Finding Martha's Vineyard Page 13

  It was strictly a house-to-house or beach-to-beach thing, and some people had boats. They’d be moored down here at Church’s Pier. There was Grant Reynolds, who said that everybody has children that get bigger, but he has boats that get bigger. He was colorful. There was lots of drinking, but nobody got drunk and disorderly. We lived a very insular social life because it was strictly us. It was not an interracial kind of thing. They didn’t need us and we didn’t need them, everybody was happy, and there were no incidences of anything but good times. And of course Miriam Walker and her mother, Sadie Shearer, and Lincoln Pope and his family, they were vintage people. Miriam Walker was a child up here. The social life was most enjoyable and it was intergenerational. When my daughter, Suzanne, had her birthday party, everyone was there, from old people to teenagers. We had it out at South Beach and everybody came. It was like a safari, everybody was carrying something and making the hot dogs and stuff. There were lots of big, family parties.

  I think it’s true that the island became more social when the New Yorkers came. New Yorkers are special. They’re more sophisticated. I can tell you that from living on the West Coast. That’s big-time Hollywood. They’re as sweet as they can be, but it’s not like living in New York. People living in Washington aren’t like the people in New York, don’t you dig that? I do. There’s something about a New Yorker, there’s something about their conversation; they take on the world. And they get louder. But then of course it grew and grew and grew and people were coming from all over. From the South, from Philadelphia, Jersey, Washington, so it got larger and larger, although it was the Boston and New York people first.

  Was there lots of drama, sex, romance, intrigue? Lots. I’m not talking about it, but there was a lot. I’ve always said that there’s a book in everyone who was here in the 1950s and ‘60s. There was intrigue and romance, and a fair amount of drinking, but social drinking. We had no roaring drunks roaming around the town. We were a classy bunch. We might have been loud at times, but we were certainly well off, well behaved, having a good time, and didn’t need that other bunch.

  I’ll tell you one thing that happened, Ed Brooke had a great big party in his house and we all worked on it. We did all the work for him. I don’t think he was a senator or even attorney general then, but he was like the lord and master, we were all running around like slaves. We had dressed for the occasion. It was a Caribbean party and the cops came in and broke it up. I was there. I thought my father was going to have a heart attack that night, he was so outraged. They said there was excessive noise. Ed Brooke’s a classy guy and he’s not gonna have any terrible thing going on in his place. Some white biddy complained so they came in and broke it up.

  As an adult, I taught school, so I spent all summer here. I was here from the day after school closed until the day before school opened. It was wonderful. I was married for seven years but most of the time I was a single mother with a child. I brought my daughter Suzanne up here when she was seventeen days old, and it was wonderful for her spending the summers here. When she was seventeen years old

  she said, “I want a job, I’ve had enough.” There were no jobs up here for her, and I absolutely think that was because of race, oh sure. When she was twenty-one she couldn’t wait to get back. Now, it’s become so precious, and I think that’s true for many of our children as they get older.

  I’m sure the social life here has changed because of my age, but I don’t think people now have the fun that we had, I really don’t. I think part of that change is because we are more spread out. It got too big, and there are so many more people here, and it’s gotten clannish. There’s a very successful group of young marrieds, and they hang together. Then there’s rappers, and they hang together. It grew, and it is very different. In my day there was a pretty small group, but enough to make it fun. August rocked, I tell you. There were two or three parties a day. You’d leave one to go to another.

  We used to put on plays. Liz White and Genevieve McClane were instrumental in putting them on. They did Rain, My Sister Ilene, and The Women. And we had fashion shows, Miriam did those. We had a couple of them over at Ed Brooke’s house, and at the Island Country Club, where Lola’s Restaurant is now. Coretta Scott King was at one of them. You either wore your own clothes or there was a woman who brought up clothes. I modeled in one of them, a black suit trimmed in chinchilla. Suzanne was in one modeling riding habits because she was a big horse woman. She was the first black kid to ever win anything up here at the horse show. She got second prize, a red ribbon. One year two women from Washington who ran a dancing school came up here and ran a program for the summer. And in six weeks those kids put on a dance recital at the Tivoli that was just amazing. Suzanne was in that, the Evans kids, there were about six girls, they were fourteen or fifteen years old. Everybody went to the plays, everybody went to the fashion shows, everybody went to the dance recitals. It was just delightful.

