of 91, the county appointed an estate liquidator to inventory the contents.
He spent four days in the house. On the fourth day, in the attic, inside a cedar-lined trunk, he found a Bible, a stack of letters tied with string that had rotted to the consistency of pipe ash, a folded child's christening gown, and 31 photographs. The widow portrait sat on top of the stack, wrapped in a square of dark green baize, the way people used to wrap the ones they were afraid of.
The estate man cataloged it as lot number 72, a cabinet card family group, and sent the trunk to an auction house in Roanoke. It sold to a private collector for $140 in November 2019.
The collector was a retired librarian named Douglas Wit, who specialized in 19th century southern mourning photography. He took the photograph into his study, laid it under a jeweler's loupe on a felt-topped table, and began to examine it inch by inch, working from the top corner down.
He looked at the mother's face, the mother's hands, the older boy's face, the older boy's hands. At the older boy's hands, he stopped. He sat there for a long time, then went into the kitchen, poured himself a glass of water, and stood at the sink and drank it. Then he came back and looked again, because he wanted to be sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.
Around each of the two boys' wrists, so faint that it could not be seen without magnification, was a thin dark line. It was not a bracelet. It was not a cuff of the sailor suit, which stopped a full inch above the mark. It was not a shadow, because the mark went all the way around, uninterrupted, on both wrists of both children — four bands in total, at exactly the same height on each small forearm.
The line was perhaps a sixteenth of an inch wide, black against the pale wet plate rendering of the boys' skin. Where the line met itself, at the underside of each wrist, there was a small square knot. Something had been tied around the wrists of both boys tightly enough to leave a mark under the sleeves of their morning clothes, tightly enough that the mark was still visible when the shutter opened, and then removed or hidden or lied about before the plate was developed and the print was made.
Douglas Wit did what any responsible collector does when he finds something he cannot explain. He made a 2,000 dpi scan of the photograph, printed enlargements of each wrist at eight times magnification, and pinned them to a corkboard in his study. Then, because he had spent 40 years reading everything written about postmortem mourning portraiture in the American South, he began to search for a match.
He looked through the Burns Archive online, the Library of Congress prints and photographs division, the George Eastman Museum collection, the New York Public Library digital collection, and every regional archive he could access between Baltimore and Atlanta. He was looking for another photograph from the same period of children with the same mark.
He was doing this on a Tuesday evening in December 2019. By the following Monday, he had found four.
The first was in a Pennsylvania collection: a widow named Adah Sturmer, photographed in Lancaster County in 1879, four months after her husband died of typhoid. She had three children in the picture with her, two girls and a boy, all under the age of 10. All three wore the mark.
The second was in a museum holding in Tennessee: Sarah Elmyra Nunnaly, photographed in Sevier County in the winter of 1877 with her four surviving sons, ages 5 through 12, arranged in a stiff row in front of a painted parlor backdrop. All four boys wore the mark.
The third was in a private album digitized for a genealogy website out of Missouri: a widow named Cordelia Rush, photographed in Ripley County in 1881 with her one remaining child, a boy of six. He wore the mark.
The fourth was in the North Carolina State Archives, filed under an unrelated finding aid for post-Civil War family papers: Mahala Gwin Loftton, photographed in Wilkes County in 1876 with her two daughters, aged 8 and 11. Both girls wore the mark.
Five photographs, five widows, nine children with a thin dark line tied and knotted around each wrist under the sleeves of their mourning clothes. The photographs came from five different states, taken by five different photographers across a span of seven years. There was no shared studio and no shared circuit rider working a route through the mountains.
Two of the photographers were dead within a decade of the sitting and had left no papers. The other three had left partial daybooks, and in none of those daybooks was there any mention of the mark, or of any request from the sitters that anything unusual be done, or of any note that the photographer himself had noticed anything at all.
The mark was on the plate. It was not in the record. That meant whatever had been tied around the wrists of those nine children had been tied before the family arrived at the studio, and had either been hidden by the sleeves at the moment of exposure, or had been meant to be there, and meant to be seen only later by someone who knew to look for it.
Douglas Wit did not sleep well for the rest of December. He spent the last two weeks of the month cross-checking the five photographs against every regional index of 19th century southern photographers he could reach, against the digitized cabinet card catalogs of 11 historical societies between Baltimore and Nashville, and against the personal databases of three other collectors he had known for 20 years and trusted enough to write about what he had found.
None of them had ever seen the mark. Two wrote back to say they had never encountered any documented practice in any of the vernacular southern death traditions they had studied that would explain what he was describing. The third, a woman who ran a private collection in Charleston, wrote back to say that he should be very careful about publishing what he had, because the American photographic record contained a small number of images that were understood by the collectors who had held them longest to be images that responded to attention. She did not say what she meant by responded to attention. She did not answer his follow-up letter.
In January 2020, he did the thing that in retrospect he wishes he had not done. He drove from his home in Salem, Virginia, to Grayson County, and went to the courthouse in Independence, and pulled the coroner's records for the years 1883 and 1884. He was looking for anything on Merritt Hollensworth and anything on Jubil Hollensworth. He wanted to know whether either of the two boys in his photograph had lived past childhood.
The Grayson County Courthouse in Independence is a modest brick building on a hill above the New River, with coroner's records stored in a basement room that smells of mildew and pipe tobacco left over from a clerk who retired in 1984. Wit arrived on a Thursday morning in the middle of January, presented his research credentials to a woman named Charlene at the counter, and was given a pair of white cotton gloves and a wheeled cart holding enormous leather-bound volumes marked in gold leaf with the years 1880 and 1885.
He asked first for the volume containing 1883. Charlene told him that a particular volume had been damaged in a water incident during a roof repair in 1997, and that portions of the record were unreadable, but that he was welcome to try.
Merritt Ellison Hollinssworth appeared on page 147. The entry was dated November 19, 1883. The cause of death, in the neat brown hand of Dr. Absalom Reeves, coroner for the Western District, was recorded as diphtheritic croup, complicated by a phrase Wit at first could not make out because the water damage had blurred the letters.
He got out his loupe and held it under the desk lamp Charlene had turned on for him. When the phrase resolved under magnification, it read: complicated by ligature contusion of the antebrachial region, bilateral, of uncertain provenance.
Merritt Hollinssworth had died with a mark on both of his wrists. The mark was still visible when Dr. Reeves examined the body, and the coroner had noted in his careful 19th century hand that he could not account for it. When he asked the mother, she told him that the boys sometimes played at being tied up like the sailors in their story books, and must have done it to themselves.
