The General's Cook

by Ramin Ganeshram

  “’Allo,” he said in his heavily accented English.

  Her little fingers closed around the coin and she held it in her palm, examining it. She smiled up at him. “Hello, sir.”

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  Her little eyebrows furrowed together. “They call me Baby,” she said.

  “And are you the baby?” d’Orleans said seriously.

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  “Where is your mama, Baby?”

  Again, the little eyebrows creased. “Don’t have none. She went to heaven.”

  “Ah,” said the nobleman and glanced up at his secretary, who was watching the exchange.

  “And your papa, he is not here either, is he?”

  “No, sir,” she said guilelessly. “He left.”

  “Where did he go, Baby, do you know?”

  “No, sir.” She fidgeted, becoming bored by the conversation. A lot of other men like this one had already asked her and her sisters the same things over and again since Papa had gone.

  Louis Phillipe grasped the little hand. It was already worn with work.

  “Tell me, Baby, do you miss your papa?” he asked gently.

  Baby focused on him looking at her dark hand in his soft white one. She nodded.

  “You must be deeply upset that you will not see your papa again,” he said gently, shaking the little hand.

  Baby looked sharply up from his hand into his eyes. He could see the lashes curling up and away from her very black pupils. She pursed her little mouth.

  “No, sir,” she said, pulling her hand gently away and straightening up like a little woman. “I am very glad—for now he is free.”

  “Full house tonight,” said James Brown, coming through the door to the kitchen where Hercules stood over one of the scullions, directing him to cut an apple thinner.

  “This pork roast is good with Madeira—push that, it will fetch a higher price,” said the chef. “And I’ve a standing pork pie for those with thinner purses.”

  Brown grinned at his business partner. “Yes, sir!” he said, saluting.

  “And now get out of my kitchen,” Hercules said, laughing. “But, tell me, any news from Virginia?”

  “You family seem well—from what I gather in Alexandria. He hasn’t harmed dem in any way,” said Brown, matching Hercules’s low tone.

  Hercules’s jaw clenched but he nodded. No, that at least wasn’t Washington’s way. He wouldn’t harm little girls for what their father had done. Richmond, however, might be another story.

  “He still out fuh you though,” said Brown. “Been sending agents around Philadelphia to rout you out.” He handed Hercules a newspaper, which he scanned quickly, reading his own description and the posting for a reward for his apprehension.

  “Well, he’ll have a time of it, won’t he?” said Hercules, smiling.

  “Dat he will,” Brown replied with a grin. “I best be back to it. It getting rowdy in dere with de crowds pushing in fuh a taste of you cooking.”

  Hercules turned back to the tavern kitchen as Brown went out to the taproom. Around him everyone was at their tasks, just as he liked it. The only sounds were the spit of the fire and knives hitting the chopping board. Satisfied that all was running tight, he stepped out the kitchen door to the alley between the tavern and the warehouse beside it.

  Hard upon the end of Spring Street, the Hudson River was choked with ships more numerous than what he had seen in Philadelphia. Behind him the city crouched, bursting its seams, pushing ever northward.

  He stood a moment and watched the hurly-burly of the docks. Men shouting orders to one another, unloading barrels like the one that had carried him aboard the ship to Philadelphia and then on to New York. The ships were larger and taller here, bound for England and the Far East. Maybe one day he’d find himself upon one, seeing more of the world.

  But for now, he turned toward his tavern and his kitchen. After the night’s business was over, there was a city of delights to behold.

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  I FIRST HEARD ABOUT GEORGE WASHINGTON’S CELEBRATED enslaved chef, Hercules, from former Clinton aide turned culinary scholar Adrian Miller, who had dedicated a good deal of time to writing about black cooks in the White House for his book The President’s Kitchen Cabinet, which was ultimately published in 2017. Hercules came up in our conversation as the “grandfather” of all African American presidential cooks, and he entered my imagination forever.

  For four years, Hercules became my all-consuming passion, taking me from Philadelphia to Mount Vernon and through thousands of pages of historical records and scholarly documentation about the lives of President Washington and the enslaved persons he owned. Much of what you have read in The General’s Cook is based on historical fact. Actual recorded incidents are reproduced faithfully where possible—like the fact that President George Washington came to serve his tenure in Philadelphia in 1790 bringing enslaved “servants” with him from his household in Virginia. Most were eventually sent back to their estate, Mount Vernon, because the First Couple feared they would take advantage of Pennsylvania’s 1780 Gradual Abolition Act, which allowed for enslaved people to petition for freedom after six months of continuous residency. In fact, it was US Attorney General Edmund Randolph who advised the Washingtons on exactly how to keep their people enslaved through a “rotation system,” moving them out of Pennsylvania and into slave states to reset their tenure. Randolph, a fellow Virginian, had himself lost enslaved people to the law and was well versed in how to subvert it.

  This rotation of enslaved people lasted throughout the Washingtons’ seven years in Philadelphia, carrying them back on visits home to Mount Vernon but also on shorter trips across the Delaware River to New Jersey, where slavery was legal.

