Finding Martha's Vineyard

by Jill Nelson

  “I use celery how often, a few times a year? For stuffing at Thanksgiving and Christmas, for potato salad in the summer, that’s about it. Now, if I need celery I just break off a stalk when I’m getting my other vegetables and put it in my pocket, pay for my groceries, and go on home. No one misses it. I take just what I need.”

  That said, she reaches into the pocket of her jacket and pulls out a ten-inch stalk of celery, casually brushing off the bits of lint that cling to its pale green surface. She walks across the big airy kitchen to the sink, where she rinses it off under cold water, running her thumb along the spine and interior to rub out any particles of dirt that nestle there.

  I have thought many times about that celery story, have come to see it as representing both a personal philosophy and one that, in different ways, applies to most of the people on Martha’s Vineyard. We each come looking for a little bit of something we need and the space to enjoy it. For some people it is the beach, or friends, or sailing, golf, or tennis. For others it is being with family, or being alone, or finding a place of silence in between doing both. We come to paint, write, walk, run, or sit on porches and laugh as loud as we’d like. The things that we come for are as numerous as the people on the island, but at our best what unites us is an absence of greed. On the Vineyard, we take no more than what we need and will use.

  We move around the big, wood-paneled kitchen, the table and counters piled with the numerous bags of groceries that represent the first shop of the summer. It is almost as if we dance the graceful dance of longtime partners as we weave around each other, moving from table to pantry to refrigerator putting groceries away. We have been here for several days and the house is finally open, clean, the porch furniture carried outside and set in its rightful place. Thus far, we have been eating catch as catch can and getting takeout, something my mother, a wonderful cook, is not happy about.

  This morning we have gone to the grocery store, and tonight my mother will be able to really cook in her kitchen; the choice of food is mine. I have asked her to make her fabulous potato salad, thus the funny, desultory discussion of celery.

  What began as a chore many years ago has over the years evolved into a bonding ritual between my mother and me. As the years pass and we both get older, we learn that we can depend on each other for this task of opening the house and making ready. We also become both more tolerant and more flexible of each other’s strengths and weaknesses, learn to complement each other. I accept that my mother is not bothered by dusty baseboards but is eager to turn on the stove and get what she calls a “real meal” started for dinnertime. She accepts my need to clean feverishly, although I think she never quite understands it.

  “Stick a fork in those potatoes and see if they’re done,” she tells me, not turning from the window above the sink. Across the yard, past the flower bed with her cherry tree, our neighbor Regina McDonough scurries about as always, hanging out a near-daily load of gleaming white laundry, watering her perfectly edged and weeded flower beds, tweaking her trim, beautifully maintained house into greater stages of perfection. Hands dripping with water, my mother bangs her knuckle on the window as Regina passes beneath it, garden hose in hand, calls through the glass, “Hey, Regina, don’t work so hard!”

  Regina’s “Hi, Leila” is heard in passing as she moves swiftly on to the next task. “That damn Regina,” my mother smiles, shaking her head. “She works so hard. I don’t know why. Her house always looks perfect.” She says this with wonder and amazement, but without envy, as if commenting on the intriguing habits of another species. My mother makes no bones about her lack of interest in both cleaning and perfection, insists that she comes by them honestly.

  “My mother was always working, always doing something, you remind me of her,” she’ll say to me. “You couldn’t get Miss Net to stop, just sit down and relax. She always had something in her hand, a cleaning rag or broom. And she was fast, but she still never finished; she was always working. I think that gene skipped me and went straight to you, Jillo. A lick and a promise are fine with me.”

  My mother’s housekeeping is practical and casual; she does what needs to be done and leaves the rest either undone or for those like my grandmother, Nettie Cox Ransom, or me, who are obsessed or compulsive or find some contemplative value in scrubbing baseboards or washing windows. My mother’s house is clean and always looks nice but you could not eat off the floor. But, as she would say, “Why would you want to?”

  I never know my grandmother before she is captured by early senility, so I never have a chance to compare notes about cleaning, ordering, arranging, and their deeper functions. What I do know for myself is that as important as a clean house is the process of getting there. I find something soothing, meditative, and mentally cleansing in the act of wiping down dusty baseboards, washing windows, scrubbing fingerprints from around doorknobs of glass and brass. The ritual opening and cleaning of my mother’s house on the Vineyard is a time of meditation and cleansing for me, too. In my head for hours, I talk out problems, formulate plans, work through slights, real or perceived. The back and forth of scrubbing a piece of wood or brass wears away the lumps and bumps, rounds out the brittle edges of my real life across the water, on the mainland.

  In the days it takes us to open the house and get it in order, my mother, with her lick and a promise, a quick dusting, sweeping, wiping down of shelves, me beside or behind her, a supplicant on hands and knees getting in the cracks and crevices, I wash away not only the external dirt but the interior funk as well. I look forward to that time when, finished, we will sit together on the glass porch, the 120 six-by-eight-inch panes of glass on the porch sparkling in the last of the sunlight, the proof of my hard work in the aching sides of my hands. The house cleaned to both of our satisfaction, we finally relax.

