Finding Martha's Vineyard

by Jill Nelson

  Once finished inspecting the house we walk the yards together, looking for last year’s plantings. As often as not there is no trace. No peonies, no forsythia, no butterfly bush, pussy willows, hyacinths—nada—but we are not deterred. Over the years we pick the brains of successful gardeners, read books, walk Beach Road perusing the flowers and bushes. We cruise the island for houses in similar locations near the water on the northeast side, the better to observe what thrives in their yards. Friends of my mother bring offerings: moist, dirty tiger lily bulbs dug up from their own yards and split, a cutting from a rosebush known to withstand damn near everything, clumps of brilliant purplish-red coleus.

  We plant these and they thrive, but we are ambitious, want flowers to cut for the many rooms of the house, seek to decrease our dependence on the brilliantly colored cosmos and zinnias sold by Kenneth and Joann DeBettencourt on Wing Road in Oak Bluffs, right before you get to the Registry of Motor Vehicles. If they can grow them, we reason, why not us?

  One year we forgo a vegetable garden and instead plant what one of the catalogs describes glowingly as a “wildflower meadow.” We will miss fresh tomatoes, lettuce, string beans, and squash, but neither one of us grieves for the break from daily weeding and watering. The catalog copy assures us that wildflowers are no-maintenance, provide a plethora of gorgeous mixed flowers for bouquets, and, providing we buy the right mix of seeds for our climate zone, are almost guaranteed. We turn the soil, weed, fertilize, sow, and wait. Amazingly, wildflowers come, and lots of them. Coreopsis, bachelors buttons, poppies, hollyhocks, daisies, hydrangeas, black-eyed Susans, delicate miniature carnations, the array is brilliantly colored, diverse, and plentiful. “Not a bad idea, Jillo, we might be on to something good,” my mother the fryer of green tomatoes and salad queen concedes one September day as I replenish the bouquet in the glass porch where she spends most of her time, although she vows to plant at least a few tomatoes in pots the next spring.

  By the third year the wildflower meadow has been transformed into a black-eyed Susan ghetto. These beautiful, tough, predatory flowers have driven out nearly every other species. Those that survive are short, stunted, pale, and scraggly, unable to fight the domination of these wildflower bullies and grow tall enough to reach the sunlight. We leave a healthy patch of rudbeckia growing and mow down the rest, settling for what passes for grass until we figure out what to try next.

  Each summer we spend hundreds of hours on hands and knees, weeding, planting, mulching, fertilizing. Our arms, shoulders, legs, and faces bake brown and smooth, moisturized by the sweat of our labors, our hands, gloves forgotten or unwieldy to the task, first crack, then callus, become themselves gardening tools. We are rewarded by a profusion of growth: deep blue hydrangeas; red, yellow, and orange tiger lilies; a tangle of white, pink, and purple sweet peas; several varieties of coreopsis; sweet William; fragrant lily of the valley; rambling roses in deep red, pink, and white; a plethora of yellow honeysuckle vines as sweet to the nose as to the eye; gallardia; and, of course, black-eyed Susans.

  Over the years we learn what will not only survive but thrive in the wind from the northeast and air heavy with salt from the ocean. Our choices are a mixture of both what we love and what will make it, romantic and pragmatic. The heartiest we establish along the ocean side of the house: tall beach grasses that send up six-foot, fluffy plumes, a beach plum bush, more of the indestructible lilies. Those plants that need protection we tuck against or behind the fence of the grape arbor, a peony bush along the back side of a porch stair.

  Each year my mother and I walk the yard looking for what should have been there and are sometimes startled and puzzled by what is. Winds bear seeds and the heartiest flowers migrate at will: sweet peas from the backyard to the front, daisies into the rose bed, honeysuckle over everything. One year we find a green, viny-looking bush with shiny, waxed leaves growing by the front steps; we have no idea how it got there or what it is. My mother likes the way it looks and optimistically speculates that it might flower. We leave it where it is and return the next spring to find that its vines have become six-foot tentacles that are in the process of choking the beach plum bush to the left and the hydrangea to the right. In a violent battle with nature I cut it back, hack it down, and remove the roots. Later that evening my mother and I share a libation on the porch as I show her the dozens of tiny cuts and gouges on my hands and legs from my ultimately victorious battle with the photosynthetic hydra.

