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Identifiers of Belonging; or, Passing for (Almost) Native on Martha's VineyardAugust 31, 2005 In her wonderful book Finding Martha's Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island (see my review on the Vineyard page), Jill Nelson discusses "identifiers of belonging": the ways that summer residents "lay rightful claim" to their piece of Martha's Vineyard. The identifiers include how long you've been coming here, how close your house is to the water, how much you paid for it, whom you've introduced to the island, what you do for a living and how much you make doing it, what groups you belong to, and how many year-round insiders you know. Confession time: I've been playing that game practically since the day I made landfall. Nearly everyone else plays it too, from recent arrivals to island natives whose ancestors washed ashore in the 17th century. People would remark on how un-status-conscious the year-round Vineyard was, and I'd think, You've got to be kidding. Make someone's acquaintance and within five minutes you'd know how long they, and if applicable their family, had been here, and they'd know the same about you. Sure, just about everyone was shingling houses, painting houses, cleaning houses, or working at the Black Dog, but they had ways of letting you know both that they had a degree from Harvard or Smith and that this didn't matter to them. Right. What we're doing isn't just staking our claim to the Vineyard; we're establishing our place in the herd. (What horses do by biting and kicking, and dogs do by sniffing each other's butts, we do with words.) It's about belonging, and it's also about credibility. Summer people are an important part of our audience: we're competing for those coveted slots as their native informants. (If this is starting to remind you of South Sea islanders angling for the attention of incoming anthropologists, and white people subtly bragging about how many black friends they have -- you're way ahead of me. Someone really should write about this. Maybe I should write about it -- fat chance, unless someone gives me a grant or four-figure payment in advance. To you who are more ambitious or better funded, I offer a few markers. "My first three years here I moved eight times." Two-digit box number at the West Tisbury post office. Winning blue ribbons for yeast breads at the fair. Would never, ever wear a Black Dog T-shirt in public -- except maybe one dated 1990 or earlier. (I do have an old one with the woodcut of a mariner in a dinghy on it, but I wouldn't wear that in public either; it's so tight it's dangerous.) Avoids the top deck on the ferry; knows which door to debark from before the PA announces it, and waits till the last minute to get in line. "I'll never forget watching Nixon resign on a battery-powered TV at the Lewises' house on Deep Bottom Cove. The dark edges were closing in on the picture, and we hoped he'd get it over with before the charge ran out." Speaking of Nixon, remember when Ben Boldt was the worst we could imagine? Whoever would have thought that he could be the subject of a nostalgia attack? "The Vineyard Gazette is for summer people; year-rounders read the Martha's Vineyard Times." Name-, place-, and event-dropping is a good way to establish credentials: Remember Helios, remember Nobnocket, remember the Art Workers' Guild, remember when Ed Redstone tried to grab that land for the M.V. effing National Bank? I never went to the Mooncusser, but at least I know people who did -- people who played there even. "My brother totaled the family station wagon on the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road and they said it would have been front page in the Gazette if Teddy Kennedy hadn't gone off Dyke Bridge that week." Some old-timers still refer to Hillside Village, an elderly housing project, as "the turkey farm." This is because there did used to be a turkey farm there. Now if only someone would tell me if that's where the ancestors of the roaming turkeys in my neighborhood (which is maybe a mile and a half from Hillside) came from. Referring to the M.V. Land Bank's Tisbury Meadow property as "Mai Fane." Dissociating myself from the "year-round summer people" -- their bodies are here but their minds are somewhere else; they bought in at the top and never worked island jobs. The possibilities are endless, but you get the idea. It's sort of sad that there are so many people who don't remember Betty Ann Bryant or Mary Payne or Doug Parker or Fred Fisher, even though the last three were all alive and well and doing their things (theater, running a gallery, and farming, respectively) only ten years ago; Betty Ann died in November 1994. Newcomers refer to Katharine Cornell Theatre as "the Cornell," which still raises my hackles: I never heard a theater person call it anything but "K.C." or "Katharine Cornell" -- possibly because we were at most one degree of separation from someone who actually knew Miss Cornell. The newcomers seem to be socializing each other, which seems like turning AA over to those who haven't received their one-year coins yet. Maybe some good will come of it, but I have my doubts.
P.S. I was just referred to a related and very apropos blog titled "You Know You're from Martha's Vineyard When . . ." It's at http://www.blogthings.com/marthas-vineyard.html. Check it out.
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