Finding Martha's Vineyard

by Jill Nelson

  My mother and Dorothy West’s mother, Rachel, used to go over there and help Sadie. My mother was always over there. She’d say, “Sadie’s got a lot of people this weekend and she needs some help,” and my mother would go right over there and help her. I never knew her daughter Miriam to ever even lift a hand to do anything, except if she had a glass in it. Miriam and I didn’t get along so well, because when we were younger I’d go over there and tell her, you ought to do this, you ought to do that, and she’d get mad at me. Then when we were grown and Miriam started having all the company she had, I said, “Well, hell, I’m not going to go over there.”

  I moved down to the Vineyard full-time with my husband, Frankie. We were here about three years when he died. It seems very, very quiet down here now. It’s not like it was years ago, that’s all I can say. Part of that is that people are so dispersed now, it wasn’t like that when we were young. There was a nice little group of people here, but everything changed. It was great while it lasted.

  Anne Vanderhoop Madison, seventy-three, first came to Martha’s Vineyard in the 1940s with her adoptive mother, a cook for a family in Edgartown. She married William Vanderhoop, a native of Aquinnah/Gay Head and member of the Wampanoag tribe, in 1946. They are the parents of five surviving sons and one daughter: All of her sons live on the Vineyard. Anne married Luther Madison, the tribe’s medicine man, in 1978. During the season, which begins with an Easter Sunday brunch and runs through the last week in October, Anne and her sons run the Aquinnah Restaurant on the Aquinnah Cliffs, home of the most spectacular sunsets and fabulous strawberry-rhubarb pie. Most summers, several of her fourteen grandchildren work there with her.

  Anne: When I first moved to Gay Head in 1946, there wasn’t any running water. You had to pump water, heat it on the stove, carry it up to the bathtub, and you had to do the same to clean your clothes. No electricity, and the refrigerator ran by a gas motor. All you had was a battery radio, and if you had one of those you were in luxury. I came from running water and flushing toilets and I used to think, “What have I gotten into?” I haven’t figured it out yet.

  I was born in Boston, Massachusetts. I am the illegitimate child of a student going to Boston University. My father was one of the janitors. His name was Arthur Joy, a mulatto, a very tall man, a yellow man. My mother was white, from a very good family from Beacon Street, and of course she didn’t want me. She didn’t want her family to know, so she had me, and then she said to my father, “Take her out and drown her.” He gave me to a lady who raised nineteen children, her name was Callie Hughes. When I was two years old Callie’s friend Gertrude Williams came to Boston and they were going to have me christened the next day. Gertrude

  Anne Vanderhoop Madison

  slept in Callie’s bed with her, and she woke up the next morning and Callie was stone cold. She had died during the night.

  Gertrude took me back to Rhode Island, and she raised me in Providence. My mother was a cook in rich people’s homes; she worked every day. When they had parents’ day at school, she could never come. I didn’t have anybody. She couldn’t take time off from work. That hurt my feelings when I thought about it, but I tried not to think about it too much. My mother was one of those who didn’t believe in welfare; she worked her butt off. All during primary grades I had to go home and make my own lunch, empty the pan to the icebox so it wouldn’t overflow, put a few more sticks of wood in the old black woodstove. When I got home later my mother was still working. Sometimes she didn’t come home ‘til five or six and it was dark. I was always lonely when I was growing up.

  My mother worked for a family in Providence and they had a home in Edgartown, and when I was sixteen they asked her if she wanted to come to Martha’s Vineyard and work for the summer.

  When we came here for the summer, we used to have these huge beach parties down in Edgartown, all the maids would get together. And then there was the Open Door Club in Edgartown that was for the people in service. Nice people, from New Jersey, some of them from the South, people who were here working for families for the summer. That’s where we met some of the locals, at those parties on the beach. After the beach parties, Mama and Aunt Lizzie used to go to Windsor Falls, on Circuit Avenue, to have their beer; they both liked their beer. Young men would be in there and they’d see us come in with our mothers, they’d come over, buy our parents a beer, and ask questions. Gracie Frye and her sister, Susan, and I became friends with these young men. I used to travel with Horace Shearer, too. I was all right here because I was free. I could move about, go where I wanted to when I wanted to. We used to hitchhike to Oak Bluffs. The Inkwell wasn’t called the Inkwell in those days, it was just the beach.

