Finding Martha's Vineyard Page 15
I heard someone say, a Howard graduate, that they’d never go back to Howard again, because the student population is no longer light-skinned women and dark men. The color line is alive and well in middle-class America. Definitely. People who lived on Waban Park or the beach area said, “It’s like a big black cloud down there.” Not everyone of course, but it was said. Then when the police chief brought in the state police with guns, on either end of Circuit Avenue, and on the roofs and on horseback, then they went crazy, because that was overkill. To their credit, people wrote letters to the editor that were very, very good, very clear. Your mother was so disgusted. A’Lelia said, “I went down there. Was I part of that black cloud?”
This island is a microcosm of the United States. Everything that happens in the United States happens here on a smaller scale. We have a tiny—compared to other places—drug problem on the island, but it’s there. We have some prejudice—it’s here, it’s just not as big. And yet we do have a kind of isolation here. It took the World Trade Center tragedy to get the newspapers here to write about anything that went on in the United States beyond Martha’s Vineyard. Except the presidential election; then they just give you the results.
When you come to the Vineyard, if you want to do anything at all, just say yes once, and you’re inundated with requests for volunteer work and things like that. Less than a year after retiring I became the Oak Bluffs columnist for the Martha’s Vineyard Times, and that kept me pretty busy. I did that for about five years, but the deadlines bothered me; I didn’t come up here to have a deadline.
I’m involved in the Conversation group, a group of people that gets together to discuss whatever anybody wants to discuss, national or local news, books, whatever. It started out with twelve men, three women, one black, that’s me. We met at the senior centers around the island until it got so big that we split into two groups, now there’s one Tuesday morning in West Tisbury and Friday morning in Oak Bluffs. Some of the same people come to both, but the lifestyles are totally different in the two towns.
I don’t feel isolated living here year-round, I feel protected as a woman living alone and getting old here on the island. It’s a small town, but you really never know from day to day what can happen. I was planning what to make for dinner tonight, but the phone just rang and now I’m going out to dinner. I had one free afternoon this week, and while I was in a meeting this morning someone asked me to play bridge, so you just never know. You can get lonely if you let yourself, if you’re not involved.
I think moving to the Vineyard has added ten years to my life. I’m calmer, although some people might not think so. There’s a kind of franticness, a kind of frenetic activity, that I don’t have now. I don’t find myself yearning for that. I really don’t find any real desire to leave the island. I’ve been back to New York to hang out once since I moved here in I983. The noise and the dirt hit me and I couldn’t wait to get home. My life is here and I have as much life as I want.
IRENE GAINES’S CHEESE WAFERS
Makes about 5 dozen wafers
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 cups grated sharp cheddar cheese
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup chopped walnuts
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
½ cup margarine or butter
1. Mix all the ingredients to form a stiff dough. Roll the dough into cylinders, 9 inches long and 1 1/4 inches in diameter. Wrap in waxed paper and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or freeze until needed.
2. Preheat the oven to 325 °F. Unwrap the dough and slice each cylinder into ¼ inch rounds. Bake 12 to 15 minutes until light brown. Cool on a rack and enjoy with a cold drink.
Tamiko Overtoil with her father, Joey
From the time she was born in 1972 until she was seventeen, Tamiko Overton, thirty-two, and her twin brother, Jason, spent every summer on the Vineyard at the home of her grandfather, New York labor leader L. Joseph Overton, with their father, Joey Overton. House guests included Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, and other luminaries. L. Joseph Overton died in 1991 and their father died in 1994, and the house was sold. An attorney on Long Island, Tamiko is now married with a five-year-old son. While her half sister, Jazmine, nineteen, owns a small house on the Vineyard, she visits the island infrequently.
Tamiko: My grandfather, L. Joseph Overton, was originally from Edenton, North Carolina, lived and worked in New York, and bought a house on Martha s Vineyard in the early 1950s. I went there every summer to stay with my father when I was growing up. My father would brag that the house, right on the ocean in Oak Bluffs, only cost thirty thousand dollars, but was worth so much more money.
During the year we lived on Long Island, in the suburbs, with our mother. We did go to Jones Beach a lot, but being at the Vineyard, having a summer home across the street from the beach and the freedom we had when we were on the Vineyard, was just amazing. At home, if I went over to a friends house my mom would ask exactly what time will you be back, will their parents be there, give me their number, different things like that. Since there were only a small amount of black people on the Vineyard and either my father or grandfather knew everyone, those things weren’t really an issue there. It was kind of like a village raising children; the black community was so tight knit. If I did something wrong, it would definitely get back to them.
In the summer me and my twin brother, Jason, would get up, get our cereal ourselves and have breakfast, get dressed as quickly as possible so we could run over to our best friends’ house around the corner. Then we’d go to the beach right across the street, stay there for a while, go home, eat lunch, and go back to the beach. Later we’d shower, go into town, go to the Flying Horses, which was everyone’s favorite thing to do, or wait in line to get pizza, or get fish or clams from the Clam Bar. We were close to the library, the park, town. We’d rent movies or read library books. One of our favorite things to do, we’d pull all the shades down in the living room of my grandfather’s house—the house was a Victorian and had the original oak walls so it could get really dark—and we’d rent scary movies, throw all the pillows on the floor, eat popcorn, and be scared to death.
