This 1903 portrait of a waitress looks polite until you notice the menu code.
It seemed like a straightforward studio portrait.
At first, a young black woman in a crisp white apron.
Her posture careful, her expression composed, the kind of image that ends up in local history books captioned, “Service industry workers, turn of the century.
” But one detail in the lower left corner of the frame would not let the investigator go.
And once she understood what she was seeing, a photograph that had been displayed for decades as a charming piece of Americana revealed itself as something else entirely.
A survival manual, a warning system, and evidence of a hidden network that helped black workers navigate a world designed to trap them.
Karen Blackwell had been the assistant curator of photography at a small regional history museum in Savannah, Georgia for 11 years.
The museum occupied a former cotton merchants’s house on a quiet square, the kind of building that had been renovated twice and still creaked when it rained.
Karen’s specialty was vernacular photography of the deep south between reconstruction and the First World War.
She had handled thousands of images in her career, portraits of families posed stiffly in their Sunday clothes, street scenes where black laborers were captured midstride, their faces blurred because the photographer had not bothered to ask them to hold still.
cabinet cards of white children with their black mammies, the enslaved or formerly enslaved women positioned slightly behind, their expressions unreadable.
She knew the visual grammar of this era intimately.
She knew how power arranged itself in the frame, who was centered and who was cropped, whose name was recorded and whose was not.
So when the Tilman estate donation arrived in the spring of 2019, she approached it with the same mixture of professional interest and ethical exhaustion she brought to all such collections.
The Tilmans had been one of Savannah’s prominent families.
Their money rooted in rice and cotton before the war, then in banking and real estate after.
The donation included ledgers, correspondents, and three boxes of photographs spanning from the 1870s to the 1940s.
Most of the images were exactly what Karen expected.
Formal portraits of Tilman patriarchs with their watch chains and stern expressions.
Women in elaborate dresses seated in parlors.
Children with toys that cost more than a laborer’s monthly wage.
But in the third box, tucked between a faded wedding portrait and a damaged tint type, she found something different.
The photograph was a studio portrait approximately 5×7 in mounted on thick card stock.
The subject was a young black woman, perhaps 20 years old, wearing the uniform of a waitress, a dark dress with a high collar, a white apron, a small white cap.
She stood beside a tall plant stand that held a potted fern, one of the standard props photographers used to fill empty space in portraits.
Her hands were clasped in front of her.
Her chin was slightly lifted.
She looked directly at the camera with an expression that Karen, after years of studying such images, could only describe as deliberate.
Not defiant, not submissive, deliberate.
Karin set the photograph under her desk lamp and reached for her magnifying loop.
The studio name was stamped in gold on the cardboard mount.
J.
Peton and son Savannah.
A date was handwritten in pencil on the back.
March 1903.
There was no name for the subject.
This was not unusual.
Black subjects in this era were rarely named in studio records unless they were paying customers, and even then, the records were often incomplete or lost.
What caught Karen’s attention was not the woman’s face, though she would return to it many times.
It was the object in the lower left corner of the frame, resting on what appeared to be a small side table.
A menu printed on heavy paper, folded once, the kind of menu a hotel dining room or upscale restaurant might use.
It was positioned casually as if it had been set down there by accident.
But Karen had seen enough staged photographs to know that nothing in a professional studio portrait was accidental.
Every object was chosen and placed.
She adjusted her loop and leaned closer.
The menu was partially open and she could make out text printed in an ornate type face.
At first, it looked like a standard bill of fair.
But as her eyes moved down the visible column, she noticed something strange.
The prices were wrong.
Not wrong in the sense of being historically inaccurate.
Wrong in the sense of being impossible.
A cup of coffee listed at $1.
75.
A slice of pie at 32.
A bowl of soup at $03.
In 1903, a cup of coffee at even the finest hotel in Savannah would have cost 5 or 10 cents.
These numbers made no sense as prices unless they were not prices at all.
Karen sat down her loop and sat back.
Her office was quiet except for the hum of the climate control system.
She looked at the woman in the photograph, at her careful posture and her deliberate expression, and she felt something shift in her understanding of what she was seeing.
This was not just a pretty old photograph.
Something here was wrong.
For the next several weeks, Karen worked on the Tilman collection during her regular hours, but found herself returning to the waitress portrait in the evenings and on weekends.
She began by researching the photographer.
Jay Peton and Sons had operated a studio on Brotton Street from 1889 to 1921.
