by Dorothy West
We were a tribal family, living under a shared roof because that was the way we liked it. My mother was chief mother because nobody challenged her. Her oldest sister, who should have been chief mother, had raised so many of my grandmother’s batches of babies that by the time we came along, she had seen enough children to have seen them all, and none of us, including her own, had anything special to delight her.
We gave her the honor that was due her as the senior sister. She carried herself above reproach. She never told lies and was a true Christian. She went to church rain or shine and visited the sick. She read the Bible and could quote it. She gave counsel when asked for it, and was never wrong. We were all in awe of her, even my irreverent mother. She was the soul of starched dignity. We often felt unworthy beside her. We were right to feel unworthy. She would not sit at table with us because we ate too much and upset her digestion. My mother had to take a tray to her in the parlor. If we went to the movies together, she would sit in a different row, so that she would not have to be part of all that candy crunching and reading the titles aloud.
When it was time to go away for the summer and my mother packed a shoebox with sandwiches which we steadily ate between South Station and Woods Hole, that was the time my aunt could have said, “Off with their heads,” without thinking twice.
We were black Bostonians on a train full of white ones. Because we were obviously going the same way, laden as we were with all the equipment of a long holiday, children, luggage, last-minute things stuffed in paper bags, a protesting cat in a carton, in addition to the usual battery of disbelieving eyes, we were being subjected to intense speculation as to what people with our unimpressive ancestry were doing on a train that was carrying people with real credentials to a summer sojourn that was theirs by right of birth.
We were among the first blacks to vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. It is not unlikely that the Island, in particular Oak Bluffs, had a larger number of vacationing blacks than any other section of the country.
There were probably twelve cottage owners. To us it was an agreeable number. There were enough of us to put down roots, to stake our claim to a summer place, so that the children who came after us would take for granted a style of living that we were learning in stages.
The early blacks were all Bostonians, which is to say they were neither arrogant nor obsequious, they neither overacted nor played ostrich. Though the word was unknown then, in today’s connotation they were “cool.” It was a common condition of black Bostonians. They were taught very young to take the white man in stride or drown in their own despair. Their survival was proved by their presence on the Island in pursuit of the same goal of happiness.
Every day, the young mothers took their children to a lovely stretch of beach and scattered along it in little pools. They made a point of not bunching together. They did not want the whites to think they knew their place.
There was not much exchange except smiles between the new and the old, no more was needed. Bostonians do not rush into relationships. Sometimes the children took their shovels and pails and built castles together. It was a pretty scene. The blacks in all their beautiful colors, pink and gold and brown and ebony. The whites in summer’s bronze.
The days were full. There were berries to pick, a morning’s adventure. There were band concerts for an evening’s stroll. There were invitations to lemonade and cookies and whist. There was always an afternoon boat to meet, not so much to see who was getting off, but to see and talk to whatever friends had come for that same purpose.
For some years, the black Bostonians, growing in modest numbers, had this idyll to themselves. The flaws were put in perspective because no place is perfection.
And then came the black New Yorkers. They had found a fair land where equality was a working phrase. They joyously tested it. They behaved like New Yorkers because they were not Bostonians. There is nobody like a Bostonian except a man who is one.
The New Yorkers did not talk in low voices. They talked in happy voices. They carried baskets of food to the beach to make the day last. They carried liquor of the best brands. They grouped together in an ever increasing circle because what was the sense of sitting apart?
Their women wore diamonds when the few Bostonians who owned any had left theirs at home. They wore paint and powder when in Boston only a sporting woman bedecked her face in such bold attire. Their dresses were cut low. They wore high heels on sandy roads.
I had a young aunt who would duck behind a hedge and put us children on watch while she rubbed her nose with a chamois when we told her it was shiny. We did not think her performance was unusual. It was the New Yorkers who seemed bizarre, who always seemed to be showing off wherever they gathered together.
The New Yorkers were moving with the times. They had come from a city where they had to shout to be heard. It was a city that offered much, judgeships, professorships, appointments to boards, stardom on stage and more. Whoever wanted them had to push. The New Yorkers wanted them. They were achievers. They worked hard and they played hard.
They would unwind in another generation. They would come to the Island to relax not to posture. They would come to acknowledge that the Bostonians had a certain excellence that was as solid an achievement as money.
But in the meantime they lost the beach for the Bostonians. That beach like no other, that tranquil spot at that tranquil end of the Island. All one summer the Bostonians saw it coming like a wave they could not roll back. It came the next summer. The beach became a private club, with a gate that only dogs could crawl under, and a sign that said, “For members only.”
You lose some, and by the same token, you win some. The world was not lost, just a piece of it. And in the intervening years more has been gained than was ever forfeited, more has been fought for and won, more doors have opened as fewer have closed.
Harry T. Burleigh, the composer, who left a priceless legacy in his long research of Negro spirituals—those shouts of grace and suffering and redemption that might have perished forever if he had not given his gifts to preserving them—he was the first to bring back glad tidings of the Island’s fair land to his New York friends, who had always thought of Massachusetts as a nice place to come from, but not to go to unless bound and gagged.