Wit turned three more pages. Jubil Cassell Hollinssworth appeared on page 150. The entry was dated November 22, 1883, three days after his brother. The cause of death was again given as diphtheritic croup, and again there was the note in Dr. Reeves's hand. This time the phrase was written in full, because the water damage had missed that portion of the page: ligature contusion of the antebrachial region, bilateral, of uncertain provenance, corresponding in every particular to the marks observed on the elder brother.
The mother, when interviewed, gave the same explanation. Dr. Reeves, in a marginal note in a slightly darker ink that he must have added later in the day, wrote three additional words: Mother appears unwell.
Douglas Wit sat in the basement of the Grayson County Courthouse for 45 minutes without moving. He was 67 years old and had been reading 19th century mortality records for most of his professional life. Diphtheria was the plague of the century for children. It killed by suffocation, slowly over the course of days, as the false membrane closed the throat. It was not unusual in a county like Grayson to lose two children in one household in a single week.
What was unusual — what was in fact unprecedented in his experience — was the marginal note. Dr. Reeves had gone to the Hollinssworth farm to examine the second child. He had found Alberta Hollinssworth still alive, still ambulatory, still capable of answering questions, and he had felt the need to write down in a legal document, in his own hand, that something about her state that morning had struck him as wrong.
Wit filled out a request slip for a certified photocopy of both entries, paid Charlene the $12, and drove home to Salem. He arrived after dark. His wife had left him a covered plate in the kitchen. He did not eat it.
He went into his study, took down the enlargement of the Hollinssworth photograph from the corkboard, and looked at it under the desk lamp for a long time. The two boys were smiling. He had not noticed before that they were smiling. It was a very slight smile on both of them at the corners of their mouths, the kind of smile a child makes when he is trying not to laugh at something a grown-up has said.
Their mother, standing behind them with her hands on their shoulders, was not smiling. Her face was completely blank, and her eyes, in the enlargement at eight times magnification, were looking at something over the photographer's left shoulder. Wit turned around. There was nothing over his own left shoulder except a wall.
He put the photograph back on the corkboard. He went into the kitchen and ate the covered plate his wife had left him. He went upstairs and lay in bed and did not sleep. Around 3:00 in the morning, he got up, came back down to the study, opened his laptop, and typed into a search engine the phrase: ligature contusion antebrachial region 19th century child mortality, southern Appalachian counties.
What came back was not what he expected. The search returned a single academic paper, published in the fall of 2011 in a small quarterly journal called the Appalachian Historical Review, based out of a state college in Eastern Kentucky. The author was a Dr. Meredith Boon, associate professor of social history. The paper was titled "Anomalous Ligature Findings in Pediatric Postmortem Records, Western Virginia and Adjacent Counties, 1872 to 1891."
It was 38 pages long. Douglas Wit printed the entire thing on the laser printer in his study and read it standing at the kitchen counter with a glass of milk that he forgot to drink.
Boon had, over the course of nine years, gone through the coroner's records of 43 counties across Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia. She had been looking for something else — a pattern of childhood tuberculosis — but had noticed in the course of her reading an unusual recurring notation.
The phrase she had noticed, in slightly varying forms, was ligature contusion of the wrists, unexplained. Sometimes it was written as bracelet mark, sometimes as circumferential contusion of the forearm at the carpal joint. In one case, a coroner in 1888 had simply drawn a small circle around the word wrists and put a question mark next to it.
Boon had found 71 such notations in her nine-year survey. All 71 were on the bodies of children under the age of 13. All 71 had died within a week of at least one sibling. In 68 of the 71 cases, the surviving parent, questioned by the coroner about the marks, had given some version of the same explanation: the children had done it to themselves.
Boon was a cautious academic. She did not, in the paper, speculate about what the marks meant. She said only that they were anomalous, that they clustered geographically in a way that suggested a shared cultural practice, and that the concentration of cases in the Blue Ridge and Central Appalachian counties argued for a folk tradition of some kind that had not been documented in any of the standard sources on southern death culture.
She proposed that further research was warranted. She noted that she had been contacted by a small number of elderly informants in Wilkes and Ashe counties, North Carolina, who told her that their own grandparents had spoken of the practice, and that the term for it in their family recollection had been "binding the wake." She had not been able to corroborate this with any written source, and she declined to include the informant testimony in the body of her paper, restricting it to a single footnote at the bottom of page 31.
The paper ended with a call for additional archival work and listed Boon's email address at the state college. Douglas Wit sent her an email at 4:18 in the morning of the third Friday in January 2020, asking whether she was still teaching, whether she had continued the research, and whether he might send her a photograph he had recently acquired that he believed showed evidence of the practice she had described.
He received a response at 6:12 the same morning. It was from the college's human resources office. Dr. Meredith Boon had retired from the faculty in 2015. She had died in the spring of 2017 of a stroke at the age of 61 at her home in Berea, Kentucky. Her papers had been donated to the college archive. If Mr. Wit wished to consult them, he could make an appointment with the archivist.
Wit made the appointment. He drove to Berea in the second week of February and spent three days in the college archive going through 11 boxes of Boon's research papers, her handwritten field notes, her correspondence, and the audio cassettes she had made of her interviews with the elderly informants in Wilkes and Ashe counties.
There were four such interviews. Boon had labeled the cassettes in careful pencil with the initials of the informants, a date, and a location. Wit asked the archivist whether he could listen to them. The archivist told him the college had some years earlier digitized all of the audio holdings in the collection for preservation purposes, and that he could listen to the interviews in the reading room using a laptop and a pair of over-ear headphones the archive kept for that purpose.
Wit put on the headphones and sat at the reading room table. He clicked the first file. The voice that came through was that of a woman named Nanny Estelle Cold Iron, 92 years old at the time of the interview in 2009, recorded on the front porch of her house outside West Jefferson, North Carolina. Boon's own voice was audible in the background, asking questions in a low, respectful tone.
Nanny Cold Iron, in a thin mountain accent, was describing what her own grandmother had told her when Nanny herself was a girl of about eight: what people used to do in the county when the children of a household began to die. She spoke for 41 minutes. Wit listened to the entire recording twice. When he was finished, he took off the headphones, sat at the reading room table with his hands folded in front of him, and did not move for a long time. The archivist, coming past on her way to the reference desk, asked him if he was all right. He said he was.
