Finding Martha's Vineyard Read online

  Guests at the Shearer Cottage. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (far left), Charles Shearer

  (third from right), opera singer Lillian Evanti (top row, right), 1931.

  to the Boston area, where Charles worked as a headwaiter at Young’s Hotel and the famous Parker House.

  In 1895, the Shearers visited the Vineyard at the invitation of a Wampanoag friend of Henrietta’s. The Shearers, devout Baptists, worshiped at the Baptist Tabernacle. In 1903, Shearer purchased a large home on a hill a stone’s throw from the Baptist Tabernacle for his wife and three children, Sadie Lee, Lily, and Charles, Jr. That same year, Henrietta built a laundry behind the main house to supplement the family’s income by providing a service to white summer visitors. The laundry employed eight island women and delivered laundry in a buggy pulled by the family’s horse, Dolly. The business thrived until Henrietta’s death in 1917, when her daughters Sadie Ashburn and Lily Pope closed the laundry, converting that building and the main cottage into a guest house. That same year Shearer Cottage, 4 Morgan Avenue in Oak Bluffs, opened as an inn catering to black Americans.

  Lovely rooms at eighteen dollars a week, wonderful food, and the certainty of a warm welcome, along with Shearer Cottage’s proximity to the Baptist Tabernacle and

  (Top) Dolly and buggy in front of Shearer Cottage, circa 1909.

  (Bottom) Guests on tennis court at Shearer Cottage, 1918.

  the beach, assured a steady stream of guests. Initially those who came were friends or acquaintances of the Shearer family, but as word spread visitors from all over the country came to spend some part of the summer at Shearer Cottage. Vineyard residents remember Shearer Cottage as the place to stay, and, if you weren’t staying there, the place to go to see who was on the island and what was happening. Usually something was. Prominent summer visitors included Harry T. Burleigh, a composer, singer, and arranger of Negro spirituals who stayed at Shearer every summer from 1917 through 1941, and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. Powell, Jr., with his first wife, Isabel, called Belle, eventually bought a house in the Highlands not far from Shearer Cottage, where Isabel Powell, now in her nineties, still summers. Other guests included the singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson; actor and singer EthelWaters; New York State Senator James “Skiz” Watson; Bishop Charles M. “Sweet Daddy” Grace; Lionel Richie and the Commodores; and many, many others.

  Charles Shearer died in 1934. Over the years Shearer Cottage, with its wraparound porches and large yards, was the site of numerous fundraisers sponsored by the NAACP, the Cottagers, a social and philanthropic organization of African-American female homeowners founded in the mid-1950s, and others. Shearer Cottage closed from 1971 to 1983, but is once again open for business, still owned and operated by Charles Shearer’s descendants.

  For those who settled on the Vineyard at the turn of the twentieth century, establishing a guest house on Martha’s Vineyard provided a steady income over the summer months. These guest houses also served to introduce the island to a new and expanding African-American population that included government workers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and artists with disposable income to spend on summer travel. Most important, they provided a place for black Americans to stay at a time when accommodations were segregated.

  Article on black innkeepers

  While Shearer Cottage is the longest-lived and most well known of these establish-ments, the accommodations and welcome extended by small guest houses, most of them established and run by black women, played a significant role in attracting and accommodating early African-American visitors to the island. Many of these visitors eventually purchased summer homes here that continue to be passed down through generations. These black women entrepreneurs included Mrs. Anthony Smith and Myrtle O’Brien, who had guest houses on Circuit Avenue; Isabelle Perry, who ran a guest house on School Street; Alice Vanderhoop, an African-American woman who married Clarence Vanderhoop, a member of the Wampanoag tribe; Boston’s Martha Maxwell, who ran Maxwell Cottage for twenty years in the Highlands, and many others. In addition, many early homeowners quietly took in guests, both increasing their income during the summer months and providing a service. Some still do.