  We find flowers and bushes planted that have not done what they are supposed to. Blooming bushes that don’t flower; flowers that never produce blossoms. Last on the tour is the small garden outside the kitchen window where my mother has planted lilacs that we never see bloom, although occasionally we find a shriveled, pale purple flower cluster, assorted shrubs, and what she swears is a cherry tree. “Where are my damn cherry blossoms?” she asks every year. I laugh, assure her that it’s not a cherry tree, that she’s mistaken, and that if it is a cherry tree it ain’t the blooming kind, that she got rooked, yet again. “Goddammit, that’s a cherry tree,” she always says, as if saying it will make it so. She stands there in her yard looking up at what has grown into a fifteen-foot some kinda tree, hands balled into fists and planted on her little hips, eyes glaring behind the enormous shades she always wears, as if she can simply stare those blossoms into being. Just as she has worried the house into not falling apart, glared four children into adulthood, created a persona that will enable her to survive as a divorced woman left alone with four teenagers against the economic and social conventions of her time and the black middle class.

  The spring after my mother passes, I go to Martha s Vineyard to open the house. The rituals are the same but now, instead of being funny, shared, part of a conspiracy to survive and uphold, of which both my mother and I are a part, they are also layered with pain, anger, and most of all loneliness. I try in these four months since her body died, cradled in my and my daughter’s arms, to create a different relationship with my mother, one that absent her body, touch, voice, smell, still recognizes and benefits from her presence. I am not sure what that relationship is or what work needs to be done to identify and sustain it. Spirit, essence, ghost? I do not know, never learned the language for such a loss.

  My mother was brought up in Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church on West Vermont Street in Indianapolis, Indiana. The roots of the AME church are in Philadelphia in 1787, when black Methodists began meeting to discuss their ill treatment by their white Methodist brethren. Richard Allen, a former slave born in 1760 who began preachingin1780 and operated a station for fleeing slaves on the Underground Railroad for over three decades, was consecrated the first bishop of the AME church at the General Conference in Philadelphia in 1816. Indianapolis’s Bethel AME was founded in 1836 in the log cabin home of a local barber, Augustus Turner. It is likely that my grandfather, Freeman Briley Ransom, a native of Grenada, Mississippi, who moved to Indianapolis in I9I2, joined the church for reasons that had more to do with a sense of community responsibility and business contacts than religious fervor. He eventually became a trustee.

  My mother raised her four children in no church and scoffed at religion, both organized and disorganized. Years later I am told that my mother and her five brothers’ disdain for the church came about after her father died of pancreatic cancer in 1947. My mother and her brothers rejected the church because they felt that their prayers for his life had gone unanswered. I am not sure if this is so, and there is no one left to ask. Even in the weeks between knowing that she was dying and her death, my mother did not call out for the Lord, nor did I. One night sitting with her in her den she says offhandedly, “Jillo, I think the Lord must be coming for me.” I hear her, shocked because my mother seldom mentioned God and then usually as the first three letters of her favorite profanity. I am scared, too, reminded again of what I endeavor to forget in the time we are together, that moment by moment her life is running out. I ask, cautiously, “Why do you say that?” trying
to keep the anxiety out of my voice and stay neutral. I am rapidly learning that seeing someone to their death is essentially about simply being there and giving them permission to go in any way they please. To eat or not, to sprawl in contorted positions painful to observe if that is what makes them comfortable, to relinquish the petty etiquettes of privacy that convince us that the corporeal and its functions have anything to do with who they actually are, even though that is who we still want them to be. It takes me several weeks to stop pulling my mother, who now prefers to slouch, legs open and arms flung over her head, straight in her chair. To recognize that making my mother sit as she used to—upright, hands down, shapely legs crossed—will not restore her to health, make her as she once was, but will only create a brief illusion for my benefit at her expense. This is not a time for illusions and my mother is paid in full.