The other three recordings in Boon's collection were briefer than the first, but their content was substantially the same. Each of the three additional informants, all women in their late 80s or early 90s, had grown up in adjacent counties in the same corner of the Blue Ridge, and each described the same practice Nanny Cold Iron had described.
One of them, a woman named Cordie Abshire, interviewed in her kitchen in Sparta, North Carolina, in 2010, added a detail the others had not. Her own grandmother had shown her, when she was very young, the bottom drawer of a kitchen dresser containing a small linen pouch. In the pouch were three items: a length of black wool cord, a pair of small iron scissors, and a folded piece of paper that was still blank.
Her grandmother had told her the paper was blank because it was not yet time to write anything on it, and that she should not, under any circumstance, ever open the drawer without her grandmother present. Cordie Abshire said at the end of her interview that the drawer had been emptied by her own mother in the 1930s, and no one in her family since then had ever kept such a pouch, but that she still remembered 75 years later the exact weight of the cord as it lay coiled in the drawer beside the paper that had not yet been written on.
What Nanny Cold Iron told the tape in the still air of a summer porch in Ashe County in the last summer of her life was this. When she was a small girl in the 1890s, on the ridge above the South Fork of the New River where her people had farmed since before the Revolution, there was a practice among the older women in the community — the widows and the granny women — that they did not talk about to the men and did not do in front of the preacher.
When a child in a household took sick with something known to spread — diphtheria, scarlet fever, black measles, or the summer bloody flux — and it looked as though the child might not live, the women of the family would send for one of the granny women to come to the house at dusk. She would arrive with a small bag over her shoulder. In the bag were three items: a length of black wool cord spun tight and waxed, of a particular thickness; a pair of small iron scissors; and a folded piece of paper on which were written words Nanny Cold Iron never learned, because she was never allowed in the room.
The granny woman would go into the sick room alone with the mother. She would close the door. She would remain there for some period of time, sometimes an hour, sometimes most of the night. When she came out, the sick child would have around each of its wrists a thin black cord tied tightly with a small square knot on the underside.
The cord was to remain on the child until either the child recovered or the child died. If the child recovered, the granny woman would return, cut the cord away with the iron scissors, burn the pieces in the kitchen fire, and take the paper with her. If the child died, the cord was to be left on the body when it was laid out for the wake. The corpse was to be dressed in its burial clothes over the cord so that nothing was visible above the wrist, and the wake was to be conducted with the child in an open casket. Every member of the family and every neighbor who came to sit up with the body was to be told that the child was not to be touched, only looked upon.
The reason, Nanny's grandmother told her, was that the cord was what held the sick child's spirit to its body during the time between the sickness taking hold and the sickness deciding one way or the other. It was called binding the wake because if the child died, the cord was believed to hold the spirit against the corpse through the wake and the burial, so that the spirit could not slip loose and come back into the house looking for the other children.
The other children in the house were the ones in the greatest danger, because a young spirit that had not yet accepted its own death was known, in the old belief, to try to take the nearest living thing back with it. The nearest living thing was almost always a brother or a sister sleeping in the same bed the sick child had been pulled out of when the fever began.
The cord was black wool because black wool was the color of mourning, and wool because wool was believed to hold weight, and it was waxed because wax made the cord slippery to the touch of anything that was not living. The knots were on the underside of the wrist because that was the vein through which, in the old belief, the spirit entered and left the body. There were two of them, one on each wrist, because a spirit bound at only one wrist could pull itself loose by turning the body on its other side.
The paper the granny woman brought was written over with a specific list of names — the names of every person in the household. The point of the paper was that the granny woman would read the names aloud in the sick room in order, so that the spirit of the sick child would hear them and would know, if it did indeed depart, whom it was forbidden to take with it.
The paper was burned with the cord if the child recovered. If the child died, the paper was folded into the coffin at the last moment before the lid was closed and buried with the body.
But sometimes, Nanny Cold Iron said — and here she paused for a long time on the tape, then went on more slowly — sometimes there were households where the sickness moved through the children so quickly that the granny woman could not get there in time. Sometimes the cord was tied on the wrong child. Sometimes the paper was misread, or a name was left off it, or the mother in her grief added a name that should not have been added.
And sometimes, though this was very rare, the mother of the household herself would take up the cord and the scissors and do the work without any granny woman present, because she was too proud or too frightened or too far gone to send for anyone. In those cases, Nanny said, the binding sometimes went wrong. The cord held, but it held the wrong way. The spirit did not depart. It did not stay. It went into the walls of the house instead.
Boon's voice at this point on the tape asked what Nanny meant by went into the walls. Nanny Cold Iron laughed once, a small dry laugh with no humor in it, and said only that when she was a child there had been three houses on her grandfather's ridge that no one would live in, and all three of them had lost their children in the same week, and all three of them had had a photograph taken of the mother and the surviving children within a month of the deaths. None of the three families had ever hung those photographs on any wall of any house they later moved into, because the mothers in the photographs, all three of them, could no longer be looked at directly by anyone who had known them in life.
Douglas Wit drove back to Salem, Virginia, from Berea, Kentucky, on a Saturday in the middle of February 2020, in a snowstorm that closed most of the western portion of Interstate 64 for six hours and forced him to spend a night in a motel in Beckley, West Virginia. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the digital scan of the Hollinssworth photograph on his laptop and thought about what he was going to do next.
What he decided to do next was to find out everything he could about Alberta Cassell Hollinssworth: who she had been before she was married, who her husband had been, what had happened to her after November 1883, and whether there was any surviving relative, however distant, who might know anything about the trunk in the attic, the photograph in the trunk, or the 12 months in her life between the marriage and the death of her two sons.
He returned to Grayson County the following week and worked at the courthouse for four days, going through the marriage bonds, the tax rolls, the deed books, and the census returns. He drove out to the location of the old Hollinssworth farm, which was now a stand of second-growth hickory and poplar, with a caved-in stone foundation and a wellhead still visible in the tall grass.
He walked the property line and found, in a small clearing about 150 yards behind where the house had stood, a family burying ground with seven markers. Three were so weathered that the inscriptions could no longer be read. Four stood in a row at the eastern edge, clearly legible.