Mr. Burleigh had come to stay at Shearer Cottage in the Highlands, a quiet boardinghouse operated by Boston friends, who had recommended the seclusion of the lovely wooded area, where New York’s busy lights seemed as remote as the Island stars seemed near.
He was very good to the children of his friends. There were seven or eight of us who were his special favorites. He gave us money every time he saw us. We did not know any better than to spend it in one place. With abundant indulgence he would give us some more to spend in another. He rented cars and took us on tours of the Island. He told us about his trips abroad. To be with him was a learning experience.
There is a snapshot of him in a family album. Under the snapshot, in the handwriting of that aunt who could take us or leave us, there is the caption: “H.T.B., the children’s friend.” He was rich and well known in important circles at the time. There were a dozen glowing captions that would have applied. I think it is a tribute to him—and perhaps to my aunt—that she chose this simple inscription.
Mr. Burleigh’s summers were spent working as well as sunning. Every weekday morning he went to a church in Vineyard Haven where he had use of the piano. Many of the spirituals sung around the world were given arrangements within God’s hearing in an Island church.
In the course of time Mr. Burleigh grew to regret the increasing number of New Yorkers who brought their joyous living to his corner of the Highlands. He had extolled this sacred spot, and they were taking over. Who can say they did not share his vision? They simply expressed it in a different way.
Adam Clayton Powell came to summer at Shearer Cottage when he was a boy. He came with his father. His mother stayed home. Adam came to our house to play every day, and every day Adam’s father came to ask my mot
her if his son was somewhere around. We were sorry for Adam that a boy as big as he was had a father who was always following him around. I can see that great tall man, who looked so like Adam was to grow up to look, striding up the road to ask my mother in his mellifluous preacher’s voice if she had seen his boy. He would hold her in conversation, and she would turn as pink as a rose. He seemed to make her nervous, and we didn’t know why. Sometimes he would come twice a day to see if Adam had lost his way between our house and Shearer Cottage. He never did, but all that summer his father couldn’t rest until he had seen for himself.
Judge Watson—the first black man elected to a judgeship in New York City—his wife, and their young children spent several summers on the Island. They were a splendid family. The younger members still return to see the friends of their childhood. They have all achieved much. Barbara Watson is Assistant Secretary of State for Security and Consular Affairs, and the first woman to attain such rank. Grace Watson directs an HEW program for volunteers in education that encompasses nearly two million teaching aides across the country. Douglas Watson is an aeronautical engineer and Chief Project Officer with Republic Aircraft in Jamaica, L. I. James is a judge in the U.S. Customs Court in Manhattan.
Though all of their titles are impressive, they have not changed. Like all who have come to the Island in the years of their innocence, something here has touched them with sweetness and simplicity.
The summer wound down in September. Labor Day came, cottages emptied. Ours stayed open. We were always late returning to school. My mother could not bear to leave. Fall was so lovely. Winter would be so long to wait to see an Oak Bluffs sky again.
We lingered for those magic days until my father wrote, as he wrote every year, “Come on home, there are no more flowers to pick.”
Then we packed our shoebox with sandwiches and left.
THE GIFT
When I was ten years old I was accepted by the Girls’ Latin School as a suitable candidate for admission to the sixth class, the level from which one progressed to the pinnacle of the first class. The average age of sixth-class students was twelve, which has a more impressive sound than ten. I was worried by that age gap which was compounded by the fact that I was small for my age, and maybe looked as young as nine, an absurd situation for a student who, I had been told, was addressed by her teachers as “Miss.”
I asked my mother if my classmates would make fun of me. In my lower school, attended by both boys and girls, the boys had made fun of me because I was colored. With them name-calling had been routine. In the Brahmin Boston of that day, boys of their simple background needed a scapegoat for their self-esteem.
My mother’s reassuring answer was that people of proper background never made fun of other people because of conditions over which they had no control, like being ten, like being small for ten, like being colored. I must never forget, she reminded me, as she frequently reminded me, that I was my father’s daughter. He had survived the condition of slavery. I would never face an endurance test more difficult than that.
So I went to the Latin School on opening day, holding my head erect, hearing myself formally addressed by my teachers, and not for a moment feeling that the title crowned my head unbecomingly. Then it was lunchtime and I made my way down the long hall to the lunchroom, never having even seen a school lunchroom before, or paid for a meal by myself before, but determined to treat it as an everyday occurrence, and not spill anything.
Two presumably first-class young women, tall and perfect in appearance, saw me, stopped dead in their tracks, enchanted by my difference, their faces spread with smiles. They rushed toward me, pulling me back and forth between them, one of them saying, she’s my baby, the other one saying, no, she’s mine.
In that comic tug and pull the title my teachers had conferred on me in my passage from childhood lost all meaning. I was stunned and speechless. Then I wriggled, found my voice and said urgently, “Beg your pardon. I’m not a baby. I’m not really as little as I look. I’m ten years old.”