  When she mentions the Lord, I figure that if my mother after eighty-two years wants to go for the God thing, hey, I’ll be right there with her, consider me born again. But then she says, “Because he’s the only one who’d have the nerve to mess with me like this!” those wonderful hands waving carelessly along the length of her rapidly diminishing body, and we both laugh. Months later, all I know is that all that energy that was my mother must be, has to be, somewhere, couldn’t be just gone. I am hopeful, but I could use a sign. Opening the house I follow our shared ritual carefully, understanding that it is a guide, a road map to survival and upholding my mother has left me, not simply for caring for this house, but for life. First the downstairs, then up, a quick peek in the attic, through the kitchen to plug in the refrigerator, wait for the hum, then the porches. I mentally note peeling paint, wallpaper unfurling in lazy, seductive curls, a loose floorboard on a porch. The yard, as always, is last. I note what’s gone, what has appeared, what hasn’t done what the package said it would, register the faded flowers on the lilac bush. Finally, I look up into the branches of the shiny some kinda tree with the reddish bark into a floating sea of tiny pink flowers, unmistakably cherry blossoms. I stand in the yard staring at that gorgeous tree and laugh for the first time since my

  My mother on her favorite porch

  trip here in January, wishing my mother were here to finally see this and enjoy the sweetness of vindication. I am happy that once again, in spite of my doubts, my mother was right. I’m on an unsolicited crash course of learning that many of the characteristics that drive daughters crazy when our mothers are alive are the ones we miss and cherish the most when they are gone.

  Six weeks later the cherry tree bears fruit, although half of it has been eaten by an unknown bug, something else to figure out and fix before next year. My cousin Janet and I sit on my mother’s glass porch as the sun sets, windows and house still intact, on that wind-buffeted corner overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, and eat a bowl of sweet burgundy-yellow cherries. I can hear my mother’s throaty, joyous laughter as I chew and spit cherry pits. There is no need for her to say I told you so.

  To spend an afternoon with Dr. Gertrude Hunter, seventy-six, Carolyn Jackson, seventy-four, and Teixeira Nash, who prefers to remain ageless, is to enter a whirlwind of voice, gesture, color, strong opinion, memory, sharp humor, sisterly affections, and sibling rivalries.

  Tall, slim, relaxed, and casually elegant, the Teixeira sisters are big, strong women. More than their hands—large, or their glasses, also large, or their feet, not small—these women’s strength and stature resides in their personalities. They are large in intellect, style, opinions, and, most of all, confidence. To meet one of them is to be impressed. To spend several afternoons with these three sisters together is to be seduced.

  During the winter the Teixeira sisters live in the Washington, D.C., area, within shouting distance of one another; in the summer they live on Martha’s Vineyard, about the same distance apart. Their only brother and the baby of the family, Antonio Dias Teixeira, Jr., lives on the island year-round.

  The Teixeiras all attended Howard University in Washington, D.C. Hunter is a pe-diatrician, Jackson runs her own real estate firm, Nash is a successful teacher and visual artist, Antonio, Jr., a retired dentist. Originally from Quincy, Massachusetts, they first visited Martha’s Vineyard with their parents in 1940.

  Their father, Antonio Dias Teixeira, Sr., emigrated from West Africa’s Cape Verde Islands, then a Portuguese colony, to Providence, Rhode Island, in 1903. He’d been studying for the Catholic priesthood but money was scarce. At sixteen he got a job on a ship headed to the United States and worked his way to what he later told his children was “the land of milk and honey where you made money” as a galley cook. He moved to Massachusetts, where he worked as a chef, married, lost his first wife to tuberculosis, and later married a woman from Springfield, Massachusetts, Carolyn Arbell Jackson, whose first husband had died of influenza. Her father, a former slave in

  The Teixeira sisters. Carolyn, Gertrude, Teixeira, and brother, Antonio.

  Jackson, Mississippi, left the South for Oklahoma, then known as Indian Territory, after the Civil War.

  Antonio Teixeira believed that “in a capitalist country, anyone can do whatever they want to.” He started a wholesale food business, Tony’s Jam Kitchen, which delivered prepared foods to stores and delicatessens around Massachusetts. The “jam” in the title refers to his signature relishes, hot Spanish and sweet Piccalilly. After a few years, Tony’s Jam Kitchen had a small fleet of trucks and delivered goods around New England.