  “Play B5,” my mother instructs. I press those buttons and a few more—Duke Ellington, Bob Marley, Dinah Washington, Aretha—on the jukebox. Etta James’s sultry voice singing her I960 hit, “Don’t Go to Strangers,” drifts from the living room out to the porch.

  “The house looks very nice,” my mother always says. “But you work too hard. Sit down and relax.” It is not easy. Admiring my handiwork as the sun sets, the fading light reveals a streaked window. Or, dropping my head back and looking upward, a wisp of missed cobweb taunts me from the ceiling. Or my mother, accelerating the motion of

  the swing with a push of her tiny feet as she gazes contentedly out at the ocean, causes

  the squeak of rusty chains and I am up and off to the back porch, in search of the stepladder and WD-40. “There she goes,” she laughs, this woman who takes just what she needs and leaves the rest. Enough said.

  LEIL’S POTATO SALAD

  Using this recipe of my mother’s, you can fill in the amounts based on how much potato salad you need. To figure out how many potatoes you need to serve your guests, put the raw potatoes in your serving bowl; when it’s almost full, that’s enough potatoes.

  Potatoes

  Hellmann’s mayonnaise

  Salt and pepper

  Stoneground mustard

  Sweet pickle relish (optional)

  Hard-boiled eggs, finely chopped (I egg for every 4 potatoes)

  1 large or 2 medium-sized onions, finely chopped

  Paprika

  1 celery stalk, tough strings pulled, and diced

  1.Place the potatoes in a large saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to medium and cook until a fork can be easily inserted into the largest one; don’t overcook. Drain the potatoes, then cover with cold water and let sit for a few minutes. Peel the potatoes by hand in the water; the skins should slip off. Cut the potatoes into bite-size pieces and season with salt and pepper.

  2. Mix together the relish, onion, and celery and gently fold into potatoes. Add about 3/4 cup mayonnaise and mustard (my mother preferred Kosciusko’s, but any mustard is fine, as long as it’s not yellow mustard) and gently toss to just coat the potatoes, addin
g more mayonnaise or mustard if needed. Fold in the chopped egg.

  3. Adjust the seasonings, sprinkle with paprika, and refrigerate for at least

  1 hour before serving.

  Ed Redd, Olga Coleman, Gloria Wong

  Ed Redd, fifty-six, is a Massachusetts trial court judge. He has been married to his wife, Shirley, an anesthesiologist, for thirty-one years. They are the parents of three daughters, Ivy, Sara, and Rachel. He has been coming to the island for thirty-one years and swimming with the Polar Bears for over fifteen.

  Ed: I grew up in Roxbury, in Boston, on the same street as the family of State Senator Royal Bolling, Sr. I remember the Bolling’s would just disappear in the summer, then they’d come back all tanned. They’d say they were in Oak Bluffs, but no one had ever heard of it; it was kind of a secret club. They talked about the place, but it was kind of an initiated conversation. If you knew about it, you could talk about it. If not, no. They’d just go and come back like that every summer.

  I first came here in 1973 with Liz Slaughter, a neighbor in Boston who grew up summers on the Vineyard. We pulled mussels off the rocks just down the road from her house, and the island just grabbed me by the throat. I was hooked. I bought my first house here, in the Highlands, when I was still in graduate school, and we lived there for about twenty years. We bought this house, off Barnes Road, about five years ago.

  What is it about the island? It’s just the tone, the smell, the ocean. You either love it immediately or you don’t. When people say, “But what do you do there?” I know they just don’t get it. I don’t even try to explain to them that just walking down Circuit Avenue is an experience. The drive down to the island is an experience. Part of what I enjoy is the investment in getting here. I have to get in my car, drive down, leave my car in the lot, and get on the boat. That whole process begins the deceleration process for me. First, the air is different. The tone of the island is softer. You don’t hear horns, people swearing at one another. Just getting in and out of your house is easier. You don’t have to lock your doors. I’m an early riser. I get up at 5 a.m. I do devotions, read a psalm or proverb, read the Boston Globe, do some yard work, and generally putter around.

  I see a change now. An increase in traffic. People who come down and don’t even try to understand the island. For instance, there used to be a courtesy at Five Corners; cars would naturally alternate the right of way. Now, people just barge through; there’s no courtesy until an island type comes along. There’s a change in tone with people who don’t know the rules, the little protocols that make things work. People now come because it’s part of the cachet. Now, when you mention the Vineyard to people, you have to make a great effort not to sound elitist. But the truth is that black middle-class people are getting priced out, and so are white middle-class people. I also see black families losing out on the island. People can’t afford to give houses to their children because they can sell them for a million dollars, houses that they paid under ten thousand dollars for in the 1940s, ‘50s, or ‘60s. I see fewer black families on the island. The working class? I don’t know how they make it. It’s become like the Hamptons. All that has to shake out, it can only go so far. It’s the price you pay for success. With some of the progress there’s a loss of some of the things I find most enjoyable about the island.

