by Jill Nelson
Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters. They all were here. They all came because this was the spot. But we took it for granted, it was just the way things were.
We went down to the Baptist Tabernacle to church, we played, we went to the beach all day as youngsters. When we got to be teenagers, we worked here. Black families started to own property after coming to Shearer, like Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. His first wife, Belle Powell, still lives here, right down the street. Every one of those black families used to go out and buy a house, they loved the island. There are so many families who were introduced to the island staying at Shearer first, and that’s how the black population started to grow. They were affluent, and they bought property.
There was one realtor who was very generous in helping find property for blacks, Evan D. Bodfish. He was very active among the black families and sold them property. He was living when I purchased my property.
Of course I worked here, I was a waitress, a lousy one, but you didn’t have to be that good. The whole family worked up here in the summer, and my children and grandchildren worked here, too, as they went through college. It was difficult for black kids to get jobs on the island, so many of them worked at Shearer, and we paid them just a little more. We had fun working here.
My mother, Lily, married Lincoln Pope, Sr., who she met here on the Vineyard. I met my husband, Herbert Jackson, here. My brother Lincoln met his wife, Gloria Downing, here. My daughter Lee met her husband, David Van Allen, here. One of my grandsons met his wife on the island. There are so many couples who met at Shearer, and they and their families continue to summer here.
It’s like a family here on the island, isn’t it? All this greenery, it’s wonderful. Where else could you go? It’s a wonderful place for meeting your best friends. We’re no different from anyone else. We come because of the beauty. Of course a lot of us come because of the nearness to each other, living so close. And we do have a closeness up here with our guests. Now, we are interracial. We just had a family from Oslo. We have people from all over now.
Shearer closed for a while in the 1970s and early I980s.There was sickness, we had children to raise, but then my sister Liz White and I brought it right back. Just
like anything else, you have your good times and your times that maybe aren’t so good, but you’ve got to keep it up, you’ve got to do it yourself financially. I personally wasn’t going to let Shearer go, and Liz wasn’t either, so we kept it going and built it back up.
Letter from Charles Shearer to Hampton University, 1913
We bless my grandfather every day for bringing us here. A lot of people wouldn’t be here now if it hadn’t been for him then. We are very blessed to have this property.
lee: The setting here is beautiful. Someone said, “A rainy day on Martha’s Vineyard is worth five good days somewhere else.” It’s a lovely island. There was a certain level of comfort for people of color when they stayed here. Is racism still alive and well on the island? Sure it is.
I can remember hearing stories of discrimination here in my time. I have a friend who was going to have her daughter’s wedding here, she was marrying a white guy, and everything was fine until the bride showed up, who happened to be black, and suddenly the date wasn’t available. Well, they just moved on to the Beach Plum Inn in Chilmark and had a lovely wedding there. And that wasn’t that long ago. Yet I still think there’s been a level of tolerance here, even though it hasn’t been 100 percent, that there hasn’t been in other places.
For Charles Shearer, who was born a slave, and his wife Henrietta, who we know was black and Native American—she had definite connections with the Native American community here, but I don’t know if she was a slave or not—for them to accomplish what they accomplished, to buy a home in the city and buy a home on this island, a place they loved, for them to accomplish that in the early 1900s and pave the way for the rest of us to be here and enjoy it in the ways we have, it’s a matter of appreciating and carrying on their legacy.
It was so very important, what they accomplished, that we need to appreciate and recognize that by keeping it going. It’s important to us because that’s why we’re here. If my accomplishment can be to keep the legacy alive for another generation, then that’s why I’m here.
Bob Hayden
Robert C. Hayden, sixty-six, first visited Martha’s Vineyard in I960 and spent summers here with his wife, two daughters, and two sons until 1974. A native of New Bedford, Massachusetts, he attended Boston University and spent his thirty-year career as an educator working with urban school districts. He is currently an educational consultant and lectures at colleges in the Boston area. Since 1999, he has lived on Martha’s Vineyard year-round, where he recently founded the Martha’s Vineyard branch of the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History. He is the author of the essential African Americans on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, published in 1999.
Robert: I view the coming, growth, and development of African Americans on Martha’s Vineyard as six waves. The first wave of blacks was those who were enslaved. Then as slavery was abolished, whether in 1780 or 1783, whichever court case you want to use for the abolition of slavery in the state of Massachusetts, comes the second wave. The majority, and that was no more than one hundred blacks, from 1773 up through the Revolutionary War period into the 1830s and 1840s, were mariners. They were in the fishery, whaling, and related industries, and fugitive slaves. It was a very transient, moving, small black community. The 1790 census, the first census on Martha’s Vineyard, numbered about fifty-nine “Negroes.” The third wave was a result of the antislavery movement and the growth of the Underground Railroad, and had fugitive slaves coming in the 1830s, ‘40s, and ‘50s; those numbers were small.
