A Dream of Daring (16 page)

Chapter 11

Ted Cooper appealed his
case to the state’s highest court. It agreed to take up the matter, with a
decision expected in early May. For the man in the cell, as well as the man
with the padlocked workshop, it was a time of waiting, first for the trial to
occur and then for the appeal to run its course.

During that period, the
household affairs at Indigo Springs were changing in unexpected ways. The month
of March brought a happy improvement to Tom’s dining. The chef’s hat placed on
Jerome’s head gave the slave a stature he had never before known. He found an
area in which
he
could be the master, and it was a field that suited
him. The newly designated chef restored order to the kitchen and taste to the
food, rescuing Tom from the culinary mishaps of the plantation’s declining Aunt
Bess.

Under the new management,
the smokehouse was better stocked than it had been in recent years. And the
storehouse next to the kitchen was more orderly and well supplied. Jerome kept
cornmeal, flour, and other dry goods in ample amounts and protected them from
moisture and insects. He ensured that enough milk, butter, and eggs were always
on hand. He caught fowl and fish from the plantation’s pond, and made fine
meals of his catch. He mastered Aunt Bess’s roasted chicken, turtle soup, and
other dishes. With a fondness for sweets, he learned to make her almond
pudding, lemon cake, and gingerbread cookies.

He bought imported items
such as tea and coffee in town. Because Bayou Redbird was a major port town
between New Orleans and Natchez, this brought to the riverfront, as well as to
Greenbriar up the bluff, a brisk commerce and variety of shops that made it
convenient for Jerome to find the ingredients he needed. He rewarded Tom’s
outlay on spices and extracts by reviving a dish recently dropped from Aunt
Bess’s collection: cinnamon buns with vanilla cream.

For the first time, Tom
was pleased with Jerome’s work. In retrospect, the inventor realized that his
slave always had a keen interest in the kitchen and a rudimentary knowledge of
its operation, which accelerated his learning. With the openness of a child
eager to be complimented, Jerome solicited Tom’s opinion of his dishes and
relished the praise he received. Tom gave him latitude, and Jerome’s talent
rose as handily as his kneaded breads. The new chef’s primary job was to cook
for his master, but he also made dishes for the servants at the big house and
its dependencies, supplementing the food they prepared for themselves from
their rations and vegetable gardens. Amazingly, Jerome seemed too absorbed with
his newfound interest in cooking to indulge in his former pastimes of indolence
and theft.

Jerome delegated tasks to
a few kitchen assistants, freeing time for him to expand his sphere. With Tom
lacking interest in culinary affairs, Jerome took to managing the field hands’
cook and the other servants involved with food production, just as he had
previously assumed the management of the household servants. He oversaw those
who tended the hogpen, cow pasture, smokehouse, henhouse, pigeon cote,
corncrib
, big-house vegetable
garden, and other food-related areas. He pressed them to do their jobs properly
so that he could have a well-stocked kitchen.

Soon Jerome was eager to
try new recipes. He remembered a few dishes he liked that Aunt Bess no longer
made. They were from the housekeeping journal of Tom’s mother, which the
mistress would read to her cook. Jerome asked Aunt Bess about these dishes, but
she no longer remembered the book or its recipes, and Pearl Edmunton had died
several years ago.

As soon as Jerome
displayed a good grasp of the cooking and squeezed all he could from the
shriveling fruit that was Aunt Bess’s memory, she was sent to join the other
elderly slaves, who watched the children while their parents worked. When she
took off her kitchen apron for the last time, it seemed to be to everyone’s
benefit.

One afternoon in late
March, when Tom was returning to Indigo Springs after a few days away, he was
hungry—and surprised to realized that he missed Jerome’s cooking. Tom had been
attending to bank business, supervising Ruby Manor and the Crossroads as he’d
promised Charlotte, and searching in vain for his invention.

Headed home on horseback,
he glimpsed his workshop on the hilltop. He had not yet entered it. While his
own project was on hold, he was pleased that a padlock of another sort had
somehow swung open to release the initiative of his most incorrigible slave.