  “He was a very smart man, multilingual. Remember, he’d been studying for the priesthood and could speak Latin, English, Portuguese, and Spanish,” says middle daughter, Carolyn. “The delicatessen owners he sold to used to call him a Black Jew because he could speak Yiddish as well as they did.”

  In school the Teixeira children were the only black children. Their mother, an avid reader, encouraged them to read widely, precociously, and often. At family dinner each evening they were encouraged to participate in the conversation, to be well informed, outspoken, and competitive. “The four of us always considered ourselves pretty special,” is how Teixeira sums up their upbringing.

  “We were raised to believe we could do anything we wanted to do,” adds Carolyn.

  “Our blackness was never put down as a handicap,” concludes Gertrude. “Our father always insisted that he be accepted as black and proud.”

  Gertrude and her husband, Charles, also a physician, celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary the summer of 2002; they are the parents of six children.

  Carolyn received a master’s degree in economics from Howard University and worked for the federal government’s Agency for International Development. “Then at forty I said, this is not for me and quit,” she laughs, running her hands through her short, silver hair. “I became a real estate agent, but when I had to split my commission with the broker, I said to heck with this and became a broker.”

  “My father used to always tell us to be your own boss,” adds Teixeira. “When I was a youngster, he did not want me to baby-sit like the white kids. By the time I was eleven I had my own lending library in the basement at home, and used to sell cookies on the island.” As an adult she worked as a technical writer, speechwriter, and management consultant, but her primary interest and passion was painting and printmaking, and she has always maintained a studio.

  Antonio, Jr., fought in the Korean war and worked for a while at the Pentagon. Realizing that he wouldn’t get where he wanted to go without a college degree, he got a job as a janitor and enrolled at Howard University, where he received his undergraduate degree and graduated from dental school.

  The children often helped out in their father’s business, assisting with deliveries or helping keep the books. On weekends the Teixeiras would pile into their father’s car or truck and go for rides to anywhere, exploring. Each adventure would take them somewhere different, often along Cape Cod, where they’d stop at different beaches. A friend who also attended St. Marks Congregational Church in Roxbury, Massachusetts, told their
mother about Martha’s Vineyard. She had chosen St. Marks, even though there were many churches closer to home, because she wanted her children to grow up knowing other black children, make lifelong black friends. In search of an affirming, middle-class black community for her children—like so many black families before and since—when she heard there was a black summer community on Martha’s Vineyard, they went to see it.

  “They had railroad tracks by the boat in Oak Bluffs, I’ll never forget,” Gertrude, who was eleven years old on that first visit to the Vineyard, says dreamily. “I said, ‘Oh Daddy, this is paradise.’ They’d rented a house, but it was an absolute pigpen, so we went and stayed at Shearer Cottage for two years,” says Gertrude.

  “We loved it,” adds Teixeira, called Tex. “All these kids from New York, it was a real socializing place. You had your meals at Shearer, all kinds of activities. That’s where we met our lifelong friends Liz White, Doris Jackson, and Harry T. Burleigh, the composer. He always dressed in a white suit, hat, shoes, shirt, and tie. We used to love to walk into town with him.”

  “I remember Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., used to take us places, too. Their house was just a few steps from Shearer,” Carolyn adds.

  “And Lois Mailou Jones, the painter, and Daddy Grace. That’s where we met Dave Dinkins, too, when we were older,” Tex finishes.

  “The boat came in at eleven in the morning and six in the evening, and honey, you

  Pyramid on the beach circa 1940s

  never missed meeting the boat,” Carolyn laughs. “We’d be down at the pier. We didn’t call the beach the Inkwell then, and when you went to the beach you stayed all day and met everybody.” Lunch was either brought from home or purchased at the Sea View Hotel across the street from the beach. “Some of our friends would swim up to meet the boat. Bobby Jones and Joyce Alexander, who’s now married to George Wein, were both great swimmers. The rest of us would walk. As teenagers, we wanted to see what new boys were coming in.” Smiling simultaneously, the sisters nod their agreement.