A professor, author, and cook finds the other side of the island
OAK BLUFFS -- By early October, Jessica Harris has usually shut down her cottage here and headed for one of two other homes: a brick row house in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant or an 1850s Creole cottage in New Orleans's Marigny neighborhood. Though her New Orleans residence did not flood, she says, ''My heart is broken right now. It's my survivor's guilt. My house was built on high ground, but I'm just so worried about all the other folks."
Harris, 57, a native of Queens, author of nine books, and a university professor in New York, is expecting guests in her cottage here but hasn't gone to the market yet. Leg of lamb and broccoli salad are on the menu. Tall and round-shouldered, Harris is dressed in a floor-length denim skirt and blue moccasins. Her long, gray hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail, and she has on chunky gold jewelry. ''Baby, I come from the Sammy Davis Jr. school of jewelry wearing," she says. ''If you got it, you had better wear it."
She has spent the summer working on ''The Vineyard Table," a volume due out in two years about home and ethnic cooking. She's on the island later than usual because she's testing recipes and a photographer is coming to shoot food photos. ''I want the book to be about the inclusiveness of Vineyard food rather than the exclusivity," she says. ''So many people think of the Vineyard as a place for hobby farms and the rich and famous. There is all that, but there are also real, hardworking farms, and it's not just the Vernon Jordans, Ted Dansons, and Carly Simons living here. This island is really full of working people."
Martha's Vineyard, she explains, ''used to be so homogenous, but now we have Brazilians and Portuguese and Cape Verdeans. We have African-Americans and Jamaicans. This is the new Vineyard."
During her five decades in an 1870s wood-shingled ''campground" cottage, she has watched the island evolve. On the front porch, a set of pink rocking chairs tip back and forth in time with the foggy breeze blowing off the Vineyard Sound. Inside it smells like old books and spices. In the summer of 1956, Harris, an only child, and her parents were about to head to Europe on a two-week voyage on the SS France. Before they were to leave, the three spent a weekend on the Vineyard, where her father saw the cottage for sale. The cruise was off. Harris's parents, now deceased, bought the place on the spot, for $4,000, and she has lived in it, off and on, ever since. ''My father had heard about Martha's Vineyard as a school kid in Tennessee," says Harris. ''Instead of a week in Brussels, we've had 50 beautiful summers here on the Vineyard. My parents were way ahead of their time. They were middle income but knew how to spend their money and aspired to the lifestyle of the upper classes."
As Harris heads out to shop, she grabs a bottle of Shiraz from her shelf. It will accompany a fried fish sandwich at Mediterranean, a sunny restaurant overlooking the harbor. She orders in French (her major at Bryn Mawr), and after lunch sets out for a favorite farm and butcher.
Harris, who is single, says that she has ''no parents, no husband, no kids, and no car." By nature, she's a late riser, an afternoon napper, a champagne drinker, and a storyteller. She dotes on her cats -- Toby, Simba, Shaka, and Nefertiti, whom she's nicknamed ''Girlfriend," makes friends with everyone she meets, loves to cook and read, and considers herself ''mama to everyone and everything."
When she's in New York, she teaches freshman English at Queens College, which she's done for 36 years. ''Everything else I do is just a hobby," she says. Over the years, she has been a restaurant critic for the Village Voice, a travel editor for Essence magazine, and a guest lecturer at the Smithsonian Institution. In 1983 Harris earned a doctorate in performance studies at New York University. She wrote about French theater in Senegal. Around that time she also wrote ''The World Beauty Book," a manual of Third World women's beauty tips with recipes for vanilla perfume and cinnamon face powder. Since then, her books have been about the foodways resulting from the African Diaspora.
That was an attraction of New Orleans. She went in the mid-1990s to research the cookbook ''Beyond Gumbo." In the Crescent City, she says, Spanish, French, and African cultures are all mixed together. ''The pace of life is different. People take the time to walk and talk and take care of each other. There's a reverence for art and a celebration of eccentricity. New Orleans is the only Caribbean town in the United States."
Tending to her dinner plans, after lunch Harris makes her first stop at Whippoorwill Farm in West Tisbury. She changes her mind about having broccoli when she sees the knobby little carrots and slender leeks Brazilian workers are washing in a plastic kiddie pool. She speaks to them in Portuguese. The farm manager asks her where she learned the language, and she answers, ''In the streets of Bahia, honey; I learned my Portuguese in the streets of Bahia." It turns out she spent time in the Brazilian state researching African culture.
Then it's back to Oak Bluffs, to the Reliable Market. A leg of lamb awaits her there, and she also wants gourds and Indian corn. At home, Harris switches on a mix tape of Creole Caribbean music and gets to work. Her kitchen is small with a low ceiling; pantry shelves overflow with pickles, spices, and cat food. Copper pans hang from a pot rack over an old cast-iron cookstove. Paintings and drawings and folksy sculptures of watermelons are everywhere. At some point, she says, she introduced a theme to each residence. The Vineyard is watermelon; New York is okra; New Orleans is black-eyed peas.
Harris sits down to peel and chop the carrots, which she'll simmer in passion fruit juice. Leeks will cook in sweet butter from Normandy, France. After stuffing leg of lamb with garlic, along with rosemary and lavender from her own garden, she slides the meat into a hot oven. Cleaning as she works and sipping red wine, the ebullient cook is uncharacteristically quiet. Sliced lemons go into a pitcher of water, a simple tomato and basil salad is arranged on a platter, and she's about ready for her guests.
She slumps into an armchair, closes her eyes, and rests for a few minutes. In the next few days, she has a house to close and two other homes to settle back into.