The business had been moderately successful, catering primarily to white middle-class families, but also, according to a few surviving advertisements offering portrait services for colored patrons by appointment.
This was not unusual for the era.
Some white-owned studios would photograph black customers, typically scheduling them for early morning or late evening sessions to avoid mixing their clientele.
Peton’s records had been partially preserved in the collection of a local historical society.
Karen spent two afternoons going through appointment books and receipt ledgers, searching for any entry from March 1903 that might correspond to the waitress portrait.
She found nothing.
No name, no payment record, no notation.
The photograph appeared to have been made without leaving any trace in the studio’s books.
She turned next to the Tilman family papers, hoping to find some explanation for why this portrait had ended up in their collection.
The Tilmans had owned several properties in Savannah, including a hotel on Bay Street that had operated from 1892 to 1937.
The hotel had employed dozens of black workers as cooks, porters, maids, and waitresses.
Perhaps the woman in the photograph had worked there.
But the hotel’s employment records were incomplete.
What survived consisted mostly of payroll summaries that listed workers by first name only along with occasional disciplinary notes.
Mary warned for lateness.
Bessie docked half day for breakage.
Celia dismissed for insolence.
The names floated without context attached to no faces, no histories, no families.
Karen reached out to Dr.
Dr.
Yolanda Freeman, a historian at Spellelman College, whose work focused on black labor and resistance in the postreonstruction south.
She sent Dr.
Freeman a highresolution scan of the photograph and explained her confusion about the menu prices.
3 days later, Dr.
Freeman called her.
Those aren’t prices, Dr.
Freeman said.
They’re addresses, or rather, they’re a system for encoding addresses.
I’ve seen something like this before in a collection of papers from a black mutual aid society in Charleston.
The numbers correspond to street intersections in a grid system.
The decimal point separates the east west coordinate from the north south coordinate.
Karen felt a prickle along the back of her neck.
So $175 would be first street and 75th block or more likely some local variation.
Every city had its own grid logic.
You’d need to know Savannah’s street layout in 1903 to decode it, but the principle is the same.
This menu isn’t advertising food.
It’s advertising locations, safe houses maybe, or employers to avoid, or places where a black worker could find help.
After the call, Karen pulled up historical maps of Savannah and began cross referencing.
The city’s grid was famously regular, organized around a series of squares.
If she assumed that the first number before the decimal indicated a north south street and the numbers after indicated an east west block, some of the prices on the menu corresponded to actual addresses.
On 75 cent mapped to a location near the corner of Lincoln Street and east broad $320 was close to a spot on West Ogulthorp.
Zuru $3 was harder to interpret, possibly a shorthand for a third location or a different kind of marker entirely.
She photographed the menu section under higher magnification and noticed something else.
Some of the items had small symbols printed beside them.
A tiny cross next to the coffee, a small star next to the pie, a circle next to the soup.
The symbols were easy to miss, no larger than the punctuation marks in the type face, but they were clearly intentional.
Karen began to suspect that she was looking at a coded directory of some kind.
A guide for black workers in Savannah that had been hidden in plain sight, disguised as a prop in a portrait that no one would think twice about examining closely.
But a directory of what? Safe houses for workers fleeing abusive employers, locations where one could find legal help or medical care, meeting places for a mutual aid network.
She needed more context.
She needed to understand what life was like for a black waitress in Savannah in 1903.
what dangers she faced and what kinds of networks might have existed to help her survive.
The world that Karen uncovered in her research was one of pervasive and systematic exploitation.
By 1903, the promises of reconstruction had long since collapsed.
Black Southerners were trapped in a legal and economic system designed to keep them in positions of dependency and vulnerability.
Vagrancy laws made it a crime to be unemployed, giving police the authority to arrest any black person who could not prove they had a job.
Convict leasing sent those arrested into labor camps where they worked in mines, on railroads, and on farms under conditions that often killed them.
Debt ponage tied workers to employers through manufactured debts that could never be repaid.
For black women, the dangers were compounded by gender.
Domestic service and restaurant work were among the few employment options available, but both placed women in close proximity to white employers and customers who felt entitled to their bodies.
Sexual harassment and assault were endemic, and reporting such crimes was effectively impossible.
A black woman who accused a white man faced not justice, but retaliation, loss of employment, arrest on trumped up charges, violence.
Dr.
Freeman put Karen in touch with Dr.
Marcus Holloway, an archavist at the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, who specialized in black benevolent societies and mutual aid organizations.
Dr.
