High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [56]
Although born enslaved, Dorsey was revered. Twenty-one years after his death, a commentator who went under the sobriquet “Megargee” wrote in the Philadelphia Times that he “possessed a naturally refined instinct that led him to surround himself with both men and things of an elevating character.” He prided himself on having hosted such notables of the period as abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and prominent blacks like Frederick Douglass. When Dorsey died in 1875, the Philadelphia Press referred to him as “the negro feast furnisher … who spread the tables for the marriage supper, or the ball, or the reception; he … gave character to any entertainment, and [his] presence was more essential than the honored guests.”
The caterers of Philadelphia had such societal preeminence that they became leaders of the city’s African American community, creating jobs for black waiters, cooks, and others within their enterprises and generally working to raise the standard of living among the newly freed who arrived in the city following the Civil War. At a time when the entrepreneurial advances of African Americans were being threatened and more often than not thwarted by increasing numbers of immigrants from Europe, the catering business arose from what Du Bois termed “an evolution shrewdly, persistently and tastefully directed, [which] transformed the Negro cook and waiter into the public caterer and restaurateur, and raised a crowd of underpaid menials to become a set of self-reliant, original business men, who amassed fortunes for themselves and won general respect for their people.” The caterers proved that blacks had not only the culinary talents but also the business acumen to produce wealth. It was a lesson that would be proven over and over again in the North.
While Philadelphia was the nexus of the phenomenon, other northern cities also had their black culinary entrepreneurs. Joshua Bowen Smith was a Boston-based caterer who served meals at Harvard and catered for the state of Massachusetts; James Wormley was a caterer, restaurateur, and hotel owner in Washington, D.C. New York, too, had its black culinary elite. The city, after all, was for decades home to the second-largest black population in the country (after Charleston, South Carolina) and had received a number of Haitian immigrants. Culinary business leaders there included Henry Scott, whose pickle establishment did business with many of the vessels sailing out of the port of New York, and restaurateurs like the Van Rensselaers, George Bell, and George Alexander, whose eating establishments served all rungs of the social spectrum. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the African American culinary entrepreneur who was as renowned as Philadelphia’s caterers was Thomas Downing, one of New York’s black leading citizens.
Downing was the son of free people of color, born in the last decade of the eighteenth century in Chincoteaque, Virginia. He, like many African Americans from the Virginia and Mary land shore, grew up with an intimate knowledge of the region’s fauna and flora. Terrapin, clams, crabs, and oysters held no mystery for the young Downing, and when he arrived in New York City in 1819, he discovered that this knowledge was his most marketable skill. At the time, New York was indulging in a citywide oyster obsession—the consumption of oysters was a virtual pastime. In 1810, the city directory listed twenty-seven oystermen, of whom, notably, sixteen were people of color. The oyster trade offered a range of job possibilities. At the lower end of the spectrum, oyster luggers offered their wares