Going home at the end of the summer was hard, because the Vineyard was the only stable home that I knew. With my mother, because of her lack of income and my father not paying regular child support, we would move a lot, and we would always move with my mother owing someone money. We got evicted a couple of times. She would always try to get a nice house, in a nice neighborhood, but it was always something beyond her means. There were times when we didn’t have any lights or hot water; we would have to heat up water on the stove in big pots to take baths.
Which was totally opposite of our life on the Vineyard. There, I wasn’t known as the poor kid, I was known as the kid who lived in the huge house on the corner. I felt like I was always someone else. When I was on the Vineyard I was this person who came from a wealthy house, whose grandfather was a known politician. I was third generation coming to the Vineyard. In Long Island, I lived in a middle-class black neighborhood, Roosevelt, but in reality we probably should have been living in a lower-class neighborhood, because we couldn’t afford it.
I think I was about seven when I started seeing that contradiction. One of our favorite places was the hardware store. My grandfather had an account there and we could just say, “Put it on the Overton account.” That was great, because they had toys, gadgets. If we decided we wanted to paint our room, we could go to the store and get everything we needed. In New York, there was hot lunch day at school, and we could barely afford hot lunch day, or we would have pennies wrapped up in plastic wrap, fifty pennies so we could buy hot lunch, if we had money at all.
We went to Catholic school, and I can remember my brother and I had to sit in the library, we weren’t allowed to go to classes, because our tuition wasn’t paid. It was like being in debtor’s prison.
My first summer job was at Cronig’s supermarket in Vineyard Haven. I was a cashier. Som
eone approached me while I was working there and asked if I’d be willing to work cleaning houses. I could make more money doing that, so I did. Eventually me and my best friend started our own business cleaning houses. Our grandparents had a fit! They felt that with all of the stuff that they went through for civil rights, as hard as they’d worked, and we’re “Cleaning white folks’ houses!” as my best friend’s grandmother put it.
Sometimes the people we worked for were demeaning, and I wanted to laugh, because the house that they were renting was tiny; it could fit inside my house. There was the assumption that I had nothing. Sometimes I felt like, if these people only knew, but I kept up with it and at the end of the summer I had a lot of money and was able to buy my first car.
When I look back on it as an adult, I would never do that again; there’s not that much money in the world. But for me, money was so important. Even as a teenager I had to try to make as much as I could to take back to New York.
Growing up on Martha’s Vineyard made me more confident. It made me know, I’m as good as these white folks, I’m as good as anyone, whether or not I have a big house or clean houses for a living. Some of the people up there are very much the in crowd, like how it is in high school or college with the cheerleaders and the captain of the football team. The Vineyard is very much like that. There’s more black people going up there now, but they’re also the same people who have been going up there for generations. When I went to my sister’s graduation party, people were like, “Oh, Tamiko’s a lawyer!” And I’m thinking to myself, I guess they wouldn’t talk to me if I was a hairdresser, and these are people I’ve known all my life. I understand that it’s good that I’m successful, but whatever I’m doing, I’m still the same person. I think a lot of people on the Vineyard don’t understand that.
There’s something very superficial and very pretentious about many people on the Vineyard. My father could be that way, too, but he never really took the people on the Vineyard seriously, he knew them for exactly who they were. At the same time, he wanted to be loved and adored and admired by them.
I have so many great memories there. The Vineyard has everything. The beach, the Tisbury Fair, the fireworks, Illumination Night, walking through the campground or running around the gazebo in Ocean Park on Sunday when the band plays, wading in the whale-shaped pool in the park, and the black community is still fairly close-knit.
The Vineyard gave me a definite sense of security. Up to my late teens, when I stopped going, that was the only stable home that I knew. In Long Island, by the time I was seventeen we had moved eighteen times. As a youngster at the Vineyard, I thought, wow, I’m going to be at the same place, see the same people; I have a home. If I only have a home for two months out of the summer, I have a home. And a fabulous home at that.
Philip H. P. Reed, fifty-five, has been a member of the New York City Council since 1998 and has spent summers on the Vineyard since 1955. One of three openly gay members of the city council, he represents East Harlem, Manhattan Valley, and part of Mott Haven in the Bronx. He has a twin sister, Elinor, and spends as much time on Martha’s Vineyard as his political life will allow.
Phillip: I have been living in this house at 23 Penacook Avenue on Martha’s Vineyard for forty-two years. My parents rented different houses each summer until they bought this house in the late I950s. The house cost $8,500 without a broker, with the furniture, including that gorgeous piano, and it was a heated house. The owner just walked out, didn’t take a thing with him.
I don’t know what it’s like to be gay on Martha’s Vineyard. I don’t really live in that existence up here. There really isn’t much of a gay life. I have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out where the gay life is up here, and to come up here and spend that much time just isn’t feasible.