Nathaniel Absalom Hollinssworth, husband to Alberta, born 1847, died April 14, 1883, aged 36 years. Merritt Ellison Hollinssworth, son of Nathaniel and Alberta, born 1874, died November 19, 1883, aged 9 years. Jubil Cassell Hollinssworth, son of Nathaniel and Alberta, born 1876, died November 22, 1883, aged 7 years.
The fourth stone at the end of the row was smaller than the others. Its inscription read: Alberta Castle Hollinssworth, wife of Nathaniel, born 1852, died — and then no date. The space where the date should have been was blank.
Wit stood in the burying ground for a long time. He was a careful man and understood that a blank date on a 19th century family marker sometimes meant nothing at all — that the stone had been carved in advance and the family had never gotten around to filling in the final date, or the mason had died before he could return to do the work, or the family had moved away and left the stone as it was.
But he also understood that a blank date sometimes meant that the person named on the stone had never, in the estimation of whoever had commissioned the marker, actually died in the ordinary sense — that she had gone somewhere else, or been sent somewhere else, or refused to be recorded as gone at all.
He photographed the stone with his phone, walked back to his car, and drove to the courthouse. Charlene the clerk was on her lunch break. Wit waited on the wooden bench outside the record room for 20 minutes. When she came back and unlocked the door, he asked her if it was possible to look at the county's institutional records for the last two decades of the 19th century.
He explained what he meant: records of admission to the county poor farm, to the county infirmary, to the state hospital for the insane in Marion, to the almshouse system that had operated in Western Virginia in that period. Charlene told him most of those records had been transferred some years earlier to the Library of Virginia in Richmond, but that Grayson County had retained a partial index of the transfers, and that she could pull it for him if he could give her half an hour.
He gave her half an hour and drank a cup of vending machine coffee in the hallway. When she came back, she had a green cloth folder with a typed index inside, three pages long. The name Alberta Castle Hollinssworth appeared on the second page.
She had been admitted to the Western State Hospital for the Insane in Staunton, Virginia, on January 11, 1884, approximately seven weeks after the death of her second son. The admitting physician was a Dr. Paulgrave Whitmore. The presenting condition was recorded in the standardized language of the period as puerperal melancholia with mania, complicated by fixed delusions of a religious character. The referring authority was Dr. Absalom Reeves, the same coroner who had examined the bodies of her two children.
The index did not include the discharge date. It included only a small notation in the last column, in a different hand than the rest of the entries, which read: transferred to the custody of family, undated, no county destination given.
Wit drove home that night and wrote a letter to the Library of Virginia in Richmond requesting the full admission and case file for Alberta Cassell Hollinssworth from the Western State Hospital records, 1884 to 1890. Because the records were more than 125 years old, they were no longer protected under the state's medical privacy statutes, and he was entitled to view them upon written request and payment of a reproduction fee.
He mailed the letter on a Tuesday. He received a manila envelope three weeks later. Inside were 87 photocopied pages. He sat down at his kitchen table and began to read them one by one from the top of the stack down. His wife brought him a plate of dinner. He did not eat it. She brought him a plate of breakfast the next morning. He did not eat that either.
He read the 87 pages twice. Then he called a colleague at the University of North Carolina, a specialist in 19th century southern folk religion, and asked whether he could drive down to Chapel Hill the following week and show him something.
The 87 pages were divided roughly into three parts. The first 30 pages were the standard admission and intake documentation for a patient of the Western State Hospital in the 1880s: physical description, age and marital status, family history of nervous disease, presenting symptoms, and attending physicians' notes for the first month of confinement.
Alberta Hollinssworth, upon her arrival at the hospital in Staunton in the first week of January 1884, was described by Dr. Paulgrave Whitmore as a woman of medium stature, well nourished, of good complexion, with no visible physical abnormality but for a slight tremor in the fingers of both hands and an intermittent tic at the left corner of the mouth.
She was quiet in speech, orderly in manner, capable of answering questions put to her, and generally cooperative with the attendants. She was, in Dr. Whitmore's judgment, not in any acute state of danger to herself, and might, under other circumstances, have been considered a candidate for outpatient care. The reason for her admission, he wrote, was the nature and content of her delusions, and the fact that her family had refused to keep her in the house any longer.
The middle 40 pages of the file were Dr. Whitmore's clinical notes for the six months following her admission. He was a careful and thorough clinician, and he wrote almost every day.
Alberta was, throughout her first month at the hospital, entirely lucid on ordinary matters. She could give the day of the week and the date of the month. She could answer questions about her upbringing in Wythe County, her marriage to Nathaniel Hollinssworth in 1873, the births of her two sons, and the deaths of her husband and her children.
She spoke of these last three losses with what Dr. Whitmore described as a settled and terrible calm — without weeping, without pacing, without any of the outward signs of grief he had come to expect in his female patients admitted for melancholia. She said in the second week of January that she did not weep because she did not believe her children had gone anywhere from which weeping would recall them. She said in the third week of January that she knew where they were.
When Dr. Whitmore asked her to elaborate, she said they were in the walls of the house she had left behind. Dr. Whitmore made a note in the margin of the third week's page: "Delusion of concrete architectural location for the deceased. This is not unheard of in cases of extreme puerperal melancholia. Follow up on antecedents."
In the fourth week of January, he did follow up. He asked her why she believed the boys were in the walls of the house. She said, without hesitation, because she had put them there.
Dr. Whitmore, whose notes were customarily written in a clean copperplate, made an error at this point in the record, blotting a line and then striking it through and rewriting it. The rewritten line reads: "Patient states that she performed a ritual action upon the bodies of her sons prior to their laying out for the wake, and that this action did not accomplish what it was intended to accomplish, and that the consequence of its failure was that the spirits of her sons were now confined to the fabric of the family dwelling, from which they could not depart and to which she could not return."
Dr. Whitmore, who had been trained at the University of Virginia and had spent his professional life among mountain country patients whose beliefs he had learned to categorize and record without necessarily endorsing, treated this initially as a symbolic account. He interpreted it in his notes as a grief-driven metaphor. He wrote that Mrs. Hollinssworth appeared to be describing, in the folk idiom of her upbringing, the ordinary experience of a bereaved mother who feels her lost children in every room of the house they had lived in.
He prescribed the standard treatment of the period: rest, mild sedation, and moral persuasion. He assigned her to a ward with three other women of similar background. He noted her improvement over the course of February and early March.