  It was all very, very separate. We had our own thing. We weren’t trying to show them how much noise we could make on the white beach. We were so desirable, why not have us? It was very insular, but it was lots of fun. We had enough of our own and we enjoyed one another. There was a special place down on State Beach, between two certain poles, I guess it’s still there. Skiz Watson, he was a judge in New York, used to say, “They don’t have to worry about Negroes getting in their way, they’re always going to segregate themselves,” and they did, at least on that stretch of beach. I didn’t go very often because the beach is right across the street from our house and that was so available. My father bought this house because it was near the water.

  I hate the word Inkwell I refuse to use it, I am insulted by that word. I don’t want an Inkwell T-shirt; don’t even mention that word to me. They said that Louis Sullivan (secretary of Health and Human Services under George H. W. Bush) started using that word publicly. I find it completely derogatory and an insult to us, and since we came here and integrated this part of town, I especially resent it. It wasn’t an Inkwell, and it’s still not. If you go down there you see plenty of white people. My good friends use the word, but I don’t.

  When people heard that this was a black place up here that you could come to and have a good time, they descended on it. I think sometimes now people come and want to be as loud and obnoxious as possible, as if that’s an act of defiance. Wherever you have created an opening, they’ll come in behind you and fuck it up. You’re comfortable there, and then people come after, determined to get as raunchy as they can. We didn’t do that. We quietly came over and went swimming, partied, and did our thing.

  I think what happens is that certain people open up a place and others flood in, but they don’t know the history. They just think, because I’m here now, everything is fine, it’s a great place, they accept us. They accept us up to a point. But I think those young people who came up for the Fourth of July a few years ago and don’t come up anymore, they got a dose of how far that acceptance does not go; they felt it right away. It is not perfect here by any means. We pay a lot in taxes and don’t get very much for it. There are a lot of us old people who can’t climb over rocks to get to the beach, and there is no walkway. I get the Vineyard Gazette all year round so I can find out what plans they have for us, and I am totally dissatisfied with the way the tax money is spent. I feel we are greatly ignored as summer people who pay the majority of the taxes. Every time I turn around I’m paying taxes, and for what? Everything is going up and the services are going down.

  There are never enough trash cans along the beach, but people on the beach will leave their trash on the beach if there are no cans. Parking is terrible. If they’re going to encourage all these cars, they have to make some accommodations for them.

  Once you get off the porch and get in the car, it’s traffic; didn’t used to be that way. You can’t find a place to park on Circuit Avenue or anyplace else, including Gay Head.

  Still, it is a beautiful place. There’s no place like it. This is where it’s at f
or me. Swimming, sitting here on this porch, the memories. Those 1950s and ‘60s rocked. Even into the 1970s, we were having a ball. We’re dying out. When Miriam Walker got ill, too ill to keep on giving her parties, something happened.

  We lived our own lives up here, which in a sense we still do, but I think we were a much more exciting group, a very diverse, close, interesting bunch. We were united by being early settlers. It’s been a wonderful experience.

  Adelaide M. Cromwell, eighty-four, a native of Washington, D.C., was educated at Smith College, the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr, and Radcliffe College, where she received her Ph.D. in 1948. After teaching briefly at Hunter College and Smith College, Cromwell was a professor of sociology at Boston University for many years. She is the author of several books, including The Other Brahmins: Boston’s Black Upper Class, 1730—1930. The mother of a son, Tony Hill, she divides her time between Brookline, Massachusetts, and her home in the town of Vineyard Haven on Martha s Vineyard.

