They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but what of reconciliation? Perhaps that expansive sentiment should be rendered not as a mere dish but rather as a feast of uncommon ambition, generosity and stomach-busting plenitude.
So it was Sunday in Charleston as nearly 80 guests gathered downtown to re-create a banquet held 150 years ago in the early weeks of Reconstruction by Nat Fuller, a chef and freed slave. At that seminal event, which might have remained a Civil War footnote if not for the work of an enterprising scholar, black and white citizens shared a table for the first time to eat sumptuously and raise their glasses “to Lincoln and liberty.”
At Sunday’s re-creation, called the Nat Fuller Feast, Charleston’s thought leaders — writers, politicians, scholars, artists — filed into the ballroom at McCrady’s restaurant for a historically accurate meal that encompassed nine kinds of fish and meat, from shrimp pie to truffled squab. After the last bite of venison with currants — but before the charlotte russe and blancmange — guests raised their champagne (the likely beverage at the original feast) for a round of toasts.
That’s when historian and author Damon Fordham stood to address the volatile issue that hung in the air, that bitter whiff of irony wafting above the appetizing smells of good food, fellowship and earnestness.
“Nat Fuller said he wanted to have this dinner of reconciliation,” Fordham began. “In light of the events of the past weeks, reconciliation is sorely needed in Charleston.”
Indeed, as the city’s elite, both black and white, chewed over its history of race relations at this ceremonial dinner, another group of 60 Charlestonians was meeting 2 miles away to discuss its current crisis at an event called Policing, Race and Injustice in South Carolina, organized by the local chapter of Black Lives Matter.
While the Nat Fuller Feast had been in the works for well over a year, it took place two weeks after the killing of unarmed black motorist Walter Scott by a North Charleston police officer. This concurrence made for a reflective mood at the dinner, tempering the spirit of celebration with one of questioning.
“That was such a negative shock to the system,” said educator Sheila Anderson, a lifelong Charlestonian who earned a coveted spot at the dinner by writing a winning essay published in The Post and Courier newspaper. “This feels almost like an antidote.”
The event was the brainchild of University of South Carolina professor David Shields, who came across various mentions of Nat Fuller and his reconciliation dinner while researching a book on Lowcountry food. In particular, he was struck by a passage in a letter written by a white woman, Frances Porcher, describing the event as a “miscegenat (sic) dinner, at which blacks and whites sat on an equality and gave toasts and sang songs.”
“The more I read, the more it became apparent to me that Fuller was a significant figure,” said Shields, who began spreading the word on this heretofore little-known slave who ran his own restaurant, the Bachelor’s Retreat.
This restaurant opened before the start of the Civil War, with Fuller’s unconventional owner also serving as the Bachelor’s Retreat’s de facto owner. But there was no question that Fuller was both the brains and palate behind this high-end eating establishment. Fuller lost control of the restaurant in 1864, only to have it restored to him as a free man a year later.
Fuller staged the reconciliation dinner for 80 people in April 1865, about two months after the surrender of Charleston. Residents who had evacuated to Columbia had just warily made their way back to their homes in the city which, unlike Atlanta, had been spared.
At that time, the residents were on rations of dried beans and grain, but Fuller had a pipeline to the best New York suppliers, so there was likely a surreal sense of sybaritic plenty at this feast. Leading the toasts to freedom were two Union generals, the honored guests.
“He knew well the symbolism of standing as a free host with white guests and African-American guests forced to perform the rites of civility,” Shields said, admiringly. “Everyone there understood the power structures in that relationship.”
Shields first floated the idea of a Nat Fuller Feast in an article he wrote for Charleston Magazine about the untold stories of great antebellum African-American chefs. “Today, in the midst of Civil War sesquicentennial remembrances,” he wrote, “it might be well to conclude our city’s memorial exercises in 2015 with a restaging of this most hopeful banquet of the first great century of Charleston cooking.”
The response came in loud and clear, along with an imperative: Someone needed to play the role of Nat Fuller. Kevin Mitchell, a chef instructor at the Culinary Institute of Charleston who has been a mentor to a generation of young, black culinarians, proved the obvious choice.
Shields and Mitchell then spent the next year drumming up more than two dozen sponsors.
“The original 80 people were guests, so we wanted these 80 to be guests as well,” Shields said. “And we really didn’t want this to be a fundraiser. We wanted to remind people what civility and civilization is all about, and you don’t do that at a fundraiser.”
Civility in the South begins, of course, with a libation. For the feast it was a brandy smash derived from Nat Fuller’s own recipe. Guests gathered for the cocktail hour in the building that once housed the Bachelor’s Retreat, now an art gallery. As Southern food expert Nathalie Dupree pointed out a judge, a novelist and a historian talking, she quietly quipped, “If a bomb were to go off here, every Charleston liberal would be gone in a flash.”
The party then walked the two blocks to McCrady’s, where Mitchell, flanked by his students in chef’s whites, greeted the room with an expression on his face betrayed conflicting emotions of stress, joy and solemnity — part fist pump, part benediction and part tacit eulogy for Walter Scott.
“These have not been hospitable times in Charleston,” he intoned. “There is strife and sorrow here. But tonight there’s a particular flavor I want to share with you. That’s the taste of liberty.”
Anderson, the educator, soaked up his words with bright, moist eyes. Afterward, she remarked, “It’s very important that people sit down to a meal together. You will have a conversation, which leads to communication, which leads to a more civil society.”
Two other South Carolina communities, Columbia and Clinton, are also staging Nat Fuller Feasts this year, and Shields said he hopes that other Southern towns will follow suit.
“Charleston has tried in recent years to develop some sort of space where a kind of comity could exist between the races,” he reflected afterward. “In a way, Nat Fuller’s Feast speaks to tensions that have always existed. They were there before the Civil War. They were in the 1960s. And they’re (there) now.”
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