Then I see the fourth wave beginning with the Civil War and ending with emancipation. Blacks had more mobility, not just from the South but from the mid-Atlantic states, and came to Martha’s Vineyard because it was a place away from the mainland, where they were still facing tremendous discrimination and lack of opportunity that they just wanted to get away geographically and physically. And of course you had the Quaker influence here, the Methodists beginning in 1835, you had a kind of religious fervor here that generally accepted and tolerated them. So you had a lot of recently freed people coming, and many of these people were alone. They weren’t families, they came solo, men and women, with trades. As domestics, as cooks, opening up dining halls, doing laundry. So you had these solo entrepreneurs who were coming, and many of them came in service with those white people who were coming in the middle of the nineteenth century and decided they wanted a piece of the pie, and found a way of getting some land, finding a cottage and a roof over their heads, and starting a little business.
Then the white leisure class came in the last two decades of the 1800s, and with them you had the fifth wave, an increasing number of blacks coming to work for and with them, and then deciding that they were going to start their own business. Then you have the black leisure class, and I’m talking about what would be considered middle-class black families in the I890s, turn of the century, who could afford to rent a place or have a place. The wives and children would be here, the husbands would come on the weekend, so you’ve got this small black summer leisure class. That began in the late 1890s and continues today.
The Shearers, who started Shearer Cottage, are an example of these solo entrepreneurs. I see a number of them opening up guest houses and dining halls, laundries, and things of that nature, particularly in the Highlands, and serving that East Chop elite white community. Horace Shearer was one of the black entrepreneurs who came, but most of them were women. The husbands were working; they had steady work or an occupation on the mainland. The women weren’t employable on the mainland, so they could come here in the summer and do something part or full time, seasonal work that supplemented their income and provided money for the family to be here. They had culinary skills, homemaking skills, personable skills where they could bring people together
. The black entrepreneurial class began to blossom, too, as more and more blacks came here and found that they weren’t generally welcome in the restaurants and guest houses. They then said, “Well, we’re going to service our own.”
The last wave, and I guess I’m one of them, are the black retirees on this island. If you look at the 2000 census, in Edgartown and Tisbury the black population has gone up about 2.5 percent. That’s a big percentage, relatively speaking, in ten years, and I attribute it to the blacks who are retiring here and are registered voters. I see that as a whole new, different wave.
I think that the next wave, and it’s already started, are those young black adults in their twenties and thirties who are coming and looking at land and looking to buy houses. Young families that are putting down roots here. Young professionals with families, twenty-five to thirty-five, who are making their second or third visit here and want to come back. I see that group really adding to our population in the next few decades. I think for a lot of families and individuals, coming here is an opportunity to create something new for oneself and one’s family. An opportunity to meet, get to know, and interact with people that you ordinarily wouldn’t meet. If you’re living and working in Boston, you’ve got a really small, close-knit, almost parochial black community in Boston, and when you come here you’re exposed to a whole different array of black individuals from the East Coast, West Coast, and all around the country. Those ties made here are maintained, in most cases.
Many, many couples come here for their children. For the recreation, the socializing, and the contacts their children make here. I first came here for one weekend, friends invited us down in the summer of 1960. The next year, and every single year up through the mid-1970s, we came every summer with our kids, renting houses. We have since divorced, but my ex-wife built a house here, I’ve got my house here, and my three children and two grandchildren are still coming. Their vacations are here every summer. I think people are attracted by the open environment, a place to relax, go fishing, go to the beach, have cookouts. I think there’s a mystique, too, about getting on the boat and coming to an island, even though it’s just a forty-five-minute ride. There’s that motor trip to Woods Hole, getting on the boat, the anticipation of seeing people you haven’t seen all year, that’s what it is.
People develop great feelings for one another here. People are able to express themselves here; people have the time to get to know each other in a way they might not back home on weekends or while they’re working. People like and
appreciate and want to have another space and place for themselves, a summer home, where they can garden and work outdoors and interact with other people in ways they often can’t in the city. I don’t see any letup in the interest, commitment, and planning on the part of black people who want to be here. The community here is healthy and will remain healthy.
For a lot of people who come for a week or two weeks or a month, this is home for them. They bring children, grandchildren, friends, and just live it all, sunup to sundown. It is a place where you can come and totally escape your other world of work and the daily routine. The great majority of the blacks who come here are working in white America. And it’s still very difficult out there, there are still a lot of subtle things you have to deal with. Whether you’re working for a newspaper, a bank, or government, it’s very difficult for middle and upper-income blacks working in the public and private sector. There’s a lot of pressure out there, and this is a way, as it was fifty and one hundred years ago, to get away from all of that. Even though it’s short term and temporary, the benefits last a long time. And then there’s always the anticipation of coming back.
Barbara Townes, ninety-five, began spending summers on Martha’s Vineyard as an in-fant at the turn of the twentieth century. Originally from Boston, Townes went to Boston Clerical and worked in a defense plant during World War II. One of the founding members of the Cottagers, an organization of black homeowners who hold social events to raise money for island organizations, she and her husband, Frank Townes, now deceased, moved to the Vineyard year-round in the 1980s. She still has her house on Plymouth Avenue in Oak Bluffs and currently lives at the Windemere Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Oak Bluffs.
