Tracing the legend of the R.I. ‘pastry queen’ who baked her way to freedom

That is, until she discovered a family connection to Charity "Duchess" Channing Quamino, an 18th-century enslaved woman who was so renowned for her baking she was nicknamed "the pastry queen of Rhode Island" and may have even used her talent with dough to secure her and her family's freedom. Williams-Adams believes she is descended from Quamino through her paternal grandfather.

Although Quamino's birth name remains unknown, she was alternately called Charity and Duchess, the latter a nickname that reflected the belief that she was born to African royalty. Her surname, Quamino, comes from her husband John, and is reportedly a derivative of his Ghanaian name Kwame. Duchess Quamino was reportedly born in 1739 in present-day Ghana or Senegal, kidnapped as a preteen and brought to Newport, R.I., where she was enslaved by a locally prominent couple, William and Lucy Channing. William was the state's attorney general, and Lucy came from a family who became wealthy through the West African slave trade.

The Channings made Quamino work in their kitchen, and soon she began caring for their children. Over time, her cooking and baking skills became apparent.

Still, Quamino's legacy is shrouded in mystery.

According to Akeia de Barros Gomes, director of the Frank C. Munson Institute of American Maritime History at the Mystic Seaport Museum, the combination of respectability politics of the day and nostalgic narratives about loving relationships between "benevolent" enslavers and the people they enslaved demonstrates a wider problem in how histories are preserved and shared.

"This folklore around enslaved people who are considered successful and beloved, it's really dehumanizing," said de Barros Gomes, a Newport native whose research includes extensive study of the Black population there in the late 18th century. Most of what's known about Quamino is confined to folklore, a very limited paper trail and a narrative that wasn't her own. "Most written sources about slavery in Newport were written from the perspective of the privileged, from the enslavers about the enslaved," she said.

William Ellery Channing, for instance, one of the children who grew up in Quamino's care, wrote openly about how much she influenced his views on religion and abolition. Ellery Channing, who went on to become the most celebrated Unitarian minister of the early 1800s, was born nearly 30 years after Quamino first became enslaved by his family. Around the time he was born in 1780, Quamino and her children were said to have been manumitted, or freed, by the Channings, but she continued to work as a paid nanny and cook for them for years thereafter.

Among the only known primary source records that mention Quamino by name are church documents that confirm her enslaved status and membership records from the Palls and Biers Society, a branch of the African Union Society that helped free Black Rhode Islanders cover family burial expenses. Quamino was believed to be one of the first women granted membership, demonstrating the local prestige she gained access to with her freedom. Beyond that, contemporary knowledge about her is a mash-up of oral histories told by generations of Channing descendants that eventually resulted in a local mythology that operates like a game of telephone - full of common details, but with limited evidence to back them up.

Legend has it that Quamino bought her and her children's freedom with catering earnings. But even though the Channings reportedly afforded her an opportunity not given to many other enslaved people - to own and operate her own business - they still controlled her circumstances and legacy. De Barros Gomes concedes that while the family loved her, "we know that she wasn't able to live with her husband. We know she had to give her children the Channing name, and they had to be baptized as Channings. And what does that mean to a mother? That you have to put someone else's children before your own. So they're not seen as the distraction. So that your children aren't sold away from you."

Ingrid Peters, deputy executive director at the Newport Historical Society, confirmed that much of what we know about this accounting “comes from Channing family memories and reminiscences,” including the 1868 text “Early Recollections of Newport, R.I., from the year 1783 to 1811,” by George C. Channing. That original has since been lost to history, but many of the memories in it made their way to late 19th- and early 20th-century Newport newspaper articles that referred to Quamino as “the most celebrated baker in Rhode Island.” Somewhere along the way, she became known as “the pastry queen of Rhode Island,” perhaps a play on the combination of what she was most famous for making and the royal lineage she was believed to have come from.

Another firsthand record that helps shape Quamino's story is the gravestone that the Channings commissioned for her. It reads "A Free Black of distinguished excellence: Intelligent, Industrious, Affectionate, Honest and of Exemplary Piety Who deceased June 29, 1804, aged 65 Years."

Because Quamino's story is filled with so many gaps, uncertainty swirls around her descendancy, too. By most accounts, she and her husband, John (whom she married in 1765 with the consent of the couple's enslavers), had four documented children, but the only two who are confirmed by multiple sources are Charles (born 1772) and Violet (born 1776 or 1777). The other two, whose names remain unclear, were reportedly both girls; one is believed to have died at birth, and the other as a young child. John, who had won his own freedom in a local lottery in 1773, died in 1779 while serving as a privateer during the Revolutionary War; he was believed to have been trying to earn money to buy his wife and surviving children's freedom.