  As I read through the period documents—most notably after the escape of Oney Judge—it was clear enough that Washington’s enslaved people knew what was going on. These included Hercules, Oney Judge, Old Moll, Austin, and later Postilion Joe, a groom and carriage driver.

  Of these souls, Hercules seemed the savviest, not only about his situation but about rectifying it—or at least so it appears to me after reading period accounts in which Hercules declares himself mortified by an accusation—from Washington’s secretary Tobias Lear—that he might take advantage of the abolition law. Just as I write in the first chapter of the book, Mrs. Washington was so touched by Hercules’s show of fealty that she allowed him to remain in the capital beyond six months—thereby actually, if unintentionally, handing him the tools for his freedom—although he did not use these tools as one would have imagined, a fact which historians and scholars still ponder, and the potential reasons for which I’ve attempted to explore in this book.

  Like most Americans, I realized that the Founding Fathers were complicit in keeping the “peculiar institution” of slavery going even if they were not actually slaveholders themselves. I knew too that Washington, as a Virginian, was a slaveholder, but this new information about how far he and his wife went to hold onto their human chattel both repelled and fascinated me enough to start examining their world—particularly their time in Philadelphia.

  Philadelphia’s population at the time of this story was roughly five percent African American and most in that number were free people. Indentured servitude was also common in the city as it was throughout the colonies and early Federal America. Orphans, like Margaret, and those dependent on the state were often indentured for a period of eight, twelve, or twenty-eight years as determined by their color, legal status, age, or physical condition. Black men, women, and children were indentured for the longest tenures and white men, women, and children for the least time.

  President and Mrs. Washington made use of the indenture system a fair amount while they were in Philadelphia—primarily to make up for the lack of their own “servants” (enslaved people) in the capital. There was, in fact, a Margaret Held indentured in the president’s house, but nothing is known about her beyond her name
. I chose to create a story around her in these pages.

  A major point in favor of holding indentures over enslaved people revolved around a serious concern for masters: Slave owners, especially those living in Pennsylvania, were, like the Washingtons, ever fearful that those they had enslaved would not just escape but revolt.

  The slave uprising and revolt in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), which brings the fictional character of Thelma to Philadelphia and into Hercules’s sphere, drove many white planters and their enslaved people from the island to the refuge of Philadelphia. In the American capital, society folks banded together to support them as refugees, but their presence also fanned the flames of the fear of an American slave revolt.

  To add to the feeling of race-related chaos, many of the enslaved people who came with the refugees of Saint-Domingue’s planter class quickly took advantage of the 1780 law, leading to a bustling trade in slave-catching funded by those who aimed to get their “property” back.

  For his own part, Washington donated money to one of these white refugee societies while refusing to comment on whether refugees had a “right” to retain the people they had enslaved. This was consistent: Washington wanted to keep his own slaves but did not want the public to turn against him for it. Instead, he opted to keep mum on the issue whenever possible.

  But just as the society refugees had backing, their enslaved people who wanted to be free were not without supports. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society operated as one of the first formal organizations to help African Americans seek freedom. Their activities included sending enslaved people north as well as using the court system to petition on their behalf—particularly against the activities of slave catchers who roamed cities seeking both runaways and even free people who might be kidnapped and sold for bounty. The most famous of these stories is that of Solomon Northup, recounted in his book Twelve Years a Slave.

  Mrs. Harris’s early “underground railroad” is patterned on groups like the PAS, but even they had to work around laws that existed in every one of the original thirteen states, except for Pennsylvania, against interracial marriage and sex, which was in some cases punishable by death. It should be noted that although amalgamation—as intermarriage between races was called—was not illegal in Pennsylvania, it was far from being socially accepted. In later years, “amalgamation” was replaced with the post-Civil War term “miscegenation” (literally, Latin for “race mixing”) and was used in the most malicious manner possible, including as a lynching rallying cry in the Jim Crow South.

  One of the major themes in this book—and probably the one dearest to me—is that Hercules and Nate both have the desire to read. To us in the modern day, this may seem like a small enough desire, but it’s important to remember that education and learning was carefully kept away from the enslaved because in knowledge there truly is power.

  The ability to read and write represented a step closer to freedom for enslaved people because it not only opened up greater opportunities in business but also allowed them to advocate on their own behalf. Something so simple as being able to read one’s own manumission papers—and using them as a means of protection under the law—meant the difference between being returned to slavery or continuing on to a free life.

  With respect to the characters in this book pursuing their own literacy, Oney Judge learned to read later in life—long after her escape. In a newspaper interview she gave when she was a much older woman, she bitterly complained that the Washingtons did not allow her to learn to read while she was with them. We do know that Washington’s body servant Christopher Sheels could read and that the Washingtons were well aware of this, but where he obtained that skill is unknown.

  Nothing is known of Hercules’s literacy, but as I researched slavery and enslaved people and the power of the written word and juxtaposed this knowledge against Hercules’s powerful personality—and later escape—it seemed inconceivable to me that he would be immune to the desire to read. So, while his lessons with Mrs. Harris are a pure fabrication, I feel they add a possible, or even probable, element to his story.

