Solomon was 15 years old at the time. He was in the neighboring cabin, separated from Dillia's by a single plank wall, and he heard everything. His grandmother, a woman named Flora, who had raised him after his mother's death, was asleep on the other side of the small room, worn down by a cough that would kill her before the end of that winter. Solomon was wide awake.
He had been wide awake on most nights that January. He was a boy who listened. Augustine told Dillia he had purchased her freedom. He showed her the notarized document.
He told her he had arranged for her and the boy Isaac to be taken by wagon that night to a safe house in Walterboro and from there to Charleston where they would board a ship bound for Liverpool. He said the war would be over soon and that she could not be here when it ended. He said he had provided a sum of money sufficient to begin a new life. He asked her to pack what she needed and to wake the boy.
Through the wall, Solomon heard Augustine's voice clearly. It was the voice of a man trying to sound generous and at the same time trying to sound like a man who had made a decision he did not intend to unmake. Solomon had heard that voice many times in his short life. It was the voice white men used when they had already decided the outcome of a conversation. What the other person said did not matter.
Dillia did as she was told. Solomon heard her through the wall, moving quietly in the dark, telling the child in that low singing voice that they were going on a journey, that he should be brave, that he should be very quiet. He heard her wrap a small bundle of clothes. He heard her strike a match to light the stub of a candle so she could find the child's shoes.
He heard the child ask if they were going to see the ocean. He heard her say, "Yes, they were going to see the ocean." Solomon, in the dark of his own cabin, began to pray. He did not know precisely why. He could not have articulated what was wrong himself, but something in the arrangement of voices on the other side of the wall had set a cold weight in his chest that would not lift.
Then Solomon heard the two men from the neighboring plantation come into the cabin. What happened in that cabin over the next half hour is the thing the wall was built to hide. Through the plank wall, Solomon heard it all. He heard the child cry out once, a small sound of surprise.
He heard Dillia scream and then a brief struggle on the other side of the wall. After that came a second short sound, and then a long silence. Solomon did not move. His grandmother slept through all of it because she was old and her cough had exhausted her, and because the human body will sometimes refuse at the end of a long life to wake for sounds the waking mind could not survive.
Solomon lay in the dark with the cold weight in his chest, and he did not cry, and he did not move. He listened to the silence on the other side of the wall as if, by listening hard enough, he could will it to become something else. It did not. Before dawn, Augustine Ravenel and the two men left the cabin.
They went to the carriage house. They returned with tools for the rest of that night and into the gray of the next morning. Solomon listened through the wall to the sound of hammers, of boards being nailed across the inside of the door, of tar being brushed over the seams, and of a wooden bar being driven across the outside of the cabin and sealed with nails as long as a man's hand. When Solomon dared near noon to look out through a knot hole in his own cabin wall, he saw three men whitewashing the exterior of the sealed cabin with a slurry of lime and pine tar.
Their faces were set in a way that told him, even at 15, that they were not men who had done something they would admit to in daylight. Augustine Ravenel told the remaining enslaved people on the plantation that Dillia and her boy had been sold in the night to a trader bound for Cuba. He said the cabin had been sealed because of fever. He said no one was to go near it.
He said anyone caught near that cabin would be whipped within an inch of their life. And then because the war was coming and there was no time for sentiment, he moved on. Six months later, in July of 1863, Augustine Ravenel was dead. He had been thrown from a horse on the river road, his neck broken against a fence post, and he died where he fell.