  I met my first husband, William Vanderhoop, at one of those parties. After we’d come back to Providence, William and a couple of the other fellas we’d met on the

  Circuit Avenue

  Vineyard said they were coming up to visit. We were going to drive up to New York.

  We had a car accident. I had just shifted places in the car with my friend Lucy, and she was killed. I was in the hospital for almost a month; they thought I was going to die. I have a metal plate in my leg to this day and wear a special stocking. I was seventeen. When I finally went home I had a cast way up to my hip. We lived on the third floor and I couldn’t get down those stairs. My mother wasn’t going to let Bobby, a boy I was crazy about in Providence, come and visit me, that was for sure, but she did let William come. William was a landscape gardener, a fisherman, and a scalloper. I don’t think marrying him was true love as much as my last resort. My mother told me, “Either you marry him or he can’t come and see you anymore.” It was do that or nothing. I didn’t have to get married, I wasn’t pregnant. We married the next September at the Baptist Parsonage in Gay Head, right down the road. That was in 1946.

  What I have missed marrying early and moving here is more education, that’s the only thing I ever wanted. I was going to be a lab technician before I had that

  accident. I had been accepted to the Wilson School of Technology in Boston. I might have even gone on to medical school. Instead, I settled for becoming an emergency medical technician here, and took evening courses at the high school. I also drove a school bus for twenty-eight years in Chilmark and West Tisbury.

  The Aquinnah Restaurant opened sometime during the Second World War. It was closed for a time when they shut that hill off during the war; there were submarines and things out there. It wasn’t always like it is now, it was just a little stand at the end of a sandy path. It was always called Aquinnah. I worked at the Aquinnah Restaurant from the time I was pregnant with my first child. It was so I could see people. If you stayed home, you didn’t see anybody. The taxi drivers would bring all these strangers up to Gay Head, and they were fun to talk to.

  Now, there are lots of people in Gay Head, but it’s getting more and more so that there are lots of people that you don’t know and maybe don’t care to know. When people come up to the restaurant and they say, “Oh, the food is wonderful, we’ll be back,” so on and so forth, they try to be your friend, but I’ve had enough friends, really. Don’t get too close, just like my food and leave me alone, that’s all I want them to do. These people that are coming in now, the wash-a-shores, we didn’t ask them to come. You see what they build, don’t you? These great, big, tremendous million-dollar houses. The people coming in are transients; they just go away in the wintertime. We’re supposed to guard their property when they go back to their condos or apartments in New York. We are actually just serving them. They’re friendly, alright, but I don’t feel a part of them. I have to work every day. As Mama used to say, there are classes and masses.

  I think there has been a real loss of community, not just in Gay Head, but everywhere. We used to have clubs, a civic club, card parties, square dances; we had all the parties. We used to get together socially a lot, and years ago there were about eight people on a party line. When the telephone rang, all the old nosy bodies would pick it up.
The rumors that used to fly! It was fun. We were too busy hellin’ around in those days. There was plenty of work, with no water or electricity. You didn’t think how lonely you might be. Those old people used to live off the land. The younger people had to make an hourly wage, and you have to go outside of Gay Head. When my kids were young, William had to pick up odd jobs wherever he could when he couldn’t fish. Today, four of my sons are fishermen, so we hope all is not lost, but I’m not optimistic. Now, I don’t think there’s anything holding the community together.

  I have always considered this island like a prison, this is as bad as Sing Sing. You’re not really free, you can’t go anyplace you want. You’ve got to have a doggone boat to take you off this island, and lots of time you get balled up and wound up in stuff that you’re doing here, and you don’t have time to go away. That’s what I say, I’m still in prison, and it’s getting worse, because all my friends are dead. I’m seventy-three years old. There’s no one around here seventy-three years old.