  On the topic of Mrs. Harris: she too is a dynamic but wholly made-up character, although the 1790 census does list a “Mrs. Harris, black, schoolteacher” in Cherry Street. Throughout much of the book I did insert real people from the 1790 census document, along with their professions, so that these early pioneers of free black American life might yet live again—if only for a line or two. They include not just the famous formerly enslaved abolitionist preacher Richard Allen but Polly Haine, the pepper pot seller, Charles Sang, the confectioner, and Benjamin Johnson, the oysterman. Their lives might have been humble, but they were forging an integral part of the new American culture just by going about their daily existence.

  One particularly notable real-life character is James Hemings, the enslaved cook of Thomas Jefferson who accompanied Jefferson not just to Paris when he was Secretary of State but lived with him in Philadelphia upon their return from France, where Hemings had been apprenticed to a master French cook and learned the cuisine that Jefferson so favored. While in France, where slavery was illegal, Jefferson paid Hemings a salary, a practice he continued when they reached Philadelphia.

  By all account James Hemings had a brilliant mind—not just in the kitchen. He could read and write both French and English and often served as Jefferson’s translator in Paris as Jefferson could not master the language. Like Hercules, James Hemings could have taken advantage of being legally free in France and not returned to America with Jefferson. Scholars have surmised that he returned to prevent retaliation toward his enslaved family at Monticello, the most famous of whom was his sister Sally, Jefferson’s enslaved paramour. Jefferson reluctantly granted Hemings his freedom in return for teaching of his French cooking skills to his younger brother. He was manumitted in 1796, leaving behind written recipes and an inventory of utensils. After Jefferson became president in 1801, he summoned Hemings from the Baltimore tavern where he was working to cook for Jefferson at the White House—Hemings refused. James Hemings died later that year in an alleged suicide to which Jefferson immediately ascribed to excessive drinking—although neither allegation has been proven true.

  While there is no definitive historical record that James Hemings and Hercules were friends, it is likely that they would have interacted given their condition of being enslaved by the nation’s two most important men, sharing the same profession, and living within a block of one another. It is within the realm of possibility that the fact that James Hemings could read and write might have influenced the real-life Hercules.

  Next to learning to read, Hercules’s secret meetings with Gilbert Stuart—and, through him, with Thelma—are my other pure fabrication in this book, but Gilbert Stuart did presumably paint George Washington’s cook and that painting, though unauthenticated, is now in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, Spain. Like much of Stuart’s work, it is unsigned but very clearly painted in his signature style. In fact, although I am no art critic, I see an uncanny resemblance in form and composition to Stuart’s famed Athenaeum portrait of George Washington himself.

  Turning from the imagined to the real, I have to say a few words on Hercules’s actual family. The cook really did have four children, Richmond, Evey, Delia, and a little girl whose name is unknown. She is the child referred to as “Baby” in this novel—a name I gave her drawing on African American and Afro-Caribbean heritages in which it would not have been uncommon for a youngest daughter to have this nickname.

  As in The General’s Cook, Hercules’s eldest child, Richmond, did spend a short time in the capital with his father as a scullion, but left in 1791, not 1794 as I’ve written for the purposes of story. There is no record of the children’s lives after their father’s escape from Mount Vernon past the account written by the future French King Louis Philippe d’Orleans during his visit to Mount Vernon, where he spoke with Hercules’s youngest daughter, who proclaimed herself very happy that her father was gone �
��because he is free now.”

  What we know of Hercules’s actual life is from letters written by George Washington, Tobias Lear, and others, household account books, and a biographical sketch written by the first president’s step-grandson, George Washington Parke Custis (“Washy”), in his book Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington. There he painted the cook as a notable personage on the Philadelphia scene who was a master chef much valued by the Washingtons, and it is from this work that I built most of my personal image of Hercules as a larger-than-life figure. The dishes described in this novel, from the salmagundi to chocolate pie to oysters and standing pork pie, are all those that Hercules would have prepared.

  After his escape on the president’s birthday in 1797, Washington did attempt to get his cook back, hiring detectives to try to discover him in his “haunts” in Philadelphia and to leave no stone unturned. Washington was unsuccessful in apprehending his cook, whom he wished to be returned “unharmed.” Hercules was spotted again in New York City in 1801, by then-mayor Richard Varick, two years after the president’s death. Varick wrote to Mrs. Washington, asking if she would care to have him apprehended.

  By that time, Hercules was a free man twice over—first because he had stayed above six months in Philadelphia and was technically a free man even though he remained in Washington’s household, and then by the terms of General Washington’s will, freeing all the enslaved people in his personal possession. However, the prideful First Lady wrote back that there was no need because “I have been so fortunate as to engage a white cook who answers very well. I have thought it therefore better to decline taking Hercules back again.”

  So what happened to Hercules? No one knows. Many have speculated that perhaps he wound up in Europe because that’s where his painting has been for the last many decades, but that doesn’t necessarily follow.