Richmond-based filmmaker Hannah Ayers knew she had to make a documentary about John Dabney when she learned of his audacity. A slave for the first four decades of his life, he was simultaneously famed for his skillfulness as a chef and bartender and for the fact that he insisted on finishing payments to his former owner for his freedom after the Civil War ended.
“The Hail-Storm: John Dabney in Virginia,” a 23-minute documentary by Ayers and her husband and collaborator, Lance Warren, will premiere Nov. 2 at the third annual John Dabney Dinner, an event honoring Dabney's legacy during the multiday Fire, Flour & Fork regional food celebration.
As Ayers read news accounts of the second annual Dabney dinner, she says she became intrigued with the life of “someone I had never really heard of before.”
While learning more about Dabney’s achievements — including his famed diamond-back terrapin stew and “hail-storm” juleps made with crushed ice, prepared for a clientele that included the cream of Richmond society — Warren says they came to appreciate how, as a black entrepreneur, he deftly tread the world in which he lived.
“It’s an interesting way of looking at what freedom meant in the first generation of emancipation,” he says.
Dabney, born in 1824 in Hanover Junction, began paying for his freedom before the start of the Civil War. He paid off the balance after the war, despite the end of slavery. Reportedly, doing so allowed Dabney, a shrewd businessman, to secure credit at any bank in Richmond.
“One of the things that captured our attention was that he very much understood the world in which he lived,” Warren says. “He and his wife counseled their children” to successfully travel their own paths.
By the 1870s, Dabney had opened a flourishing restaurant. He continued to work until the week of his death, and died June 7, 1900, at his home.
Ayers and Warren founded Richmond-based Field Studio. Two of their films include “An Outrage,” about lynching in the American South, and “That World Is Gone: Race and Displacement in a Southern Town,” about Vinegar Hill, Charlottesville’s largest African-American neighborhood, which was eliminated by urban renewal.
Portions of “Hail-Storm” were filmed in Richmond; Brooklyn, N.Y.; and Lexington, Ky., the home of Jennifer Jackson Hardy, Dabney’s great-great-granddaughter.
A re-creation of Dabney’s signature canvasback duck dish was filmed in Charleston, S.C., with Chef Kevin Mitchell.
The Dabney dinner will be held from 6 to 9 p.m. at Richmond’s First African Baptist Church, a congregation that Dabney and his wife belonged to. The evening will feature Michael Hall of Spoonbread Bistro, Velma Johnson of Mama J’s, Neverett Eggleston III of Delancey's, Michael Twitty, author of “The Cooking Gene,” and others. Tickets are $55 to $78.16 and are available at fireflourandfork.com.
Richmond magazine Editorial Director Susan Winiecki is a co-founder of Fire, Flour and Fork.
