Finding Martha's Vineyard Read online

  “The big thing, as you got older, was being thrown off the pier, if you were a girl. God, if you got thrown off, that was it!” Teixeira laughs heartily, her large silver hoop earrings dancing against her cheeks. “We spent all day at the beach, hoping to be thrown off. You were black as a berry by the end of the summer.”

  Arriving the day after school closed and leaving the day before it reopened, summers were long, alternating in one day from the excitement of greeting new arrivals to the languor of long days spent on the beach. Fudge was purchased from Hilliard’s Candy Kitchen on Circuit Avenue, frozen custard from several ice cream shops along the avenue, perfectly grilled hot dogs could be had at the Sea View.

  Railroad along the water in Oak Bluffs.

  Ferry terminal in Oak Bluffs, circa early I900s.

  Circuit Avenue, from ferry terminal.

  Sixty years later, in many ways much remains the same for children growing up summers on the Vineyard. Hilliards closed after the summer of 2002, and gone with its fudge are the delicious dark, milk, and white chocolate lollipops cast in the shape of shells and mollusks. Fudge abides, and can still be found at Murdick’s on Circuit Avenue, where visitors can watch it being made in great vats. Ice cream and custard are plentiful at Mad Martha’s or Ben and Bills, a ten-minute walk from the beach. The Sea View Hotel is gone—and with it those grilled hot dogs—torn down and turned into condominiums after years of fierce opposition. Yet the short walk to Circuit Avenue yields a dozen shops offering whatever food the vacationing heart desires: fish sandwiches, fried clams, hamburgers, veggie burgers, lobster rolls, and those signature hot dogs, the buns lightly spread with butter and grilled.

  Much has changed. What was once open land in and around the island’s six towns has over the last three decades been transformed by development, subdivisions, and bad or no planning. In 1986 the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank Commission was created by island voters to receive a 2 percent surcharge on most real estate transfers in the six island towns. Recent revenues provide a gauge of island real estate transactions: In calendar year 1986 Land Bank revenues for the six island towns totaled $3,323,136.03. In calendar year 2003 revenues were $8,230,383.93. Projections are that in 2004 transfer fees collected by the Land Bank will be in excess of $10 million. Money collected by the Land Bank is used to purchase land that will be kept open and made accessible to the public. By 2003—2004 the Land Bank had preserved more than two thousand acres, an impressive feat, but just 3 percent of the island. Their work continues, along with that of the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, the Nature Conservancy, Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary, the Vineyard Conservation Society, the Trustees of Reservations, the Martha’s Vineyard Preservation Trust, the Vineyard Open Land Foundation, and the Conservation Partnership of Martha’s Vineyard.

  While everyone sees problems on the Vineyard subjectively and people tend to date those problems to immediately following their arrival, the issues of growth, tourism, and overpopulation are not new. There are many more people: year-rounders, summer vacationers, and day trippers pouring off the ferries—which there are more of, too— to spend time on the Vineyard. There are too many cars on the roads, too, joined by the demon moped, the cause of eternal crawling traffic and you’d think enough accidents— several serious or fatal—to support their being banned.

  Yet the saving grace of this island in the Atlantic is that as much as it changes it man-ages to retain much of the natural and spiritual beauty. It remains a place of welcome. Certainly the problems of tourism and overpopulation, while increasingly more urgent,

  are nothing new. “There are great changes, especially in the villages where modern department stores have taken the place of the corner grocery and ship-chandler’s shop. Great Changes indeed: yet it is still the old Vineyard,” Joseph C. Allen writes in Tales and Trails of Martha’s Vineyard (1938).

  In the up-Island towns, the wild shrubs, black alder, wild cherry, elderberry and other bushes have been trimmed into tall, beautiful hedges that line the roadside. They are a modern touch, something that the older inhabitants never dreamed about, and they form an admirable border to the smooth, surfaced auto road that crosses the Vineyard in all directions.

