Finding Martha's Vineyard

by Jill Nelson

  Erin: Or it hasn’t yet.

  Cecily: And there’s no McDonald’s.

  Della Brown Hardman, eighty-three, a professor of art at West Virginia State College for thirty years, has lived year-round on Martha s Vineyard since 1986. Hardman visited the Vineyard as a child and young woman, but after she started teaching, married, and began raising three children, she often spent summers traveling in Europe studying art, and her visits to the island decreased. In the late 1990s, she was asked to take over the Oak Bluffs column in the Vineyard Gazette from Dorothy West, and she has written it ever since.

  Della: I’m originally from West (by God) Virginia. My mother died in childbirth when I was twenty months old. Fortuitously, she named me after my Aunt Della, my father’s sister, who was a schoolteacher. I learned in later life that Aunt Della had been engaged, but after my mother died she broke that engagement and devoted her life to her teaching career and to me.

  Aunt Della had a sister who lived in Cambridge and in the summers she would visit her, and somehow or another she discovered the Cape. She worked on the Cape many summers, she must have worked in some of those inns or the homes. In the late 1930s, I was in junior high school, and we would come and rent a place. She used to say, “If I could come to the Vineyard and get my toes in the water I could make it through the winter.”

  We drove up every summer from West Virginia, and usually stayed two weeks to a month and rented different houses. We stayed in the Highlands, down on Masonic Avenue, a house off Pacific Avenue. I just liked going on vacation, going to Massachusetts and seeing the cousins there, and the ocean, the water. See, I lived in the hills of West Virginia, and the ocean was just unique for me. I didn’t see any ocean at home.

  Della Hardman

  There’s just no comparison.

  To see the ocean, it’s just a novelty, so different, so different. That was something to really look forward to. Even now, I wish I could tell you how much gas I burn up when I take that car out of the garage. I go the long way to town so that as soon as possible I can take a look at the ocean. When I come home I take the long way so that I can follow the ocean for as long as possible. It gives me a sense of relief. I see this vast expanse of space, no clutter; it lets me know that things can be cleared and emptied out. The water comes and goes, just very relaxing. Then I can come in the house and deal with all the clutter.

  I find time each day, weather permitting, to go to the beach. Walking, driving to different beaches, I know where just about every beach is on the island, and they are all different, with certain things I like about each one. It’s therapy for me.

  I retired here in 1986 because of the memories and because of the ocean. Nobody thought I would leave the hills of West Virginia. When I moved here I took an adult writing class at the high school. We had to write something and read it every time we met. There was a woman in the class who worked at the Gazette, and she went back and told Dick Reston, who was then editor, that she had found somebody to replace Dorothy West, who had written the Oak Bluffs column for several decades.

  One day I got a call telling me that Dorothy wasn’t well and they wondered if I would consider taking over the column. I talked to Dorothy, who I had known since those early trips here; we became friends after I moved here. She was delighted to pass the torch. I said, Well, if she thinks I can do it I’ll give it a try. Dorothy had written the column for thirty years, so I told Dick Reston, if I can make it for thirty months ... And it’s been about five years now.

  I start gathering material for the next column as soon as I finish one. I keep a yellow pad for notes and information. I go to the post office, I overhear conversations, and if I hear something that sounds like it’ll work, I say, Excuse me, and we go from there. No one has insulted me yet. I don’t see myself as the “black columnist,” because Dorothy didn’t, and I use her as a model.

  People ask me, What do you do on the Vineyard? I feel so sorry for people who wake up in the morning and aren’t sure what they’re going to do in the course of the day. I don’t have that problem. It’s a matter of what am I not going to do.

  You have to plan your retirement just as you plan other aspects of your life. I do watercolors, photography, needlework. I’m a weaver. I have several writing projects and my column, so don’t ask me what I do. I’m quite busy and have no regrets. When I travel—I still travel and will travel for as long as there’s breath in my body and I’m able to go—I can’t wait to get back to Martha’s Vineyard. Can’t wait to get back. It’s magical here.

  Charles H. Jones, Jr., better known simply as “Cee-Jay,” eighty-eight, worked for the United States Postal Service in New York City for thirty-nine years. He first visited Martha’s Vineyard in 1949 with a friend who was a bartender at a popular Harlem bar, Bowman’s. He’s returned every summer but one since then, renting rooms from many different people from July 4 through Labor Day until his stepdaughter bought the house where he now lives. In 1988, he retired and moved with his wife, Mavis, to Martha’s Vineyard. Mavis died ten years later, in 1998. He spends part of each winter in Port Charlotte, Florida, but the Vineyard is home.

  Cee-Jay: When you love this island, there’s no need to say what you like; you feel it. I felt it the first time I came here. There’s nothing here other than scenery and people, it just got to me. I played tennis, and loved the camaraderie with the people who come here, people from all over. I brought my wife, Mavis, up here in 1959. We got married in I960, and had our honeymoon up here. I only missed one year, 1972. My wife and I went to Spain that year.

