Finding Martha's Vineyard

by Jill Nelson

  You never really noticed that it was an island full of women with kids until you got older. You know that saying, It takes a village? Well, we had a village, we lived in that village. Everybody was aunt and uncle this, although you didn’t know the uncles so much as you knew the aunts. We had party lines. When you picked up the

  Skip and Karen Finley

  phone you had to see if somebody was on there, and if it was someone who had seen you mess up in town, they were going to tell on you, and that was your ass.

  Growing up, I spent the whole summer here with my two brothers, sister, and Mom, generally from the second week in June when school let out until the day after Labor Day. My father came on weekends, he made the Daddy Boat. In those days it took nine hours to get here from Long Island. You had to come up Route I. There wasn’t any 95 or 195, and you had to drive through Providence, Rhode Island, and Taunton, Massachusetts, all those places. As kids our thing was to be the first one to see the Bourne Bridge, you know, “The bridge, the bridge, the bridge!” I’m fifty-six goddamn years old, and we still do that, my kids still do that. I still remember when we’d get down the road past the go-cart place, all of a sudden, right near Fairhaven, you smell that pine and the salt air at the same time. I can’t describe what that rush feels like. You could drive me through there blindfolded and I’ll know exactly where I am, exactly how long it’s going to take me to get to the Rock—that’s what I call Martha’s Vineyard—from that point.

  Growing up here what you learn is, I don’t want to take that nine-hour drive from New York twice a weekend. I don’t really want to leave here, I want to stay. And you do what you’ve got to do to stay. So many of us worked here in the summers. I washed dishes, I painted houses, I did roofing, I drove nails, dove for coins back in those days when that was cool, raced kids on their bikes for money, washed cars, whatever. Because you wanted to stay here, and you had to be out of the house or your folks would find something for you to do.

  To me there’s a sense of freedom here. You can be whoever you want to be, do whatever you want to do, nobody really cares. Nobody really bothers you to the extent you don’t bother anybody else. I have made so many friends here over the years, and now new friends since we’ve been spending much more of the year here, and I don’t have a clue what their last name is, what they do or what they did, and really don’t care. It’s just fabulous.

  The only time I did not come here was when I could not, and that was either work-related or financial. I could always come because my family always had a house, but I couldn’t take the whole summer off. I had a little one-week or two-

  Me, my brother Ralph, and friend Judyie, Oak Bluffs Beach, I960

  week vacation. That’s one thing I laugh about now in hindsight; virtually half the property in this town is owned by people who only live here two weeks a year. People talk about “my summerhouse.” It’s not your summerhouse, it’s your two-week house, or it’s your one-week house. And you like it so much you’re willing to spend fifty-two weeks’ worth of money to be here for two weeks. That’s the kind of place the Vineyard is. There are not many places like that.

  I met my wife, Karen, in Boston when we were in college. She was at Wheelock, I was at Northeastern, and we were introduced by a friend who also lives here on the island, Alton Hardaway. Karen had never heard of the Vineyard. First time I brought her down here we bought a bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine and drank it on the way down and back from Woods Hole. I’d just drive down here and sit on the dock in Woods Hole, talk her face off the whole time. We couldn’t come over to the island, it was either too cold or we didn’t have the money. I would get down there and smell that water and be fine for a few weeks. I’ve never been able to live away from the ocean for any length of time. Karen said, “What the hell is it about this place that you can get this close and be so cooled out?”

  She instantly liked it. In my case, I would have had no relationship with her if Karen hadn’t liked the Vineyard, that was just going to be it. But it’s pretty rare that someone doesn’t like the Vineyard. What’s not to like? You can’t handle this, I can’t handle you.

  CAPTAIN BUDDY VANDERHOOP’S

  STUFFED STRIPED BASS

  1 cup diced onions

  1 can baby shrimp

  ½ cup diced celery

  1 can lobster meat

  ½ cup diced mushrooms

  1 can clams

  ½ pound (2 sticks) butter

  1 can crabmeat

  1 box Stove Top Stuffing

  2 five pound striped bass fillets

  1. Call Buddy Vanderhoop at Tomahawk Charters in Aquinnah [508-645-3201 office; or visit www.tomahawkcharters.com] and schedule a trip with him to catch at least one 20-pound “keeper” striped bass. Freeze half your catch.

