Finding Martha's Vineyard

by Jill Nelson

  The round robin of voices, requests, and desires that a trip to Tony’s evokes on a summer evening at the Vineyard ebbs and flows. My mother’s request passes from person to person, room to room, an unannounced game of intergenerational telephone in which the initial request is embroidered and changed as it moves among those of us living in my mother’s house.

  As likely as not she sits on the porch in a bathing suit or shorts, a pair of randomly selected enormous shades covering a third of her face, filling out her number slips. Her wallet lies on the table beside her, or almost obscured by a pile of slips from losing and winning numbers previously played. Rising above the debris of bad combinations and successful hunches, there is usually a glass of champagne or Jack Daniel’s and water.

  After fifty years, my mother is familiar with the chaos of that time in the evening when everyone returns home at once after long days spent at the beach. One grandchild whose bathing suit is not quite dry is tired and shivering; another, hungry and tired, is slightly fussy. Low tubs of water are run for the children as adults rush to the showers, vying to be able to rinse the salt from hair and skin before the bathtub overflows or the child left with a relative erupts in a fit of cranky exhaustion.

  My mother has lived through this many times: as a young mother herself, as an older woman, now as a grandmother. She does not often spend the whole day on the beach anymore, preferring to go across the street and “take a dip” in the morning before the crowd arrives or in the evening after they leave. In that hour or so before twilight the air is still warm and the bright light of summer slowly turns from gold to orange to blue. Then, the crowds of people with the paraphernalia of children, sand toys, picnic lunches, and, brought by the more obnoxious, ringing cell phones and boom boxes, are gone. At worst, all that remains of them is the garbage they were too lazy or ill-trained to take with them, but most of the time there is not even that.

  After five o’clock on most evenings the characteristics of beaches all around the island change. Islanders or summer workers come down for a swim after work. Adults not interested in the midday noise of families with small children appear for an evening swim. The serious sun worshipers, those without children to tend or meals to prepare, remain on the beach talking among themselves and enjoying the growing quiet and fading of the day. Noisiest and always present is the familiar contingent of gulls. They stalk the beach on their awkward legs or fly above it, ancient, jaded-looking eyes alert for the curl of a potato chip, scrap of bread, or pretzel left behind. They swoop in with yellow beaks and snap up what has been forgotten or discarded, feeding on what has been left behind.

  In the evening when my mother comes down to the beach for a last dip or just to sit

  and smoke a cigarette, she joins a group of women I affectionately call the diehards. Most days, they sit alongside the jetty, facing the ocean in one direction, the Oak Bluffs ferry terminal in the other, with the sun lowering in the sky behind them. My mother’s old friend, eighty-three-year-old Pauline Flippin from New Rochelle, New York, owns a house on Midland Avenue in Vineyard Haven and raised her children and grandchildren during summers spent here. Her husband, Wilton, a doll if there ever was one, drops her off at the beach around two o’clock and returns to pick her up just before sunset. Sandy Hamilton, fifty-five, from Hartford, Connecticut, who owns a condo in the Sea View, a stone’s throw away, spends five months a year here. Eloise Allen from Philly, whose house is always crowded with the children of her lawyer son, Wes, and doctor son, Mark, and guests, comes down for a late swim or just to relax after a busy day.

  Bob Jennings, who runs the children’s summer basketball clinic next to the tennis courts, whose mother, Betty, owns a house just up the street on Narragansett Avenue, and his young daughters, Cheyenne and Quiana, their house less than a block away, stay as long as possible, too, playing in the water. Bertha Blake, a nurse at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, is often there, too. She has raised her two sons, Daniel and Aaron, as water babies, and they spend long days on the beach. These people are often among the last to remain, leaving when the sun is almost below the horizon.

  Others come as they please, as their time on the Vineyard or in a day allows. Ann Parsons, a retired teacher from Sharon, Massachusetts, whose yeast rolls are out of this world; Delores Littles from New York whose husband, Jim, is a wonderful artist; assorted children, grandchildren, family, and friends temporarily join the group. All are welcome, the only rule: Don’t bring no bad vibes.

