He said the war would be over soon and she could not be here when it ended. He said he had provided a sum of money sufficient to begin a new life. He asked her to pack what she needed and to wake the boy. Solomon through the wall heard Augustine's voice clearly the voice of a man trying to sound generous and at the same time a man who had made a decision he did not intend to unmake. Solomon had heard that voice many times in his short life.
It was the voice white men used when they had already decided the outcome of a conversation. And it did not matter what the other person said. Dileia did as she was told. Solomon heard her through the wall, moving quietly in the dark, telling the child in that low singing voice, that they were going on a journey, that he should be brave, that he should be very quiet. He heard her wrap a small bundle of clothes, strike a match to light a candle stub so she could find the child's shoes.
He heard the child ask if they were going to see the ocean. He heard her say, "Yes, they were going to see the ocean." Solomon, in the dark of his own cabin, began to pray. He did not know precisely why. He could not have articulated what was wrong, but something in the arrangement of voices on the other side of the wall had set a cold weight in his chest that would not lift.
Then Solomon heard the two men from the neighboring plantation come into the cabin. What happened in that cabin in the next half hour is the thing the wall was built to hide. Solomon, through the plank wall, heard it all. The child cried out once. A small high sound of surprise more than fear because the child had not yet understood what was about to happen.
Dileia scream, a single scream cut short, a sound he could not describe to the coroner 45 years later without stopping and asking for water. A heavy sound, a wet sound, and then a second smaller version of the same sound, and then for a very long time, silence. Solomon did not move. His grandmother slept on through it all. Because she was old and her cough had exhausted her, and because the human body will sometimes refuse.
At the end of a long life, to wake for sounds the waking mind could not survive. Solomon lay in the dark with the cold weight in his chest and he did not cry and he did not move and he listened to the silence on the other side of the wall as if he could by listening hard enough. Will it to become something else? It did not. Before dawn, Augustine Ravenel and the two men left the cabin.
They went to the carriage house, returned with tools, and for the rest of that night, and into the gray of the next morning. Solomon listened through the wall to the sound of hammers. Boards being nailed across the inside of the door, tar brushed over the seams, and a wooden bar driven across the outside of the cabin, sealed with nails as long as a man's hand. When Solomon dared, near noon, to look through a knot hole in his own cabin wall, he saw three men whitewashing the exterior of the sealed cabin with a slurry of lime and pine tar. Their faces set in a way that told him even at 15.
They were not men who had done something they would admit to in daylight. Augustine Ravenel told the remaining enslaved people that Dileia and her boy had been sold in the night to a trader bound for Cuba. He said the cabin had been sealed because of fever. He said no one was to go near it and anyone caught near it would be whipped within an inch of their life. Then because the war was coming and there was no time for sentiment, he moved on.
6 months later in July 1863, Augustine Ravenel was dead. He had been thrown from a horse on the river road, his neck broken against a fence post, and he died where he fell. With no last confession, no last arrangement, no last 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.