My parents and many of my friends’ parents always seemed to be aware of the island’s past attitudes on race, but these people also always seemed to suggest that we had little reason to complain because nowhere else in the world were we going to find blacks like us living such a relatively conflict-free life.
Since Oak Bluffs is often perceived as some kind of oasis in the otherwise white-dominated world, no one in this black community seems to want to get a straight story on the Campground. They just all seem a little uncomfortable with it. And they are satisfied with maintaining that level of discomfort.
“Even though Edgartown and Vineyard Haven were even less welcoming to blacks, Oak Bluffs has its own blemish with the Campground houses,” says a New York attorney, who points out that he can’t recall any black families that have ever been welcomed into the historic section.
According to one longtime black Oak Bluffs summer resident who says he doesn’t want to stir up anything, the Methodist Campground association has to approve the sale of the houses on the property. “Anyone can buy a house on the property, but since the association owns the land, it’s my understanding that they can refuse to let you stay there,” says the man, who quickly adds that he wouldn’t want to live that close to people like that.
Robert Jones’s grandfather, Thomas Vreeland Jones, had purchased a Campground house in the early 1900s and had it placed on a flatbed with wheels in order to have it moved out of the white neighborhood and pushed up along School Street to Pacific Avenue, where many of the town’s blacks were living at the time.
“Most of us blacks lived on the other side of New York Avenue—closer to East Chop. That’s where we were more comfortable and that’s where my own grandfather moved when he got here in the thirties,” says Doris Pope Jackson, whose grandfather, Charles Shearer, was one of the first black landowners in the community.
Despite the history of the Campground neighborhood and the current makeup of the predominately white area, Oak Bluffs has long been considered the most hospitable area for blacks on the island. Even in the 1960s and 1970s Oak Bluffs was one of the two towns where my parents allowed us to roam unsupervised.
Although there were several black families like Robert Jones’s that initially moved to the School Street area of Oak Bluffs, a much larger number came to settle in the area Doris Pope Jackson refers to several blocks north—on the other side of New York Avenue. This second black neighborhood was located near a part of the very white East Chop section of Oak Bluffs, and it is sometimes referred to, by older black residents, as the “Pork Chop” neighborhood. The area, which takes in such streets as Highland Avenue, Rose Avenue, Mountain Avenue, and parts of Munroe Avenue, includes such residents as Isabel Powell—the congressman’s widow—and the writer Dorothy West.
This is also the neighborhood where the historic Shearer Cottage can be found. Doris Pope Jackson remarks that her grandfather, Charles Shearer, a Hampton graduate, established the inn on Rose Avenue and made it a stop for many blacks who had avoided the island because of the inability to find innkeepers who would accept nonwhite guests. “We can accommodate up to sixteen visitors at a time,” says Jackson, who now owns the inn, along with several other buildings that are operated under the Shearer Cottage name. Jackson was an early member of the island’s elite black women’s group, The Cottagers, and her family is well known in Oak Bluffs.
Not long after some of these blacks arrived in the area near East Chop, many white residents began to aggressively buy up the undeveloped East Chop beach area during the 1940s and 1950s in order to maintain white dominance over the neighborhood. These white residents also established an exclusive club, the East Chop Tennis and Yacht Club, that black neighbors say did not have a black member for several decades, even though there were many well-to-do black residents living in the area.
Even though the oldest black residents of Martha’s Vineyard acknowledge the elitism evident among the white residents that have settled in East Chop, Edgartown, and other neighborhoods, they are not so quick to admit to the healthy dose of snobbery that they, themselves, serve up each summer for the black people who are new to the summer resort.
Even as a child, I was aware, upon our arrival, of the need to make a good impression. In fact, each year before we came up to Martha’s Vineyard from New York, we would spend a couple of weeks amassing new beach paraphernalia at Abercrombie and Fitch and new summer clothes at Lord and Taylor’s and Saks Fifth Avenue. One year, when I was around six or seven, just hours before we were to leave town, my mother hurriedly drove us over to one of the stores with the demand, “My sons need two or three matching outfits for clamming.”