  African-American summer visitors warranted this small notice in the Vineyard Gazette of September I, 1940, titled “Beach Roamers’ Picnic”:

  One of the most eventful affairs given in Edgartown this season was the guest picnic held at Gay Head Sunday by the Beach Roamers, a group of colored girls who have trampled and roamed the beaches together all summer. The picnic was given as a roundup, members inviting friends they have met this summer not being able to be in their constant presence.

  There were thirty guests in all and a delightful up and back was enjoyed by all in Mr. Sibley’s bus and a car...

  Everyone had a most wonderful time and we thank them. We hope to meet with them again next year. The Beach Roamers are: Mrs. Claretta Boyd, Mrs. Nancy Mitchell, Mrs. Bertha Allen, Mrs. Minnie Scott, Mrs. Katherine Strickland, Mrs. Elizabeth Moss, Mrs. Helen Foster, Mrs. Corey Sally, and Miss Betty Mathis.

  After World War II, when African-American vacationers began summering on the Vineyard in increasing numbers, many cottages in Oak Bluffs were available for rent or sale, often for a few thousand dollars. During the 1950s and ‘60s there were more than a few houses that stayed empty and boarded up summer after summer, not only in Oak Bluffs but in other island towns as well. Until the early 1970s, it was not uncommon to purchase a large cottage for four or five figures. These houses are now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  Early black summer visitors came primarily from Boston, but were soon joined by people from Providence, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. Now people come from as far away as Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, and California to summer here. We overcome great obstacles to get here. For some it is the hassle of making ferry reservations and the rush of trying to make the boat after running into unexpected traffic. For others, arriving by plane, it is the challenge of fitting together disparate itineraries to arrive on the island in a timely fashion, without the trip taking a full day. For all of us, there are the financial demands of the island, where all supplies are brought in by boat or plane and everything is more expensive. Many people who live here year-round and many summer residents go off-island periodically to shop, having figured out that even with the price of a roundtrip ferry ticket money is saved. Others arrive for the summer in cars laden with nonperishables: paper goods, condiments, bags of flour and sugar, multiple packages of batteries, sunscreen. Still, it is impossible to bring enough fresh vegetables, meat, fruit, and fish to last a summer. The prices at the grocery stores are part of the cost of being here.

  From the 1940s onward the number of African Americans on the Vineyard has increased dramatically. Black vacationers, many of whom became homeowners, began arriving on the Vineyard after World War II, first renting and later purchasing houses in the Highlands and spreading out to buy houses closer to town and the beach. While African-American homeowners are predominantly in Oak Bluffs, the most integrated of the islands six towns, in recent decades increasing numbers of African Americans have purchased or built homes all around the island. When it comes to buying property on the Vineyard these days, class, and the financial ability it brings with it, for the most part trumps race.

  Yet a black service class has always existed on Martha s Vineyard: cooks, maids, nannies, and drivers who accompany the families they work for to the island for the summer. While the circumstances of that class have changed with the political winds, it has remained fundamentally separate from and invisible to the island’s leisure class, and in recent years has been overshadowed by workers from Brazil. For the most part, the lives of service workers are separate from those of summer vacationers, and they create a vibrant, thriving society that exists beneath the surface of everyday life.

  Members singing in front of Open Door Club, circa 1950.

  James and Edna Smith, found
ers of the Open Door Club (with Louise Harper). Open Door Club members picnic at Bend in the Road Beach, Edgartown, 1950s.

  In 1940, Louise Harper of Englewood, New Jersey, came up with the idea of creating a place for herself and other domestic workers to go and socialize on their days off. Assisted by husband and wife James L. and Edna Smith, also in service, they created the Open Door Club as a place where domestic workers on the island for the sum-mer could gather to socialize, organize trips, and simply relax on Thursdays and Sundays, their days off.

  “When I first came here in 1935,” Edna Smith told the Vineyard Gazette in 1957, “we had nowhere to go on our afternoons and evenings off. We used to go down to the end of Fuller Street and sit in the fog and damp.”

