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Back to Martha's Vineyard Index Finding Martha's VineyardJill Nelson, Finding Martha's Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island, Doubleday, $27.50 (cloth) Beautifully crafted from history, oral histories, and the author's own lifelong experiences on the island, Jill Nelson's Finding Martha's Vineyard is one of a small handful of books that are indispensable to anyone struggling to understand, or at least come to terms with, Martha's Vineyard. Another is Milton Mazer's People and Predicaments, though it's 30 years old now and has never been revised. Mazer, a psychiatrist and founder of Martha's Vineyard Community Services, focused on year-round "old island" stock. Nelson, a writer, explores the deep-rooted African American summer community, which she has been part of since childhood. The text is lushly complemented by photographs, many taken in long-bygone years and furnished by the contributors; others were taken for the book by island photographer Alison Shaw. The community Jill Nelson writes about is one that I, a white woman who's lived here year-round for 20 years and had a summer history for 20 years before that, glimpse as sun through tall, leafy trees. My little planet drifts close in perihelion, then pulls away, depending on what I'm doing and whom I know and where my attention is focused. In these pages I glimpse my year-round island world in a similar way: recognizable but at a distance, partially obscured. To the summer island, year-round is background; to the year-round island, summer is a comet that comes ripping into the solar system, glows in the sky for two or three months, and then leaves. But it's background too, a chaotic canvas against which one tries to maintain one's connections with friends and family, and with one's own sanity. The links between the two are often surprising and sometimes wholly delightful. Says Charles H. Jones Jr., better known as Cee-Jay: "I didn't buy property here, my wife's daughter bought property here, so it's my home and their house. . . . They pay the taxes, I take care of the house, I do what I'm supposed to do, and it's my home, their house. I don't want anything different." Cee-Jay Jones was a summer visitor from 1949 to 1988, when he retired here with his late wife, Mavis. I've never heard my own relationship to the Vineyard described so perfectly: I can't afford a house, I never could afford a house; I don't even want to own a house, but it's my home nonetheless. The summer world that Jill Nelson and many of her informants evoke in these pages is a kid-centered world presided over by benign but mostly unobtrusive mothers. Kids roam on bikes, hanging out at the beach or on each other's porches, adhering to the most basic of rules: tell someone where you're going; be home for supper. The appearance of fathers on the Friday night "Daddy Boat" signals a moratorium on summer ways, a return to "more formal meals with Daddy or entertaining Daddy's friends, or trying to be really good and not too loud because Daddy worked so hard and was tired and sometimes grumpy when he arrived." Many of these families were making significant inroads in the white working world. Their struggle required continual, energy-sapping vigilance and often isolated them from other black families. For daddies, mothers, and kids alike, the Vineyard offered time to relax and a community they didn't have to prove anything to. Finding Martha's Vineyard weaves African American history into island history, or, more accurately, illuminates -- brings to the foreground -- the black threads that are already integral to the tapestry. In the process it highlights other threads that often get short-shrifted or left out entirely, particularly those of class. On Martha's Vineyard, as elsewhere in the U.S. of A., class is simultaneously invisible and totally in your face: you fall and you can't see what tripped you; you're silenced and can't feel what's stuck in your throat. Consider the currents that converge in the brief history of the Shearer Cottage in Oak Bluffs: Charles Shearer, born a slave in 1854, married Henrietta, a Blackfoot; they were invited to the Vineyard by a Wampanoag friend of Henrietta's and first visited in 1895. The family bought a house and supplemented its income with Henrietta's thriving laundry business, which "employed eight island women and delivered laundry in a buggy pulled by the family's horse, Dolly." After Henrietta's death in 1917, two of her daughters converted the house into an inn that catered to black Americans. For decades Shearer Cottage was a magnet for eminent black musicians, politicians, and religious leaders, and for the rest of the community, who knew to drop by when they wanted to know what was happening. Most of Jill Nelson's informants seem relatively optimistic about the Vineyard. Pollyannas they are not: these are perceptive, thoughtful, and articulate people, most of whose memories go back three, four, five decades and more; whose memories are augmented by the stories of parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents who were contemporaries of Charles and Henrietta Shearer's daughters. Nelson herself writes: "What is surprising is the ways the island has not changed. That with all the cars, houses, people, and hassles it still remains an odd, physically