  This is the time, too, when those who live and work on the Vineyard year-round, the people who make it possible for summer residents to do little or nothing as much of the time as possible, come down for a swim. The water washes off the stress and grime of a hard day’s work. The carpenter, plumber, farmer, chef, waitress, fisherman, realtor, landscaper, clerk, shop owner, teacher, house painter, electrician, nanny, all come to the water. Some to swim, others to simply sit on the sand and watch the tide; all to be cooled and rejuvenated.

  The beach is a constant, but luck is fleeting. My mother is feeling lucky and numbers close at 7:45 each night. “Who’s driving?” she’ll finally call out. “It’s six thirty. I’m on the porch, ready when you are.”

  Someone always takes her. We know that Leil is lucky, have learned that the sometimes inconvenient trip to Tony’s is a small price compared to the hell to pay if we don’t take her and her number comes out. Children are watched, bathed, pots stirred, dishes washed, table set. My mother sits in the car, wallet and plastic folder holding her number slips in one hand, likely a cigarette in the other. One of her hard fingernails taps the folder thoughtfully.

  “You know, Jillo, I feel lucky tonight,” she says.

  “Leil, you feel lucky every night,” I tease, making the right turn from Ocean Park onto Sea View Avenue.

  “That’s true,” she laughs. “But sometimes I am lucky.”

  After six, Tony’s is always crowded, not only with gamblers but also people who need something at the last minute. It’s the only game in town besides Our Market on the harbor.

  After years of driving “The Tony’s run” with my mother, the faces of most of the other last-minute gamblers are familiar. We know the drill; get in the line specially designated for numbers players in the corner, have your slips properly filled out and ready, and hope the person in front of you isn’t playing dozens of numbers, all combined differently.

  Now, my mother, she’s gotten this whole thing pretty much down to a science after all these years. Most of the time she plays the same numbers each day, although occasionally she’ll add a new one for a day or so, inspired by the birthday of close family or friends, or the appearance of someone she first met in, say, 1979. (If she truly liked them, that’d warrant a two-dollar bet, one straight, one boxed. Otherwise, it’d be two fifty-cent bets.) My mother’s numbers are all, like her, personal and subjective. She didn’t play O. J. Simpson’s license plate number the summer he got in that white Bronco and drove around for hours, causing the interruption of the NBA playoff game between my mother’s beloved Knicks and Houston. On the Vineyard August 8, 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned, she didn’t play the date of Tricky Dick’s birthday, although she did pop a bottle of champagne and pour everyone a drink while Dennis McRae, a family friend, played taps on the battered bugle that still hangs on the porch.

  My mother plays her family and friends’ birth dates, street addresses, usually some combination of 828, the house on Indianapolis’s California Street where she grew up. She does not play the flight numbers of planes that crash or the dates that disasters occur or the number of people killed when something goes terribly wrong. Even though she sometimes announces, “Damn it, I should have played that number,” on the rare occasion when it comes out, she never does. My mother does not gamble on the bad luck of others. Instead, she banks on the good luck of family and friends, coming out ahead in the end.

  My mother was a wonderful storyteller, at her best on the Vineyard, on the porch overlooking the wat
er. She loved to tell the story of the response of some people when she and my father purchased their house for the low five figures. “Oh, these people thought we were crazy,” she’d laugh. “No black had ever paid that much money for a house here, for all I know no one in Oak Bluffs ever had. They told us we were nuts, would make it difficult for other blacks, drive the prices up.” Then she’d laugh, lifting her arms, bent at the elbows, up, palms out and hands spread, a frequent gesture combining exasperation, supplication, and who gives a damn.

  “But your father always loved this house. From the first summer we came here, 1955, he wanted this house. And I loved the view. There’s plenty of room and it’s solid; it has stood here for a long time. But most of all it was the view. There’s just something about that water...” her voice drifts off, comes back. “Look at that,” she’d say, her hand broadly gesturing across the front of her body, a motion that encompasses the ocean in front of her, sailboats in the distance, people passing by. “What we paid for this house was a lot of money in those days,” I can hear my mother saying as she finishes her story, looking out at the ocean. “But we had to take the chance.”