  The Open Door Club rented a house in Edgartown on the corner of Cook Street and Tilton Way from Lyman Norton, purchasing it in 1943 and building a new club-house on the property. The club sponsored picnics, fishing parties, choral singing, trips around the island, and birthday celebrations. An annual August tea, to which friends and employers were invited, featured fabulous food cooked by members, singing, dramatic and humorous readings, recitation of poems, and in 1956 an acrobatic dance to the tune of “Aint She Sweet” and another member showing off her baton twirling skills. The annual tea also included an inspirational speech from a guest minister. At its height in the 1940s and ‘50s, the club had one hundred members.

  Louise Harper did not return to the island after 1941, but kept in touch with the Smiths and the progress of the Open Door Club until her deathin1957. James L. Smith, the senior deacon at Reverend Denniston’s Bradley Memorial Church, died in 1967. In 1972 Edna Smith, seventy-seven, sold the house that had been the Open Door Club, unable to keep it up alone. She died in I973. The Open Door Club continued to operate until the mid-1990s, meeting at Edgartown’s Federated Church Parish House.

  I have vague recollections of several summer visits in the late 1960s and early 1970s from my great-uncle and aunt Hayes and Mary Bolden, who came to the island in the summer from Virginia with the family they worked for. They’d come by the house, sit on the porch, and visit. Uncle Hayes always wore a black suit, white shirt, and tie, and Aunt Mary a dress, which seemed an odd way to be dressed in the summertime on Martha’s Vineyard. I recall riding along once when my mother took them back to Edgartown, dropping them off by the small park as you enter town, not far from the Open Door Club.

  “I liked it all right during the summer, but after Labor Day it was gloomy, nothing much to do. We used to go watch people get on and off the ferry,” laughs Aunt Mary, who first came to the Vineyard in 1955 or 1956 working as a maid for a family from Princeton, New Jersey. This was around the same year my parents came to the Vineyard as vacationers. “We stayed out of Oak Bluffs, or you’d come home with no money, those year-round people could get your money. We’d mingle around with some of the people, but not too much. On Sundays we were at the church, then after that we’d have our little gathering at the Open Door Club.” She met her husband, Hayes, a chauffeur for a family from Virginia, in 1961 at the club; she needed a ride home, and he gave her a lift. After their marriage she became the cook for the family he worked for.

  Program from twenty-first annual Open Door Club tea, 1961

  “Everybody in Oak Bluffs had their own homes, but they were renting rooms, trying to make a buck like everyone else,” Aunt Mary laughs when asked about class distinctions in the black community. “When we visited your family, we didn’t stay that long. Sure I felt comfortable. I’m a person who can adjust myself to anything. Sometimes your father would come by and see us in Edgartown and we used to stop by on Thursday, talk about the old people and back home.” Mary recalls attending meetings of the Open Door Club at Federated Church, after the original building was sold, through the late 1980s, when her employer stopped coming to the Vineyard.

  I do not remember ever hearing about the Open Door Club until the late 1990s. I had completely forgotten about the visits of relatives who were members for many years until I began research for this book. This strikes me as indicative both of how close middle-class black families are to the tradition of domestic service and how class and perceived status was and is a dividing line separating not only domestic and other workers from the leisure class on the Vineyard but creating tiers within the leisure class itself.

  I have come to call some summer residents’ desire to, if not quite separate, distinguish themselves from other summer residents on the Vineyard “identifiers of belonging.” These identifiers have emerged as more and more people of all colors have come to the Vineyard. The origin of these identifiers is a desire not simply to lay claim, but to lay rightful claim to a piece of this lovely island, as if on that great come-and-get-it day some of us will be revealed as pretenders. These identifiers of belonging stem from several sources: a desire for inclusion; a basic insecurity about your right to inclusion; the desire to date one’s arrival or residence on the Vineyard outside the problems of overbuilding and overpopulation; and the desire to freeze the island in time and avoid change, driven by the collective fear that as more people come to the Vineyard, what is loved about the island will be lost.