When the salesclerk shook her head in confusion, Mom said, “You know, short pants—somewhere between bathing trunks and long trousers—something stylish and nautical. Something that won’t get wet if they’re in ankle-deep water.” My brother and I knew that it wouldn’t do to suggest that we could go hunting for clams or shells by simply rolling up our khakis or by wearing cutoff jeans. We knew that no kid in our group would show up looking so mismatched and “middle class.” It did not matter that they were middle class. So, instead, we ended up with some horribly effete yellow-and-white suits—I’d call them culottes—that would have been perfect for Little Lord Fauntleroy on a pirate ship.
But we were not alone in the pursuit of making good first impressions in Martha’s Vineyard.
From the moment one prepares for the trip to Oak Bluffs, the goal is to be well prepared to show your best. Because my parents used to move us to Oak Bluffs for nearly all of July and August for our summers, we would fill two cars to the brim with our new summer clothes, our newest toys, four bicycles, beach paraphernalia, and boxes of school study guides, Mad magazines, and the last several issues of Ebony and Jet.
My father would spend two hours packing our Pontiac sedan and Buick station wagon in the garage the night before, and then awaken us in pitch-black darkness at 4 A.M. The cars were so overloaded that in my grogginess it felt as though we were stealing away like runaways.
“Keep the blinds closed. We don’t want these people seeing us going away,” my father would whisper to us as we tiptoed out to the garage with our final baskets of food for the five-hour trip.
I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way, but because we were the only blacks in our neighborhood, taking off for two months of solitude among our black friends, my brother and I always imagined that “these people” referred to the white people who lived around us. (Whoever “these people” were, by 1971—the year our house was burglarized—my parents wised up and realized that they’d better start telling the neighbors to watch our empty house.)
So, with no sounds outside except for the hiss of a neighbor’s automatic lawn sprinklers and our electric garage door coming up and then down again, I would get into the Buick with my mother, and my brother would get into the Pontiac with my father, and we’d head north for a highway that would begin our three-hundred-mile trip to Martha’s Vineyard.
It is at Woods Hole that one gets the first look at the black elite of Martha’s Vineyard. Woods Hole is a port community at the southern edge of Cape Cod, and it serves as the docking location for ferries taking the forty-five-minute trip between mainland Massachusetts and the small island.
Even though there are four times as many white families sitting in their cars in the large lot waiting to board the ferry, it was always the black people that we were looking at. They were the faces we were expecting to recognize.
When I was a child, walking the line between the cars in the early morning sunlight gave me an exhilarating, almost cocky feeling as we saw other good-looking black people hop out of station wagons and fashionable sedans.
Today, on that line, blacks give each other a knowing nod as they pass by in their tennis whites and sunglasses, with copies of Black Enterprise magazine folded underneath their arms. We don’t always know each other, but we’ll generally use this opportunity to meet one another if it
looks like the person might belong to one of our social or civic groups.
“I put my best face on when we arrive at Woods Hole for the ferry ride,” says a forty-year-old Washington, D.C., resident who has boarded the ferry to Oak Bluffs each summer for thirty-three years. “We always car-hop when waiting to drive aboard. You get to see who’s coming out, what people are driving, who’s giving parties, who’s changed jobs, who got divorced, and who died. It’s a great prelude.”
This prelude of people-watching and “profiling” continues during the forty-five-minute ferry ride until the boat docks at Oak Bluffs. Then people head down to one of two places: the Ink Well or Circuit Avenue.
The Ink Well is the nickname for a section of the Oak Bluffs beach that the black elite have informally taken over as their own. Just a few blocks southeast of downtown, running along Nantucket Sound, the Ink Well is a four-block stretch of beach that dips several yards below Seaview Avenue—the road that borders the beach. Not surprisingly, its name comes from the fact that its chief patrons are black. The closest beach to the town’s busy center, the Ink Well also abuts the rocky area where the Steamship Authority ferry loads and unloads. This makes the location bad for solitude but great for getting your name around.