  Adelaide: I first came to the Vineyard in 1943. I knew vaguely about the Vineyard, I had an aunt who had come up here when it was Cottage City, but she never discussed that in any particular way. I married Henry Hill, and he had what was then a good job for a college student, working on the boat from New Bedford to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. I was out of college and was teaching, and he urged me to come to the Vineyard. I came down just for the day, we drove along the beach and went up to Shearer Cottage, and I liked it, so we came down the next year. I stayed with Barbara Townes, and after that, I rented Alice Vanderhoop’s Quonset hut inVineyard Haven, adjacent to Mai Fane s property, for two or three years.

  Barbara Townes, Dorothy West, and Lois Mailou Jones grew up here in the summer since they were children; I met them here. Ed Brooke is my cousin; I think I brought him down the first time he came. Then he bought a house and we would go down and stay with him.

  Since my mother liked the place, and I liked the place, I decided to build this little place here, in Vineyard Haven. My husband came once or twice, but he

  Adelaide Cromwell

  worked very hard, had his own business, and had probably seen enough of the island; like the men who were in the war and their wife wants to go to Paris, but their feeling is, “I had all the Paris I needed in the Second World War.”

  I always liked the country kind of life. Not really country, now; I didn’t want any horses and cows. We didn’t have a summer home when I was growing up in Washington, but I used to go to Camp Atwater in Brookfield, Massachusetts, in the summer, so I knew this general area up here, New England, and it just seemed a nice place to go away for the holiday. I wasn’t going to go all the way down to Washington in the summertime, only a fool would go to Washington in the summer. I never was much into the social world here, that’s not my style. I have some good friends here, but I do think a crucial point was Edward having the house and my mother liking it here. And mother died up here, so it was a good thing for her.

  I got to know more and more people as they came, mostly through other friends. When my son, Tony, was growing up, I couldn’t imagine not going to the beach every day. I meet people now and they don’t go to the beach. I like Eastville Beach, but my friends don’t, so we go to the edge of the Oak Bluffs beach, on the other side of the last jetty, down near where Barbara DePasse lives.

  The early blacks who came here for recreational purposes, not those who worked in service, they felt a comfort with themselves, they knew who they were, and most of them came from Boston and from Providence. Dorothy West’s father had money, Barbara Townes’s grandfather had a lot of money. Like some whites, they didn’t make it themselves, but they came from some idea of money.

  As Dorothy said, and I agree with her, “Then the New Yorkers came.” They brought a whole different set of values. In New York, things depend a lot on material wealth, although I think in fairness you have to say that New York has that level of intellectuals, but they didn’t have the same opportunity to manifest it as say, you had in Washington, where you had the universities where you could be an intellectual. In Boston, I call these Blacks “the other Brahmins,” they thought they were living up to the values of whites; they imitated their lifestyle and their values. Other than being a doctor, or a dentist, or a lawyer or minister, you didn’t have

  that level of intellectuality in New York. But you did have that artistic thrust that brought notoriety and prominence. So when that package came on this scene, it seemed to me that they set up a different set of values. They didn’t absorb or coalesce with that earlier group.

  Undoubtedly, the New Yorkers were more ostentatious, in their play, their dress, their lifestyle.

  When the New Yorkers came in the 1950s with the shift in real estate and residential location, it made a different environment here. The Vineyard became more heterogeneous and more stratified. Blacks started to leave the Highlands and move to the Gold Coast, that area closer to the water. Living in the Highlands was more of a liability than an asset, because the houses were better on what I’ll call the Gold Coast. It’s interesting that in certain cities, Washington, Boston, and maybe Philadelphia, blacks leave areas that become much more prestigious. They leave, go somewhere else, and where they go isn’t as good. For example, blacks left Georgetown in Washington, Beacon Hill in Boston, because the houses that they got did look better, but before another generation had gone by, they’d given up more than they got. That has not happened here. Yet. Each section that blacks have moved into here has been better than the one they left, as far as I can see, even though they no longer move as a group, but as individuals. And they move to much more impressive places than anyone could have dreamed of fifty years ago. And they’re not going back.