  But peep into the tangle of this shrubbery—there one will discover the remains of old stone walls, piled up by the farmers of three hundred years ago. Half-removed, perhaps badly tumbled, the stones are still there and add their strength to the barricade that surrounds the meadow beyond. Beneath the asphalt of the highway, there remains the clay and brush foundation of the old trails, with the hard-pressed earth still supporting the new road—and scored, beneath the surface, by the wheels of ox-carts and hoofs of the beasts that drew them.

  And in the hearts and souls of the people who lived on this Island is the same old spirit: the hospitality, the charitable heart, the respect for all that is good and beautiful; the old Vineyard, which may don modern dress, but never really changes.”

  One year my friend Lynn and I remain on the Vineyard for a week after Labor Day. One night we take a rambling, going nowhere walk through the town of Oak Bluffs. Unlike a few days earlier, there are no cars parked jam packed along the narrow streets and none drive by as we walk. Perhaps half the houses are closed and dark. The ambient noise of the height of summer, of mingled voices, water running, laughter, competing music, the creak of rockers on wooden porches, the layered smell of charcoal and cultivated roses, is gone. It is so quiet that we speak in hushed tones, whispering as if not to be overheard by the silence surrounding us. “It’s so empty here,” Lynn says. “Like when we were kids.”

  In the 1950s and ‘60s there were still shuttered, dilapidated houses in Oak Bluffs that we deemed haunted and onto whose porches we dared one another to run. We rode our bikes everywhere in packs, often recklessly and always without helmets, and the cars looked out for us, unlike now, when it’s wise to look out for them. As children, we literally knew everyone in town, if not by name at least by face, and spoke to them passing by.

  We stroll up and down the streets of our childhood; Narragansett, Tuckernuck, Pequot, Canonicus, Nantucket, Penacook, Nashawena, Naumkeag, Vineyard. In the silence of late summer, we are young again, revisiting our past. On Wamsutta are the public tennis courts where I took lessons one summer from the ancient Mr. Crozier, a nice and patient man if there was one. For a decade before my parents bought a house we rented a different cottage each summer and Lynn and I pass most of them that night, each one evoking a snapshot of a Vineyard summer. We lived there the summer Lynn fell in love for the first time at twelve; here when we used to go to block parties in front of the Oak Bluffs post office, when the street in front still allowed cars and the town would close it off and play records, before it was a pedestrian mall. That’s the house we rented the year my toddler brother, Ralph, down for a nap, sleepwalked out of the house and was found by my mother walking up the road in his underclothes.

  It is on the lawn of her parents’ house on Vineyard Avenue that Lynn married in 1974. On the high porch of her family’s house on Narragansett where we met Tonetta Henderson from Long Island, daughter of one of the Dowdell sisters, who at first seemed shy and maybe prim, but turned out to be mischievous and full of fun. As voyeurs and then participants, we have partied in almost every other house in town. As adolescents we secretly followed Lynn’s teenage brother and my sister to parties and spied on them from the bushes. A few years later, old enough to be invited guests, we practiced the latest dance steps for hours in front of the mirror at home, playing the same 45s over and over again. At the party we tried to look cool as we held up the wall, simultaneously praying and dreading we’d be asked to dance.

  All the houses are familiar, although in many there are new faces, the owners we knew as children and young women now gone. Some we have met, others we have not. What is obvious from the hanging plants, neatly painted trim, bicycles leaned against porches, is that these people, known and unknown, whenever they arrived on this island, have found a home and lo
ve it, too.

  Laughing and happy, our walk ends at the beach. Here is the ocean and the shore, the aspect from which everyone, Antonio and Carolyn Teixeira and our parents and ourselves and all our children and grandchildren, first saw this island. It is the view that welcomed those who came long before us and those we hope will come after. Hopefully they will find, when they meet Martha’s Vineyard, a little piece of what they can also, like the eleven-year-old Gertrude Teixeira, call paradise.