Barbara: My grandfather sent his children down here to stay with Grandma Hemmings and one of her sons, Fred. My grandfather wanted to get rid of all these kids in the summer, so he sent my mother and her two brothers down here to stay. I’ve been coming down here since I was a baby. I stayed with Dorothy West’s mother, she was my godmother, until eventually I bought the Hemmings house. I still have that house today.
I grew up with the writer Dorothy West and Lois Mailou Jones, the artist. We were very close friends. Lois had peculiar ways about her. Our little gang couldn’t stand some of the things she wanted to do, but her mother had a lot to do with that. Her mother, Carrie Jones, gave people baths and did heads, we were all kids together, but there were some things you couldn’t tell Lois. Carrie Jones wanted to be everything, she was a climber, and these women down here didn’t want that, because everybody was just trying to get along. Lois was just different, fussy and whiny. Dorothy and I used to go in the Baptist Tabernacle in the Highlands and play hide and seek, do things that kids do. When Dorothy was a baby her family
Barbara Townes at forty, approximately 1950
had a house right down near where Our Market is now, but it burned down. They said that someone was smoking a cigarette, and that’s what caused the fire.
We went to the beach in the morning around nine or ten o’clock. We went to the beach where the East Chop Beach Club is now, there always was a beach there, and we went to Oak Bluffs Beach, right across the street from Ocean Park. Sometimes we had lunch, sometimes we didn’t, depending on who could get the most to eat to bring to the beach. We stayed on the beach until the five o’clock boat came over the horizon from Nantucket.
We went to the movies every night that we could get enough money. Just go down and stay a couple of hours on Circuit Avenue, eat popcorn, and stuff ourselves. What was there to do when you were a little kid? Nothing. But during the day when it was bad weather we found things to do. You know who was very, very generous, my godfather, Harry T. Burleigh. He would give us money to go to the movies and do the things we wanted to do, and there was quite a gang of us, there must have been ten kids.
When we got to be teenagers, everything was different, because there were more kids down here, more everybody. You know what used to happen? Sadie Shearer, she took in all these roomers, anybody that wanted to come down came down and stayed with Sadie or they stayed at Ann B. Smith’s house, or they stayed with Jimmy Coleman’s mother; she used to take people in as well. Or they stayed with Mrs. O’Brien on Circuit Avenue. She was a very nice-looking girl, long hair. She wore it braided all the time. She could almost sit on her hair. She was old man O’Brien’s second or third wife, I don’t know which.
The cellar was fixed up and she used to have parties for children. They’d get a three-piece band and have parties for us. Sure, I went to those parties when I was a little girl. They were fun. Mostly dancing.
When Sadie Shearer was just starting to have a lot of people in her house, she was trying to work up a business, and people recommended her to their friends, and that’s how she got people. I know she never got them right off the boat. I know she got a lot of people through Harry Burleigh and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
There were the people who stayed at Shearer Cottage and then there was another
Ferry terminal with black livery driver, turn of the century
clique of black people you just met them different places or through somebody. And there was not a lot of mixing from one place to another. Shearer Cottage was a place, if you didn’t have your own house, you could go there and hang out with people who were staying in Shearer Cottage. Shearer Cottage and Harry Burleigh really helped to introduce a whole group of people to this island.
I have been down here all my lif
e in the summer. As a teenager, we had parties, and had card games, that’s what we did mostly. I started working when I was sixteen, over at Havenside in Tisbury. There were fourteen girls working there, all of us in high school or just getting ready to go to college, and never anything but nice-looking girls. Every night we had someplace to go or a date with some guy, and we would go different places. A young woman who is like a daughter to me asked, “How did you get those bracelets?” I had a million bracelets. I said, “Oh, they came from Gay Head.” She asked, “Who gave them to you?” And I said, “Oh, different guys.” There were a lot of college boys who worked on the boats. I never went with any of the Gay Head boys. To tell you the truth, I was afraid of them, ‘cause they were Indian. They were very nice, and their families were very nice and
Miriam Walker, Cutie Bowles, Mai Fane, and friends, 1950s. Party at Miriam Walker’s home. Olive “Cutie” Bowles, Dorothy West, and others, 1946.
we were nice to them, but we never dated them. I think they were just as funny about dating us as we were about dating them.
In the 1950s a lot of professionals from New York and Washington started coming to the island, and that changed the island. There were a lot of doctors and their families, and just more and more professional people. Miriam Walker grew up here, and after she married Johnnie Walker, she got very social. Johnnie was a racketeer and he had money, and Miriam had diamonds. She had the money to spend and she spent it on these lavish parties. One thing about Miriam is that she fixed up her house herself. She never had somebody come in there and fix it, she did everything herself. Her mother, Sadie Shearer, was smart in that same way. She held on to Shearer Cottage and fixed it up so it looked like something.
