In the autumn of 1908, a crew of five men tasked with tearing down the final remaining cabin on what was once the Ravenel Bluff Plantation in the South Carolina Low Country drove their crowbars into a wall that had been nailed shut, tarred over, and whitewashed three separate times across 45 years. The man who had ordered it sealed in 1863 had been dead for decades. His widow had passed away the winter prior. The property's deed had changed hands four times, with each new owner assured by the Ravenel family's former overseer that the small cabin at the edge of the rice field could be demolished, but never for any reason opened. When the first board came loose that October afternoon, the foreman recoiled from the odor that poured out into the pine-scented air.
Two of the younger workers made the sign of the cross. The eldest among them, a freedman named Solomon Pinkney, who had been born on a neighboring plantation in 1847, set down his crowbar and said very quietly that he had spent 45 years waiting to discover what lay on the other side of that wall. What they uncovered inside that cabin would compel a county coroner to come out of retirement, generate a series of newspaper articles that vanished from circulation within three weeks and expose a crime that the Ravenel family had spent two generations and a considerable fortune attempting to conceal behind pine boards and Sunday piety.
To understand what lay behind that wall, we have to go back to the spring of 1849 when Ravenel Bluff was still regarded as one of the most successful rice plantations along the tidal stretch of the Combahee River. The plantation sat on a high bank of sandy loam overlooking nearly 300 acres of flooded rice fields bordered to the east by a thick stand of cypress and live oak draped in Spanish moss, and to the west by a low tidal creek that filled and drained with the salt-pulled rhythm of the Atlantic. The air in the Low Country that spring was heavy with the smell of mud and blooming jessamine. And at night the rice fields echoed with the croaking of bullfrogs and the slow, steady clicking of rice birds descending from the Carolina Piedmont to feed on the spring plantings. To the north, the Combahee River flowed between its banks of black water and tangled palmetto, its surface broken every few yards by the long, still shapes of alligators basking in the long afternoon light.
In the geography of the antebellum South, it was one of the wealthiest stretches of land in the republic. A single acre of Combahee rice at the price it fetched in the Charleston markets of 1849 was worth more than most free white farmers in the Upcountry earned in a year. The main house was a two-story Greek Revival structure painted the specific shade of white that only the very wealthy could afford to maintain in that humid climate. Its columns were carved from heart pine, and its long verandas were shaded by the same live oaks that had already been old when the first European settlers passed through the region in the 1690s. The interior was furnished with pieces that Augustine Ravenel's grandfather had shipped from Philadelphia and New Orleans: mahogany writing desks, a Broadwood pianoforte in the front parlor, a sideboard of French walnut carried down from Richmond on a coastal schooner in 1811.
The floors were heart pine, the walls plastered, and painted the color of old cream. Above the dining room fireplace hung an oil portrait of Augustine's father, Colonel Pierre Ravenel, who had served under General Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, and who stared down at every family meal with a severity that Augustine Ravenel, as a boy, had found difficult to bear. Behind the main house, arranged in a neat double row along a packed earth lane, stood the plantation's 12 slave cabins. They were small structures of rough-cut cypress plank roofed with hand-split shingles, each one housing between four and eight human beings considered under the laws of South Carolina in that year, the legal property of Augustine Ravenel. The cabins had packed earth floors, a single hearth at one end, and small unglazed windows covered at night with oiled cloth.
In the summer, they were thick with the smell of sweat, smoke, and the resinous breath of the pine forest beyond the fence. In the winter, they were cold enough that the children slept three to a pallet for warmth. Between the cabins and the main house ran an invisible line that every person on the plantation understood without ever having it explained. One side of that line was the world of the Ravenel family. A world of ledger books, Sunday dinners, and letters written on cream laid paper. The other side was the world of work and survival and the long memory of a people who had been brought to that place from a continent most of them had never seen and would never see again.
Augustine Ravenel was 46 years old in the spring of 1849. He was the third of his family to hold the plantation, descended from a Huguenot merchant who had fled France in the 1680s and settled in Charleston before pushing inland to the rice country. Augustine was a tall, narrow-shouldered man with sand-colored hair going gray at the temples, and a habit noted by every neighbor who ever had supper at his table, of chewing the inside of his cheek when displeased. His wife, Henrietta Bono Ravenel, was seven years his junior, educated in the French manner at a finishing school in Charleston and known among the wives of the Low Country gentry for her fierce adherence to the proprieties of her class. They had three children, a daughter, Clotilda, who was 12 that spring; a son, Augustine Jr., who was nine, and a younger boy, Laurent, who was four. The plantation held, by the census of that year, 47 enslaved people.
Among them was a man named Ezekiel who was the head driver of the field hands born on the plantation in 1809 whose father before him had been brought in chains from the windward coast of Africa in 1787. Ezekiel knew every inch of the rice fields, every working of the trunk gates that controlled the tidal flow, every name of every person who lived in the cabins in the unspoken hierarchy of the enslaved community. He was the man to whom the others turned when a child fell ill or when a dispute needed settling without the overseer's involvement. He was 40 years old in the spring of 1849. A broad-shouldered man with hands so calloused he had lost most of the feeling in his fingertips. He moved through the world with the careful patience of a man who had learned very young, never to waste a motion or a word.
There was a woman named Clarissa who ran the kitchen and was considered by Henrietta Ravenel to be indispensable. Clarissa was 52 that spring. She had been a girl of eight when she was bought by Colonel Pierre Ravenel at the Charleston market in 1805, separated on that same afternoon from her mother, whose name she could no longer remember by the time she reached middle age. Over the decades, Clarissa had made herself the most skilled cook in the parish. Her shrimp pilau was famous from Beaufort to Charleston.