“If you want to quickly get an idea of who is out here on any particular weekend, you should walk the length of the Ink Well around 2:30 or 3 P.M. after the whites have left,” says the forty-year-old Washingtonian. People stand up along the sidewalk and wave down to friends and children who are playing, swimming, reading, tanning, building sand castles—and most of all, keeping track of who’s around.
“My daughters loved going to that beach,” says Dr. Beny Primm, a New York physician who bought an Oak Bluffs house in 1971. “They saw their friends from home, from school, and from Jack and Jill there. It was an extended family.”
Jacquelyn and Bill Brown own an 1869 modified Campground-style house that has a view of the beach. “Initially we were going to buy a place in Newport,” explains Bill Brown, an MIT graduate, who first visited the island in the late 1960s and stayed at Shearer Cottage, “but what attracted us to Oak Bluffs years ago were unique factors like the Ink Well. We didn’t want to be spending summers in places where we were the only blacks. Our kids got enough of that during the school year.”
Longtime Vineyarder Alelia Nelson laughs when she hears people talk about the Ink Well. “Originally that term was used privately among blacks; then one day Louis Sullivan, George Bush’s cabinet secretary, gave an interview to one of the white newspapers and he mentioned the term ‘Ink Well,’” explains Nelson as she sits in the rambling home that wraps around one of the most picturesque corners in Oak Bluffs, “and that’s how white people learned about the nickname we’d made up for our section of the beach. And then came that dreadful movie about the Ink Well. Not only was it insulting; it wasn’t even filmed here. They did it down in Virginia someplace.” Nelson, who is the goddaughter of millionaire entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker, brought her children to all the beaches on the island—not just the Ink Well. Her daughter, Jill, a former Washington Post reporter, has written about the summers she spent there. Her son, Stanley, a filmmaker, has worked on projects focusing on the community. “I was not going to be intimidated by people who said the only beach for us was the Ink Well. So I brought my kids to all the beaches here.”
Like the Primms and the Browns, well-to-do families populate this beach throughout the summer. On any given afternoon, there are doctors from Philadelphia, radio station owners from Detroit or Pittsburgh, bankers from New York, attorneys and teachers from Washington, and journalists from Los Angeles. Everyone has one or two books stacked on top of issues of Essence, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Vineyard Gazette, and the black newspaper from home. Pen and paper are also de rigueur for copying down phone numbers of old friends one will inevitably see. It’s a perpetual networking scene.
“Unfortunately, there’s also this coarse element that has started showing up here on the Fourth of July,” says a New Jersey dentist as he looks up from the beach to a group of teenagers playing a radio and sitting on a railing overlooking the beach.
“They obviously have no business here,” adds the dentist’s wife as she adjusts the umbrella behind her and rubs sunblock on her pale, lightly tanned skin. “All these loud, dark-skinned kids coming over here for the day. They nearly destroyed Virginia Beach—and now they think they can just plop themselves down here. Just because we’re black doesn’t mean we have to put up with this.”
“They think they’re fitting in, but they are clearly not our kind of people,” adds another woman as she drops the Vineyard Gazette by her side. “But I guess we can all tolerate them two days out of the whole summer. After all, they always just go back to wherever they came from.”
A short walk from the Ink Well is Circuit Avenue, the main shopping street in Oak Bluffs, which consists of about two dozen shops, restaurants, and small businesses, and a post office. The sidewalks on the narrow street are jammed with people stopping and gaping at the slow-moving cars, straining to see who of their friends is back on the island. Among the newer institutions on the street is the dance club Atlantic Connection, which attracts young people, who line the street outside on Friday and Saturday summer nights.
With the increasing number of blacks visiting the island, there seem always to be new ways to separate the elite from the ordinary. Ever since I was a teenager, I recall that one popular method of establishing divisions was by asking every new face one question: “Do you rent, or do you own?” It’s a question that you hear black people asking up and down Circuit Avenue as they bump into vaguely familiar black faces, or completely new black faces that seem inviting enough to welcome with a few words of introduction.