Within a system that
didn’t allow him a choice, Jerome had found something he wanted to do. Within a
system that didn’t allow him to learn, Jerome had found a subject he wanted to
understand. The unexpected change in Jerome was another step on the path to a
future era, Tom thought, when all people would be as self-starting and
self-fueled as the new engine he wanted to bring to that age. Could he somehow
tap the will of the
other
slaves—for their benefit and his? He thought
of one slave in particular who had gazed longingly at a picture card of couples
dancing around a ballroom, a literate young woman who seemed to him terribly
miscast in her new role as Jerome’s replacement in the stable. What would he do
with Solo?

Riding toward the big
house, he pictured her. Dressed in a man’s shirt and trousers, her sleeves and
pants cuffs rolled up to fit her small frame, she spent her days raking the hay
and tending the horses, looking like the young slave boys who assisted her. At
night, in her cabin near the stable, she read voraciously. She made frequent
trips to Tom’s library for books. She returned her selections promptly and
always in the same condition she’d found them, as if the dusty old volumes were
sacred texts not to be crimped, bent, or soiled. By the location of the latest
gap on the library shelves, Tom could tell the category of book she was
reading—an ancient history, a biography of a distinguished person, a collection
of poems, a novel, a travel journal, a geography of the world. She displayed a keen
interest in every kind of book—and no interest in any person. She kept to
herself, declining to socialize with the other slaves or to accompany them to
town on errands. Within a group that was limited in its human interactions by
outside forces, she was even more so by choice.

Tom was drawn to the
mysterious girl who seemed to be such a misfit. Wasn’t he too an outsider? Was
that why she aroused his . . . curiosity?

When he arrived at the
big house that afternoon, his horse was tired and he needed food. However, no
one was there to help him. He walked the animal to the stable, but Solo was not
in sight. He looked for Jerome in the kitchen, but the cavernous brick hearth
was dormant and the room was empty.

He heard voices coming
from the storehouse and walked there to investigate. Through the window he saw
two figures standing by a table, one wearing a chef’s hat. Intent on their
business, they failed to notice him.

“This next entry is
something entirely new!” said Solo.

Her dirt-splattered pants
and shirt gave her the look of a farm boy at work, but her long tangled hair
was emphatically feminine.

“Whut the missus mean?”
asked Jerome.

Solo was holding a bound
volume of more than one hundred handwritten pages. Tom recognized his mother’s
housekeeping book. Jerome had recently asked him about the book, but he hadn’t
been able to find it in his mother’s room. It must have been placed in the
library, where the room’s newest visitor apparently had located it.

Pearl Edmunton, like many
other plantation mistresses, kept a journal of helpful tips for managing the
domestic affairs of the estate. The book contained items as diverse as remedies
for soothing sore throats and for treating cholera, techniques for dying
fabrics and for polishing furniture, and recipes for making soups, meats,
stews, breads, cakes, preserves, brandies, and other foods. Watching Solo read
from the book, Tom was carried back in time, held for a moment by an image of
the mother he loved, who had died six years earlier.

“Mrs. Edmunton said she discovered
something new to eat while she was traveling around the North,” said Solo. “She
said it was delicious.”

“And whut that be?”

Glancing in the window,
Tom was astonished by what he saw. To his surprise, the items in the room were
labeled
.
Common cooking measures and ingredients were spread out on the table as if a
lesson were in progress, with the name of each item written on a scrap of paper
near it:
teacup
,
teaspoon
,
tablespoon
,
pint
,
quart
,
mixing bowl
,
eggs
,
butter
,
milk
,
sugar
,
flour
,
yeast
. On the shelves, he saw labels adhered with a spot of glue to
containers of foodstuffs:
raisins
,
molasses
,
peach preserves
,
pepper
,
vinegar
. Tom also saw labels on cooking equipment:
cake
pan
,
soup kettle
,
sieve
.

“Mrs. Edmunton came back
from her trip with a recipe for a new kind of cake,” said Solo.

Jerome looked at the page
she was reading. His face crinkled with the mental labor of deciphering the
words.

