Finding Martha's Vineyard

by Jill Nelson

  My oldest son, who is the brownest of us all, had those moments when he had to beat somebody for calling him one of those names. My oldest daughter, she’s quite smart, but the group she was with wasn’t, and she had to hide her report card ‘cause they wouldn’t accept her A’s and B’s—they were getting D’s and C’s—but she managed to get over that, too. My children flourished here. Even though I wasn’t ready, it was the best move we could have made for our children. That’s why I didn’t do or say things that let anyone know that I was dissatisfied, because my children weren’t, and that was most important.

  After my kids were pretty grown I had time to think about the things that I didn’t like about the Vineyard or the things that I missed. I’m first vice president of the NAACP on the Vineyard and I also belong to the League of Women Voters. I was on the board of Hospice. I used to be on the board of the 4-H Club. It seems like I’m always doing something; people call you when they see you’re involved.

  I’m cofounder of the African-American Heritage Trail of Martha’s Vineyard. I always liked black history, first of all because I didn’t know that much about it, so I did research and tried to keep myself up on it. I noticed in the schools they didn’t do much for black history, if anything at all, and I took it upon myself to provide them with things. When I used to go to the NAACP board meeting I’d bring back posters and literature and share it with the school. At best, they would hang a few posters. I still wasn’t satisfied with that, so I began to create exhibits. I have lots of dolls and I would dress them in different periods to represent different people. Mary McLeod Bethune, Harriet Tubman, black cowboys, players in the Negro Baseball League. I felt it was important for all black children to learn about their history; they have to be proud of something. They have to know that their people also helped, that they did most of the building of this country. I took the exhibits to the schools, the libraries, and they accepted them. I gave talks to the best of my ability, but that’s not where I’m good, I try not to do too much talking. I’m good at creating things. It became my job, unpaid of course, and for the most part, unrecognized. I did it for years and years and years, long after my kids were out of school, but now I’m tired, I don’t do it anymore. The Oak Bluffs School has continued with it, they do quite a lot. My friend Elaine Weintraub, who’s the cofounder of the Heritage Trail, she teaches in the high school, and she does a lot, too.

  I met Elaine through a mutual friend. She was teaching at the Oak Bluffs School then, she had a lot of black children in her class. She asked them about the history of the island, and one of her students said, “Well, we don’t have any history on the island.” She told them, “Oh yeah, you do.” Where there are white people there are black people, and everybody has a history. A mutual friend told me this story and said that we should meet, so I called her. Then a patient of Dr. Strock’s, whose office I worked in, who knew I was involved in black history, came into the office and gave me a document from 1850 that turned out to be similar to a census report, and in this document were black people who Elaine had heard about but didn’t know anything about, with docket numbers. It was information about Captain William A. Martin, an African American born in Edgartown in 1829. In our research we discovered that he became the only African-American master of whaling ships on Martha’s Vineyard. In 1857 he married a woman named Sarah Brown from Chappaquiddick, and they lived on the Chappaquiddick Plantation, which was known then as Indian land. He died in 1907 and the house still stands. He was buried right across the road. His gravestone faces away from all the others in the cemetery.

  Today, I know more about his family than I do about my own. Learning about and letting people know about black history, it’s just something I like to do. My granddaughter who’s in college calls me an activist, and included me in a paper she did, and it made me feel great. I was very proud.

  Some of the racism here on Martha’s Vineyard was just kind of in your face, but most of it is more covert. I think I just wasn’t accustomed to the kind of racism that there is here. I knew more about overt racism. I’d rather somebody tell me to my face, or show me, than ... Here, you just never know where it’s coming from or when it’s going to come behind you. For example, as long as I can remember there’s been an influx of black people on the holidays. Why those particular years when the black college kids came did someone have a problem? Maybe it was because there were more of them, and not families, like we’re accustomed to. But the problems were blown all out of proportion, the stuff that the town did was so unnecessary. I think the police, whether they mean to or not, make the situation worse; they’re like agitators sometimes. There was no need for cops telling people to move along, move along, cops on horseback.