On the 14th of March 1884, something happened at the Western State Hospital that Dr. Whitmore recorded in his notes at unusual length, occupying the better part of four pages. Alberta Hollinssworth, having been on the ward for approximately 10 weeks, had that morning been visited by her older sister, a woman named Rachel Castle Corvin, who had traveled from Wythe County to Staunton by rail to see her.
The visit had taken place in the hospital's family parlor, a room reserved for such purposes. It had lasted approximately 40 minutes. At the end of the visit, Rachel Corvin asked to speak privately with Dr. Whitmore. She told him three things in his office, with the door closed.
She told him first that she had been in the Hollinssworth farmhouse two days after the funeral of her nephews, and that she had seen something in the parlor that she wished to describe to him. She told him second that she had removed a small object from the hearth of the parlor that morning without telling her sister, and that she had kept it in her possession since then, and that she wanted him to see it.
She told him third that she was of the opinion, as the older sister who had known Alberta since infancy, that her sister was neither insane nor deluded, but that she was in a state Rachel Corvin herself could not name in ordinary language, and that this state had begun on the night between the death of Merritt and the death of Jubil, and that whatever the object was that she was about to hand to Dr. Whitmore, it had been made in that house on that night, and it had been made by Alberta.
Dr. Whitmore's notes go on to record that Rachel Corvin then took from her handbag a small folded square of what he identified as heavy black wool cord, tightly waxed, of a thickness he estimated at three sixty-fourths of an inch. The cord had been cut into two lengths, each of approximately five inches. On each length, at the midpoint, there was a small square knot.
Wrapped around the two lengths of cord was a folded piece of paper, brown with age at the edges, on which were written, in a hand Dr. Whitmore recognized as Alberta's own from the intake form she had signed, seven names: the names of her husband, the names of her two sons, the names of both of her parents, the name of her one surviving sister, Rachel, and the name of Rachel's oldest daughter, a girl of 11 named Susan.
The name of Rachel's daughter, Susan, had been struck through with a heavy line of the same brown ink used to write the other names. The line went through the entire name, from the first letter to the last. It had been drawn, Dr. Whitmore noted, with such force that the paper had been scored beneath the ink, and in one place had torn.
Rachel Corvin, sitting across from him in his office at the Western State Hospital in the third week of March 1884, explained what she believed the striking through of her daughter's name to mean. She believed it meant her sister, on the night between the death of her older son and the death of her younger son, had performed some version of the granny woman's binding ritual on her own, without any granny woman present.
In the desperation of that moment, believing she could not save Jubil by any ordinary means, she had attempted to substitute another name on the paper. She had tried to give the spirit of her dying second son another child to take with it, so that the spirit would not remain in the house, and so that the sickness that had killed her older boy would not come back for the younger one. The child she had named on the paper as the substitute was her own niece, Susan Corvin. And then, at some point between the writing of the name and the death of Jubil, she had struck the name out.
Rachel Corvin told Dr. Whitmore that she had not been in the Hollinssworth farmhouse on that night, and that no one had been in the house except Alberta and the two dying children, because the doctor and the neighbors and Rachel herself had all been sent home earlier in the evening by Alberta, who had said that she wished to sit up with her sons alone.
She told Dr. Whitmore that when she had returned to the house on the morning of November 23, the day after Jubil died, she had found her sister sitting in the parlor by the cold hearth, dressed in the same clothes she had been wearing the previous evening, holding in her lap the folded paper and the two lengths of cord, and unable to speak.
She had made her sister a cup of tea. In the ordinary act of cleaning the hearth of the previous day's ashes, she had seen the paper drop from her sister's lap onto the floor. She had picked it up. She had read it, and she had understood in that moment exactly what her sister had tried to do, and exactly why the striking out of her own daughter's name meant that Alberta had at the last possible moment changed her mind, and had let Jubil go instead of Susan.
But, Rachel Corvin said — and here Dr. Whitmore noted that her voice had dropped in his office to a whisper he could barely record — there was one thing more. She had taken the paper from the parlor and put it in her handbag without telling her sister. She had ridden home that afternoon to the Corvin farm, 11 miles south.
She had gone into her own house, and her own daughter, Susan, ordinarily a well and vigorous child of 11, had come to the door with her arms held oddly at her sides. Rachel had asked her what was the matter with her arms. Susan had rolled up the sleeves of her dress, and around each of her wrists, at exactly the same point on the forearm, there had been a thin red mark — a perfectly circular abrasion, unbroken, of a thickness Susan could not explain and had not felt appear, that had been there when Susan had woken up that morning in her own bed, in her own room, in her own house, 11 miles from the Hollinssworth farm.
Susan Corvin had not been in the Hollinssworth house on the night in question. She had not been out of her own bed. She had not touched any cord or any paper. But the marks were there.
Rachel Corvin, sitting in Dr. Whitmore's office at the Western State Hospital, told him that the marks had lasted for three days on her daughter's wrists and had then faded, leaving no scar. She told him that in the 12 years since November 1883, her daughter Susan had grown into a healthy young woman of 23, had married a man from Marion, had borne two healthy children of her own, and had never again shown any sign of illness or of the marks reappearing.
But Rachel herself had never gone back into the Hollinssworth farmhouse. When she had gone to Grayson County to arrange her sister's admission to the state hospital, she had made the arrangements from the front porch of the house and had not gone inside. Neither she nor any member of the extended family had spent a single night under the Hollinssworth roof since the night the two boys had died.
Dr. Whitmore, in his notes at the end of that afternoon's entry, wrote a paragraph that in the context of the other pages in the file is startling. He wrote that he did not know what to make of Mrs. Corvin's account. He wrote that he had known Mrs. Corvin for only 40 minutes, and that in that time she had impressed him as a woman of perfect composure and no discernible tendency to the fantastic.
He wrote that he had, at his own request, kept the cord and the paper Mrs. Corvin had brought him, and had placed them in a locked drawer of his desk. He wrote that he intended over the coming weeks to speak to his patient, Mrs. Hollinssworth, about the objects, and to see whether her account of the night of November 22 would accord with her sister's account of what had been found in the parlor the following morning.
And he wrote finally that he had, in that afternoon session, formed for the first time the impression that his patient's condition might not be, in the strict clinical sense, a delusion at all. That it might instead be a memory of an act she had in fact committed. And that the psychiatric symptoms he was observing might be the ordinary consequences, in a woman of her upbringing and belief, of having believed herself for a period of some hours to have successfully done what she had set out to do, and then discovering by the fact that her son died anyway that she had not.