Holloway had spent decades studying the networks that black communities built to survive under Jim Crowe.
And when Karen sent him the photograph, he recognized the menu immediately.
This is a route card, he said.
Not exactly like the ones used during slavery, but the same principle.
During the antibbellum period, the Underground Railroad used all kinds of coded systems, quilts, songs, hand signals.
After emancipation, those networks didn’t disappear.
They adapted.
Black communities in the south developed their own systems for sharing information about which employers were safe, which boarding houses would take you in, which doctors would treat you fairly, which neighborhoods to avoid.
He explained that root cards were particularly common among service workers who moved between chess cities for seasonal employment.
A waitress or cook might work in Savannah in the winter, then move to a resort town in the summer, then relocate again in the fall.
Each move was dangerous.
Without connections, a worker could end up in a labor contract that amounted to slavery, or in a boarding house that was actually a front for prostitution, or in a job where wages were stolen and complaints were met with violence.
The symbols you’re seeing, Dr.
Holloway continued, those would be quality indicators.
A cross might mean the location is connected to a church.
A star might mean it’s highly recommended.
A circle might mean caution is needed.
The exact meanings would have been shared within specific networks.
You’d learn the code from a trusted person, not from a printed guide.
Karen asked the obvious question.
Why would someone put this information in a photograph? Portability.
Dr.
Holloway said.
A menu in a photograph looks like decoration.
It looks like nothing.
A worker could carry this portrait in her luggage and no one would look twice.
If she was searched by police or inspected by an employer, it was just a picture.
But if she knew how to read it, it was a map of safe passage.
Karen returned to the photograph with new eyes.
The woman’s deliberate expression now seemed less like careful neutrality and more like a message.
She had posed for this portrait, knowing what it contained.
She had looked into the camera and let herself be recorded holding evidence of a secret network, trusting that whoever received this image would understand.
But who was she? Karen had been calling her the waitress for weeks.
But the woman had a name, a history, a life beyond this single image.
Finding her became an obsession.
The breakthrough came from an unexpected source.
Karen had posted a query on a genealogy form used by researchers tracing African-American family histories, describing the photograph and asking if anyone recognized the coding system.
A woman named Denise Watkins responded.
She was a retired school teacher from Atlanta whose grandmother had worked as a cook in Savannah in the early 1900s.
Denise had inherited a collection of papers and photographs that had been passed down through her family, and she recognized the symbols on the menu.
My grandmother used to talk about the guide, Denise wrote.
She said it was how black folks knew where to go when they were traveling.
She had a copy of something similar, but it was destroyed in a house fire in 1947.
I never knew exactly what it looked like until I saw your picture.
Denise’s grandmother’s name was Ida May Watkins.
She had been born in 1881 in rural Georgia and moved to Savannah as a teenager to find work.
According to family stories, she had been part of a network of black women who helped each other find safe employment and housing.
The network had no formal name, but its members sometimes called it the sisterhood or the chain.
Karen asked Denise if her grandmother had ever mentioned anyone who might match the description of the woman in the photograph.
Denise searched through her papers and found a letter dated 1952 written by Ida May to her daughter.
In it, Ida May mentioned a woman named Pearl who had worked with her at the Tilman Hotel and who had been the one who made the pictures that kept us safe.
Pearl.
It was not much, but it was a name.
Karen returned to the Tilman Hotel records with renewed focus.
She found three women named Pearl in the payroll summaries from 1900 to 1910.
Pearl J, who worked as a laundress, Pearl M, who worked in the kitchen, and Pearl T, who worked as a waitress from 1901 to 1905.
The dates matched.
Pearl T had been employed at the hotel when the photograph was taken.
Further searching turned up a single additional reference.
In 1903, a woman named Pearl Thompson was mentioned in the Savannah Tribune, one of the city’s black newspapers, as having contributed to a church fundraiser.
The notice listed her occupation as domestic and her residence as a boarding house on East Huntington Street.
Pearl Thompson.
Karen wrote the name in her notebook and underlined it three times.
She contacted the Savannah Chattam Metropolitan Police Department to request any historical records related to Pearl Thompson.
After several weeks and multiple follow-up emails, she received a reply.
There were no arrest records for anyone by that name.
But there was something else.
In January 1906, a complaint had been filed by a man named Gerald Tilman, a member of the hotel owning family, alleging that a former employee named Pearl T had stolen property from the hotel.
The complaint had been withdrawn a week later with no explanation.