  And then there was the whole thing with the Black Bean, a restaurant in Edgartown popular with black people, closing them down for the Fourth of July weekend. I’ve never heard of such a thing. You make an infraction today and you’re punished a year later on the busiest weekend of the year, the most lucrative for everybody? That’s what I mean, that’s the kind of stuff that they do, and they have the power to do it. It’s difficult for any business to make it here, and there are not many black businesses here at all. The reputation that the island has as a place where there’s no racism is not real, but it’s certainly not the worst place.

  One problem with the island is that it is so expensive. Every now and then there’s some group that talks about affordable housing, but they don’t really want affordable housing here. There are prejudices about what type of people need affordable housing—poor people with too many kids—but there are doctors and nurses who would like to come down here and cant afford it. We have lost good educators because of that. The housing situation on the island is very bad, that’s why I hang on to this little piece of house. Time was when you had a few little lots, one child could build over here, another over there. You can’t even do that anymore; now they’ve regulated the size of them. Martha’s Vineyard is not a place for poor people, and working-class people can only make it here if they’re in the laborious type of work, painting or plumbing; those people make a few bucks. I’ve known girls who made more money house cleaning than I did on my job, and I did pretty good on my job. Still, I didn’t get twenty-five dollars an hour.

  Everything that they want to do to make money is done in Oak Bluffs: the music, the bars, the tourists. Then again, lots of things of value are here, the airport, the hospital. It’s not perfect in Oak Bluffs, but this is the only place on the island I’d want to live, this is it for me. It is more liberal than other towns. I like the Highlands, the area that I live in. I like the people.

  I like to sew, I like to write. I do all sorts of things with my hands, knitting, crocheting. I am making quilts for my grandchildren now, all African prints. Since the attacks on the World Trade Center I feel a great sense of urgency. My quilting has been going and going and going. I’m not really a quilter or anything, I just find my way. I always said I’m going to be the best grandmother anybody ever had. All my grandchildren have an afghan, knitted sweaters, and now I’m on quilts.

  I don’t have regrets about moving here, but now that my children and husband are gone, I don’t really have anybody. I don’t have any of my own blood here. I’d like to leave, go someplace warm, my bones are aching. I miss the city, all the choices, the theater, the cultural institutions, the shopping. My one close friend up here is dead. I have lots of acquaintances, but no real close friends. But still, for my children, moving here was the best thing.

  Diane Williams and Brenda Williams-McDuffie

  Brenda Williams-McDuffie, fifty, is president of the Buffalo, New York, Urban League and the mother of a son and a daughter. Her sister, Diane Williams, forty-two, is an editor at the newspaper of the union Local DC 37 in New York City, covering politics and litigation. They began spending summers on the Vineyard in the 1950s after their father, David, an electrician for the New York City Transit Authority, and their mother, Pauline, a librarian, disc
overed this oasis for themselves and their five children.

  Diane: I’ve been coming here since I was born. My mother worked with Millie Dowdell Henderson, and they invited my mother and father up to visit them in 1958. My mother says she had never seen black people like this. She just wanted that environment, professionals who had met with more success than oppression, for us. Then there’s the natural environment, how beautiful it is here. She fell in love with the island. My father was a great fisherman, a golfer, he just loved to be outdoors. My father and our Uncle Al used to fly up here. Al had a plane, and at that time there was just that little tiny shack airport.

  Brenda: We grew up in a housing project in Brooklyn, New York, so just the fact that we were living in a house on an island in the summer was really something very different for us. When I grew up I didn’t know that black people could be professionals, that they could live in houses. I kind of knew that there were houses around us in Brooklyn, but the neighborhood that surrounded us was pretty much Italian, and people lived in apartments, not houses. Up here, everyone had a house, and it was the kind of environment where you could leave your doors open.

