B (3:18)
Bye. This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate Deo. Hercules was a real live man. There are a number of reasons we know for sure. His name, just the one name, just Hercules, shows up in tax records. He's there among a list of taxable property in a census of slaves conducted in 1787. He is listed as a cook. He is mentioned in a handful of diaries and letters. There is a portrait that people think is him, a black man in a white chef's coat, his dark hair barely contained in his tight white chef's hat. It is probably him, but it could be someone else entirely. But Hercules was a real man. We have the evidence and we have that evidence, those records, the diaries, the probable portrait, because George Washington owned him. And when you are George Washington, people save your stuff. They keep your writing. They keep the diaries and letters that your friends and your family wrote just in case you first president, founding father, hero of the revolution show up in those diaries, just in case you answered their letters. So that historians and biographers in the Mount Vernon Ladies association can tell your story, can give a full accounting of your life, can catalog its moments and chronicle its days. Hercules was one of George Washington's slaves, and so we know he existed, though we don't know much beyond that. Hercules was born sometime around 1754. He was married, though we don't know when, to another slave named Alice. They had three kids, Richmond and Evie and Delia. George Washington bought Hercules from the guy who lived next door to Mount Vernon, then put him to work running a ferry across one of the rivers that ran through the estate. And then at some point, he got transferred over to the kitchen and he took to the work and he became the head chef, the chief cook, they called it. Hercules would make the food that George and Martha Washington and their family and their guests would eat. Washington's step grandson wrote. And people still keep the things he wrote because he was Washington's step grandson. He remembered Hercules fondly as a celebrated artiste, as highly accomplished to proficient in the culinary art as could be found in the United States. A man, he wrote, who had full command of his kitchen, who seemed to have the power of ubiquity to be everywhere at once. Washington loved his cooking, so much so that when he became president, he took Hercules with him to be the chief cook at the presidential mansion. And this was back before they built the White House, back when the Capitol was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And here's the thing about Pennsylvania then they had a law that said that any slave who lived within its borders for more than six months would be freedom. And the President wasn't above the law. But let's be clear. The President also didn't want to free his slaves. So every six months, he'd send these people back home to Virginia for some interregnum, some period that would allow him to comply with the letter of the law. And then he would rotate these people back in for another six months so that he could continue to own them. And so he sent Hercules back to Mount Vernon. It was a bummer for Washington to have to do it. He was totally going to miss his cooking. But the law was the law. He wasn't the governor of Pennsylvania. So Hercules goes home, and they don't need a chief cook in Mount Vernon with the Lord and lady of the men are out of town. And so he gets put to work in the fields. He was a big guy. He was called Hercules for a reason. They have him building a brick wall, and there he is back in Virginia, sent away from a job he thrived in, possibly enjoyed that gave him status. He had even been allowed to sell the leftovers. And he used that money to buy things for his family and fancy clothes for himself. He'd been sent from a city where several thousand black men lived free. And here he was back in Virginia because George Washington wanted to make sure he could remain a slave rather than let him live as a free man, even as an employee in the same position Hercules ran. George Washington was a real live man. We know this because every 10 years, Americans have to fill out a census form. And he started that. And because there's a presidential cabinet and they have real meetings and staffs who collect real paychecks, funded by taxpayers, and they create policies that have real impacts on people and upon the natural, inbuilt environments. We know because Native Americans no longer own what we call downtown Chicago or much of Ohio. We know because there is a United States at all. Then there are all those portraits he sat for. Sat in a room at one point with another real man. We know because we have his teeth, or his dentures anyway, which are actually teeth from other men, and pieces of teeth from horses and cattle and ivory from an elephant. He didn't put the dentures in very often because they couldn't really open and close and they hurt besides. But there were times that those fake teeth were in his real mouth. And we have his hair, so much of it kept by his barber, cut off by his personal assistant before Washington was buried in the ground. Because people had been writing to both he and the President for years, asking for a lock of George Washington's hair as a souvenir, some tangible connection, because otherwise he's just an idea, a memory unremembered now, an image that can be conjured just by invoking his name, George Washington. See, there he was for a second there. A presence that can be summoned at will with some inspirational quote on liberty or to make some point about America or Americanness or leadership or honesty or bravery or dentures or the Delaware River. But he was a real man once, and he was once mad that another real man he owned had run away. Mad because his family missed the man's cooking and mad because it made him look bad. He had been telling people he would never purchase another slave, and he felt pretty good about telling people that. But this thing with Hercules really put him in a tough spot. Here's a quote. The running off of my cook has been the most inconvenient thing to this family. And what renders it more disagreeable is that I had resolved never to become master of another slave by purchase. But this resolution I fear I must break. Over the course of several letters written over the course of more than a year, Washington kept pushing people to try and find Hercules. He kept suggesting places he could have gone, methods of capture, names of people who might have leads or could otherwise assist in the search. Meanwhile, people at Mount Vernon were suggesting he just hire a cook. They had a nice white woman in mind. But the President wanted Hercules back. He liked his food, and he liked that he worked for free. At one point, possibly as part of Washington's efforts to track him down, an aide to the Prince of France who was staying at Mount Vernon tried to get information from Hercules six year old daughter. He asked wasn't she upset that her father left her? Wasn't she sad she'd never get to see him again? She shook her head. No sir, she said. I am very glad because he is free now. Hercules never came back and we know nothing of where he went or how it felt to get there. Just that he was never caught. He was formally freed when Washington died several years later. The President's will emancipated all of his slaves and that's a fact that is often summoned when people want to throw in a yeah but argument when someone points out that Washington was a slave owner. Hercules family were not freed. They legally belonged to Martha Washington who made no such provision and so they remained enslaved. We don't know how Hercules felt about that. As far as we are able to know. His story ends when he ran beyond the boundaries of Mount Vernon and off the pages of the diaries and the letters. But we can still conjure him. We can do that with the dead. We can remember him. We can grant him the power of ubiquity to be everywhere at once free in Philadelphia or in the air right there. The next time you think of George Washington forever out of his reach. Satan. Radiotopia from prx.