  2. Preheat oven to 350° F.

  3. In large fry pan, sauté diced onion, diced celery, and diced mushrooms in butter until onions are translucent. Add Stove Top Stuffing and I cup of water. Add the shrimp, lobster, clams, and crabmeat and cook until the

  shellfish is almost white and the mixture is the consistency of traditional turkey dressing. (Add water if necessary to keep the stuffing from drying out.)

  4. Place a bass fillet on buttered aluminum foil, skin side down, place stuffing on the fillet, and top with the other bass fillet. Fold over to enclose. Bake for 30—40 minutes until fish is white and flaky. Serve with sliced summer

  squash and zucchini (from Norton’s Farm on the Vineyard Haven— Edgartown Road) sautéed in butter and a chilled German Spatlese wine.

  Olga Coleman holding Polar Bear coffee cups

  Olga Coleman, seventy-five, and Stanley Maynard met in the 1940s. Olga, the mother of one daughter, worked for IBM in Boston, Massachusetts. Stanley, who has two sons, one daughter, and seven grandchildren, was a chemist for Polaroid in Cambridge. Early members of the Polar Bears, they have spent all or some part of every summer on the Vineyard for over fifty years, and were partners for more than twenty years. Since the early 1990s, they have spent May to November on Martha’s Vineyard.

  Olga: I started coming to Martha’s Vineyard in the 1940s, when I was around thirteen. My grandmother had a friend who owned a house on Warwick Avenue. My two sisters and I came down one year and we had a great time. I stayed with her quite a few times, and then I also stayed with Mrs. O’Brien at her guest house, 222 Circuit Avenue. Now it’s the Tivoli Inn.

  The island was beautiful then, as it is today, quiet. The lady’s house that we stayed in didn’t have any electricity or water. We used a pump, and the bathroom was an outhouse. My sisters and I were in complete shock. We had never seen an outhouse or used a pump before, that was unusual for us, but we enjoyed ourselves. During the days we went to the beach, went blueberry picking. The woman we were staying with would make blueberry pies. We went bicycle riding and to the beach all the time.

  I have been coming every year since then. I stayed with Mrs. O’Brien and then I stayed here, at Stanley Maynard’s house. I don’t believe I’ve ever missed a summer here. I brought my daughter here when she was nine months old—we stayed at Mrs. O’Brien’s—and she’s loved it ever since.

  In the 1940s and ‘50s there were a lot of house parties and gatherings on the beach. If you went to the town beach in Oak Bluffs, you had to pay to go on to it, so we went to the other side, where it was free. We had a good time all the time.

  We didn’t have any problems with anything here. I first heard the beach called the Inkwell fifteen or twenty years ago. Prior to that, it was not the Inkwell, it was Oak Bluffs Beach, or Oak Bluffs Town Beach. Where did Inkwell come from? There are a lot of different answers to that. But I don’t like that name. I don’t think we should have a beach just for us. I don’t know, maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I don’t think it should be called the Inkwell. It’s just a beach. It makes it sound as if only blacks go there, and that’s not true. And I don’t want anybody to say I have to go to that beach all the time. I want to be able to go to Sout
h Beach, State Beach, Menemsha, everywhere else.

  Stanley: I was introduced to the island by Thelma and Tony Suarez. I came here first in the late 1940s and it was quite a place. We didn’t do much, but we all had a nice time. I was living in Cambridge and came every weekend. Then Thelma and Tony bought and they influenced me to buy, and then I started coming down regularly. We’d go over to Mrs. O’Brien’s for coffee in the morning, go for a swim, go back for coffee, sit around her iron stove, and, as we used to call it back then, tell a few lies.