As frustrated as I get certainly sometimes as a gay man because I don’t have a “social” life up here, I quickly remind myself of what good friends I have. People who really care about me. People who have watched me grow up. Friends whose children I have watched grow up. I feel very much connected to this community, I don’t feel isolated or ostracized at all.
There are several Vineyard families whose kids grew up with me, and I’m unbelievably close to them emotionally—Finleys, Evanses, Joanne Walker, Nelsons—so I feel a part of this community. There’s a comfort level. I import friends to have a weekend of gay folks around or I put it on the back burner.
Philip Reed with next-door neighbor Hurmie Thorne, 1970s
Sometimes you’re surprised what happens when you put something on the back burner; someone might turn up the flame.
You never know.
Growing up, my existence up here was tennis. I played tennis every morning. We’d come back home and cook these humongous breakfasts. I remember many, many mornings where my best friend, Lincoln Pope, would be at my door first thing in the morning, waking me up, then we’d go play tennis. We had a huge old Checker cab as a car, and my mother loved to go to the beach and didn’t mind carrying all our friends. Since I have a twin sister, as teenagers this was neutral ground. The girls could always be here under the pretense that they were visiting Ellie, which was true, and the boys could always be here because they were visiting Philip.
My stepfather, Bill Preston, was like most of the professional workingmen, he came up on the weekend. He’d fly in from New York, sometimes with a whole set of his business friends my mother, Doris, would have to entertain, grumbling. It was, “Your father’s coming, clean up the house.” Oftentimes he’d have this whole group and Doris would have to be the wife with steaks and dinners and cocktail parties and all that, and then he would leave on Monday. It was like, “Whew!” Then we’d have a ball all week.
We had parties all the time. There was always a dance party somewhere, and a lot of the time it was right here in this living room. This was like teenage central, because Doris let us have our friends over. There were some homes you were not allowed into. We rode our bikes every damn place. I vaguely remember some sort of art class. There was always something going on, someplace to go. We had big fun all summer long. I never felt class snobbery. It may be present and I just sort of didn’t feel it because I grew up here. I just don’t feel a classism up here.
Having a white mother and a white stepfather, the whole thing was strange: Who are these two white people raising these black children? I mean, they named the women’s trophy at the “black” tennis tournament after my mother, the Doris Preston Memorial Trophy, and at that same ceremony they named the men’s trophy after Lincoln Pope, Sr., Lincoln’s father, who was black. I had tears in my eyes.
I lived in California for about ten years, becoming an adult, sort of framing my gay life, and it was not easy to get back here. There was a period of time when I was estranged from my mother over my sexual orientation. Was she uncomfortable with my being gay? She was not having it! I remember sitting right on the couch in the living room trying to have a heart to heart with her, but there was total rejection of that concept.
Between that and the fact that I didn’t have a whole lot of money, I would come back here every other year. To this day I feel some disconnection, because it was that in my twenties, that formative, going to adulthood period. People were moving into professions, defining themselves as adults, and I was not here.
My mother finally accepted my being gay shortly before she died, eight or ten years after I first told her. I was disconnected from her for about two years and then they told us she had cancer. She was supposed to last six months; she lived six more years. We were estranged, but worked it out in the end. It was expedient for her, she needed me to help take care of her, but I do think she accepted the whole thing. I think she finally just realized that my happiness was most important.
During her last years Doris was sick and she would prop herself up on this settee and stay here all day. She felt so supported by people up here, this was her community. Eddie Heywood, he was a famous composer and pianist but just Uncle Ed
die around here, used to come and talk to Doris for hours and play the piano.
My mother died when I was twenty-eight and so I had to really think about whether I wanted this connection. I was living in California and this house was the only real root that I had to my life, let alone to the East Coast region. It was a place that had given me a lot of happiness. It’s also given me a lot of turmoil. The whole history and family drama are played out in this house.
Coming here is ancestral. It’s where I grew up, it’s where my happiest reminiscences of adolescence and being a teenager are rooted, so it has that whole nostalgia aspect. This was my black connection. I think that for many of us, this is where our roots are, and that’s powerful stuff, powerful stuff. Where else do I have this sort of ongoing legacy?
PHIL’S CORN PANCAKES
Makes 4 pancakes
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 egg
2 tablespoons sugar
1 ear of leftover corn
Pinch of salt
1. Sift the flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt together in a bowl. Add the milk and egg, and beat until batter bubbles. The batter should be thin, so add more milk if needed.
2. Cut the corn off the cob and add to the batter. Beat for 2 minutes.
3. Lightly oil the bottom of a cast-iron skillet and heat until hot. Fry pancakes until bubbles rise, flip once, and cook until done. Serve with butter and maple syrup.
Constance Batty and her mother, Irma Wheat
Constance Batty, seventy-one, spent most of her career in higher education. In 1992, the year her husband died, she retired as vice president for student affairs at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, where she worked for twenty years. She is the mother of two daughters and has two grandchildren. Since 1979 she has shared a summer home in Oak Bluffs with her parents, Donald and Irma Wheat, who have been married seventy-two years.