In the autumn of 1908, a crew of five men was pulling down the last remaining cabin on what had once been the Ravenel Bluff Plantation. Out in the South Carolina Lowcountry, they swung their crowbars into a wall that had been nailed shut, tar-coated, and whitewashed three separate times over 45 years. The man who had ordered it sealed back in March of 1863 had been dead a long while. His widow had passed the previous winter.
The property's deed had changed hands several times, and with each new owner, the former overseer of the Ravenel family assured them that the little cabin at the edge of the rice field could be demolished, but never, for any reason, opened. When the first board came loose that October afternoon, the four men stepped back as a smell rolled out into the pine-heavy air. Two of the younger workers crossed themselves. The oldest man among them, a freedman named Solomon Pinkney, born on a neighboring plantation in 1847, set down his crowbar and said very quietly that he had been waiting 45 years to learn what was on the other side of that wall.
What they discovered inside that cabin would later force a county coroner out of retirement, produce a series of newspaper articles that were pulled from print within 3 weeks, and uncover a crime the Ravenel family had spent two generations and a small fortune trying to bury behind pine boards and Sunday piety. To understand what lay behind that wall, we have to go back to the spring of 1849. When Ravenel Bluff was still considered one of the most prosperous rice plantations along the tidal stretch of the Combahee River, the plantation sat on a high bank of sandy loam overlooking nearly 300 acres of flooded rice fields, bordered to the east by a dense stand of cypress and live oak draped in Spanish moss, and to the west by a low tidal creek that filled and drained with the salt-pulled rhythm of the Atlantic. That spring, the Lowcountry air was thick with the smell of mud and blooming jessamine.
At night, the rice fields filled with the croaking of bullfrogs and the slow, steady clicking of rice birds coming down from the Carolina Piedmont to feed on the spring plantings. To the north, the Combahee River moved between its banks of blackwater and tangled palmetto. Its surface was broken every few yards by the log-still shapes of alligators sunning themselves in the long afternoon light. In the geography of the antebellum South, this was one of the richest stretches of land in the republic.
A single acre of rice at the price it commanded in the Charleston markets of 1849 was worth more than most free white farmers in the Upcountry earned in a year. The main house was a two-story Greek revival structure painted that particular shade of white that only the very wealthy could afford to maintain in that humid climate. Its columns were carved from heart pine, and its long verandas were shaded by the same live oaks that had already been old when the first European settlers passed through the region in the 1690s. The interior was furnished with pieces that Augustine Ravenel's grandfather had shipped in from Philadelphia and New Orleans: mahogany writing desks, a Broadwood pianoforte in the front parlor, and a sideboard of French walnut carried down from Richmond on a coastal schooner in 1811.
The floors were heart pine, the walls plastered and painted the color of old cream. Above the dining room fireplace hung an oil portrait of Augustine's father, Colonel Pierre Ravenel, who had served under General Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. He stared down at every family meal with a severity that Augustine Ravenel, as a boy, had found difficult to bear. Behind the main house, arranged in a neat double row along a packed earth lane, stood the plantation's 12 slave cabins.
These were small structures of rough cut cypress plank roofed with hand-split shingles, each one housing between four and eight human beings who under the laws of South Carolina in that year were considered the personal property of Mr. Augustine Ravenel. The cabins had packed earth floors, a single hearth at one end, and small unglazed windows covered at night with oiled cloth. In summer, they were thick with the smell of sweat and smoke, and the resinous breath of the pine forest beyond the fence. In winter, they were cold enough that the children slept three to a pallet for warmth.
Between the cabins and the main house ran an invisible line that every person on the plantation understood without ever needing it explained. One side of that line was the world of the Ravenel family, the world of ledger books, Sunday dinners and letters written on cream laid paper. The other side was the world of work and survival and the long memory of a people who had been brought to that place from a continent most of them had never seen and would never see again. Augustine Ravenel was 46 years old in the spring of 1849.
He was the third of his family to hold the plantation, descended from a Huguenot merchant who had fled France in the 1680s, settled in Charleston, and then pushed inland to the rice country. Augustine was a tall, narrow-shouldered man with sand-colored hair going gray at the temples, and a habit noted by every neighbor who ever had supper at his table, chewing the inside of his cheek when displeased. His wife, Henrietta Ravenel, was seven years his junior, educated in the French manner at a finishing school in Charleston, and known among the wives of the Lowcountry gentry for her fierce adherence to the proprieties of her class. They had three children, a daughter, Clotilda, who was 12 that spring, a son, Augustine Jr., who was nine, and a younger boy, Lawrence, who was four.
By the census of that year, the plantation held 47 enslaved people. Among them was a man named Ezekiel, the head driver of the field hands, born on the plantation in 1809. His father before him had been brought in chains from the windward coast of Africa in 1787. Ezekiel knew every inch of the rice fields, every working of the trunk gates that controlled the tidal flow, every name of every person who lived in the cabins, and the unspoken hierarchy of the enslaved community.
He was the man to whom the others turned when a child fell ill or when a dispute needed settling without the involvement of the overseer. He was 40 years old in the spring of 1849. He was a broad-shouldered man with hands so calloused that he had lost most of the feeling in his fingertips, and he moved through the world with the careful patience of someone who had learned very young never to waste a motion or a word. There was a woman named Clarissa who ran the kitchen and was considered by Henrietta Ravenel to be indispensable.
Clarissa was 52 that spring. She had been a girl of eight when she was bought by Colonel Pierre Ravenel at the Charleston Market in 1805, separated that same afternoon from her mother, whose name she could no longer remember by the time she reached middle age. Over the decades, Clarissa had made herself the most skilled cook in the parish.