The first time I came to Martha’s Vineyard was in the late 1960s. We got invited to visit by Mike Sviridoff, who was at the Ford Foundation with my husband Ron. It was a wonderful time, with one little glitch. Ron and two friends went out swimming, and they were out there waving to us, and we were happily waving back at them. It took us awhile to realize that there was a riptide, and they’d been swept out and couldn’t get back in. A young teenage girl and her brother paddled out on their surfboards at a diagonal angle to rescue them. The girl reached Ron, but he insisted she help the others first, since he was the strongest swimmer. “Flip over,” she commanded, with great authority. She must have weighed 100 pounds, he about 175, but she flipped him over anyway and swam him back to shore. Ron was in a state of shock and kept scouring the beach for a piece of wood long enough to extend to the others, but the girl’s brother got them, and soon all three were reunited on the sand.

I’d been hearing about the Vineyard since I was a kid, because some people I knew in Atlanta came here. I always had this image of a place that was crawling with grapevines. So when I finally got here, in my thirties, it wasn’t at all what I’d expected. But as we tooled around, doing all the Vineyard things and finding so many connections with people here, it became less important to find those grapevines.

The next year, Ron and I came back and stayed in a cottage in Oak Bluffs that was black-owned, and a lot of black people stayed there. Then we ran into Les Hayling, a dentist, and his wife, and they invited us to come stay with them. We went to some of their favorite places, including Gay Head, where we had fried clams. I was sick all night from those clams, but it didn’t sour me on our excursion or the Island.

We also went to the [Oak Bluffs beach known as the] Inkwell, where there were all these black people. People were talking about the history of black people on the Island – because they were living it. I was working for The New York Times then, so I called the editor, Arthur Gelb, and said, “Look: I’m on to a wonderful story. I’d like to stay a couple of extra days and write a piece about this magical place where black people are allowed to be themselves. They don’t have to worry about discrimination. They own their own homes. They have these amazing traditions.” So he sent up a photographer.

I went around interviewing people about their experiences on the Vineyard. It was like I’d discovered something, but in fact it was always here.

We didn’t come back for a long time, but then twelve or fifteen years ago, we rented a house over in the main part of Oak Bluffs. We liked it because it was close to everything. And I liked the feel of people walking by on the street. It reminded me of the neighborhood where I grew up in the South – the friendliness of it. We knew everybody, and people would just stop by. It’s still like that here – somebody’s always coming by. Last year when I arrived, I hadn’t been in my house for forty-five minutes before there was a message on my machine saying, “Hi! I hear you’re on the Island!” It can wear you out, but it’s a good exhaustion.

People here call me and my husband the Hyperactive Thyroids, because we’re busy from sunup to sundown. I get up to watch the sun rise. I go to the plant stores, the flea markets, the fairs, and sometimes I’ll go to the hardware store eight or nine times a day. I like to do little projects around the house. Every year, we say, “Okay, we’re not going to get into that crazy schedule we always get into,” but then we get here, and friends are calling, and we’re off and running. I personally think there are getting to be too many events. Most of the people who come here work pretty hard, and they ought to be able just to play while they’re here.

When I come in May, I garden. It takes my mind off the other stuff I have to deal with. I don’t even watch TV when I’m here. I got this fancy new TV recently, and I have it on maybe twice a summer.

I don’t like to have to leave the Island while I’m here. This place plays an important role in my life – it’s about renewal and reconnection. When we get together with our friends, it’s like a conversation that was interrupted by eleven months, but you just pick up and go from there. You find out who got married, who had a baby, and who died.

One of the things I love about this place is the intergenerational nature of relationships. I had a good friend here named Lee Simmons, who was in her eighties when she died a few years ago. She was one of the great characters of Oak Bluffs. She knew everybody’s business on the Island, and before you left, she’d know all of yours. We stayed with her one summer. It was the first year Vernon [Jordan] gave a birthday party for Clinton. Vernon and I go way back. He was a junior member of the legal team when I was breaking the racial barrier at the University of Georgia. I was one of the first two black students to go there, and Vernon walked me through the mobs my first day.

Anyway, at this party for Clinton, I was telling Bill about Lee Simmons, so he wrote her a little note – “Dear Lee, Please take care of my friend Charlayne.” Well, Lee was the kind of character who wasn’t happy just to get a note from the president who at the time was everyone’s hero. She went around telling everyone that Clinton had invited her to the White House!

Lee used to have parties that everybody wanted to go to, so she’d give people letters of the alphabet, and every letter was assigned a time to come. One time Senator Edward Brooke, who was in the B’s, arrived when the A’s were there. Lee told him she was sorry, but he had to come back when it was the B’s turn. So he left, and came back later.

To me, as a southerner, the Vineyard is more welcoming than a city like New York or Boston. The variety of people here, not just generationally, but also
racially and socio-economically – there’s nowhere you don’t feel comfortable. I don’t mind walking into town in my paint-stained jeans. There’s a sort of
respect for you being who you want to be when you’re here.

When I first saw the house we own now, it was a mess, but I could see the potential in it. I finally talked Ron into buying it in 1995, because having real ownership affects the way you relate to a place. I’ve never regretted it. Our friends from South Africa hear us talking all the time about how magical this place is; when they visit, they say, “You didn’t exaggerate one bit.”