  In 1943, three years after his family first visited Martha’s Vineyard, Antonio Teixeira bought a ten-room house on Pacific Avenue in the Highlands, the section above Oak Bluffs harbor up New York Avenue. The house was purchased by Teixeira through what’s known as a “straw,” a white realtor, in this case Henry Cronig, who, along with Evan D. Bodfish, helped many early black families purchase property on the island at a time when there were prohibitions, many of them unspoken, against selling property to African Americans.

  This was the case with the purchase of more than a few houses on the Vineyard up until the I960s. The island, like everywhere else in America, is not racism free, in spite of an overall air of tolerance and an attitude of live and let live. Here, what racism exists is largely sub rosa, manifesting itself when black Americans overwhelm unspoken and perhaps unnoticed limitations. Such eruptions are usually focused around a specific event: the arrival of too many unfamiliar black faces on an already crowded holiday weekend or an attempt to buy property in a neighborhood where blacks have not traditionally lived.

  “Every day we would walk down to the beach, at that time there was a pier you could jump off, and at night we’d go bowling. There were always parties, the Flying Horses carousel, some nights we’d go down to the beach, to the jetty, just sit out there and tell jokes. My sisters,” adds Teixeira, cutting her eyes, “were involved in other things, but I was too young.”

  “In those days, many of the black people on the Vineyard were there because they worked for wealthy white families,” Gertrude says, deftly moving the conversation away from specifics of the “other things” Teixeira alluded to earlier. “There were people who came here to vacation, and then the people who came here to work. There was class, but it was unspoken. Everybody commingled.”

  “You didn’t have to belong to a social clique to enjoy the summer,” Carolyn elaborates. “There was no such thing as nobodies, and there was no such thing as somebodies, if you want to put it like that. Back then there was no ‘My father’s so-and-so.’ ”

  “There was always discrimination on the island, but we were isolated by being all together in Oak Bluffs,” Teixeira says. “Just as class distinctions, as blacks have become more educated and joined these more prestigious and exclusive enclaves, have increased, in the segregated era you had more of a need to stick together. Now, it is probably more from desire than from need. I raised my children here in the summers, and one of my daughters, Robyn Nash, now lives on the Vineyard year-round; she’s an attorney. People come here from all over the country, and I felt that was an important experience, for myself and my children. So many people now think Martha’s Vineyard is solely the jet set and elitist, but that’s just a false concept.”

  “The people who came here to vacation, they brought with them this aura,” says Gertrude, her eyes widening and hands drawing a circle in the air, as if to give substance to that emanation. “They came from New York, Washington, and other places, and they had money. I think this elitism happens with all societies. People separate themselves by virtue of what they have accomplished and what others have not.”

  In September of 1943, the Teixeira family’s home on Martha’s Vineyard burned down.

  “I remember walking up to the house and seeing just the pantry sitting in all the rubble. I was just heartbroken,” Gertrude recalls. Undaunted, their father bought the house next door—better constructed, he said—along with eight lots, two of which would eventually go to each of his children.

  In 1945, Antonio Dias Teixeira died at the age of fifty-eight. His wife, Carolyn, died two years later, in 1947. She was fifty-four. Gertrude was twenty, her siblings all teenagers, and she became their surrogate parent. The family stayed together, but between finishing high school, going to college, and maintaining their home on the mainland, the house on the Vineyard was too much of a burden. It was sold in 1950 to Mrs. Lynwood Downing, mother of Eloise, Gloria, Lylburn, and Lewis.

  The Teixeira siblings finished college, began careers, married, dispersed. For a num-ber of years they did not visit Martha’s Vineyard, but they held on to those eight lots. Gertrude Hunter, living happily in St. Louis while doing her internship and residency in pediatrics, was not enthusiastic about moving back east until her husband, Charles, pointed out that she’d be closer to the Vineyard. “I said, Okay!” she laughs. “I always remembered the peace and tranquility of the island. It was a tie to my past. Even after we sold the family homestead, if home was anywhere, it was the Vineyard.”