  For a person who’s very much involved in blacks and always has been, I don’t necessarily want to be immersed in them, I guess it’s as simple as that. I know I’m black, no one can tell me what I am, but I have never in my adult life lived in what could be called a black community; it’s too oppressive. You got to do what they all do, you can’t be yourself. I’m not a Link, I don’t want to be in Jack and Jill, and I was only in the Smart Set by accident. Some people move away because they want to get away from being black, that’s not my thing. I want to make sure that Adelaide does what Adelaide wants to do, and if you live in a group you cannot do it, they won’t let you. They talk about you like a dog or mistreat your child, so the best way to avoid it is to not be around it. That said, I wouldn’t live in the campground; you couldn’t give me a house in the campground, black or white.

  The Cottagers were started by the last vestiges of that first group of Bostonians. I don’t think they started to keep other people out, but they weren’t too anxious to get other people in, either. They have done good works, but I don’t know if the good works were really what made them get together, but they thought it was.

  I haven’t been in any group where I heard people talking invidiously about darker people. I do not think darker people would be left out here, because there are too many people who are dark who have all the other symbols of success. I do think there are remnants of people from the lighter group who came here thinking that color was a distinguishing characteristic, but I don’t think they amounted to much. In other words, if it had been more segregated by color, they would have been happier.

  There are people who come up here who have been, for all their lives on the island, apart from what is going on in Oak Bluffs, and I think that is great. On the island you can do what you want to do and you’ll be welcome. Yesterday I went to the breakfast the Rotary Club has, and it was open to anybody who wanted to come. There were only a handful of blacks, but they were welcome. That’s what I like about this place.

  I went to lunch yesterday at the Harborside Inn in Edgartown. That’s been there for a long time. But when I first started coming to the island, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to go there for lunch. I had other things to do. I didn’t go out for lunch then as I do now. You’d see those r
ocking chairs when you passed by and you never saw any blacks there. I didn’t even know any blacks who worked there. Maybe if somebody had said, come on, let’s go there, and they didn’t treat you right, I could say that they didn’t want blacks, but I can’t say that. It simply wasn’t on my radar or on anyone else’s I knew.

  The thing about us is that once we find out we can do something, then we do it to a fare-thee-well. Take Farm Neck. Five years ago, you went to Farm Neck for lunch, there might be another table of blacks there and chances are you’d know

  them. Now, it’s like Harrisons Restaurant in Washington used to be, or Frank’s in Harlem was, packed.

  Where are blacks and whites forced to intersect on Martha’s Vineyard? The post office. I think we live in separate worlds, and I think that is by circumstance. I do think that these black resorts, by and large, even when people came from a segregated group, but certainly when they came from the more integrated group, provided an experience that was missing in their regular lives. I don’t think that is my experience, because as I said to you before, I never lived in a place that was completely black. There were always whites, and they weren’t necessarily my quote, unquote, “equals,” either.

  I have no reason not to continue to come here. I wouldn’t want to move here permanently. I come every month except February, just about. I come for New Year’s, not Thanksgiving. I come for the summer in May or June.

  I think the island could go up or go down as a place. There really are getting to be too many people trying to squeeze in, and that will eliminate what was so good about this place. Then of course a lot of people come hoping to find something, but they’re not going to find it here. It’s like trying to find the Kingdom of God.

  What We Need Here

  Oak Bluffs beach, 1920s

  Celery. Why should I buy a bunch of celery? All I need is a stalk. They should sell stalks of celery, but they don’t. Instead, you’ve got to buy a bunch, and for what? How many recipes call for more than a stalk of celery? You use one stalk, forget about the rest, then find it months later in the back of the vegetable drawer all brown and slimy. It’s mostly water anyway and it’s turned to liquid and stinks. Phew! I don’t do it anymore. It’s a waste,” my mother says.