  Diane: It was very confusing, because here you had all this freedom. You caught a gold ring and got a free ride on the Flying Horses, you lived in a dollhouse world with candy-colored houses where everybody was nice and police officers spoke to you. Then you went back to New York, especially in our neighborhood, where if you crossed Flatlands Avenue you risked your life. That was the dividing line between the Italian-Jewish section and the black part of the neighborhood. Even though our neighborhood was integrated, it was like being in Alabama in the 1940s or ‘50s. Just a very racist, violent community. You knew your limitations. You knew you couldn’t go on Avenue L after a certain time. Or when you got out of school you couldn’t linger on Avenue J and 100th Street because you had to get back to the other side where you lived. When we hit the city coming home from the Vineyard, this beautiful, rural, bucolic place with green oceans and all this vivid color, and then you come back to bricks, cement, dirt, homelessness. It was just like up and down for me as a kid, to see the contrast of these two worlds of mine. The island was my escape, and it still is: that I’m going to come up to the Vineyard and just be normal.

  Brenda: We used to hang out all day at the beach. There were loads and loads of people on the beach. We’d go down to the beach early, do a little swim, come back, sit on the porch, play cards, go hang out on Circuit Ave, eat ice cream. You know how people say they people watch? We used to do it from the youthful point of view and just laugh at how gullible adults are, how sometimes they did real stupid things.

  Our house was kind of in town so everybody stopped by. It was across the street from the Laundromat, and at that time not everybody had a washer and dryer, so everyone used to come by our house. There was also a bar across the street and at night we’d sit on the porch and laugh at the people getting drunk.

  My parents always had so many people in the house. My father would come up on the weekends and bring all his friends, and my mother would say, “What is this? I’m not running a camp!” There were all these people on the weekends coming up from Brooklyn, from the housing projects. Now they’re on Martha’s Vineyard, and they didn’t have a clue. It was like they were free. They used to just hang out and have Brooklyn parties all night.

  We had a very different world from most of the kids we grew up with here, because we went back to a very different world. I never knew classes of people when I was growing up in Brooklyn. I got exposed to a whole middle-class and upper-middle-class black culture here that I wasn’t exposed to as a child. When we went home, we went home to people who were living in the projects, low income; many people depended on public assistance to subsidize their income or it was their only income. We were probably an exceptional family in that environment, too. Our parents were together, they both worked, and we spent our summers on Martha’s Vineyard. In our project, that was unheard of. Nobody went to Martha’s Vineyard in the summer.

  Diane: Unless they came up with our father. And he used to bring up everybody.

  Brenda: I didn’t really know black people were doctors or lawyers growing up in the Brookline Houses in Brooklyn. I think that we were probably one of the lower income families growing up here, but it didn’t bother us, we had a very rich spirit. My father worked maybe three jobs in order for us to come up here all summer, and it has had a dramatic impact. I told my husband from the beginning that I want our kids to go up to the Vineyard, and we’ve come every summer since they were born. We rented houses until this one was built in 2000.

  You want your children to have similar experiences to those that had a positive impact on your life. My kids used to say, “When we get grown, we’re going to live on the Vineyard year-round.” You don’t have to lock your doors. You can go into town and hang out. I wouldn’t let my kids go up on a strip in Buffalo to hang out. But if they hang out on Circuit Avenue, what’s the difference? They’re not going to get into any trouble. I want those experiences for my children because they had such a positive effect on me, on who I am.

  Being here really helped me define relationships and friendships and sort out which were which. My kids have many friends they’ve met up here who they stay in contact with. It’s really nice to see that black people have held on to a place, that they have an asset that they can pass on from generation to generation. And it’s not only an asset, it’s memories and feelings and relationships and friendships that surpass time. You don’t have to be in each other’s company or see each other all the time, but as soon as you run into someone at the post office or the supermarket there’s a genuine bond about the fact that you’re on the Vineyard. Even off-island, in business environments, when people hear that you have some connection to the Vineyard they become very accepting of you. It’s a real strange thing. Maybe they believe that you’re more established.

