Finding Martha's Vineyard Page 17
You’re led to believe that New England is heaven on earth for black folks, but that’s not so. I think there’s racism here. When we first came over fifty years ago, many of these local people, islanders, some of whom are doing so well financially now, weren’t doing well at all. I felt a resentment because our folks came up here in their big Cadillacs and Lincolns and a lot of these people up here started out doing lawns, the whole family riding around on a piece of truck. Now they’re doing well, which is fine, they should be doing fine. But I always felt that there was an underlying racism that they try to hide. You wonder about the trouble people have getting permits to build or improve their houses, you see these things.
The obvious change over the years is overbuilding. When you drive Barnes Road from the beginning to the blinker light, there’s one new house after another, and if there isn’t, there’s one under construction, all along the lagoon. When you drive to Edgartown, also Sengekontacket, it’s like a row of houses. It is too developed. On one hand you say you don’t want all those people, but you want to be here, so why shouldn’t they?
I was briefly a member of the Cottagers, the organization of black homeowners, but it was a time when our kids were young teenagers, and they had to go off-island for jobs because there was no summer work for black kids. I was having a whole lot of run-ins with the selectmen, and I didn’t think that the Cottagers were political enough. If they had one hundred members representing that much in taxes to a town, I thought they would have some kind of leverage. I got out of the Cottagers in the 1960s. I’m not putting them down. My mother was one of the organizers of the group. As I said, if they’d been more political, I would have stayed with them. But I was having to fight too many battles on my own.
What I enjoy is that people you knew from all over, from Camp Atwater or Howard University or wherever you went to school, you run into so many of them here. I remember my husband, Wes, came in years ago from playing golf, and he was talking about Stanley this, Stanley that. And a few days later in walked your father, and I said, “Blabber!” that was his nickname at Howard University. We went to college together. Of course, you know what he told me, “I’m Stanley now.” Well, that’s fine, but he was Blabber then, and his brother was Little Blabber.
You run into people here who you maybe never expected to see again, renew acquaintances that you thought were past. This place is a magnet for people from all over. It has become a small world up here. If I live and nothing happens, as the old folks say, I’ll be back next year.
(Eloise Downing Allen passed away in the spring of 2003.)
Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., fifty-two, is the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law at Harvard University and director of the Harvard Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. Ogletree and his wife, Pam, an attorney active in education issues, spend several weeks of the summer on the Vineyard, sometimes joined by their grown son, daughter, and granddaughter. The author most recently of All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v Board of Education, he is an avid fisherman.
Charles: I am a lifelong fisherman. I fished with my grandparents in California growing up. I fished in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Fishing is my thinking time, whether I am with ten people or one person. I’m always thinking of another idea, another concept, how to solve a problem or how to create a problem. On the ocean away from all the other distractions turns out to be an ideal place to think.
Every time you go on a fishing trip, there’s great expectation but no certainty, there’s a puzzle. Is the water right? Is the bait right? Are the fish hungry? Are you going to be able to hook it? If you hook it can you catch it? Mind games. It’s always a challenge. You say, This is a great day for fishing because it’s sunny, or no, because it’s cloudy, or no, because it’s rainy or because it’s flat or it’s a little rocky, which means that there is no perfect day, and every kind of day adds something to the experience.
I do a lot of catch and release. I’ll catch a fish and give it to people who are interested in it, but I fish for the excitement of trying to have this struggle between me and the fish. The fish that we catch, as they get bigger and bigger they’ve been in the water for a while, so they know what they’re doing. This is not where you drop a line and something gets on your hook. There’s so much strategy to it. It’s all
Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., attorney John Payton, judge Harry Edwards, Charles Ogletree, and striped bass
about the quality of your line, your bait, your experience, and your patience. I can fish for twelve or fourteen hours a day.
I used to fish outside Washington with a friend, Dennis Sweet; we practiced law together. We spent most of our time not worrying about catching fish, but talking about life, talking about our families, talking about our cases, talking about what we’re going to be doing in the future, talking about politics. Fishing was the event that brought us together, but it was the conversation and the reflection that we couldn’t do in the office, we couldn’t do in our living room, we couldn’t do with a broader group of people, that was most important. It was a bonding relationship. Dennis teases me now because he believes I judge a lawyer’s ability on whether or not they can fish. There were some brothers who practiced with us who could not fish who we determined were not good trial lawyers. There seemed to be a relationship between the two.
There’s also a sense of family. Fishing is something where the brothers and the sisters would get together. It’s not like playing football or baseball where people are competitive. Everybody could do it, there was no special talent required, it wasn’t about strength. It was about finesse and patience and learning from experience.
I came to Boston in 1975 and was in law school there until 1978, and never once heard about or thought about Martha’s Vineyard. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that I heard about it, and I didn’t visit until I994. That was a result of some friends, Margaret Burnham and Max Stern, who were trying to buy a house and called to see if Pam and I were interested in being co-owners with them. I had no interest, and left it up to Pam, who knew about the island and thought that it was a good place to raise children. We started coming in 1994 and bought the house that same year.
