For the first three, he alternated between fever and shivering, asking for his mother, who could not be reached in time, and for Dileia, who did not leave his side. By the fifth day, the disease had entered its second phase, the yellowing of his eyes, the severe vomiting and other symptoms that gave yellow fever its grim historical reputation. Dileia, who was 21, held him through each convulsion with a steadiness the household physician, the household physician, Dr. Franklin, later described in a letter to Henrietta Ravenel as remarkable. When Laurent could no longer speak, Dileia held his hand and sang to him the same song she had sung when he was an infant. She sang about the river that ran to the sea and about the woman who became a bird.
She sang until her voice gave out, and then she hummed, and then she simply held him. Henrietta Ravenel was in Charleston when the child died, visiting her sister. Augustine was in the study. It was Dileia who closed the boy's eyes, who washed his small body with rose water, who wrapped him in the linen set aside for the purpose, and who did not cry in front of the physician because she knew no one in the main house would ask her to. In the weeks that followed, something shifted in the main house.
Henrietta returned from Charleston 3 days after her son's burial collapsed in the front hall. and had to be carried upstairs. She did not leave her bedroom for nearly four months. The nursery curtains were drawn. The toys wrapped in muslin and packed away in a trunk. The house draped in black crepe.
The mirrors turned to the wall and the mantel clocks stopped at the hour of the boy's death. Augustine, who had been distant from his children for most of their lives, began to spend long hours in the nursery where his youngest son had died. Sitting in the rocking chair Dileia had once used. He drank more than he ever had, slept badly, snapped at his daughter, Clotilda, who was 15 that summer, and had begun to fear her father in a way she never had. And Dileia, who had nowhere else to go, was often in that same nursery, folding small clothes that would never be worn again, dusting a rocking horse that would never be ridden.
What happened between them in that nursery over the course of the next year did not happen because either of them chose it in any sense a free person would recognize as choice. Augustine Ravenel was the man who legally claimed ownership over her. Under the laws of South Carolina in 1852, there was no such thing as the rape of an enslaved woman by her enslaver. Because the word rape required a violation of the victim's will, and the law did not recognize that an enslaved woman possessed a will that could be violated. This was not a private opinion of the Ravenel family.
It was the written law of the state upheld by every court in the republic south of the Mason-Dixon line most infamously articulated by Judge Thomas Ruffin of North Carolina in the case of State v. Mann in 1829 when the judge wrote that the power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect under the cover of that law under the cover of his wife's grief under the cover of the quiet rooms of a house draped in morning cloth. Augustine Ravenel began a relationship with the young woman who had held his dying son. Dileia did not fight him. A woman in her position did not fight because a woman in her position who fought would be whipped, sold, or worse. She did what she had always done. and she went still, went silent, sang one of her grandmother's old songs in her own mind, and waited for it to be over.
When she walked back to her cabin afterward in the darkness of the lane between the quarters, she walked without making any sound at all. She had learned by the age of 22 that the body could be separated from the self if you were careful. if you were very careful and if you kept singing.
In the autumn of 1853, Dileia was pregnant. She was 22. She told no one. The other women in the cabin saw the shape of her body changing under her apron and knew the way women have always known. Clarissa, who ran the kitchen, took her aside one evening behind the smokehouse and asked whose it was.
Dileia did not answer. She did not have to. Clarissa had lived on Ravenel Bluff for 31 years. She had seen this before, seen what happened to the women it happened to, seen what happened to the children. Clarissa, who had buried three of her own children, and watched a fourth sold away to a plantation in Alabama when the girl was 12, looked at Dileia for a long time in the red light of the setting sun.
Then she took the younger woman's hand in her own and said that whatever happened she would help her. She said it quietly once and then went back to the kitchen and did not speak of it again.