  As for the future, I think these summer people are going to try to squeeze out every poor person in Gay Head. The town is divided from the tribe, and it will always be that way. They are going to make that tribe do what they think they should. The people of the town are not members of the tribe; they have nothing to do with the tribe. We’ve got nobody that knew the old Gay Head. We are losing the history. Now all we have are a bunch of pictures on the walls. I think Gay Head as it once was is just going to fade away. I know it is. I kept telling my children, once you sell your land, you’ll never be able to buy it again.

  What Brought Us Here

  Buddy Robertson in plane, Martha’s Vineyard, I960

  Time to get up,” my mother says. But when I open my eyes the room is still dark, I can barely make out my mother’s tiny form, outlined in the light from the hallway behind her. I am nine.

  “Let’s roll, big team.’” she says, using a familiar phrase when she wants all of us to do something at the same time. Waking up, I can faintly smell coffee, maybe toast.

  Appetizing, but it’s still dark and chilly. I burrow under the covers, trying to escape back into sleep, but before that happens, the overhead light is switched on.

  “Let’s go. Everyone up,” my mother says in her husky voice. “Daddy’s almost ready. Your clothes are laid out on the chair. Put them on over your pajamas and you can sleep in the car.” She pauses, watching as my sister and I, sharing a room, slowly emerge from underneath bedclothes.

  “Don’t go back to sleep,” she instructs, turning toward the doorway. “I’m going to get the boys up. We don’t want to miss the ferry.” Ferry. The magic word. I throw the covers back, make for the bathroom, suddenly wide awake. Ferry means Martha’s Vineyard. Martha’s Vineyard means summer. Summer means swimming, fishing, crabbing, riding my bike, seeing friends I haven’t seen for nine months. Moments before, I resisted getting up in the dark, but I am now happy, knowing that at just about the moment the sky lightens and the sun rises we will be there, at Woods Hole, pulling around that curve in the road with the harbor on the left and the ocean beyond, as likely as not the ferry with its swollen sides sits there waiting just for us. For my family, and many other families who drive to Martha’s Vineyard, the trip always begins in the early morning.

  It takes me nearly forty years to break this ritual. I am long a grown woman before it slowly becomes clear to me that there is no longer any need to rise in the darkness of just after midnight to begin my annual pilgrimage to the Vineyard. This is true for many reasons, some of them practical, many of them not. The drive to the ferry in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, no longer takes seven or eight hours from New York. Since the completion of Interstate 95 in the early 1960s, there is no need to drive through the city of Providence, Rhode Island, or the little towns of Taunton or Wareham, Massachusetts, and the time it takes to make the trip has been cut in half.

  Unlike my parents, who were transporting four children and a summer’s worth of clothes, books, bikes, water toys, and other necessary stuff, more often than not it is only my daughter, my mother, and myself in the car. We do not have to structure our trips around avoiding the anticipated problems of overt segregation. In the 1950s and ‘60s driving at night with a car full of sleeping children avoided numerous pitfalls. No whining pleas to stop someplace that we saw from the car window and risk being treated with disrespect or hostility. Less fighting over who would control the radio and choose the station we would listen to, since the only sound in the car on those trips is the swoosh of the road underneath the tires of the car and the low murmur of my parents’ voices. The hope and gamble was that we would sleep all the way there, not waking to insist that we had to go to the bathroom. If we did, the car was simply pulled over to the side of the road, front and back doors opened, and we were told to squat between them in the dark and relieve ourselves in the grass. Then it was back into the car as we continued the trip north. We did not stop for food. My mother anticipated our hunger and brought provisions with her. In the car we are enveloped by the smell of tuna salad sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, grapes, cantaloupe, and secreted candy bars.

  I am convinced that the trip over to the island on the ferry is dermabrasion for the soul. I have sat outside on the deck of the ferry Islander or Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket in all kinds of weather; this is part of my ritual. I let the wind hit me, and as it does it takes with it some of the tension I carry with me from the life I live most of the year. Sometimes, I sit upright, eyes open, mesmerized as I watch the island emerge seemingly from nowhere as the ferry moves closer. Other times I close my eyes and let my head fall forward or back, feel the rhythm of the boat on the waves and do not open my eyes until we are almost docking at the Steamship Authority in Vineyard Haven. If I am on the ferry that docks in Oak Bluffs, once the island is in sight I stand on the prow of the boat, leaning forward, waiting to catch a glimpse of the house on Ocean Park that my mother left to her four children. Since my mother died in 2001, that first glimpse brings tears of missing. Then I grin, because as much as the house crouches on that corner so does she, her spirit filling out and enriching this place where my mother, and three generations of her family, have spent some of our happiest days.

