Then in the summer of 1862, everything changed. The war had come to the Sea Islands. The Union Navy had taken Port Royal the previous November, landing troops on Hilton Head and the surrounding islands, sending the white population of the region fleeing toward the interior. Confederate planters up and down the coast were beginning to understand that their world was ending. The Great Sea Island plantations had been abandoned.
The enslaved people left behind had been declared contraband of war by General Benjamin Butler and then in January 1863 declared free by the Emancipation Proclamation. News of all this reached the plantations along the Combahee River through channels the planters could not control the kitchens, the stables, and within days the cabins. Augustine Ravenel, now 59, and having lost 30 lbs in the last year, began to drink in the evenings in a way his wife and daughter pretended not to notice. He sat up late in his study with ledgers open, staring at columns of figures representing a form of wealth about to be taken from him. He wrote long letters to his banker in Charleston, to his brother-in-law in Richmond, and slept, when he slept at all, in the chair by the study fire with a pistol on the desk beside him.
The field hands were beginning to disappear, slipping away at night toward Union lines. No amount of patrolling was able to stop them. In April 1862, three young men from the second cabin left together and were never heard from again. In June, a woman named Hannah and her two daughters simply were not in their cabin when the bell rang at dawn. Ezekiel, the head driver who had been with the family since before Augustine inherited the plantation, walked into the woods on the night of August 9, 1862, and never came back.
In the preceding weeks, he had begun to speak more openly to the younger men about what was coming. Then, on one warm night, he simply stepped out of his cabin and was gone. He was 53. He left behind a wife named Khloe, who would eventually find him again in the fall of 1864 at a contraband camp outside Beaufort and who would die in his arms of pneumonia in the winter of 1867. A free woman on free land.
Augustine Ravenel began to be afraid, a specific nameable fear. He was afraid of what would happen when the Union Army came, and he knew now it would come. He was afraid of his ledgers being read by Yankee officers. He was afraid of his neighbors, several of whom had already begun to whisper about him in Beaufort society, about the child at the end of the quarter's row, about the resemblance no longer deniable as the boy grew older, and in a way he had not previously permitted himself to think. He was afraid of Dileia and the child Isaac, now eight, whose face was a daily public record of something Henrietta had spent nine years pretending did not exist.
The war was about to make Dileia a free woman, and a free Dileia could testify. A free Dileia could write her own name if she chose on a piece of paper any Union officer in the region would read with interest. A free Dileia holding the hand of a light-skinned boy whose features mirrored one of the most prominent planters on the Combahee was no longer a private shame to be managed behind a plank wall. She was a witness and witnesses in the calculation of a man like Augustine Ravenel were not problems to be reasoned with. They were problems to be solved.
In the autumn of 1862, Augustine Ravenel began to make arrangements. He told his wife one evening in October that Dileia had grown insolent and it was time to sell her away. Henrietta, who had been waiting for this conversation for 9 years, did not argue. She asked only that it be done quickly and that the child go with her. Augustine agreed.
He did not, however, make contact with any slave trader. The ports were blockaded. The auction houses in Charleston were empty, and Augustine had begun in the long evenings of that autumn to calculate a different sort of arithmetic. What happened next is the heart of what the men found behind the wall in 1908, the part of this story the Ravenel family spent 45 years and two generations trying to hide.
On the night of January 17, 1863, according to the testimony Solomon Pinkney would give to the Beaufort County coroner on October 29, 1908, Augustine Ravenel came to the cabin at the end of the row with a bottle of imported French brandy, a folded document bearing the seal of a Charleston notary, and two men from a neighboring plantation Solomon did not recognize. Solomon was 15 at the time in the neighboring cabin, separated from Dileia 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 winter's end. Solomon was wide awake.
He had been wide awake on most of the nights of that January. He was a boy who listened. Augustine told Dileia 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.