At that, to my surprise, instead of sobering, they burst out laughing and walked away doubled over with mirth, the sound of which lingered with me for the rest of the day.
That encounter made me feel a great unease about another matter which I had never let surface, knowing my mother knew the truth of it, but not yet sure I was ready to surrender my chosen belief to her reality. Nevertheless I wanted to avoid a misstep and stand on firm ground in front of the twelve-year-olds in my class. I could no longer put off facing the truth about Santa Claus.
If ten seems too old not to know whether Santa Claus is real or not, that period in America’s history was called the age of innocence for the general population, at least for those who had never had to struggle with want. I was one of those so blessed.
When my mother said that my father was Santa Claus, I wasn’t demolished. I know I felt sad, but I think I felt relieved. Now I could talk to my classmates about Christmas without skirting around the edges. That I was shedding the last vestige of my childhood was not traumatic, considering that in return I saw my father in a special light.
Slavery ended when he was seven. His mother, who had been a cook, found hire in a boardinghouse, my father sharing her quarters, and shining shoes, running errands for the boarders, and putting his pennies and nickels and occasional dimes in a cigar box except for a small sum he paid an indigent townsman to teach him to read and write and figure sums. The latter became one of my father’s indispensable skills.
When he was eight or so, he went to the open market with the boardinghouse owner to carry her baskets when they were laden, and watched her pick and choose, heard her haggle over prices, listened to the market talk of the men. The Christmas that he was ten he knew what he wanted. He wanted a business of his own. He got out his cigar box with his savings, and asked his mother how much she had in savings. He told her, this ten-year-old man-boy, that he wanted to go into business for himself, he wanted a boardinghouse of his own. If he could borrow her money and services, he promised that he would make her rich in return.
I am told that he did, that they had a boardinghouse and a restaurant in Richmond, Virginia, that my grandmother learned to wear silk.
My father moved on, as men seeking wider opportunities do. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that his race and former condition of servitude might be handicaps. They were not. He came North to Springfield and apprenticed himself to a wholesale buyer of fruits and vegetables. When he had learned the art of trading, he opened two stores, one a retail fruit store, the other an ice cream parlor, catering to those who could afford to eat fruit every day, to whom an ice cream parlor was a pleasant place to dally.
My father’s dream was to be a wholesale merchant of fruits and vegetables in the venerable Boston Market. And so he was. His place of business was on South Market Street just opposite Faneuil Hall, and I will cherish forever the sound of the great dray horses’ hooves on the cobblestones as I waited, with my hand in my mother’s, to cross the street to my father’s store, with its big banana rooms, and the big store cat that thought small children were varmints to attack.
My father was a generation older than my mother. Yet I cannot imagine either one married to anyone else. I cannot imagine belonging to anybody else. On the Christmas of my father’s tenth birthday he prepared my own coming of age in my tenth year on Christmas Day. Then I knew the gifts he had given me were endurance and strength of will. The tangible gifts were just extras.
THE PURSE
The Christmas that I was six my father’s banker, Mr. Lowell Bancroft, gave me six five-dollar gold pieces in a lovely little brocaded purse that swung from my wrist on a drawstring. I was not impressed with the gold pieces. I was a simple-minded child who did not care for money because I did not care for candy. When you are a child one is related to the other. Six five-dollar gold pieces were beyond the bounds of any familiar reality.
When my mother saw the contents of my purse, she said that Mr. Bancr
oft was a fool. What could a child do with all that money but lose it? My father said that I could bank it and watch it grow. My mother said Mr. Bancroft hadn’t given me much of a gift if I had to put it back in his bank and watch it grow for him.
She reached for my purse and said coaxingly, “Let me keep it for you until I can take you downtown and show you how to spend it sensibly. You can start saving when you’re old enough to decide for yourself.”
I was not a balky child, and never about money, which my mother regularly fleeced from me whenever my father gave me a piece of change from his pocket. But this time I jerked my arm away. If she had thought to say, “You keep the purse and give me the gold pieces,” I would have been glad to oblige. It was only the purse that I was being mulish about. I knew that one of my aunts was taking us children out later. I wanted to show off my splendid purse to all the people I passed. What I didn’t know was that a purse hanging loosely from a child’s forgetful arm was just waiting to slide off.
As a rule my father did not interfere with my mother’s commands to the children. She had long since taught him that she was our boss. She believed that children belonged wholly to women. It forever annoyed her that only one woman in history could really substantiate that claim. She always felt that immaculate conception should have come down through the ages.
My father said gently, “Christmas is for children. Let her have her way today. You can have your way tomorrow. It’ll please Mr. Bancroft when I tell him she loved his present so much she wouldn’t let go of it.”
“I get tired of hearing about Mr. Bancroft,” said my mother, who got tired of hearing about rich people who had more lovely money than they could ever spend. What good did it do her to have Mr. Bancroft give a simple-minded child thirty dollars in gold if that child’s father gave her an open invitation to lose it. My mother was pretty sure that if she went to Mr. Bancroft on bended knee and begged him to lend her as little as ten dollars, he’d call a bank holiday so he wouldn’t have to.