Finding Martha’s Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island

Jill Nelson, the Oak Bluffs author of Volunteer Slavery and Sexual Healing, has written a new, best-selling book about the generations of African Americans who have settled and summered on the Vineyard. Finding Martha’s Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island, with photographs by Alison Shaw (Doubleday, 281 pages, $27.50), is on sale at Island bookstores.
    
Excerpts follow:

Tonya Lewis Lee

Tonya Lewis Lee, thirty-eight, is an attorney, television producer, and mother of two children, Satchel and Jackson. Married to filmmaker Spike Lee for eleven years, they co-authored the children’s book Please, Baby, Please. Most recently, she co-authored the novel Gotham Diaries.

“Being here is wonderful for my kids, because there are a lot of black folks who have kids around their age, who are very much like them, and they can just groove with other kids. I didn’t grow up coming to the Vineyard, but I’ve heard stories about growing up here, and then your kids grow up with your friends’ kids here, and I can totally see that happening. It’s a great, great, great thing. I have to say that spending summers here is almost like a reprieve. Coming here is like a breath of fresh air, where there are people who are like me, who have similar experiences and you don’t have to go through that translation, that cultural barrier. It’s just nice to be able to relax and not have to deal with that stuff. And for my children to be able to socialize with children who look like them and who are similar to them, just to know that they’re there and have those relationships, it’s really important to me. It’s funny, because I feel – I don’t want to say protected, but insulated.”

Vernon Jordan

Vernon E. Jordan Jr., seventy, has served as president of the National Urban League and executive director of the United Negro College Fund. An avid golfer, he plays regularly with his close friend Bill Clinton on Martha’s Vineyard.

“Almost every August since 1971 I’ve found myself at the Vineyard. I like the culture of the Vineyard, I like the people of the Vineyard, I love belonging to the Farm Neck Golf Club, which is in my experience the most integrated club in America, racially, economically, and gender-wise.

“The one option that you have at the Vineyard is to say, ‘No, I’m not coming.’ Oh yeah, I say that. On the best days, we play golf, eat lunch, go mess around in Chilmark. I’ll call Larsen’s, order two lobsters, go get them at 6:30. Make some salad, corn on the cob that you picked up somewhere on the Island, a little wine, read a book, and go to bed. My life has never been either/or, it’s always been both/and. The Vineyard satisfies that in me.”

Skip Finley

Skip Finley, fifty-six, spent summers growing up on Martha’s Vineyard. After a career in radio all over the country and raising two daughters, Kharma and Kristin, who, like their father, grew up summers on the Island, he and his wife Karen moved full time to the Island.

“My parents bought their house at 14 Pequot Avenue in August 1955 for $4,700. To stay here, my mom used to rent rooms to her friends. You never really noticed that it was an island full of women with kids until you got older. You know that saying it takes a village? Well, we had a village, we lived in that village. Everybody was aunt and uncle this, although you didn’t know the uncles so much as you knew the aunts. We had party lines. When you picked up the phone you had to see if somebody was on there, and if it was someone who had seen you mess up in town, they were going to tell on you, and that was your ass.

“Growing up, I spent the whole summer here with my two brothers, sister, and Mom. My father came on weekends, he made the Daddy Boat. In those days, it took nine hours to get here from Long Island. Growing up here what you learn is, I don’t want to take that nine-hour drive from New York twice a weekend. I don’t really want to leave here, I want to stay. And you do what you’ve got to do to stay.”

“The Sisters”

Mildred Henderson, seventy-nine, Ruth Bonaparte, eighty-one, and Kathy Allen, eighty-three, are known to many people on the Vineyard simply as “the Sisters” or “the Dowdells,” their maiden name. Divorced or widowed and each the mother of one child, they live in the neat house with a flourishing, rambunctious garden on Narragansett Avenue in Oak Bluffs that they have shared for almost fifty years.  

Mildred: “The men would come up on the weekends. Half the children would be in pajamas, and all the other mothers would be at the ferry, meeting the Daddy Boat, that 10 or 10:45 Friday boat. It was like a vacation when the men weren’t here – you weren’t under the scrutiny of a husband. Then when the husbands came in you had a little pressure because you had to do the things that wives are supposed to do when husbands are there. We used to cook out all the time, it was a lovely life. It was so easy, beans, potatoes, hot dogs, then when the husbands came in, you had to do heavy cooking on Saturday and Sunday to relieve the guilt.”

Ruth: “It was a good childhood for them, a great childhood. It was fun being here. All the people who lived around here, black and white, we’d all meet down at Town Beach, we didn’t know it as the Inkwell, in the morning. We’d go down to the beach around 10 a.m. and come back around twelve o’clock for lunch. Most of the time we didn’t go back, and if we did, we were finished with the beach by three or four.
“The first we heard about the Inkwell was from the baby sitter. So we walked down one day about four o’clock and it was a transformation. The beach that we had seen as a white and black beach was practically all black. There were people who had come down from the Highlands, and we heard that they partied and slept late, so that’s why they came to the beach in the afternoon. We brought the kids down early in the morning because we lived right here, all the families, white and black. A lot of people went down to State Beach, in Edgartown, at the third pole, that was the marker where you knew the black people would be, and they would meet down there and party.”

Kathy: “In getting the house, race was a factor, because all of a sudden the bank decided we needed to put up more of a down payment, half. And they only gave us a ten-year mortgage then. The house cost $8,000 when we bought it in 1956. That $47.25 a month mortgage that we had to divide between us, sometimes it wasn’t easy.”

Mildred: “But once we got the house, race didn’t really figure in it. We were like a family, all the way from Ocean Park to Nantucket Avenue; we were a family, blacks and whites. It was a lovely mixture.”