The remaining 17 pages of the file, covering the period from March 1884 to the following July, contained Dr. Whitmore's continued observations. Alberta Hollinssworth's condition deteriorated steadily through April and May. She became less communicative. She stopped eating for periods of three and four days at a time.
In early June, she began to spend long hours seated on the floor of her ward in a corner facing the wall, with her palms pressed flat against the plaster at approximately the height at which her sons' shoulders would have been if they had been standing beside her. She would remain in this position for eight and ten hours at a stretch. She would not respond when spoken to.
On the 6th of July, at the request of her sister and after consultation with the hospital superintendent, she was discharged from the Western State Hospital and released to the custody of Rachel Corvin. There was no notation of a destination.
Dr. Whitmore's final entry, written the morning of the discharge, is one sentence. It reads: "I do not believe this patient will be seen alive again by any member of my staff, and I do not believe she will be found where her family is going to look for her."
The colleague at the University of North Carolina was a Dr. Ansel Poindexter, professor emeritus of religious studies, who had spent his career among the small Presbyterian and Primitive Baptist communities of the North Carolina and Virginia mountain counties, documenting the vernacular death practices that had survived in odd and marginal forms into the 20th century.
Douglas Wit drove to Chapel Hill in the second week of March 2020, arriving at the small brick house on Boundary Street where Poindexter had lived alone since his wife's death six years earlier. Poindexter was 83 years old. He was mostly blind.
He listened to Wit read the 87 pages of Dr. Whitmore's notes aloud over the course of two long afternoons, sitting in his armchair with his hands folded in his lap. He did not interrupt, except once, when Wit reached the passage about the paper with the seven names and the striking out of Susan Corvin's name. At that point, Poindexter raised one thin hand and said, "Please stop for a moment." Wit stopped. Poindexter sat for perhaps half a minute without speaking, then said, "Please go on."
At the end of the second afternoon, when Wit had finished the reading and had shown Poindexter, through a magnifier, the digital scan of the Hollinssworth photograph enlarged to four times its original size on a laptop screen, Poindexter said he had a folder in his study upstairs that he had been keeping for many years, and that he wanted his housekeeper to bring it down.
The housekeeper brought it down. It was a thin manila folder with the word Hollinssworth written on the tab in blue ink in Poindexter's own hand, though the handwriting was of a much younger man than the one now sitting in the armchair.
Inside the folder were four typed pages, prepared in 1978, based on interviews Poindexter had conducted in the late 1960s with an elderly Grayson County woman named Bethesda Marian Ash, who had died in 1972 at the age of 94, and who had been, as a young girl of 13 in the summer of 1884, one of the neighbors who had helped Rachel Corvin close up the Hollinssworth farmhouse in the weeks after Alberta was discharged from the state hospital.
According to Bethesda Ash's account, transcribed by Poindexter in 1978, Rachel Corvin had come to the Hollinssworth farm on the 12th of July 1884 with a wagon and two hired men, intending to take her sister to live at the Corvin farm in Wythe County. She had not brought Alberta into the house. She had gone into the house alone. She had spent perhaps 20 minutes inside.
She had come back out and told the men to load into the wagon the two cedar trunks from the attic, one small chest of drawers from the parlor, and a family Bible from the mantel. She had told them to leave everything else.
She had then, in Bethesda Ash's presence, done something the 13-year-old Bethesda had watched from the far side of the yard and had never forgotten. She had walked the perimeter of the house once with a bucket of dry salt taken from the smokehouse, pouring a thin, unbroken line of salt along the foundation, closing the line where it met itself at the corner nearest the front door.
She had then stood at the front door, taken from her pocket a small object which the young Bethesda could not see clearly at that distance, and pressed it against the door for perhaps a count of 10. She had then walked back to the wagon, climbed onto the seat next to her sister, taken the reins from the hired man, and driven away without looking back.
The Hollinssworth farmhouse, according to the four typed pages, had remained standing but unoccupied for the next 51 years. No one from Grayson County had ever attempted to buy or rent it. The land around it had been leased for pasture by a neighbor.
Twice, in 1891 and again in 1906, itinerant tenants unfamiliar with the local history had moved into the house without knowledge of what had happened there. Both families had left within a week of moving in, and neither family had ever spoken publicly about their reasons for leaving.
In the spring of 1935, the house burned to the ground during a lightning storm, and the stone foundation was all that remained by the time the young Bethesda Ash, now a woman of 64, had walked the property with her nephew and told him the story that would eventually reach Ansel Poindexter 30 years later.
Bethesda had ended her account with a single detail that Poindexter had underlined in his own hand in blue ink at the bottom of the last typed page. She told him that on the morning after the fire in 1935, when the neighbors had walked over to inspect the ruins, they had found in the center of the parlor foundation, in the ash, two small square knots of black wool cord, tightly bound, unburned, sitting on the hearthstone, as though they had been placed there that morning.
Poindexter, having finished the reading of the four typed pages, told Wit that he had never published the account and had never included it in any of the four books he had written on southern mourning practices, because he had never been able to corroborate any element of it against a second source.
He had assumed for the entirety of the last 42 years of his life that Bethesda Ash, though a lucid and generally reliable informant, had confused or embellished the story in the way old people sometimes did with the frightening tales of their own childhoods. He had put the folder in the drawer of his desk and had rarely thought about it.
He now believed, having heard Wit's account of the hospital records and having seen the photograph, that Bethesda Ash had told him the exact truth — that she had witnessed it in the summer of 1884, and that the reason he had never found a corroborating source in 40 years of subsequent research was that no other person present at the closing up of the Hollinssworth house had ever, under any circumstance, spoken about it to any outsider.
Poindexter asked at the very end of the second afternoon whether Wit intended to publish what he had found. Wit said he did not know. Poindexter said, in a voice quieter than any he had used all day, that he had one further suggestion, which he offered in the spirit of a man who had reached the end of his own working life and no longer had any professional interest to protect.
He suggested that Wit not, under any circumstances, hang the enlargement of the Hollinssworth photograph on any wall of his own house. He suggested that Wit keep the original in the archival sleeve, in the archival box, in a closet with the door closed. He suggested that Wit not, if he could avoid it, look at the photograph after the sun went down.
And he suggested, most seriously of all, that Wit make no attempt to find or contact any living descendant of Rachel Corvin's daughter Susan — whose name had been written on the paper in Alberta Hollinssworth's own hand in November 1883 and then struck out at the last moment, in the last possible act of mercy a mother who had already lost everything could make.
