Five locals gathered to hear Catherine Stewart, a professor at Cornell College, speak about late black novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston and her use of food as a metaphor in her writing.

Hurston was college-educated during the 1920s when the streets of Harlem, a borough of New York City, were alive with cultural creativity-art, music, writing-a period known historically as the Harlem Renaissance.

At the time, Harlem drew blacks and their supporters from the American South, from big cites nationally, even from the Caribbean and the West Indies.

"It seemed to whites, I think very often that it was a kind of a monolithic black community but I think in many ways it was very diverse, very heterogeneous," Stewart said.

Hurston, Stewart said, "initially trained professionally to become an anthropologist and went on many folklore-collecting expeditions into the wilds of Florida-they were wild at that time, no Disneyworld-wild places in Georgia, the sea coast islands, and then also traveled on to Jamaica and Haiti as well in search of African traditions, African folk culture, that she could report in a number of ways."

As these blacks were coming into Harlem, Hurston set out to study their cultures of origin in the field-and in the mines and the lumber camps-of swampy Florida.

Stewart showed an undated photo of Hurston in a boat. Stewart said she liked to imagine Hurston was "being propelled forward probably in search of one of the lumber camps-phosphate mining communities that existed in this time period and which were routinely staffed by African-American workers from whom she hoped to gather all of her folk materials."

Photos of Hurston in the field collecting folklore were taken by her fellow anthropologists, Stewart said. Hurston used a still camera and, briefly, a film camera in documenting some rituals, folk dances and children's games, which were called traditional folk games, though because of her status as a black woman pre-Civil Rights, she had a hard time obtaining audio and video equipment that was at the time advanced, and often given to whites for whose work Hurston paved the way and made some connections. Film footage and audio recordings of folksongs Hurston collected are on file in the Library of Congress, Stewart said, showing stills from one of her film reel recordings of a folk dance.

Stewart said she had spent recent research time connecting Hurston's love of folklore collecting and folk culture with an interest in African-American culinary traditions.

"Some of the connections I'll be drawing for you then are between storytelling as Hurston saw it or African-American folk traditions and culinary traditions as both a subject for study by the anthropologists, but also Hurston became interested in food as a metaphor, as a way in which she, herself, as a creative fiction writer could talk about identity, could talk about meaning in one's life," Stewart said.

"Her nieces recalled with fondness how many meals she'd cooked for them during the 1930s when she was working for the Federal Writer's Project in Florida, and in Harlem where Hurston became a central figure of the frequent gatherings of African-American intellectuals, writers and artists, Hurston was always prepared to feed whoever dropped into her flat for a visit, and she was actually well-known for her special dish of fried shrimp and okra. Some people actually spoke of this as a celebrated dish that she managed to create.

"Hurston's cooking skills were actually good enough for her to consider using them as her primary source of income by becoming a caterer in New York City under the title she dreamed up for herself, 'New York's Chicken Specialist.'

"So I think we're very lucky, at least for us, that she decided to pour both her love of folklore and her love of food into writing, and create kind of a literary feast for all of us to enjoy," Stewart said.

"'Folklore,' Hurston proclaimed, 'is the boiled-down juice of human living.' Food and storytelling, as Hurston makes clear, are both related to desire, to appetite, to fulfillment, and to one's own sense of identity and one's way of belonging to a larger community.

"Drawing upon the metaphor of food once again to explain both the universal as well as the particular elements of folk culture, Hurston explained, 'In folklore, the world is a big old serving platter and all the localites are like eating plates. All of the plates get heaped with food from the platter but each plate [is seasoned] to suit itself, and that is known as originality.'"

For more, see our Feb. 10 print edition.