  Leil’s porch, her favorite spot. A few months after she passes I call Priscilla Sylvia of the Friends of Oak Bluffs and arrange to purchase and inscribe a bench for my mother. I email Priscilla the specifics of exactly where I want the bench placed, along the water right across the street from her porch, in the middle of the view she loved. She is sympathetic, patient, helpful, and assures me that she understands where I want it to sit. I am not so sure, but what can I do, I’m in New York; I’ve got to take a chance. It is the same with many of those who now own homes and spend time each year on the Vineyard, and will probably be the same for those yet to discover this wonderful island. People who came here by chance, casually invited by friends who they took up on the offer of a weekend visit, sometimes reluctantly, people like my parents who fell in love with this island and took a chance on getting a piece of this rock.

  Now it is virtually impossible for a working-class or middle-class family to purchase a home on the Vineyard. Cottages that were purchased for four or five figures thirty, forty, or fifty years ago are now worth upwards of a half million dollars. The price of buying and maintaining a summer home here necessitates, for most families, that both parents work. Today, Martha’s Vineyard is one of the in spots, with no sign of cooling down.

  After decades of being off the radar of the popular culture following the heyday of the late nineteenth century, over the last three decades the Vineyard has revived as one of the hot summer destinations. Some say it began with the Kennedys, others say it was Bill Clinton and his family summering here when he was president that put the Vineyard into the national consciousness. Others say the island’s revived popularity is just a natural part of the cycle of the place.

  The growing popularity and expense of existing here have changed the island in fundamental ways. There is a housing crisis for those who live here year-round, many of whom can barely afford to rent, much less purchase or build, a home here. Each spring, many islanders must scramble to find a place to live for the summer when the owners of the homes they rent in the winter return or rent their houses for increased summer rates and income to pay their mortgage. Some who live here year-round move out of their own home and rent it in the summer to get ahead. A small cottage that might rent for five hundred dollars a month in the winter can fetch several thousand dollars a week in the summer. Demand for services, from water to sewage to garbage pickup and disposal, has radically increased, straining the fragile ecosystem of the island. Taxes increase steadily. There are people on the island whose annual tax bill exceeds the original purchase price of their homes. According to tax assessors on the Vineyard, for the last five years property values have increased 24 to 36 percent annually.

  Many, many island residents are leaving because the cost of living and raising children here is too high, and their loss weakens the fabric of the island, the very thing that made it so wonderful. What is being lost is the class diversity that made the Vineyard such a special place. Chatting in the spring of 2004 with a reporter at the Vineyard Gazette, she comments that the word on Nantucket is that the billionaires are driving out the millionaires, adding that the rule of thumb is that the Vineyard is ten or fifteen years behind Nantucket. This is a profoundly troubling thought for many, many reasons, particularly for all the hardworking thousandaires like me who call this island home.

  Some days, it seems as if the stress level I come here to escape has followed me. Impatient drivers honk horns and refuse to yield. Yuppies of all ages and colors descend on island-grown produce at the Chilmark Farmers Market on Saturday morning as if in a religious frenzy. Parking is so scarce that in August it is difficult to go to the supermarket, the bank, sometimes even the beach. Each year when I return there are new roads, many new houses. Some of the most beautiful vistas on the island are suddenly gone, an enormous trophy house plunked down, it seems, overnight.

  What is always amazing is that through and underneath it all, although it is increasingly more difficult to see and find, Martha’s Vineyard remains beautiful and magical, a place of grace. It is the suspicion many of us have that perhaps magic wears thin, grace goes elsewhere, the surety that we cannot take this small and fragile place, or the liberating psychic space it offers us, for granted that makes us protective of this small island. Even though we perhaps cannot imagine the Vineyard without its natural and spiritual beauty, we know that the loss of these things is possible. We must each do what we can to protect and treasure this place that is so special to so many of us.

