His eyes yellowed, and the severe retching reflected the symptoms that had given yellow fever its old name of vomito negro. Dillia, now 21 years old, held him through each convulsion with a steadiness that the household physician, Dr. Franklin Lazir, later described in a letter to Henrietta Ravenel as remarkable. When Lawrence could no longer speak, Dillia held his hand and sang to him the same song she had sung when he was an infant. She sang about the river that ran to the sea.
She sang about the woman who became a bird. She sang until her voice gave out and then she hummed and then she simply held him. Henrietta Ravenel was in Charleston visiting her sister when the child died. Augustine was in the study.
It was Dillia who closed the boy's eyes, washed his small body with rose water, wrapped him in the linen set aside for the purpose, and did not cry in front of the physician because she knew that no one in the main house would ask her to. In the weeks that followed, something shifted in the main house. Henrietta returned from Charleston three days after her son's burial, collapsed in the front hall of the plantation house and had to be carried upstairs. She did not leave her bedroom for nearly 4 months.
The nursery curtains were drawn. The toys were wrapped in muslin and packed away in a trunk. The house was draped in black crepe. The mirrors were turned to the wall, and the mantel clocks were stopped at the hour of the boy's death.
Augustine, who had been distant from his children for most of their lives, began to spend long hours in the nursery where his youngest son had died sitting in the rocking chair Dillia had once used. He drank more than he ever had before. He slept badly. He snapped at his daughter Clotilda, who was 15 that summer and had begun to fear her father in a way she never had.
And Dillia, who had nowhere else to go, was often in that same nursery, folding small clothes that would never be worn again, dusting a rocking horse that would never be ridden. What happened between them in that nursery over the course of the next year did not happen because either of them chose it in any sense that a free person would recognize as choice. Augustine Ravenel was the man who owned her under the laws of South Carolina in 1852. There was no such thing as the rape of an enslaved woman by her enslaver because the word rape required a violation of the victim's will. And the law did not recognize that an enslaved woman possessed a will that could be violated.
This was not a private opinion of the Ravenel family. It was the written law of the state, upheld by courts across the slaveholding South and famously articulated by Judge Thomas Ruffin of North Carolina in State v. Mann in 1829, when he wrote that the power of the master must be absolute in order to render the submission of the enslaved person complete. Under cover of that law, under cover of his wife's grief, and under cover of the quiet rooms of a house draped in mourning cloth, Augustine Ravenel began sexually abusing the young woman who had held his dying son. Dillia did not fight him.
A woman in her position did not fight because a woman in her position who fought would be whipped or sold or worse. She did what she had always done. She went still. She went silent.
She sang in her own mind one of her grandmother's old songs, and she waited for it to be over. When she walked back to her cabin afterward in the darkness, down the lane between the quarters, she walked without making any sound at all. She had learned by the age of 22 that the body could be separated from the self if you were careful, if you were very careful, and if you kept singing. In the autumn of 1853, Dillia was pregnant.
She was 22 years old. She told no one. The other women in the cabin saw the shape of her body changing under her apron and knew. The way women have always known.
Clarissa, who ran the kitchen, took her aside one evening behind the smokehouse and asked whose it was. Dillia did not answer. She did not have to. Clarissa had lived on Ravenel Bluff for 31 years.
She had seen this before. She had seen what happened to the women it happened to and what happened to the children. Clarissa, who had buried three of her own children and watched a fourth sold away to a plantation in Alabama when the girl was 12, looked at Dillia for a long time in the red light of the setting sun. Then she took the younger woman's hand in her own and said that whatever happened, she would help her.