On a humid August morning in 1855, a child appeared on the auction block in Savannah, Georgia, and no one wanted to buy him. His pale skin and colorless eyes suggested he was cursed, dangerous, a bearer of bad luck no plantation owner would dare bring onto his property. Bidding began at $20, then $15, then $10.
Finally, for just $5, one woman raised her fan. Margaret Dunore, a widow who owned 4,000 acres of land 12 miles outside the city, donated $12 from what she called Christian charity. The crowd applauded her generosity. They didn’t know that Margaret had been searching for just such a child for three years. They couldn’t have imagined that over the next 14 years, 73 people would disappear from her property.
Their fate was documented in ledgers that local authorities supposedly burned in 1861.
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