  The primary “identifiers of belonging” are:

  1. My family has been coming to the Vineyard for_____number of years. (The point is that the more years you’ve been coming, the more claim on the island you have.)

  2. My house is_____from the water. (The nearer the better. Or farther can also be better if you’re in an isolated, idyllic spot far from the crowd.)

  3. My house cost_____. (This is a tricky identifier. If you were lucky enough to buy a house before the mid-1970s for four or five figures that’s now worth almost a million, you brag about that. If you paid half a million for your house more recently, you brag about your ability to do that.)

  4. When I came to the Vineyard I encouraged_____(artists, academics, people with money, politicians, actors, sports figures, famous people, in famous people, whatever works for you) to also come who have contributed to the intellectual, cultural, or social life of the island.

  5. I dofor a living and make $_____, therefore I am important.

  (Again, a tricky one, since accepted etiquette on the Vineyard makes it crass to ask people what they do or talk overtly about money. This information must be carefully worked into conversations with people you know. Or, you can have loud cell phone conversations on the beach or at other public places.)

  6. On the island I belong to_____. (Membership in a golf course, the Cottagers, the NAACP, book clubs, card players’ groups, etc.)

  7. Even though I come here in the summer or recently moved or retired here, I know many people who live here year-round and am privy to island secrets that only they know. (Secrets include: out-of-the-way beaches; people with keys to private beaches; good mechanics, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, etc.)

  The fabric of the Vineyard is by no means devoid of issues of class and race. As the number of African Americans on the Vineyard has increased (composed largely of people whose sole purpose in coming to the island is to relax and recreate), so have instances of racial tension and confrontation.

  For the most part the racial pressures have the most direct impact on teenagers and young adults, many of them the children and grandchildren of homeowners, who complain about being harassed at the beach, rousted as they hang out on Circuit Avenue, Oak Bluffs’ main street, or at the basketball courts. The descriptions of harassment and disrespect from the police that I hear from young people today echo those of my daughter, now thirty-one, when she was a teenager. For the most part, these complaints are individual, anecdotal, and sub rosa. But beginning in 1995, when thousands of young black college students and professionals came to the island to celebrate the Fourth of July weekend, the invisible tipping point for African Americans on the Vineyard was reached, and the island reacted miserably.

  Young people were not allowed to drive their cars to massive, legal beach parties on South Beach, bu
t instead were required to board a shuttle bus. Cops stopped cars for no apparent reason, issuing no citations or tickets but harassing drivers and passengers. Police officers in mirrored shades and black leather gloves posed threateningly on Circuit Avenue, RoboCop wannabes on a resort island. After the bars let out at 12:30 a.m., police on horseback closed off Circuit Avenue in an offensive attempt at crowd control. The response to young black vacationers was as if the island were being invaded, no matter that the invaders were overwhelmingly college-educated buppies with jobs and disposable income simply looking to have a good time.

  And it wasn’t just the police. Vineyard homeowners, including more than a few black ones, also reacted as if they were being invaded. At one public meeting, a Vineyard homeowner announced that “they have their own Internet.” A letter sent to the newspaper stated, “One only needs to read the ads placed several months earlier in Ebony and Jet magazines to know that this was a planned assault by these hoodlums on this Fourth of July, after they wore out their welcome in Virginia Beach.” Discussion of the black holiday crowd continued for several years, in private, in public meetings, and in the pages of the Vineyard Gazette and Martha’s Vineyard Times. In many instances the level of conversation articulated the fear with which too many island residents greeted these young black revelers.

  I have never heard or read of similar sentiments being expressed toward the thou-sands of young white people who visit the island on holidays, whose behavior, like their black counterparts’, while sometimes loud, inconsiderate, and obnoxious, is not illegal. Apparently, island residents do not find this behavior from whites threatening; from blacks it inspired something bordering on terror. One group that was happy with these young black visitors was the merchants, who made a great deal of money off these young people who arrived driving Lexuses, Mercedeses, BMWs, and with money to spend.