  I love the water. For years I’d see these old folks frolicking in the water early in the morning, and that’s how I got started with the Polar Bears. You come, you swim, and you are a Polar Bear. I love the ritual of the Polar Bears. That is very much an island thing: It seems there’s nothing to it, but there’s a whole lot to it. The conversation is always constructive, always positive. People are down there with cancer, people whose husbands are sick and dying, but no one brings it to the water.

  The Polar Bears transcend race, economics; they don’t get into who you are, what you do. You’re in the water. That’s the bond.

  There’s something spiritual and medicinal about the water, it really does seem to have healing properties. Whatever hurts, the water helps.

  I love the comfort that black people have on Martha’s Vineyard. It’s not a recent phenomenon, it’s a relevant phenomenon. There is a real large comfort zone of

  The Polar Bears following an early morning swim

  black people here. The fact that you’re here and I’m here speaks volumes. People have self-selected the island. There are no obvious issues in terms of race, certainly not to the extent you find in other places.

  There’s a lack of pretense here. Everyone’s just down here to have a good time. I’ve swum with people and said hello to them for years before they know what I do or I know what they do when we’re not here. And that’s fine. This is a place where you learn what people do by chance. People here just really get to know you.

  Irene Gaines

  A summer visitor since 1955, Irene Games, eighty, has lived year-round on Martha’s Vineyard since 1986. Gaines is actively involved in both the winter and summer communities on the island. She is a member of the Friends of Oak Bluffs Council on Aging and volunteers at the Oak Bluffs Senior Center and on the building committee for the new Oak Bluffs Library. A former travel agent, Gaines says when she got ready to retire, the Vineyard was the only place she wanted to go.

  Irene: I first came in 1955 because I heard this was a nice place for African Americans to come for summer vacation. There were lots of people who I knew here, and I wanted my only child, my daughter, Leslie, to know other African-American children.

  The idea of being on an island really appealed to me. I used to lie in bed and listen to the foghorns, and whatever tension I had went right on out with the foghorn. Now, I miss the ferryboat whistles, which we don’t have anymore. I always felt at home here. This was a kind of coming home, this was the place where I relaxed; it was just such a change. My husband didn’t care for it. He could not understand why I was leaving all the comforts of home in New York City to come up to a small old cottage, but I loved it, and Leslie did, too.

  We used to party all the time in the 1950s and ‘60s; this was a party place. There was partying, but there were no formal invitations sent out, a few people got together and had a drink, talked, had dinner, whatever.

  There was subtle and not so subtle prejudice back then. Nothing terribly overt, except for the teenagers; they were always saying they were being hassled. But for the adults it was like, we’d be just as happy if you weren’t here. It was also difficult getting a mortgage on the island. Most people got their mortgages off-island, until the bank woke up and said, “Wait, that’s money.” It was not overt, but it was there, and you knew it. I felt restricted here, but not any more than I did in New York.

  Party on a porch, 1940s. Dorothy West (left), Doris Pope Jackson (right)

  There were certain areas where you were not shown houses in the 1950s and ‘60s; Edgartown had a gentleman’s agreement against Jews and Negroes at that time. Now, we are all over the island. There are a lot of younger black people, and by young I mean in their forties and fifties, who have done very well in business, and now we are all over the island.

  I was not comfortable going to some of the churches, the Harborside, some of the restaurants in Edgartown, but I don’t think we really even felt it. I think we wanted our own company, wanted to be together, and that’s happening all over again. I don’t really see anything wrong with that. Integration sounds like a nice idea, but I don’t see any reason why, if people want to be with their own people, there’s anything wrong with that. I think that we pretty much stayed together in Oak Bluffs and I don’t think we gave a thought about where we might not be welcomed. We just knew that there were some places that would not be very nice, but I have not ever heard of anybody being refused service anywhere. And the churches? As Martin Luther King, Jr., said, that’s always been the most segregated hour in America.

  There’s a class system in the United States and we’re part of that system. Everybody who came up here was connected. They went
to camp together. Or school together. Or went to the same school—maybe not in the same year— because there weren’t that many colleges to go to at that time. Or there were sorority and fraternity ties. People who came up were pretty much of the same economic as well as cultural background. The black middle class was smaller then, and there were also fewer people altogether who came to the Vineyard.

  What some people call bourgeois but what I call the black middle class has always been the people who came up here. I know there are African-American people on the island who are working class, maybe blue collar, but there has always been a predominance of white collar workers here. You didn’t even have that many people who worked on the island who were not Vineyarders. Then the Jamaicans came. Now it’s Brazilians. Working-class African Americans do not necessarily come to the island. Working-class whites come as day trippers. I think the people who are here for a week or more are middle class or above.

  Middle-class blacks are emulating, to a large extent, the white middle class. When there was an influx of real black ordinary-type-looking people, there was as much dissension and condemnation in the black community as there was in the white community. I think it was, “What are you doing on my turf?” For the most part they were college students and young career people. There was one group that the former police chief, Joe Carter, who is black, swore was a Boston gang, but for the most part the people who were up here in the BMWs, Navigators, and Lexuses were people with jobs or in college. But they didn’t look like our kids and they didn’t look like us. They had on long baggy pants and all kinds of things. And they were dark.