He left no last confession, no last arrangement, and no alteration to the will he had signed in 1861. His widow, Henrietta, inherited the plantation. The Union Army reached the Combahee River in the late summer of that year. During the raid led by Harriet Tubman and Colonel James Montgomery, 32 of the remaining 39 enslaved people at Ravenel Bluff walked away toward the gunboats and were free.
Solomon Pinkney was among them. He was 15 years old. For the next 45 years, the sealed cabin at the end of the row stood where Augustine Ravenel had left it. Henrietta Ravenel, who lived until the winter of 1907, never spoke of it.
Her surviving children Clotilda and Augustine Jr. grew up knowing only that their father had ordered the cabin sealed because of fever and that it was not to be touched. When Clotilda married a Charleston physician in 1868 and moved away, she did not look back at it. When Augustine Jr. inherited the plantation in his mother's last years, he did not look at it either. The cabin was whitewashed a second time in 1881 during a general repainting of the outbuildings and a third time in 1899 when the plantation was first put up for sale.
Each time the workmen were told by the estate's overseer, an old man named Claiborne Huger, who had served the Ravenels since before the war, that the cabin was to be painted over, but never opened. Claiborne Huger died in 1906. He took what he knew with him. Decades passed.
The fields grew up in pine saplings and broom sedge. The main house, which had been grand in 1849, settled and sagged on its foundations. By 1908, the plantation had been sold twice and was in the hands of a timber company out of Savannah that had no use for it except to harvest the last of the live oak and pine, and then subdivide the rest for small farms. The timber company hired a local foreman named Edgar Frip to tear down the outbuildings.
Edgar Frip hired a crew of five men on the morning of October the 27th, 1908. That crew came down the old packed-earth lane between the rows of collapsed cabins and arrived at the one at the end of the row. The one that had been whitewashed three times, the one that stood slightly apart from the others, the one no one in Beaufort County could remember ever having seen opened. Edgar Frip, a practical man not given to superstition, told his crew to knock it down.
He did not know about the wall built on the inside of the cabin. He thought it was just another slave cabin, dozens of which stood on dozens of abandoned plantations up and down the coast, and that it would come down in 20 minutes. The first blow of the crowbar against the outer wall of the cabin came down just after 11:00 in the morning. The plank splintered easily. The wood was old.
It was cypress cut from the river bottom 60 years before, and it gave way with the dry crack of something that had been waiting a long time to fall. The second blow took down a second board. The third exposed what at first seemed to be a second wall perhaps 18 inches behind the first, nailed up from the inside with boards of the same cypress plank. The seams were sealed with black tar that had hardened to the consistency of stone.
The men paused. They had all seen the outside of the cabin whitewashed three times over, but none of them had expected a second wall. Edgar Frip stepped forward and ran his hand along the inner wall. He pulled back his fingers, smelled them, then looked at Solomon Pinkney, the oldest man on the crew, and the only one among them who had been alive in 1863.
The younger workers, who had started the morning joking among themselves about how quickly the job would go, had fallen completely silent. One of them, a man named Jessup, took off his hat and began to turn it slowly in his hands. Another, the youngest, a boy of 19 named Caleb, took several steps back from the cabin without seeming to be aware he was doing it. The autumn light fell slant through the pines.
Somewhere in the distance, a mourning dove called three times and stopped. Solomon, who had been waiting for this moment for 45 years, said nothing. He took the crowbar from the younger man nearest him, walked up to the inner wall, set the bar against the seam between two boards, and pulled. His hands, which had grown old on their own schedule, were shaking.
He had to set the bar a second time before he could get leverage. When the board finally came loose, it came away with a long tearing sound like cloth being torn in half. The smell that came out was not the smell of fever. It was not the smell of any illness Edgar Frip had encountered in his 41 years.