I was struck by what an amazing collection of black people were on this small island. This was not the Hamptons. This was a place where you could see a whole range of black people coming, and that to me was impressive. Folks who were professional and folks who were working class. Folks who lived in Roxbury and folks from Hollywood. Folks who would come as day trippers and folks who’d been coming for fifty years. That seemed amazing.
It was also the sense of tradition on the island. I heard about the Polar Bears, people who would come together every morning and swim at the Inkwell. I met Mandred Henry and saw that there was an NAACP chapter on the island that was active. I met Ken Williams and he took me to Mink Meadows and I saw black golfers, something I had never seen before. I started seeing people who I saw in professional circles, Vernon Jordan, Skip Gates, and a lot of my Harvard Law School students who told me they’d been coming here since they were kids.
What was most powerful was that Martha’s Vineyard was really an unpretentious location. I’ve been around black folks with a lot of money or with a lot of ego who wanted you to know what they had. But I saw people here wearing shorts whether they were millionaires or not. I saw people driving old Volvos and BMWs. People sitting on the beach having a communal meal and a conversation and a card game. It really seemed like a place where black people could just be themselves and not worry about who they were talking to, where they were, or what they were doing. A place where black people could just sit back, think, and enjoy one another and leave here inspired to do something.
It really is the antidote to the Hamptons. Martha’s Vineyard is a place where diverse, brilliant, creative black folks can just relax. And be serious. The doors are unlocked, the phone is on, people are moving around doing things. For me, the island has just enough that you c
an lay back and not be bothered, but also something intellectually challenging. You can go hear Myrlie Evers, or to a discussion of reparations, or, before her death, hear Dorothy West wax eloquently about her writing, or see John Lewis come here to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It is a place where you can have the best of the black experience concentrated over a few miles, in a few weeks, and go back refreshed and energized. I can’t imagine another place that has all the attractiveness and lack of pretentiousness that make the Vineyard so exceptional.
The one disappointment was the reaction that most islanders, and even African-American islanders, had to the influx of young black people during the Fourth of July weekend in the late 1990s. I thought it was a wonderful thing that young black professionals had chosen Martha’s Vineyard, of all the places in the world they could go, as the place they wanted to spend some time. They weren’t violent, drunk, or gang members, but the idea of three thousand black young people showing up one weekend terrified and froze many people here.
I hope that Martha’s Vineyard doesn’t become a place that starts judging folks based on the jeans or hat they wear. It seems to me that this is the one place where you don’t have to be ostensibly rich to be a part of it. You can see some of every kind of black person here. I’m looking for a place where I see some of everybody, not just the people I know.
This is the place where I get the most relaxation out of life. I have this resolve that in 2005 I’m going to take back some time for me and start spending a lot more time here, year-round, not just weekends. This clearly is the most enjoyable place that I ever spent any time in my life. I come here and get more accomplished: by doing something or by doing nothing. Both ways are extremely valuable. It is the quality of what this place offers, not just the physical, but the emotional, intellectual, and psychological advantages.
Ruth Bonaparte, Millie Henderson, and Kathy Allen
Mildred Henderson, seventy-nine, Ruth Bonaparte, eighty-one, and Kathy Allen, eighty-three, are known to many people on the Vineyard simply as “the Sisters” or “the Dowdells,” their maiden name. Divorced or widowed and each the mother of one child, they live in the neat house with a flourishing, rambunctious garden on Narragansett Avenue in Oak Bluffs that they have shared for almost fifty years. Former schoolteachers in Long Island, New York, they are active in the Cottagers, the Senior Center, and most social activities in the community. They now divide their time between the Vineyard, Long Island, and Sarasota, Florida. Talking with the Sisters is like talking to one organism with three minds, mouths, and opinions.
Mildred: We started coming in 1955. My husband was friends with Ewell Finley, we were neighbors on Long Island, and we came up with Ewell and his wife, Millie, when they opened their house on Pequot Avenue, right around the corner. While I was here, I said, Whoa, I love this place. I called Kathy and Ruth and said, You got to come up and see this place, I think this is where we want to go in the summers. The next weekend we all came up, and that was it. We started looking at houses.
Kathy: A love affair.
Ruth: Right away.
Kathy: It was different, like someplace you’ve never seen before. It was unpopulated, the kids were really free. It was almost as if you could turn them loose and let them run the streets. It was just an instant love affair with the island.
Ruth: We knew this was the place we wanted to be. It was stress-free, for one thing.
Kathy: It was like a family. Everybody knew everybody, all the children knew one another, and you felt safe.
Mildred: This was the place where you could let your children go into town by themselves when they were five or six, and you could never have done that in Long Island. Here they could walk into town, go to the Flying Horses, go to the park, and there was no fear. It was just a beautiful relationship. And the people that we met here.
