Isaac, small and thin, watching the older man with gray eyes already old for his age, understood what was being described. Dillia, listening from inside, said nothing. She was afraid of what Ezekiel was telling her son and afraid of what would happen if he did not tell him. Then in the summer of 1862, everything changed.
The war had come to the Sea Islands. The Union Navy had taken Port Royal the previous November, landing troops on Hilton Head and the surrounding islands and sending the white population of the region fleeing toward the interior. Confederate planters up and down the coast were beginning to understand that their world was ending. The great plantations of the Sea Islands had been abandoned.
The enslaved people left behind had been declared contraband of war under Union policy, and in January 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation declared enslaved people in rebelling states free. News of all this reached the plantations along the Combahee River through channels the planters could not control. It reached the kitchens, then the stables, then within days the cabins.
Augustine Ravenel, now 59 and 30 lb lighter than the year before, began to drink in the evenings in a way his wife and daughter pretended not to notice. He sat up late in his study with the ledgers open in front of him, staring at columns of figures representing a form of wealth he now understood was about to be taken from him. He wrote long letters to his banker in Charleston and to his brother-in-law in Richmond. He slept when he slept at all in the chair by the study fire with a pistol on the desk beside him.
The field hands were beginning to disappear, slipping away at night toward the Union lines, and no amount of patrolling could stop them. In April of 1862, three young men from the second cabin left together and were never heard from again. In June, a woman named Hana and her two daughters simply were not in their cabin when the bell rang at dawn. Ezekiel, the head driver, who had been with the family since before Augustine inherited the plantation, walked into the woods on the night of August the 9th, 1862, and never came back.
In the preceding weeks, he had begun to speak more openly to the younger men of the quarters about what was coming. Then, on one warm night, he simply stepped out of his cabin and was gone. He was 53 years old. He left behind a wife named Khloe, who would eventually find him again in the fall of 1864 at a contraband camp outside Beaufort and who would die in his arms of pneumonia in the winter of 1867, a free woman on free land.
Augustine Ravenel began to be afraid. It was a specific nameable fear. He was afraid of what would happen when the Union Army came. And he knew now that it would come.
He was afraid of his ledgers being read by Yankee officers. He was afraid of his neighbors, several of whom had already begun to whisper about him in Beaufort society, about the child at the end of the quarter's row, about the resemblance that was no longer deniable. As the boy grew older, and in a way he had not previously permitted himself to think, he was afraid of Dillia and of the child Isaac, now eight years old, whose face was a daily public record of something Henrietta had spent 9 years pretending did not exist. The war was about to make Dillia a free woman, and a free Dillia could testify.
A free Dillia could write her own name, if she chose, on a piece of paper any Union officer in the region would read with interest. A free Dillia holding the hand of a light-skinned boy whose features mirrored one of the most prominent planters on the Combahee was no longer a private shame to be managed behind a plank wall. She was a witness and witnesses in the calculation of a man like Augustine Ravenel were not problems to be reasoned with.
They were problems to be solved. In the autumn of 1862, Augustine Ravenel began to make arrangements. He told his wife one evening in October that Dillia had grown insolent and that it was time to sell her away. Henrietta, who had been waiting for this conversation for 9 years, did not argue.
She asked only that it be done quickly and that the child go with her. Augustine agreed. He did not, however, make contact with any slave trader. The ports were blockaded.
The auction houses in Charleston were empty, and Augustine had begun in the long evenings of that autumn to calculate a different sort of arithmetic. What happened next is the heart of what the men found behind the wall in 1908. It is the part of this story the Ravenel family spent 45 years and two generations trying to hide. On the night of January the 17th, 1863, according to the testimony Solomon Pinkney would give to the Beaufort County coroner on October 29, 1908, Augustine Ravenel came to the cabin at the end of the row with a bottle of imported French brandy, a folded document bearing the seal of a Charleston notary, and two men from a neighboring plantation whom Solomon did not recognize.