“Hmm,” said the chef in
deep concentration, pointing to words in the recipe, then searching the items
on the table to find the objects they named. His eyes moved back and forth,
from the page to the labels, looking for matches. Finally, he found one.
“Eggs!” he said in triumph.

“That’s right,” said his
teacher.

He picked up a small
basket of eggs and moved it in front of him. He repeated the process for a
second item, then a third, and so on. In that manner, he gathered in front of
him butter, sugar, and flour.

“Good.” Solo nodded her
approval.

His finger paused on an
ingredient in the recipe that had no matching object in the room. He
scrutinized the table and shelves, trying to match the word that appeared in
the recipe, and indeed also in the title of the dish, but without success.

“This ain’t here. Whut
this say?” Jerome pointed to the puzzling word on the page.

“
Chocolate
,” said
Solo.

“Oh, that be cocoa. But
that fer drinkin’, ain’t it?”

“Actually, Mrs.
Edmunton’s recipe is for a chocolate
cake
.”

Jerome and his teacher
looked surprised. Although cocoa was widely used as a beverage, they had not
heard of anyone eating food made with it.

“She has a note about
it.” Solo read to Jerome from the book:

There
is a growing interest here and in Europe in using chocolate for eating. Through
better roasting and grinding methods, companies are manufacturing a smoother,
richer chocolate that brings out more of the flavor. Shops sell this chocolate
in one-pound bars, which can be cut into smaller pieces and melted, then used
to make quite delicious bonbons, candy sticks, and other confections.

Solo looked up and smiled
about this pleasant new discovery.

Jerome’s eyes flashed
with interest. “I’s gonna make this cake!”

The man at the window
felt sure that the chocolate cake from his mother’s book would soon appear on
his table. He sensed what Jerome was feeling; he had felt the same eagerness in
moments of surprise and discovery that had sparked his own life. In fact, he
was having such a moment right then because, finally, he knew what to do with
Solo.

He stepped up to the open
door to face the culinary explorers.

They turned to him in
awkward silence, with their book open, looking like two burglars caught with
goods that didn’t belong to them.

It was Solo who broke the
silence. “I’ll tend to your horse.”

“No, don’t go back to the
stable.” Tom walked toward them.

“I fix yer dinner, Mr.
Tom.”

“No.”

Jerome seemed taken aback
by Tom’s remarks. There was no trace of the slave’s ready smile and cheerful
manner. He dropped his head as if expecting a reprimand. Solo didn’t follow
suit; she kept her eyes on Tom, more curious than fearful—and perhaps more
attuned to his nature than was her friend.

“But Mr. Tom, you jus’
gittin’ home; you needs yer dinner—”

“I don’t want you to go
back to the kitchen, Jerome.”

“But—”

“And she’s not going back
to the stable.”

“Whut?!” Jerome looked terrified.

Tom, intent on a new
idea, didn’t notice his cook’s panic. “Somebody else can get me dinner and take
care of the horse.”

“But, Mr. Tom, you can’t
send us to the fields! Fo’ Gawd, pleez, sir!”

“What?” Tom was
astonished. “The fields? Why would I do that?”

“I knows Miss Solo can’t
be learnin’ me. Pleez don’t send us to th’ fields! We gives back yer mama’s
book and won’t do this agin.”

Jerome took the
housekeeping journal from Solo, closed it, and handed it to Tom. The slave then
started to take the labels away from the items on the table.

“No, stop, Jerome.” Tom
spread his arm over the table to block the action. “What I meant was, you can
stay here and finish your lesson.”

Jerome stared at him.

Tom held the book out to
his confused slave. “I’d like to taste that new chocolate cake.”

Slowly, Jerome’s smile
returned. He reached for the book and grasped it gingerly with both hands as if
it were a prized manuscript.

Then Tom turned to Solo.
“And I just realized what you could do here.”

She looked at him, her
eyes of melted chocolate waiting to hear his recipe.

“You can give classes to
the servants. Teach them to read and write. Teach them to want to learn about
something. Teach them to
care
about something,
anything
. I want
you to make me more Jeromes.”