The story around the next generation starts to get murky, especially with Ancestry.com and other crowdsourcing sites drawing connections without sound documentation.

Even with that doubt, though, Quamino's purported descendants feel a deep connection to her. Being able to build a tangible bond to someone with a name, a story, is meaningful to their senses of who they are and where they came from, they say.

"Learning about Duchess has given me a sense of pride and understanding," Shae Williams-Adams said. "Pride in the fact that I come from history-making people. Understanding [how] as a people we were able to shift situations into our favor."

Jonathan King-Cretot, 46, a global studies professor in Arcadia, Fla., said that when he discovered his possible relationship to Duchess, he cried. "Because my whole life, inside of me, it sounds funny, but I felt Africa just pulling at me," he said. And when he traveled to Senegal, "I felt, honestly, at home. ... I was able to make the connection and say that my ancestors arrived from Senegal."

According to de Barros Gomes, it doesn't matter that the connections are tenuous. "That's the story they tell, and it's absolutely valid." On the one hand, she said, "I'm always arguing that we need to counter nostalgic views of the era of slavery that make it seem benign and familial." But she also stressed that she believes in "the value of oral history and descendant voices, particularly because Black stories and perspectives have been traditionally minimized, undermined and appropriated."

Estelle T. Barada is another keeper of Quamino's legacy, as a historic interpreter who portrays her in colonial Newport reenactments with such local organizations as Stages of Freedom. Barada has learned as much as she could about Quamino, embodying her as accurately as possible and filling in the gaps with thoughts and feelings informed by parallels in her own life, when it makes sense.

Barada has been living with pancreatic cancer for four years and is slowly losing her eyesight due to glaucoma. Like Quamino, she is a mother several times over. A grandmother to 15 and great-grandmother to one, she draws on her bonds to the generations that follow her when she's considering Quamino's outlook on life.

Barada's interpretation is inspired by her own experience as a pioneering ballet student at the Boston Conservatory in 1971. "I wanted to be a prima ballerina," she said. "At that time there were no Black ballerinas. I got there and the doors slammed in my face." People told her, "You'll never be in 'Swan Lake,'" she said. "Why don't you go back to Harlem where you belong?"

After two years of rejection, Tucker left ballet for the theater's costume department, where she managed pieces that spanned generations of American history. That work, she says, led her to Quamino. She learned about historic baking and has since re-created the dish Quamino was best known for, according to George C. Channings' recollections: her frosted plum cake.

Unfortunately, no effort to get to know Quamino has yielded confirmed, accurate recipes, even though her prestige for baking was so revered that she was reportedly commissioned to make a birthday cake for George Washington, according to lore shared by Barada. Much of what Barada and other keepers of Quamino's story know about her comes from such academic texts as Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck's 2010 book "Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England," and Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s 2008 anthology, "African American National Biography." As with other contemporary accounts, most details about Quamino in these texts come from Channings' memories. As an enslaved person, local historians agree, Quamino was probably illiterate, and as a result, she presumably committed her recipes to memory, passing them down through an oral history from which only bits and pieces remain.

That said, a few things are probably true about that plum cake. First off, the name itself is a misnomer: According to culinary historian Sarah Lohman, plums probably referred to raisins or dried currants. "It was probably most similar to a fruitcake we know today," Lohman said. "There were no chemical leavenings, so no baking powder. No vanilla. Trash everything you know about 21st-century cakes." The cake may have been finished with a decorative dusting of confectioner's sugar, as opposed to a glaze or icing. According to Lohman, the "frosted" decorations may have been what made Quamino's cakes so spectacular, but it could just have well been the result of a unique spice blend.

Former Ellis Island genealogist Elizabeth Migliore says it's telling that so little is known about Quamino, despite her powerful and lasting reputation - and that so much is known about the Channings, whose very livelihoods were made possible at least in part by Quamino's labor. "It's not the distance and time that makes it difficult to trace Quamino and her descendants," Migliore said. "It's their status as enslaved people."

Keith Stokes, a Newport native, also helps maintain Quamino's legacy as vice president of the 1696 Heritage Group, which cares for her and her daughter's gravesites. Stokes stresses that Quamino's story is bigger than her enslavement. "As my grandmother would remind me as a boy, 'Slavery is how we got here, but it tells you little about who we are as a people.'"

For Barada, the gaps in Quamino's story have required her to make assumptions about not only who Quamino was, but how she had to cultivate herself. "Duchess, she was kind of sweet," Tucker says. "A very gentle woman. I mean, she used to feed people with sugar."

Shae Williams-Adams, the Colorado chef who says her discovery of Quamino has validated much of her own identity, reflects similarly on her purported ancestor's legacy.

“The decisions we make today will affect the next generations,” she said. “Hate is a learned trait, but love is instinctual. Duchess chose to lean into love through her food.”