Karen read the brief document several times.
Gerald Tilman had accused Pearl of theft, then dropped the accusation.
Why had Pearl paid him off? Had she fled before she could be arrested, or had something else happened? The answer came from Dr.
Freeman, who had continued her own research into the networks Dr.
Holloway had described.
She had found a reference to the Savannah sisterhood in the papers of a black Baptist church in Atlanta, where several women who had fled Savannah in the early 1900s had eventually settled.
One of the church’s oral histories recorded in the 1970s mentioned a woman named Pearl who had been run out of Savannah for helping girls escape.
The oral history was fragmentaryary, recorded from an elderly woman whose memory was fading, but it contained one crucial detail.
Pearl had not just helped women find safe employment.
She had helped them escape from specific situations, including forced labor and sexual coercion.
She had used her position at the hotel to identify which workers were most vulnerable and to connect them with resources.
The photographs she helped create were part of a larger system that included safe houses, legal assistance from sympathetic attorneys, and in extreme cases, organized escapes to other cities.
Gerald Tilman’s complaint suddenly made sense.
Pearl had been stealing, but not silverware or linens.
She had been stealing workers.
She had been helping black women leave situations that the Tilman family considered their property.
And when they realized what she was doing, they tried to have her arrested.
The withdrawn complaint suggested that Pearl had gotten away.
But where had she gone? And what had happened to the network she had helped build.
When Karen brought her findings to the museum’s director, Richard Carile, she expected interest, perhaps even excitement.
What she got instead was caution.
This is fascinating research, Richard said, leaning back in his chair.
But we need to think carefully about how we present it.
The Tilman family is still very prominent in Savannah.
Several of their descendants are major donors to this institution.
If we put up an exhibit that essentially accuses their ancestors of participating in forced labor.
I’m not accusing anyone, Karen said.
The records speak for themselves.
Gerald Tilman filed a complaint against a black worker who was helping other workers escape.
The system of exploitation is documented in the hotel’s own payroll records.
Women were docked wages for breakage and insolence, creating debts they could never repay.
That’s textbook ponage.
Interpretation.
Richard said these are historical practices that were legal at the time, common throughout the South.
I’m not defending them, but I’m also not sure it’s our place to single out one family.
We’re not singling them out.
We’re telling the story of a photograph that they donated to us.
A photograph that turns out to be evidence of black resistance to exactly the kind of system their ancestors benefited from.
That’s not accusation.
That’s history.
The meeting ended without resolution.
Richard asked Karen to prepare a written proposal outlining how an exhibit might be framed.
He would share it with the board of trustees for their input.
Karen spent 3 weeks on the proposal.
She included highresolution scans of the photograph, transcripts of relevant documents, statements from Dr.
Freeman and Dr.
Holloway about the significance of the find, and a detailed plan for an exhibit that would center Pearl Thompson’s story while placing it in the broader context of black survival networks under Jim Crowe.
She proposed reaching out to Denise Watkins and other descendants of women who had been part of the Savannah Sisterhood.
She suggested partnering with the local chapter of the NBA and with black history organizations that could help ensure the exhibit was developed with community input.
The board’s response came 6 weeks later.
They appreciated the research.
They recognized its historical importance, but they were not prepared to move forward with a full exhibit at this time.
Perhaps a small display case in the permanent collection with carefully worded interpretive texts that avoided naming specific families.
Perhaps a scholarly article in the museum’s quarterly journal which had a limited circulation.
Karin understood what was happening.
The museum was afraid.
Afraid of losing donors.
Afraid of controversy.
Afraid of being seen as taking sides in a culture war over how the South remembered its past.
The story of Pearl Thompson and the Savannah Sisterhood would be quietly filed away, acknowledged in principle, but never allowed to challenge the comfortable narratives the museum had built its reputation on.
She considered her options.
She could accept the compromise, publish the article, and hope that someday a braver institution would take up the cause, or she could find another way.
She chose another way.
Karen reached out to a journalist named Michael Chen, who wrote for a regional magazine focused on southern history and culture.
Michael had a reputation for stories that complicated the region’s dominant narratives, and he was immediately interested in Pearl Thompson.
Over the course of several months, Karen shared her research with him, introducing him to Dr.
Freeman, Dr.
Holloway, and Denise Watkins.
Michael conducted his own interviews in archival research, eventually producing a long- form article that told the full story.
The article, published in the spring of 2021, generated significant attention.
It was picked up by national outlets and shared widely on social media.