  Over the years they have all migrated back to the Vineyard, drawn by childhood memories, good friends, the beauty of the island. The Teixeira sisters each have a house in Oak Bluffs, within shouting distance of one another if the wind is right. Their brother lives in Vineyard Haven. Carolyn’s house is built on the lot her father left her; the others expect their children to build on their lots when they are ready. After sixty years the pleasures they find on the island have changed little. Sitting on the porch, relaxing with friends, going to the beach, watching children and grandchildren come of age in a place where they too grew up. Here, simple pleasures are the best.

  “I’m not very social in Washington,” confides Carolyn, the middle child and widowed mother of two. “When I’m introduced to people there, I’m always someone’s sister or someone’s mother. But when I go to the Vineyard, all the people I know and all the people I see know my name is Carolyn!” She bangs her fist on the table and tears roll down her face. “People know me here, me. Here, I see all these things and people that are familiar.”

  “I look at the island as home base,” says Teixeira. “A place I always go to be rejuvenated. The minute I see that water and get on that ferry, I am transformed. The seagulls, the water, are very inspiring. It is a wonderful place to paint. I have never had a desire to go to another spot. The unique thing is that you can have whatever you want on the Vineyard. If you want to socialize, you can. If you want to be alone, you can.”

  “It’s an amazing place,” Gertrude sums up in that way big sisters do. “You see the changes, but it remains the same. That is what is so enduring and draws people back.”

  The Brown sisters. Left to right: Barbara DePasse, Constance Koeford, Jacqueline Llewellyn, 1943

  Barbara Brown DePasse, eighty-four, better known as Babs, has spent summers on Martha’s Vineyard since 1943. In 1944 her father, Dr. Lucien Brown, and his wife, Ida, nicknamed Spider, bought a house on Waban Park in Oak Bluffs. Along with her sisters, Constance Koeford and Jacqueline Llewellyn, now eighty-one and seventy-five, she has swum, partied, relaxed, welcomed friends, and raised children and nieces and nephews on the island for over sixty years.

  Babs: I lived in Harlem, on Sugar Hill, until I was eleven, then we moved to the Bronx and my father built a house there. My father and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., were very friendly. Adam had a newspaper called The People’s Voice, and he’d published an article about Clarence and Alice Vanderhoop’s guest house on Circuit Avenue on Martha’s Vineyard. The number was in the paper, so my father called them up. He and my mother came up for the week, without us. Adam and Isabel took them out on Adam’s boat and entertained them.

  They liked it so much they took the three of us back the next year, 1943, and we rented a little garage cottage from Clarence and Alice Vanderhoop. That’s the year we met Mai Fane. My father was thinking of buying a house in Nantucket, and Adam told him to buy on the Vineyard, “Because you’ve got three young daughters and they’ll have a lot more life here.”

  This house was not eve
n publicly on the market. A man named Evan D. Bodfìsh helped my father purchase the house. The town was mad with him and he engineered the sale. They did not know the woman who looked at the house on our behalf was a very light-skinned black woman. It was owned by a man named Gardner who lost his money when the mills on the Cape went south.

  We were the first black family to buy a house on the ocean in Oak Bluffs. They increased my father’s taxes 100 percent the year after he bought this house. They were small to begin with, but they went up 100 percent. They knew they couldn’t get him out; it was just punishment. My father went over to the tax people, and when they saw him coming, they ran. He walked upstairs and there was nobody in the office. They had flown the coop! We live on Waban Park, it’s a big park, but right after my father bought they put the playground right across the street, directly in front of our house.

  People used to drive by in their cars to see us, the Negroes. We didn’t care. We really had no big thing about it. We didn’t really have any bad times with the people here, not when you think of how they burn crosses and bomb houses, there was nothing like that. In no time at all, my father became the darling of the street, he just charmed everyone. He was a real bon vivant.

  The social life here really got good as we got older. Before that it was just riding bicycles and going to the beach. It got good in the early 1950s. We met Miriam Walker and that whole wonderful group, from numbers bankers to bar owners to lawyers, doctors, professors, and Indian chiefs. More people came, and the social scene grew. It was hot. In August there were nothing but parties day after day, the same people for the most part. You got tired of them, but at least you were having a good time.