It has little wooden swinging-hinge shutters where windows should be, and floorboards so worn you can stand in the front doorway and see the ground through the slats.

This, a tiny 1840s cabin built for plantation slaves, will be my home for the night.

Unlike the original inhabitants, I'm here by choice. But I'm uneasy.

For me, slavery isn't just fossilized history. I grew up in an isolated enclave in the S.C. Lowcountry we called Pyne, on about 100 acres an ancestor bought from the state just after the Civil War.

That land was part of the Duharra rice plantation my ancestors worked on as slaves. My family stayed there, generation after generation, right on up to me. That past - slavery and all - is part of my personal story, part of my present.

I've been doing research on that land, digging through wills and maps and library books. Slavery doesn't tell me where I'm going, but it does help me understand where I come from.

And so on a sunny Saturday I've come to Hobcaw Barony, a sprawling former rice plantation about an hour south of Myrtle Beach, to meet Joseph McGill of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

I'm hoping by talking to him, I'll get a better understanding of how slaves lived in the Lowcountry.

I packed my pens, my notebooks, my tape recorder. I'm approaching it like any reporting assignment.

But, as I've often found in my two decades of reporting, stories don't always take you where you think they will.

This one would take me somewhere I'd never been.

McGill, an African-American who grew up not far from here, has been sleeping in former slave cabins around South Carolina this year, drawing attention to the need to preserve these painful remnants of the South's plantation past.

My first thought was to help his cause by doing a story. I'd planned to drop in as he made his sleepover preparations, do the interview, snap some pictures, then head back to the air-conditioned Hampton Inn across the bay, maybe fall asleep watching HBO.

But as I thought about my own research, that seemed wrong. Cowardly, even.

What better way to burrow into the dark, dank heart of slavery than to spend a night in a slave cabin?

I wouldn't be comfortable - physically, intellectually or emotionally.

Still, I was determined to do it. McGill often goes it alone, but gladly agreed to let me join him.

Finding Hobcaw Barony is easy. It's right off U.S. 17, the four-lane road that takes tourists from the Outer Banks to Charleston and on to Savannah.

Hobcaw once consisted of 14 plantations. During the 18th and 19th century, as many as 100 slaves labored on each plantation, systematically flooding swampland to produce as much as six million pounds of rice a year.

Now, under care of the Belle W. Baruch Foundation, the land forms a 17,500-acre wildlife refuge.

There's a tidy little visitor's center just off 17, where I find McGill holding forth to local journalists - journalists who aren't staying the night. I can't help but think: Lucky them.

George Chastain, head of the Baruch Foundation, briefs me on the property's history. The foundation inherited the land from Belle Baruch. Her father, S.C. native and Wall Street millionaire Bernard Baruch, used it as a hunting retreat in the early 20th century, and once entertained Winston Churchill there.

We pile into our cars and drive down about 3 miles of dirt and gravel roads before we reach Friendfield Village, the slave encampment with about a half-dozen well-preserved structures, including a church and a doctor's office.

Chastain shows us around. McGill is impressed with the work the foundation has done to preserve the buildings, some of which were lived in and used as late as the 1950s.

Wildlife all around

The first cabin on the left will be ours for the night. It looks disarmingly quaint from the outside.

Chastain says it's made of heart-pine, and nearly collapsed in recent years. They put it on brick piers, restored the wood, built a new chimney, put on a cedar shake roof and gave it a fresh coat of paint.

It looks to be no more than 300 square feet. A living room with a fireplace, and a bedroom. Field workers would have lived in this cabin, but Chastain doesn't know how many. McGill says they might not have been members of the same family.

I have to run to the hotel, where my girlfriend and daughters are staying, to make sure they're settled.

I say I'll be right back. The notion of sleeping out here in the woods, in this cabin, is giving me the creeps.

By the time I get back, night is falling. It feels like I'm leaving civilization behind.

Big black mosquitoes swarm my pants legs, the one place I hadn't coated in bug repellent.

Chastain says alligators, turkey, wild boar and coyotes roam the place. With a twinkle in his eye, he says he thinks the bats are gone from the cabin. Can't say for sure about the snakes, he adds.

I could punch him.

'These buildings tell a story'

Night falls. McGill lights the candle in the field lamp he carries at Civil War battle re-enactments. He's founder of a group that re-creates the all-black 54th Massachusetts Union Army regiment depicted in the movie "Glory."

We sit on his wooden camp chairs. He opens his cooler and pulls out a couple bottles of Sam Adams. The man has thought this through.

We talk about his project to sleep in slave cabins all over South Carolina. It has brought many headlines, a few rejections and skeptical questions from both blacks and whites who wonder why he'd want to revisit an unpleasant part of the past.

But saving significant buildings is his life's work. Preserving the plantation "big houses" and all their finery is appropriate, he says, but too many plantations are neglecting the homes of the slaves who made the enterprise work.

"These buildings mattered to someone," he says. "These buildings tell a story."

I agree. If my ancestors spent their entire lives in cabins like these, what's one night for me in memory of them?

The mosquitoes settle down. But man, is it hot.

McGill suggests leaving the windows and doors open. Something in my head screams: "Are you nuts!?" I try to come up with an objection that doesn't involve me blurting out, "I'm scared!"

I can't think of any. The doors and windows stay open.

Sounds of the night

Somewhere after 10, McGill puts out the candle.

Thank God for a full moon, I think. Its silver beams spill through the doorway, and cast tree shadows across the road in front of the cabin.

We talk in the dark, lying on our sleeping bags in front of the fireplace.

I am tired - mentally as much as physically. I fall into a light, fitful sleep. I wake at the slightest sound: wind in the trees, McGill bumping the floor with his foot.

Asleep. Awake. Asleep. Awake. This goes on until about 3 a.m., when I hear a mechanical hum in the distance. Is it a boat in the bay? The big paper plant in Georgetown?

Sometime before 4, I fall asleep again, only to be awakened by the realization that the sound is still there. Only now it is rising, arcing, thinning into something entirely different.

My brain races. My heart thumps, my ears strain. I bolt up, eyes scanning the trees.

A horn! Somebody's playing a horn!

A few languid jazz notes, spiraling like smoke, out in the darkness.

Then, nothing.

Morning thoughts

I do not sleep again. Dawn breaks sometime after 5. I haven't been this happy to see daylight in a long, long time.

Thinking of my car, my air-conditioned hotel room, and my own bed back at home, I breathe a silent prayer of appreciation for whoever once called this place home.

McGill, who had snored resolutely through the night, woke. "Sometimes I sleep better in these cabins than I do at home," he says. "It's a lot to think about, when you're out here ... alone with your thoughts."

No kidding.

I still think about the music that night. Was I dreaming? Did it drift on the breeze from someone's house?

I'll never know. But I'll never forget that night in the cabin.

I learned that whatever got slaves through their nights - prayer, love or stoic determination - is a beautiful thing.

I learned that history lives and breathes through us, snapping the present into sharper focus. I'd always felt I had a lot to be thankful for. Now I know just how much.
Eric Frazier: 704-358-5145

Sign up for our Weekly Email Newsletter Email: For Email Marketing you can trust

Other Ways to Share Twitter Del.icio.us MySpace

Discussions and Submission Agreement