We came to the Vineyard from New York years and years ago – it’s got to be forty. In those days, they were building the interstate, so it took eight hours to get here. What provoked, triggered, stimulated, or motivated us to come?

My husband Rufus was an educator, and he was embroiled in board of education fights in New York. I worked for the IRS as an equal opportunity officer at a time when there was a lot of confusion about the rights of women and minorities. So in the summer we wanted a break. We went to places we felt comfortable in: Sag Harbor, the Borscht Belt in the Catskills. There was still a lot of sub-rosa discrimination. The first time we ventured into New England, we went to Camp Atwater

in Springfield. I went up as dance director. Later Rufus became program director. Then we rented in Mashpee and came to the Vineyard for the day. We loved it.

In those days we were both very busy. We had more money and less time. In the early ’70s, we bought a house in Sea Glen on the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road. The Island was looking for a superintendent of schools. Rufus was reluctant, though. He wasn’t too sure that’s what he wanted. He knew it would be a very political job. But they wanted him. He basically had always wanted to run a school system. Both our daughters, Lynn and Beth, urged Rufus to apply. They were instrumental in getting a portfolio together for him. After that, the rest is history.

Rufus did not like being called the first black superintendent on the Island, because he felt it was a sad commentary when you had to be the first of something. He hoped he would live to see it change.

I was still working in New York, commuting from here, when he took over as superintendent. I enjoyed working. I had three thousand employees to look after from the equal opportunity office. It didn’t seem reasonable, though, and I thought he might need a partner. We had always been partners.

We found it was not a bowl of cherries. There was a need for an extension on the high school. Everything here is a fiefdom. For any kind of money, you had to go to each school board in each town. That’s the downside of a gracious, friendly island – the feuds, the cliques, clans, and territoriality: Oak Bluffs isn’t going to pay more than Edgartown, and Edgartown isn’t going to pay more than Vineyard Haven. After a year or so, though, the addition was approved, built, and named after Rufus.

He had also been a Nathan Mayhew Seminars board member. Rufus thought it was important to the community, and he helped sixteen teachers receive their masters’ degrees through the Seminars. The Rufus Shorter House was named for him, and after his death – in 1980 Rufus died of a brain tumor that had been lying dormant since childhood – I became a member of the board. I coordinated the celebrity tennis tournaments there for years. Now I’m on the advisory committee. I’ve stayed with them through thick and thin.

Why did I remain here after my husband died? I asked myself a lot of times. Twenty years ago I was still marriageable. When I was going through my grief process, a friend of mine invited me to California. All of a sudden, I thought, I want to go home. And home was Martha’s Vineyard.

Our daughter Beth was a Bob Fosse dancer on Broadway then, so it was a glamorous time to be a mother. Our other daughter Lynn, who is a clinical social worker, was in her wandering stage. They were very good to me. And the kindness of strangers you cannot believe. That must have been what made Martha’s Vineyard home to me – the kindness that was exhibited. There was a sense of security here. I don’t lock my door.

This is my Ginger Rogers hairdo. My father was a dancer; my mother was a musician. Whenever we got together, it was singing and dancing and recitation. I did the recitations – Lady Macbeth’s “out, out damned spot,” and William Ernest Henley’s “I am master of my fate and the captain of my soul.” Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou – I was such a ham. My father taught me how to dance, and my mother was a piano player. My great aunt owned a restaurant in Huntington, Long Island, and we entertained there Friday nights. My sister sang, my brother played the ukulele, and I danced. My mother was really a gifted musician. Her ear was perfect.

Nobody ever made a lot of money in my family, but they always believed in looking out for others. They always helped. After my mother came to the Island to be near me, she helped form a tenants’ association at Hillside Village on the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road, where the elderly housing is. She also played the piano. Two things my parents did give me: you are not alone, and there’s a lot of joy in simple things. That’s why I stayed.

I had an accounting business. I became a joiner of boards: the hospital, Community Services, Island Theatre Workshop. Then I got into my own community. I became president of the Lagoon Pond Association. I became very active in the NAACP. So I filled up my time.

Bias and prejudice are so interwoven in daily life that people don’t even realize what they’re doing. Some of that is here on the Island. A typical example is what happened in Chilmark several years ago, when kids on the bus started making comments that were construed to be anti-Semitic. The children were just representing what they heard at home.

I’m on the Tisbury Police Advisory Committee, which promotes community policing. It used to be that you could say, “If you don’t cut that out, I’ll go to your father. I fish with him.” Those days are over, and adversarial relations between the police and young must stop.

In spite of all that stuff, though, this is the place I want to be.