“If they’ve owned a house here for twelve years, I’d know ’em,” said a gray-haired woman, interrupting a bridge game that I sat in on recently.
“Well it’s supposed to be some fabulous place with six bedrooms,” added her partner. “Something like five thousand square feet, with a tennis court. And he’s a surgeon from Washington, and she’s a lawyer.”
“I’m telling you, Alma,” insisted the older woman. “Surgeon from D.C., five thousand square feet. I’d know ’em if it was true. Never heard of ’em.”
A third woman, also a longtime owner in Oak Bluffs, took a sip from her iced tea. “Well, that’s probably because they’re in Chilmark!”
“Ha! I knew it!”
“Well, there you go.”
“Okay, then.”
I looked around at the women sitting on the screened porch of a home not far from the town’s Waban Park.
“What kind of black folks are going to be in Chilmark? Is his wife white?”
“They must be hiding. Might as well be in Chappaquiddick. Or Nantucket.”
There was nothing more to say about the Washington surgeon to this group of women. He and his wife were so irrelevant, they were not worth further discussion.
Among the blacks who summer on the island, there are fine distinctions made between those who own in Oak Bluffs or Vineyard Haven, those who rent in Oak Bluffs or Vineyard Haven, and those who own or rent in places like Edgartown, West Tisbury, or Chilmark. Blacks who live in the latter three towns might as well live on the island of Nantucket. The old-guard blacks dismiss these vacationers as “Incognegroes” who are trying to hide out in faraway white communities.
“Historically, blacks were not welcomed anyplace but in Oak Bluffs—and later in Vineyard Haven,” explains a Chicago attorney who owns an Oak Bluffs home, “so people always question blacks who choose to live outside these two areas. We kind of wonder if you’re hiding or trying to separate yourself for some reason.”
While any person, black or white, can place themselves on the Ink Well beach section and attempt to blend in, there is no mistaking who the old-guard people are in Oak Bluffs. Among the established summer residents is a small club known as “The Cottagers,” a group of
one hundred black women who host clambakes, bridge games, and fund-raisers for various island charities. The close-knit, almost clannish group not only owns their own clubhouse on Pequot Avenue but they also give out scholarships to students headed for college.
Hester Boxill is a member of this selective club that has been around for more than forty years. “Our group is limited to one hundred members,” she explains, “and while many of our members live in Oak Bluffs, the primary requirement is that they own their own homes somewhere on Martha’s Vineyard.” Along with Boxill, there are such other members as retired teacher Helene Wareham, Mary Manley, and Agnes Louard, one of my mother’s former professors from the Columbia University School of Social Work.
Louard, who has owned three different Oak Bluffs houses since 1964, is a big fan of the Cottagers and their activities. “We have bridge groups here on Monday mornings, as well as dance, exercise, and arts lessons for children,” says Louard, who often runs into her fellow Delta sorors at Cottager events. “Although we have meetings at the clubhouse on every other Wednesday, our most popular event is our annual house tour which takes sightseers to the historic houses in Oak Bluffs. We have as many as three hundred guests, and most of them are white visitors who are interested in the community’s history.”
“My sister, Liz White, and her friend, Maggie Alston, negotiated the purchase of the Cottagers’ clubhouse at a time when black organizations rarely owned their own buildings,” says Doris Pope Jackson as she points out a building on Pequot that once served as the neighborhood firehouse.
In addition to the Cottagers, there are other institutions and events that continue to link the elite blacks on the island. One of those events is the annual Tucker Tennis Tournament that takes place at the family compound of Judge Herbert and Mary Tucker. The invitation-only gathering begins in early August and brings together some of the most prominent summer residents as observers and participants in a mixed doubles tournament where the women pick their male tennis partners through a drawing.
Our Kind of People Page 22