  In September of 2001, the year my mother’s body dies, with my daughter, Misu, pregnant with my first grandchild, I return to the Vineyard, clinging to the last of summer. “Mom, come see the bench,” my daughter calls from Leil’s porch soon after we arrive. I join her, look across the street at the bench. There is a couple sitting there. “When they leave, we’d better run over there,” Misu says. “Someone’s always stopping to sit down. A few minutes ago a couple drove up, parked, and went and sat on Grandma’s bench. Then before I could get over there, those people came.”

  Leil’s bench

  I’m not surprised. When I look out the window of my mother’s favorite porch, there’s the bench—planted firmly on the edge of this wonderful island that my mother loved and so many others love so much, looking out over Nantucket Sound and, beyond it, the Atlantic Ocean—perfectly placed. There’s her bench, as chance would have it, right where my mother would want it, smack dab in the middle.

  Acknowledgments

  This book could not have been written without the assistance, direct and indirect, of countless Vineyarders, summer and year-round residents alike, some of whose names appear in this book, but many more of whose do not.

  I appreciate the generosity of all who took time from busy lives to sit for interviews, suggest other people I should talk with, books to read, places to go, or who found old photographs and expressed interest and enthusiasm about this project. In particular Dorothy Burnham, Gloria Pope, L. E. Howell, Elaine Weintraub, Sandy Hamilton, Gloria Wong, Olive Tomlinson, Keith Maynard, Jacqueline L. Holland, Kristin Finley, Kehinde Howell, Chi Chi Robinson Brown, Maria Blakey, Ilao Jackson, Chef Marvini, Geri DeBettencourt, Bob Hayden, Vera Shorter, Skip Finley, and Ellen Weiss.

  The Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society was extremely helpful, especially Linsey Lee, Dana Costanza, and several summer interns and volunteers.

  I appreciate the assistance of Donna Maurice at the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank Commission. Claire Cain’s calm, humor, and organization are much appreciated. Chris, David, and everyone at the Granary Galley in West Tisbury always offered a warm welcome, great art, and new ways of seeing the island.

  Thanks to the Vineyard Gazette for access to their library of clips and for letting me and photographer Ron Hall use the conference room as a photographic studio. Special thanks to the Gazette’s librarian, Eulal
ie Regan, who fielded my many requests with ease and aplomb, found everything I needed, and made it all seem simple. Thanks for the coffee and cruller, too.

  Many thanks to Phil and Ellie, friends since childhood, who gave me their beautiful, warm house on the Vineyard so I could work on the island in the cold days of winter. And to my friend Debbi Finley Jackson, who welcomed me into her home in the dog days of August.

  My editor, Janet Hill, has been generous, patient, and enthusiastic as this book evolved. I sincerely thank you.

  And once again to Flores, for so much patience, support, and love.

  Finally, thanks to all the people who cherish Martha’s Vineyard. You each contribute to making the island a place I am honored to call home.

  Bibliography

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  Banks, Charles E. The History of Martha’s Vineyard. Dukes County, MA: Dukes County Historical Society,

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  Banks, Charles Edward, M.D. The History of Martha’s Vineyard, 3 vols. Dukes County, MA: Dukes County Historical Society, 1966.

  Brown, Lynis. Cinnamon Traveler: Martha’s Vineyard Island 2004. New York: Juana Negra Press, 2003. Burroughs, Polly. Guide to Martha’s Vineyard (sixth Ed.). Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 1993.

  . Guide to Martha’s Vineyard (ninth Ed). Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2001.

  Corsiglia, Betsy, and Miner, Mary Jean. Unbroken Circles: The Campground of Martha’s Vineyard. Boston: David

  R. Godine, 2000.

  Dos Passos, Katherine, and Shay, Edith. Down Cape Cod. New York: Robert M. McBride & Co., 1936. Fodor’s Pocket Martha’s Víneyarí New York: Fodor’s Travel Publications, 2001.

  Franklin, John Hope, and Moss, Alfred A., Jr. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. New