Her shrimp pilau was famous from Beaufort to Charleston. She baked benne wafers that Henrietta served to the visiting wives of state senators. She knew every herb that grew in the kitchen garden, every remedy for a child's fever, every measure of every ingredient in every recipe she had ever learned. And she also knew how to listen.
The kitchen was where the main house and the quarters met. And Clarissa had spent 44 years of her life standing at that intersection, hearing everything that passed between the two worlds and remembering it. And there was a young woman named Dillia, 18 years old that spring, whose mother had died of the fever the year before. Dillia had been assigned to the main house as nursery maid to the youngest Ravenel child.
She was tall for a woman of her time, with high cheekbones and dark eyes that seemed older than her years, and a careful stillness about her that her fellow servants had learned to respect. She did not speak unless addressed. She did not laugh where it could be heard, but she sang very softly to the little boy Lawrence when she put him to sleep at night, old songs in Gullah that her grandmother had brought from the Sea Islands. The child would fall asleep with his hand curled around one of her fingers, as if he had always known her.
Dillia's grandmother, whose name had been Bayana, had told her as a child that the songs were older than any of them, older than the plantations, older than the ships, and that as long as there was a child in the world who could still hear them, they would not die. In some private corner of her mind, Dillia believed that singing those songs over the cradle of a white child who was not her own was the only way she had of keeping her grandmother alive. The Ravenel family did not think about Dillia.
They did not think about any of the people who served them. The machinery of the plantation was simply there. The way the tide was there, the way the heat was there, the way God was said to be there. Henrietta Ravenel recognized her house slaves by face and by function, but she could not have told you the name of a single field hand.
Augustine kept better records, but only because records were money. In his study, in a leather-bound ledger stamped with the family crest, he wrote down every purchase, every birth, and every death among the people he owned in the same neat column as the purchases of livestock and the prices of seed. There was no difference in the architecture of his mind between the two. And on a plantation of 47 souls, one young woman in a cotton head wrap who sang to the baby was less visible than the furniture she dusted every morning.
The politics of the Lowcountry in 1849 were already beginning to tighten around the edges of this world. In the Charleston newspapers delivered to Ravenel Bluff by courier every Wednesday, Augustine read with increasing frequency about abolitionist agitation in the North, about the debates over slavery in the new western territories, about the fury of Senator Calhoun and the nervous calculations of the great cotton planters. The nullification crisis of the 1830s was still a recent memory. The Mexican War had just ended.
The compromise of 1850 was a year away. Augustine Ravenel, like most of his class, believed with a conviction that admitted no argument that the southern way of life was divinely sanctioned and economically necessary, and he was prepared, if necessary, to defend it. He did not yet know that within 12 years his country would split in two over the precise question of whether he should be permitted to continue to own the woman who dusted his desk. And Dillia, who knew nothing of the debates in Washington, continued to sing to his youngest son in the nursery, to make the little boy laugh, and to keep him alive through the fevers of his first years, because that was what she had been assigned to do, and because the boy, in his own way, had become the thing that made her own life bearable.
This was the ordinary world of Ravenel Bluff in the spring of 1849. It was a world of rice and rhetoric, of mint juleps on the veranda, Sunday sermons at the parish church in Beaufort District, and neat ledger books in Augustine's study recording every bushel, every birth and every purchase both of livestock and of people. It was a world that its inhabitants believed would last forever. It was a world that was about to crack open along a seam no one in the main house had yet seen.
The crack began in the summer of 1852, when Augustine Ravenel's youngest son Lawrence died of yellow fever. He was 7 years old. The fever came that summer to Beaufort district in one of the worst outbreaks the region had seen since the epidemic of 1817. It moved through the low-lying plantations along the Combahee River, the way fever had always moved in that country, through the mosquito-thick air of the August dusk, striking the youngest and the oldest first.
At Ravenel Bluff, it took three people in the course of two weeks. An elderly field hand named Old Moses died on the 11th of August. A 4-year-old girl in the second cabin died on the 15th. On the morning of the 21st, little Lawrence Ravenel woke with a flushed face and a temperature that made Dillia's hand jerk back.
From that morning, the boy lasted eight days. For the first three, he alternated between fever and shivering. He asked for his mother, who could not be reached in time, and for Dillia, who did not leave his side. By the fifth day, the disease had entered its second phase.