Historians praised its rigor.
Descendants of the Savannah sisterhood came forward with their own family stories, and several members of the Tilman family issued a public statement acknowledging that their ancestors had participated in systems of exploitation and expressing support for efforts to document this history.
The museum, facing pressure from both the public and from within its own staff, reversed course.
In the fall of 2022, they opened a new permanent exhibit focused on black labor and resistance in Savannah from 1865 to 1940.
The centerpiece of the exhibit was Pearl Thompson’s photograph displayed alongside the decoded menu, documents from the Tilman Hotel, oral histories from descendants, and a detailed explanation of how the sisterhood had operated.
The exhibit included a section where visitors could hear recorded excerpts from the oral histories Denise Watkins had helped collect.
One recording featured an elderly woman named Dorothy Ida May Watkins’s granddaughter, describing what her grandmother had told her about Pearl.
She said Pearl was the bravest person she ever knew.
Pearl had this way of looking at you that made you feel like you were worth something, like you mattered.
and she’d say, “The white folks think we’re furniture.
They think we don’t talk to each other, but we see everything and we tell each other everything and that’s how we survive.
” My grandmother kept a picture of Pearl her whole life, carried it with her everywhere.
She said it was her good luck charm.
She didn’t know about the code until much later, but when she found out, she wasn’t surprised.
She said Pearl was always hiding things in plain sight.
The exhibit also addressed what had happened to Pearl after she left Savannah.
Records from the Atlanta Baptist Church indicated that a woman matching her description had arrived in Atlanta in 1906 and worked as a seamstress for several years.
She married a man named Robert Lewis in 1910 and had two children.
She died in 1943 and was buried in Oakland Cemetery.
Her grave, located after months of searching by Denise Watkins and a team of volunteers, was marked with a simple headstone that gave only her married name, Pearl Lewis.
No one visiting the cemetery would have any idea who she had been or what she had done.
At the exhibit’s opening, Karen stood beside the photograph she had spent 3 years investigating.
Visitors moved past her, some lingering to read the interpretive panels, others pausing to listen to the audio recordings.
A few wept.
A young black woman stood in front of the photograph for nearly 10 minutes, not moving, just looking.
Later during the reception, Denise Watkins found Karen and embraced her.
“My grandmother would be so happy,” Denise said.
“She always said the truth would come out eventually.
She just didn’t live to see it.
” Karen thought about Pearl Thompson standing in that studio in 1903, looking into the camera with her deliberate expression.
She thought about the menu in the corner of the frame, hiding its secrets in plain sight.
She thought about all the people who had seen that photograph over the past century without ever realizing what it contained.
The image had been displayed in the Tilman family home for decades.
It had been donated to a museum and filed away in a box.
It had been labeled a charming period piece by curators who never thought to look closely.
And all that time it had been speaking.
It had been offering testimony.
It had been waiting for someone to ask the right questions.
That is the lesson buried in photographs like this one.
The images that fill our archives and museums are not passive records.
They are acts of communication shaped by the interests and assumptions of those who commissioned and created them.
But they are also sometimes acts of resistance.
The people who appear in them, especially those who were given the least power and the least voice, often found ways to inscribe their own messages.
A hand position that signals something the photographer did not intend.
An object placed just so, a gaze that refuses to be merely decorative.
Across the American South, in archives and atticss and museum basement, there are thousands of photographs like Pearl Thompsons, portraits of black workers who were supposed to be anonymous, voiceless, interchangeable.
Many of them contain details that have never been examined, codes that have never been broken, stories that have never been told.
The work of finding them, decoding them, and restoring the voices they contain is slow and painstaking.
It requires expertise and resources that are often in short supply.
It requires institutions willing to tell difficult truths, even when those truths upset donors and complicate comfortable narratives.
But it is work that matters because every time we recover one of these hidden stories, we push back against the eraser that the original photographers and commissioners intended.
We refuse to let the archive remain a monument to power.
We insist that the people who were supposed to be furniture, who were supposed to be invisible, who were supposed to leave no trace, were in fact there.
They saw everything.
They told each other everything.
And if we are willing to look closely, to ask the right questions, to listen to the testimonies they left behind, they will tell us, too.
The next time you see an old photograph in a museum, look past the central subject.
Look at the edges of the frame.
Look at the objects that seem like mere decoration, ask yourself what you might be missing.
Ask yourself who put this image together, and who might have found ways to put something in it that was never meant to be seen.
You may be surprised what you
