The sheriff and the remaining workmen stood a respectful distance away and did not interrupt them. At last, Solomon looked at him and asked in the careful voice he had used to speak to white men all his life whether the bodies were of a woman and a boy. Dr. Stewart said yes. Solomon asked whether the boy had light hair.
Dr. Stewart said he could not be certain because of the condition of the remains, but that what hair was present appeared to be fair. Solomon nodded once, and then he began to cry. He was about 60 years old. He had not cried.
According to grandchildren who were interviewed later, he cried without sound for nearly 20 minutes. Then he stood up, put his hat back on, and told Sheriff Hayward and Dr. Stewart what he had heard on the night of January the 17th, 1863. He told it slowly in the same careful voice, stopping twice to ask for water. He named the men.
He described the sounds. He described with an accuracy later corroborated by the coroner's findings exactly where the bodies had been placed on the bed, which one had been killed first, and how he knew. When he was finished, Sheriff Hayward took off his own hat, and the three men stood together in the long October shadows and did not speak for a long time. The investigation that followed lasted exactly 17 days and then it was over. Beaufort County Sheriff Oscar Hayward took Solomon Pinkney's statement on the evening of October 29, 1908 and filed it with the county court.
Dr. Stewart filed his coroner's report on the 30th. Both documents clearly named Augustine Ravenel, deceased in 1863, as the probable perpetrator and named two further individuals, unidentified, as his accomplices. The local paper, the Beaufort Gazette, ran a story on the morning of October 31st under the headline, grim discovery at Old Raven Place, describing the finding of the remains and alluding in the careful language of 1908, South Carolina to the possibility that a crime had been committed. The Charleston News and Courier picked up the story on November 2nd.
A reporter from the Savannah Morning News came to Beaufort County on November 4th and interviewed Solomon Pinkney at length. And then on November the 17th, 1908, the story disappeared. The Beaufort Gazette ran no further articles. The Charleston News and Courier printed a brief notice on its back page stating that the remains had been interred at the county's expense in an unmarked grave at a nearby cemetery and that no further investigation was warranted given the death of the principal suspect 45 years previously.
The Savannah Morning News never ran the interview its reporter had conducted. When Solomon Pinkney's grandson, Samuel Pinkney, attempted in 1934 to obtain a copy of Sheriff Hayward's original report from the Beaufort County Courthouse, he was told that the file could not be located. What had happened can be pieced together from later evidence.
Clotilda Ravenel, the daughter of Augustine and Henrietta, was by 1908 a widow living in Charleston, the mother of three sons, two of whom were prominent figures in South Carolina politics. Her brother Augustine Jr. had died in 1901, but his sons, her nephews, were officers in the state banking system. In the 45 years since the war, the Ravenel family had rebuilt its fortune through a combination of timber interests, banking, and marriage. It was not a family that could afford to have a newspaper story circulating about a murder committed by its patriarch.
Through mechanisms never documented, but not difficult to imagine, the story was made to go away. Sheriff Hayward, who ran for reelection in 1910, did not mention the case in his campaign. Dr. Stewart, who died in 1912, never spoke of it publicly. The reporter from the Savannah Morning News was reassigned to the agricultural desk and left the paper within the year.
What the Ravenel family could not control was Solomon Pinkney. Solomon lived until 1927. He was 79 years old when he died. In the last decades of his life, he told the story of what he had heard through the wall on the night of January the 17th, 1863 to anyone who would listen.
He told it to his children and his grandchildren. He told it to the members of his church at the African Methodist Episcopal Congregation in Green Pond. He told it on one occasion in 1921 to a young graduate student from Fisk University who was traveling through the Lowcountry collecting oral histories of formerly enslaved people and whose notebooks were eventually deposited in a university archive where they were not cataloged until the 1970s. Solomon insisted every time he told it on three points.
First, that Dillia had been told she was being freed and had believed it until the moment the other two men came into the cabin. Second, that the child Isaac had died knowing he was being taken to see the ocean. Third, that Augustine Ravenel had sealed the cabin not out of shame, but out of calculation. He had sealed it because a living woman and a living child, both free and both carrying evidence of his paternity, could destroy him and his family in a way the corpses behind a plank wall never could.