  On this forty-five-minute ride to a little slice of paradise, I begin the process of laying my burdens down, letting go of the many things, small and large, that I will not do in my time here. I will not rush, impatiently honk my car’s horn at a preoccupied driver, spend very much time on the telephone. During my time on the island I will not take an elevator, ride on mass transit, or negotiate streets filled with thousands of people. A ferry ride away from the noise, crowds, and everyday tensions of life, this is a place where I find stillness.

  Even though I have been coming to this place every summer, and for occasional winters and falls, for fifty years, I still feel the same anticipation on each trip that I did as a child, maybe more. Now, I carry with me the same expectations: To open the door and walk through the house, empty after nine months, each room an architectural dig not only of last year, but decades of summers happily spent. To cross the street to the beach in Oak Bluffs where my mother taught me to swim, where I taught my daughter, and where, as soon as he is willing and able, I intend to teach my grandson. I swim each morning, doing as many laps as I can muster between the jetties. Here on this island, even going to the post office and opening the mailbox for the season is a welcome ritual. In the little square in front of the post office building, friends, acquaintances, and people I’ve never seen before will all be warmly greeted, united as we all are in being in this treasured place, acknowledging the ritual of our returning.

  These first few days back on the Vineyard each year I allow myself a brief return to childhood, indulge in all the sensory pleasures the island has to offer but that adulthood often puts off-limits. I eat fried clams and onion rings from the Clam Bar at the foot of Circuit Avenue, across the street from the Flying Horses, America’s oldest carousel. Ice cream from Mad M
artha’s or Ben and Bill’s, doughnuts from Old Stone Bakery, creamy sweet candy from Chilmark Chocolates, fish sandwiches from John’s in Vineyard Haven or Linda Jean’s on Circuit Avenue are all consumed. I drive up-island along winding, narrow roads, a canopy of oak trees over my head, to the town of Aquinnah, on the westernmost tip of the island, and have a piece of strawberry-rhubarb pie at the Aquinnah Restaurant on the edge of the famous clay cliffs. On sunny days, I sit outside on the deck that hangs over the cliffs and the ocean and eat slowly, savoring each bite and relishing both the pie, baked by Luther Madison, chief medicine man of the Wampanoag tribe, and the beauty of this place. For these scant days, there is no cholesterol, no weight to be maintained, no such thing as too much sugar or fat or salt.

  I reacquaint myself with the town of Oak Bluffs, walking up and down streets where I have spent summers all my life. What’s always amazing and comforting is how seldom houses disappear. They change, but they remain. Unlike when I was a child and young woman here, few ramshackle or empty houses remain. Instead they have been shored up, restored, brightly painted, and are now full with people in love, like I am, with this special place. I walk through town, admiring the shingled houses with broad porches and ornate woodwork, the neat lawns and precise, colorful plantings. I know who lives in many of them, either well or by their faces. On Martha’s Vineyard a walk of half a mile can take an hour or more as I stop to reconnect with friends not seen for nine months, chat with acquaintances, admire a garden, and pry from the gardener plant names and information on upkeep.

  Then I go to the beach, lie down in the sand, close my eyes, and breathe the salt air, listening to the steady, gentle lap of the waves as they break on the shore and then move out, the cry of seagulls circling above looking, as always, for a meal plucked from the ocean or from the picnic basket of an unsuspecting bather. Finally, I walk to the edge of the water and put my feet in. It is always cold. And for as long as I have been coming here, I always cringe, hop from one foot to the other, as if surprised by the freezing Atlantic, although I never am. This, too, is part of my ritual. I walk the length of Oak Bluffs town beach, feet immersed, skipping rocks and trying to psyche myself into taking the plunge while letting my feet, ankles, and calves get used to the cold.