Douglas Wit drove home from Chapel Hill on a Friday. He arrived in Salem, Virginia, after dark. His wife had gone to visit her sister in Roanoke for the weekend. The house was empty.
He went into his study. He took the archival box containing the Hollinssworth photograph off the shelf where he had kept it since December, and placed it inside a second, larger archival box, which he sealed with acid-free tape. He took that second box down to the basement and put it on the highest shelf of the utility closet. He closed the closet door and did not touch the box again for four months.
He did not, however, follow Poindexter's other recommendation. He did make an attempt to find the living descendants of Susan Corvin. He told himself he was doing this in the interest of thorough historical research. He believed this at the time. He no longer believes it now.
Susan Corvin, born in 1872 in Wythe County, had married a man named Whitaker Leman of Smyth County, Virginia, in 1893, and had borne him five children between 1894 and 1906. She had died in 1941 at the age of 69 of complications from pneumonia.
Her five children had scattered across Virginia and West Virginia in the first half of the 20th century, and their children in turn had scattered further. The line at this point comprised, on paper, somewhere between 40 and 60 living descendants distributed across seven states.
Wit spent the spring of 2020 working through the genealogy on a subscription database. By the beginning of May, he had assembled a partial family tree that included the names, current addresses, and telephone numbers of 11 of Susan Leman's great-grandchildren, most of them in their 50s and 60s, most of them living within a few hundred miles of the original Corvin farm in Wythe County.
He began calling them one at a time in the second week of May. The first six he reached had never heard of Alberta Hollinssworth. They knew, in the vague way that most Americans know their family history, that they had ancestors who had lived in the mountain counties of Virginia in the 19th century. One of them had in fact done a fair amount of genealogical work on the Corvin line. But none had heard the name Hollinssworth in any family context, and none had ever been told about a great-grandmother named Susan who had been marked on the wrists by something invisible for three days when she was 11 years old.
The seventh person Wit called was a woman named Eileen Leman Whitel, aged 68, living in Bristol, Tennessee. She was the granddaughter of Susan Leman's third child, a son named Rufus. Wit introduced himself, explained that he was a researcher studying 19th century southern death practices, and mentioned that he had come across her great-grandmother's name in a set of hospital records from 1884.
Eileen Whitel listened without speaking. When he had finished, she said, "Hold on. I need to sit down." Then she said, "Please tell me your name again and where you live and how I can reach you back, because I am going to hang up now and I am going to think about this for a day, and then I am going to call you tomorrow evening and we are going to have a longer conversation."
She called him back the following evening at 7:14 p.m. Eastern time. She spoke for two hours and 11 minutes.
She told him that her grandfather, Rufus Leman, had in the late 1940s told her father, on his own deathbed, a story about his mother, Susan, that her father had never repeated to anyone else in the family until he himself was dying, in 1996, in a hospice in Kingsport.
She told Wit that her father, on that last night, had told her three things. She was not going to tell Wit all three of them — not on a telephone, not to a man she had never met. But she was going to tell him one of them, because she believed, based on what he had described about the Hollinssworth photograph, that he was already close enough to the truth that the one thing she was about to tell him would not surprise him.
What her father had told her on that last night in Kingsport in 1996 was that his grandmother, Susan Leman, had on three separate occasions in her adult life been photographed with her own children in the standard family portrait style of the era. Once in 1899, when her oldest child turned five. Once in 1904, when her third child was born. And once in 1915, when the whole family sat for a formal group portrait in a studio in Marion, Virginia, before her oldest son left for the army.
All three photographs still existed. All three were in the possession of Eileen Whitel, in a box in her hall closet in Bristol. And in all three photographs, if you looked at Susan Leman's wrists under sufficient magnification, at exactly the same point on each forearm at which the marks had appeared for three days in November 1883, you could see, faintly but unmistakably, a thin white line of scar tissue. The marks had faded. They had not gone away.
Eileen Whitel told Wit that her father had told her that his grandmother Susan had lived her entire adult life with the awareness that, at the age of 11, on a morning in November 1883, she had been offered by her own aunt as a substitute for a dying cousin, and that the offer had been rescinded at the last moment, and that she had been permitted to live only because her aunt Alberta had, at the final second, been unable to complete what she had begun.
She told Wit that her father had told her that his grandmother had lived every day of her life afterward with the belief that something was owed — that she had been let off a debt she had not incurred, and that the letting off had been provisional, not permanent. That someone somewhere in her line, in some generation, not necessarily her own, was going to be called to account for the mercy Alberta Hollinssworth had shown on that November morning. And that this was the reason her father had told her the story on his own deathbed: because he wanted her to know before he died that the debt had not yet come due in his lifetime, and might come due in hers, and might yet come due in her children's or her grandchildren's.
Douglas Wit hung up the phone with Eileen Whitel at 9:25 in the evening of the second Wednesday of May 2020. He sat at his desk for perhaps 10 minutes without moving. He then went into the kitchen, poured himself a glass of bourbon, which he did not ordinarily drink at that hour, and carried it back into his study. His wife was reading a book in the living room. He could hear the sound of her turning the pages through the open door.
He sat back down at his desk and opened, for the first time in almost four months, the manila folder in which he had been keeping his working notes on the Hollinssworth case since the previous December.
The next morning at 7:00, before his wife had come downstairs, he went into the basement and took the sealed archival box off the top shelf of the utility closet. He carried it up to his study. He cut the acid-free tape with a small pair of scissors. He removed the inner archival box. He removed the archival sleeve. He removed the photograph.
He put it flat on his desk under the desk lamp. He got out his loupe and looked once more at the two boys standing on either side of their mother in the morning parlor of a photographer named Ellsworth Reamer in Independence, Virginia, on a Saturday afternoon in late April 1883 — six days after their father had been buried, and seven months before both of them would themselves be dead.
He looked at their wrists. The marks were still there. They had not moved. They had not faded. They had not, of course, changed at all.
But something else had changed. Wit was certain of this. He had, in the previous four months, looked at the enlargement of the photograph on his corkboard hundreds of times, and at the digital scan on his laptop and on his phone even more often than that. He was as familiar with every detail of the image as he had ever been with any 19th century photograph in his 40-year career.
