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Six people, one photograph.
A mystery that has haunted researchers for over a century.
Atlanta, Georgia, 1897.
Inside a prestigious photography studio on a crisp October afternoon, a prosperous black family arranges itself before the camera
The father, dressed in a perfectly tailored suit, stands with quiet authority.
The mother, elegant in a high- necked Victorian dress with fashionable sleeves, sits poised and dignified.
Their three older children position themselves carefully around their parents, expressions serious as the era demanded.
And there, seated in the mother’s lap, is a child who doesn’t seem to belong.
A small girl, perhaps six or seven years old, whose skin appears impossibly pale against her mother’s dark hands, whose hair gleams an inexplicable light blonde beneath its carefully tied ribbon, whose entire presence in this frame raises a question that no one, not the archivists who cataloged it, not the historians who studied it, not the genealogologists who referenced it, has ever been able to answer.
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