Ruth: Remember, there weren’t that many of us, so you knew everybody, most of the African Americans who were here. Now, of course, you don’t. I still feel safe, but I will lock the door now. We didn’t used to.
Mildred: We only had a lock put on our door about eight years ago. We had a skeleton key, and that’s all we ever used. People would come in during the day, leave a note for us if we weren’t here, whatever. We still have a habit of leaving the doors open during the day, but at night we lock up now. In those days people just came and went and left everything where it was. If you left something on the beach or in town, when you went back it was there.
Kathy: If you saw something, you just left it there, because the person would be coming back. Years ago, Miriam Walker lost her wallet, and they advertised, and somebody brought it back to her, and there was $450 in it. We had a guest who left an expensive camera in the liquor store, went back the next day, and it was there.
Ruth: It’s not like that anymore. Now you read the paper and somebody stole somebody’s bathing suit off the line. It used to be that you didn’t even try to put bicycles on the porch, just left them on the lawn, and never lost a bike, never.
Kathy: We could take the kids down to the beach and they enjoyed it so very much. They could just splish and splash.
Ruth: There were so many vacant houses at that time, you could take your choice, a winter house, a summer cottage. You could take your choice.
Kathy: We picked this because it was close to the water. We didn’t know whether we were going to have a car and we knew we could walk to town, walk to the beach. We looked at the Powell house, we looked around the tennis courts, but this is the one we finally chose, because it was convenient. Then the husbands came up and we decided this was it.
Ruth: We bought it together, three couples, each with one child. It really was not an easy thing, because we were all buying houses in New York, which was our permanent residence.
Kathy: And we weren’t working, we were all home with our children.
Mildred: We bought the house, and then decided maybe we’d better have a vote and decide what to do with it. The husbands and Kathy voted to have a guest house, so for ten years exactly, from 1956 until 1966, that’s what we did, we ran a guest house. Once it was paid for, we said, This is it, this is now a family home.
Kathy: The guests were all friends, only friends. The husbands said, Now that you have this house you’re going to have freeloaders. Everyone’s going to want to come, and what are they going to do? Bring a little bottle, and that’s going to be their payment. We’re not going to have that. So we put a little price tag on it. It was four dollars a night, including your breakfast. That eliminated the moochers, it really did.
Mildred: Ruth and I were here all summer. Kathy taught summer school for part
of the summer, she was here weekends and the last three or four weeks with the kids and a baby-sitter. We sort of laid out a Continental breakfast, although sometimes we had pancakes. One weekend we had twenty-eight people and it was awful, awful. It was a rainy weekend and they were stuck in here and they were all cooking. It was terrible.
Kathy: Wasn’t it a holiday, the Fourth of July or something? The beds were here, there, in the dining room, even out in the laundry room, Mother and Dad slept in the laundry room.
Mildred: The men would come up on the weekends. Half the children would be in pajamas, and all the mothers would be at the ferry, meeting the Daddy Boat, that 10 or 10:45 Friday boat.
Ruth: That was such an experience, to see all these kids waving, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” Waving to Daddy. He’d be here for Saturday and Sunday, take them to the beach and the Flying Horses, and then of course on Sunday the Daddies were out of here, and the kids were left with mothers again.
Mildred: It was like a vacation when the men weren’t here—you weren’t under the scrutiny of a husband—it was like another vacation. Then when the husbands came in you had a little pressure because you had to do the things that wives are supposed to do when husbands are there. Then when they left Sunday night, you were happy because you were back to your l
ovely, leisure life again.
Mildred: We used to cook out all the time, it was a lovely life. It was so easy, beans, potatoes, hot dogs. Then when the husbands came in, you had to do heavy cooking on Saturday and Sunday to relieve the guilt.
Kathy: Our children have met friends here who they will cherish for life, and they are still friends.
Mildred: They talk about the Vineyard all the time, and have good memories. It was just a great life for them. When my daughter, Tonetta, was eighteen or nineteen she decided she didn’t want to have anything else to do with the island, too bourgie. That was during the I960s. That lasted maybe four or five years, then that bourgie thing was out, and she was back here, loving every minute of it.
Ruth: It was a good childhood for them, a great childhood. It was fun being here.
All the people who lived around here, black and white, we’d all meet down at Town Beach, we didn’t know it as the Inkwell, in the morning. We’d go down to the beach around 10 a.m. and come back around twelve o’clock for lunch. Most of the time we didn’t go back, and if we did, we were finished with the beach by three or four.
The first we heard about the Inkwell was from the baby-sitter. So we walked down one day about four o’clock and it was a transformation. The beach that we had seen as a white and black beach was practically all black. There were people who had come down from the Highlands, and we heard that they partied and slept late, so that’s why they came to the beach in the afternoon. We brought the kids down early in the morning because we lived right here, all the families, white and black. A lot of people went down to State Beach, in Edgartown, at the third pole, that was the marker where you knew the black people would be, and they would meet down there and party.