And on the morning of the second Thursday of May 2020, sitting in his study in Salem, Virginia, looking at the original cabinet card under the desk lamp with the same jeweler's loupe he had first used in December, he saw something in the background of the photograph that he was certain — absolutely certain — had not been there before.
Behind the mother and to her left, at a distance of perhaps three feet from her shoulder, painted onto the studio backdrop that Ellsworth Reamer had used for his mourning portraits in the early 1880s, was the outline of a door frame. Wit had noticed the door frame on his very first examination of the photograph. It was a standard element of the painted backdrop, a piece of illusionistic architecture meant to give the sitters something to stand in front of.
The door frame was open. That is, the door itself was not shown. What was shown was the frame. And inside the frame, the painted suggestion of a darkened room beyond.
In the painted darkened room beyond the door frame, on the morning of the second Thursday of May 2020, there was standing the outline of a small figure. It was a child. It was standing perhaps three-quarters turned toward the camera. It was of the same approximate height as the older of the two boys standing in front of it, and on each of its wrists, at the same point on each forearm, there was a small dark mark.
Wit looked at this figure for a long time. He compared it against the enlargement on the corkboard, which had been printed in December. The figure was not visible in the enlargement. It was not visible in the digital scan on his laptop, which he opened and examined on the same desk under the same lamp with the same magnification. It was visible only in the original cabinet card, and only as far as he could determine by tilting the card slightly under the lamp at a specific angle of incidence of the light.
He sat with the card in his hand for perhaps half an hour. He did not call his wife. He did not call Eileen Whitel back. He did not call Ansel Poindexter, who would in fact die of a stroke the following November, before Wit had a chance to tell him what he had seen.
He put the photograph back into the archival sleeve. He put the sleeve back into the archival box. He put the box back into the second archival box. He carried the box back down to the basement and put it back on the top shelf of the utility closet. He closed the closet door. He went back upstairs. He made himself a cup of coffee. He sat at the kitchen table until his wife came down at 8:00, and she asked him how he had slept, and he told her that he had slept fine. He did not say anything else about it to her that day, or the next day, or in any of the days that followed.
Douglas Wit is, as of the recording of this account, still alive. He is 72 years old. He lives in the same house in Salem, Virginia. The Hollinssworth photograph is still in the archival box in the utility closet in his basement. He has not looked at it since the morning of the second Thursday of May 2020.
He has, in the years since, done no further research on the Hollinssworth family. He has not contacted Eileen Whitel again, though she has on two occasions called him, and he has on both occasions let her calls go to voicemail and has not returned them. He has told his wife that he intends in his will to leave the photograph to a specific museum collection in North Carolina, on the condition that it be kept in permanent storage and never exhibited to the public. He has not told her why.
The four other photographs Douglas Wit identified in the second week of December 2019 — the ones from Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Missouri, and North Carolina — are all still, as far as anyone knows, in the collections where he first located them.
The Adah Sturmer portrait remains in a private holding in Lancaster County. The Sarah Elmyra Nunnaly portrait remains in the storage of a small local history museum in Sevier County, Tennessee, cataloged but not on display. The Cordelia Rush portrait is on the genealogy website in Missouri, viewable by anyone with a paid subscription, tagged simply as "widow and son, 1881, Ripley County." The Mahala Gwin Loftton portrait is in a filing cabinet in the North Carolina State Archives, in a folder that has been opened, according to the checkout log, four times in the last 30 years. One of those four times was by Wit himself, in the first week of January 2020.
None of the four photographs has, to Wit's knowledge, been examined for the same anomaly he observed in the Hollinssworth image. He has not, in his own words, been able to bring himself to look.
But the 68 other coroner's entries in Dr. Meredith Boon's 2011 paper suggest that there are at minimum 68 other households in the Blue Ridge and Central Appalachian counties in which, between 1872 and 1891, a mother of a dying child took up a length of black wool cord and a small pair of iron scissors and a folded piece of paper, and did what the granny woman was supposed to have done — and did it either well or badly, and left behind a set of marks on the wrists of the dead child that a rural coroner found strange enough to write down, but not strange enough to investigate.
Boon's paper listed the 68 cases only by their date and county. She did not, in the paper, provide the names of the deceased children or of the surviving parents, out of respect for their descendants. Her research files, which Wit reviewed in the college archive in Berea, do contain those names. Wit has not compiled them into any list. He has not attempted to trace any of the 68 cases. He has, in his own account, made a decision that the work is not his to do — and that the reason it is not his to do is that once a person has looked at the Hollinssworth photograph the way he has looked at it, one time is enough for a lifetime.
The mourning portrait tradition of the American 19th century was already a strange one by the standards of our own moment. The idea that you would sit for a formal photograph with your recently deceased spouse or child — sometimes with the corpse propped up, sometimes with the corpse in the coffin — so that you might have a permanent visual record of a face that would soon be beyond the reach of memory, is a practice that seems to us now to belong to a foreign country, though it was our own country only 140 years ago.
Most of these photographs are, when you know what you are looking at, simply what they appear to be: a grief-stricken family, a dead loved one, a fixed record. But some small number of them, in the mountain counties of the upper South, are something else. They are photographs taken in the presence of an act, or of the memory of an act, that the family sitting for the portrait had reason to hope no one would ever notice.
The mark on the wrists of the children in those photographs is the physical trace of that act, left on the plate because the photographer did not know it was there, and preserved through 140 years of storage in cedar-lined trunks in attic rooms in county after county — waiting for someone with a jeweler's loupe and 40 years of experience and enough time on a Tuesday evening in December to notice.
Douglas Wit looked once, on a Tuesday evening in December 2019, at a photograph he had bought at an estate auction for $140. He has not slept a full night through, by his own report, in the years since. He has said that if he had it to do over again, he would have cataloged the cabinet card as a family group, mother and two sons, circa 1883, and shelved it in the archival box in his study, and moved on to the next acquisition, and died an old and happy man in his own bed sometime in the middle of the next decade.
He does not now expect to die in his own bed. He does not, he has said, expect the debt that Susan Corvin was let off from in November 1883 to remain unpaid forever. He believes only that he has moved himself closer to the front of the line by looking — and that once you have looked, you cannot go back.
The photograph is small, four and a quarter inches by six and a half. A woman in a black dress, her two sons on either side of her, all three looking at the camera with the patient, blank expression of people who have been told not to move. Their mother's hands rest on their shoulders. It is, on any first inspection, an ordinary portrait.
Look at their wrists.