  I think the Polar Bears started in the mid-1940s. I heard that it started when the maids used to come down on Thursday or whenever they had a day off, and they’d go in the water. That’s what I heard, but who knows? The old-timers had a funny thing going, that you had to go swimming at the beach every morning. If you missed, they all came by your house after swimming and made you fix breakfast. So it cost you less just to go, unless you wanted people to come by for breakfast. At that time there were maybe twelve or fourteen of us.

  What is it about the Polar Bears? It’s the camaraderie. I don’t swim anymore. Now, I go to see people I haven’t seen for a long time, they come from all over now. I go and sit and talk.

  Olga: I believe Mrs. O’Brien named it the Polar Bears because of the cold water. I think she named it that because we get up so early in the morning, and the water is

  so cold. We used to go to the beach at seven o’clock in the morning, way down the other end, down near where the Island Queen comes in.

  We used to be kind of quiet because people lived right across the street. We finally came down towards the Oak Bluffs Town Beach, because we felt we were making a little too much noise, just having fun in the water, laughing and talking. Then we’d leave the beach and go to Mrs. O’Brien’s and have coffee in her great big old kitchen with an iron stove. We all had mugs with our name on them; she painted your name on them with red nail polish. She used to buy doughnuts and we’d always tease her that they were stale. By ten o’clock we were on our way. I started swimming with them when I was seventeen. Stanley and I knew each other years before the Polar Bears, but we weren’t good close friends like we are now.

  There are people on the island from all over the country, not just the East Coast. California, Texas, Atlanta, you name it, and they’ve swum with the Polar Bears. There’s a set group of people who are here the whole summer, and then there are many more people who come for a week or two or a month, and when they’re here they swim with the Polar Bears at 7:30 a.m.

  I haven’t been swimming in the last couple of years because I hurt my foot. I can float though and I enjoy exercising. I like getting up in the morning. I’m a morning person. I do all my work in the morning and I don’t do any work in the afternoon.

  Stanley: Typical islander.

  Olga: When I’m finished working, I’m ready to put that bathing suit on, go down to the beach, and meet all these folks. Hi, how are you? It’s friendly, the camaraderie is just wonderful. It’s a wonderful thing first thing in the morning. They say the water heals.

  Stanley: It’s good for you, that’s a fact, saltwater.

  Olga: It’s cold, usually. The water temperature doesn’t change until August, when it

  becomes seventy degrees. The water makes you feel better, much better, it wakes you up. You’re ready for the day, to do anything.

  Stanley: Going in the morning, it makes your day. It makes you feel sort of complete. I’m not one of those who, after I go in the morning, want to go back in the afternoon. I go in the morning and that’s it.

  In the past five or six years, people who walk by in the morning, of all colors and denominations, they walk by and see you having so much fun that they ask if they can come down and join with you.

  Olga: It doesn’t make any difference what color people are. If they stop and talk to us, we invite them to come back the next day if they want to and join in with us. We do pay small dues, and that helps toward flowers if someone is sick, or the plastic utensils for breakfast, and if someone passes away we send flowers to their immediate family, and sometimes buy memorial benches from the Friends of Oak Bluffs. We don’t really have officers. I would say that just because I’ve been in the Polar Bears for such a long time they just sort of look forward to my being in charge. I don’t really care what you call me, I just take care of those various things. And Kathy Allen is the treasurer.

  The Polar Bears are a great way to plug into the island. I always invite friends to come. Or if someone’s lonely. Some people come to the island and they don’t know anyone and they say that it’s boring here. I tell them, look, you come to the Polar Bears and we will introduce you to people and you can go to plays, musicals, parties, play cards, or whatnot.

  Stanley: It’s a good place to meet people of all kinds. By that I mean you meet lawyers, doctors, chemists, you never know. And by meeting these people you never know what might happen. Could benefit you, could benefit them.

  Olga: And they don’t have to be professionals, either. Anybody can come and is welcome.

  Stanley: That is just the way the Polar Bears have evolved, it wasn’t meant to be any particular way. It just happened. As time moved on, things moved on.