  Diane: Our house up here had all old Victorian furniture, those big iron beds that sat way up in the air; it seemed they were eight feet off the floor. The smell of the houses. I mean, who likes musty, damp smells except people from the Vineyard? Or sand all on your floors? Or living in your bathing suit all day? These are things the Vineyard means to me.

  Growing up here, it was get up and put on your swimsuit, every single day. You never wore clothes, just your bathing suit. You never worried about your appearance. You just got up and could roam free. You got on your bike and went crabbing, to the tennis courts, to the park. And there was a lot of Beatles music. At the end of the summer, I’d get sick, although I dared not say it. I just hated going back to Brooklyn. My mother would make all these sandwiches for the trip home, and on the ferry ride back to the mainland my father would eat all the sandwiches, so we’d have to stop on the road. I remember as soon as we got into the city, Brenda would say, “Put on WWRL,” because we had not heard any soul music all summer. All we listened to was the Beatles on the radio, and whatever records we brought up, but by the end of the summer you were sick of them.

  After my parents sold the house in 1971 or 1972, I would get so sick whenever I heard Beatles songs and I never understood why the Beatles made me so sad. Years later, in the 1990s, a Beatles song came on the radio one time as we were driving home after checking on the construction of the new house, and I didn’t feel sad anymore hearing them, because now we had a house on the Vineyard again.

  Brenda: When we were growing up in the Vineyard, we never had our parents around. We just ran free. We used to be on the beach all day. No one had to work by necessity. If you had a summer job, it was by choice. Growing up, there were so many teenagers, and new ones came to the island every day. I don’t see that number of teenagers here anymore, except maybe during the Fourth of July, and that’s a college crowd.

  We’d go crabbing, fishing, crabbing. My uncle used to go get snails. I can remember my mother making Quahog chowder in the kitchen. You just sort of lived off the land more than you do now. Back then
, people were here all summer with their kids. We didn’t have to work, and things were a lot less expensive. Many of the mothers taught school, so they had the summers off. It was the dads who went back to the city to work. And families seemed as if they were bigger then, so we watched our younger siblings. Diane used to tag along with me and my friends; I’m seven years older, so that gave my mother a break, too. When you met people on the beach, they were there all summer. There was a natural summer pack, and then there were people who came in and out. I don’t see that now with my children. When they meet kids they’re usually here for a week or two, because both parents are working full time and can’t spend the summer on the island. I don’t see the large grouping of families with children here for the summer anymore. I think that’s over.

  Kids now spend much more time with their parents. I don’t think they know the experience of riding bikes back in Cottage City, going out in the morning with a gang of other kids, and not seeing your parents until dinnertime. There was no game room, there was no teen night at the local club, the Atlantic Connection. When we were growing up here there was nothing to do, so we had house parties. Or just sat on someone’s porch and laughed, played cards, or whatever until it was time to go home. Now, black people own or rent all over the island, not just in Oak Bluffs, so they’re more spread out. We got around by foot, by bike, or hitchhiked, and we don’t have that anymore. My kids’ generation wouldn’t hitchhike, and I wouldn’t encourage them to. The world is very different now, it is a less safe place.

  Diane: Coming here in the summer almost defines who I am. I think because Oak Bluffs was such an artistic community—I can remember finding rocks and painting them and selling them when I was about five—it made you want to be an artist. But then when I got back to New York, my parents didn’t really encourage me to pursue the arts, because I needed a real job. That was always a conflict for me, because I always wanted to be an artist, not a paralegal. Eventually, I just came to the point where I said, “I’m going to write,” and that’s as close to art as I’m going to get. So I went to Columbia Journalism School, and now I work at a large union, DC 37, and write for their newspaper. I’m a hired hack, but I do what I want and write stories about people whose lives nobody would really care about.