beautiful, eclectic slice of paradise." Could this be a summer vs. year-round thing? In so many ways, the devastation wrought in the last ten or fifteen years is less evident in summer: summer is as boisterous and bright and crowded as it ever was, and it takes an exceptionally clear and unbedazzled eye to spot the shifts and changes under all that hullabaloo. In the off-season, though, with most of the crowds gone, then you notice. More T-shirt and jewelry shops, boutiques and upscale restaurants catering to summer money, most of them closed by Columbus Day. More huge lawns and more huge houses, and more signs announcing that the house is protected by XYZ Security Systems. Year-round rentals are harder to find and more expensive. Even in January you don't recognize most of the people you see at the supermarket. The flourishing grass-roots theater scene of the early 1990s is gone, and so is Wintertide Coffeehouse. Efforts to bring them back in other guises have mostly failed: rents are too high, communal space scarce and the demand for it great, and those who would have been organizing and volunteering fifteen or twenty years ago are working two and three jobs, especially in summer, to make rent and buy gas. Or maybe they came, looked around, and left, because there was no compelling reason to stay. As I read and reread Finding Martha's Vineyard, it seemed that the summer residents were more sanguine about the island's future than the long-time year-rounders. The sample, as the social scientists say, is not large, and probably not statistically significant, but read Anne Vanderhoop Madison's story. Toward the end, she says: "Today, four of my sons are fishermen, so we hope all is not lost, but I'm not optimistic. Now, I don't think there's anything holding the community together. . . . We are losing the history. Now all we have are a bunch of pictures on the walls. I think Gay Head as it once was is just going to fade away. I know it is. I keep telling my children, once you sell your land, you'll never be able to buy it again." Or listen to Carrie Camillo Tankard, who like Anne Vanderhoop Madison is a visible mainstay of the year-round Vineyard. Having lived here year-round for nearly 40 years, she says: "I didn't have a problem fitting into the community at all, but even now, it's just not the place I call home. I have no place that I call home right now. . . . I find things to do on the Vineyard, but it's just not for me. I'm adjustable, so I've adjusted." Sometimes even the guarded optimism, the assumption that the African American summer community will continue, blessing future generations as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were blessed, seems like whistling past the graveyard. Several interviewees note the huge appreciation in property values: "cottages" bought for barely five figures as recently as the 1970s are now valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars. The high valuations translate into ever higher property taxes. Will their children and grandchildren want to, and be able to, hold on to those houses? At what point do the taxes become too burdensome, the temptation to sell out and run too great? Here and there someone voices the resentment that many summer residents seem to have against the year-rounders, because it's the year-rounders' votes that dispose of the seasonal homeowners' tax dollars. No taxation without representation, they say. But the economic forces that are pushing long-time year-rounders off the island, and transforming it almost beyond recognition for those who stay, are driven by summer money. We have no say in that either, and unless we're in the building trades or real estate, we don't derive much benefit from it. Foreground, background; background, foreground. Jill Nelson's island is the background to mine; mine is the background to hers. But it's less clear-cut than that. Foreground and background are linked by myriad relationships; so many of us belong to more than one world. I would love to see a symposium, or, better yet, an ongoing series of roundtable discussions in which anyone could participate, based on this book and perhaps Mazer's People and Predicaments. The goal would be to come up with ways of reversing the downward slide that no one who loves this place wants. At least some of these gatherings would have to take place in the off-season, when working year-rounders could attend, and none of them would require a $50 and up donation for admittance. They would be benefits in a way, but the beneficiary would not be an off-island academic or activist organization; the sole beneficiary would be Martha's Vineyard. Hard to imagine, isn't it. This review is long and wanted to be even longer but the editor, she wouldn't have it, so lots of interesting stuff got cut. The writer, however, she is sneaky and she snuck one of the outtakes, about "identifiers of belonging," into the bloggery, where you'll find it, much expanded and dated August 31, 2005. If you're on Martha's Vineyard, the local bookstores should have this book. If you're not on Martha's Vineyard and want to buy a copy, consider going through BookSense, www.booksense.com, instead of patronizing Behemoth Online. Independent booksellers, not to mention the writers and readers who depend on them, will thank you.
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