  Olga: What’s so special about the Vineyard? It’s the peacefulness here. I am never bored, I find things to do. I enjoy being here. I go to the Senior Center a lot and play table games or do arts and crafts. They have nutritious meals, and I do a lot of volunteering there. I also volunteer during the fish derby. I know a lot of people on this island. I love it, I’m not bored. If I was, I wouldn’t be here. Now, when I go to Boston for a month in the winter and the early spring, I’m bored and chomping at the bit to leave and get back to the island.

  (Stanley Maynard passed away in 2004.)

  What We Create Here

  Dorothy West

  “You say you want to be a writer, well that’s Dotty West, she’s a writer and she lives here all the time,” my mother whispered. It was the early 1960s. We were at the post office—the equivalent of the town square in Oak Bluffs—extricating mail from ancient boxes as a little woman scurried by, effusively greeting my mother and everyone else in her path in her melodious voice.

  It wasn’t until I was almost grown and had known her for years and years as the tiny,

  birdlike woman with the thick Boston accent who talked faster than seemed humanly possible who I often saw around town, at the post office, and occasionally on my mother’s porch, that I realized this friendly, talkative neighbor was also the famous writer Dorothy West.

  When I was a youngster, she was simply another friend of my mother’s to whom respect and politeness were due, a woman who stood out because she was so small that I did not have to crane my neck to look into her eyes. She talked rapidly and directly to me and her small, wiry hands were always in motion.

  I knew that West, who moved to Martha’s Vineyard year-round in 1943, wrote columns for the Vineyard Gazette for nearly thirty years, drove a great big old car that sometimes looked driverless coming up the street as she could barely be seen above the steering wheel. I knew she was a founding member of the Cottagers, the association of black homeowners founded in the early 1950s. I knew, because I was told, that she was an important writer. It was not until years later, in a college course on black women writers, that I read West’s first novel, The Living Is Easy, published in 1948. That was when I learned that she was the last surviving member of the group of writers and artists who created and defined the Harlem Renaissance. That she actually knew and hung out with writers Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, and others. A few years later West was “re-discovered” by feminists and African-American literary scholars. In 1995 she published her last novel, The Wedding, and became Oak Bluffs’—and perhaps Martha’s Vineyard’s—most recognized literary star. So beloved was West that the island gave her an open to the public, standing-room-only ninetieth birthday party in 1997 at Oak Bluffs’ Union Chapel.

/>   And it wasn’t just Dorothy West, who first came to the Vineyard with her family as a child, moved there full time in the mid-I940s, and remained until shortly before she died in 1998 at ninety-one. The list of African-American artists and writers who have spent time on the Vineyard and some of whose work has been inspired by the Vineyard, created on the Vineyard, or both, is long and goes back to the early decades of the twentieth century. Visual artists Delilah Pierce, Lois Mailou Jones, Olive “Cutie” Bowles, Genevieve McClane, Stephen Rose, Glenn Tunstull, Myrna Morris, Patricia Cummings, Paul Goodnight, Louise Minks, Suesan Stovall; performing artists Paul Robeson and

  Ninetieth birthday party for Dorothy West, Union Chapel, 1997. Left to right: the author, Anita Hill, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Hillary Clinton, Charles Ogletree, Dorothy West.

  Ethel Waters; dollmaker Janice Frame; sculptors Thaddeus McDowell and Shahid al-Bilali; academics Ewart Guinier, Charles V Hamilton, Adelaide Cromwell, Lani Guinier, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., James Comer, Patricia Williams, Christopher Edley, Charles Ogletree, Manning Marable, Leith Mullings; Mel Patrick, who from 1965 to 1985 published The Delegate, an informal who’s who of accomplished blacks nationally; poets and writers Helene Johnson, Kenneth McClane, Bebe Moore Campbell, Phil Hart, Stephen Carter, Tonya Lewis Lee; furniture maker Bob Glover; jewelry designer Ocean; musicians Harry T. Burleigh, Eddie Heywood, Alfred Robinson, Michelle Holland; filmmakers Spike Lee, Stanley Nelson, and Salem Mekuria. These are just some of the artists and intellectuals connected to the Vineyard.