  When people ask me what I do here, I tell them nothing. That’s what I come here for. It’s wonderful. It’s picturesque, it’s calm. People who come here come to enjoy whatever’s here, beaches, galleries, Aquinnah, which is not like it used to be, the cliffs are so much smaller, not as much color. They used to have the best hot dogs, toasted, for a nickel. There was an Indian lady out there, beautiful lady, making pottery. You could watch her do that, and right next to her was an Indian man who would take your picture with a live ox. That was a long time ago. Things change.

  Way back when I started coming, the Vineyard was known as a little bourgie. They had their little cliques and so forth; it was known as Peyton Place, because of

  Cee-Jay Jones

  the stuff that went on. There was a lot of romance. Would I still describe it as Peyton Place? Nope. It’s a little more discreet now.

  In the early days here, wherever you saw a light and heard music, you could go in. There was a lot of partying. Then, you just walked by and heard the music and went on in. It was just that way at that time. I miss that a little. Now, you have to be invited. The way people socialize on the island has changed quite a bit. There were fewer of us then, and not too many places for us to stay, unless you knew somebody, so it was in some ways more open.

  I don’t have a group here. I just go around with everybody. I know who I like. I’m friends with a lot of people—I have loads of friends—but I don’t necessarily feel I belong to a group. I go most anywhere I feel comfortable.

  I didn’t buy property here, my wife’s daughter bought property here, so it’s my home and their house. I could have gone in and bought it with them, but I decided it would be better for me to go the other route. 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.

  I’m on the Vineyard from April until Christmas Eve. Since 1992 I’ve worked in the information booth Saturdays and Sundays, from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. I am also a crossing guard at the Oak Bluffs Elementary School. I do my little twenty-five minutes a day in the afternoon, no mornings. While I’m in Florida, somebody else is doing it. My birthday’s April 22, and I make sure I’m back here for that, and school usually comes back from spring break a few days later.

  This is the best time of the year for me, summer, because people I know come down, and when their time is up somebody else I know comes, so I have a chan
ce to visit a lot. I still play tennis occasionally, but am I a golfer? Emphatically no. It takes too long. I can play tennis and be home in an hour or so. In the mornings I go to the Council on Aging—I’ve been a little active there—and have coffee. Then I go downtown, take a walk, see who’s around, if I need anything in the stores, do that. I get home around ten thirty, have breakfast around eleven. That’s it. There’s not too much to do. For me, that’s a good thing. I always say, I have nothing to do and plenty of time to do it. And I love it. I don’t get bored; boredom is a state of mind.

  I know a lot of people, summer people and those who live here year-round. I go out at night occasionally, but I did so much of that before. I was a bar hopper in New York, that’s all I was. Everybody was going to bars back then, in the good old days. I’ve only been back to New York once in fifteen years, and that was in 2004. I don’t miss it. I did love it, I don’t dislike it now, but New York is out of me. I did New York: From 1942 to 1988, I went to school.

  I always contend that being here on the island may not add anything to my life, but it certainly won’t take anything away. You have to roll with the changes; adjusting to your immediate environment is a way of life. You have to adjust, that means coping, and coping is the way of life.

  I feel wonderful when I’m here. When I was moving here and we crossed the drawbridge from Tisbury into Oak Bluffs, I just looked up and smiled and my wife, Mavis, smiled at me. I’m contented, I don’t have to look over my shoulder and all that kind of stuff. This is home. Everything I have is here. When I moved here, I had everything I needed to be a resident within a week, including a cemetery plot. I’m going to be buried in the Oak Bluffs Cemetery, after I reach a hundred. You said you hope you’re around? I hope I am, too.

  Norman Hall, forty-five, grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and along with his five siblings has spent summers on the Vineyard since he was an infant. Hall lived and worked in Amsterdam from 1989 until the late 1990s, where he met his wife, Jessica, and built a house on the Vineyard in 1997. He now advises and structures deals for small businesses that need financing, raises capital, and often invests in them himself. Martha’s Vineyard is his legal residence, and Hall lives there with his wife, son Evan, eleven, and daughter Imani, five. He commutes to Europe and the Caribbean, where he has business interests.

  Norman: About ten years ago I started looking for something different for my children. A place where they were free, could be creative, and basically not just put in a box.

  My first thought was, as a child, where did I have my best memories and my dearest friendships? The things that breed happiness and give you the feeling that you are valued? And all of those feelings that I had within me were based upon summers on the Vineyard.

  I started coming here in 1958, when I was two months old. My mother grew up in Brooklyn, New York, after she moved to the United States from Suriname when she was seven years old, and she had come to the island in her youth, so it was natural for her to bring the six of us up here. We spent all summer, every summer, here. When I got older, in high school, I started to come up in early June and just stay by myself, and that’s how I got to know many islanders really well, because I would start working early.

  The Vineyard was a place where families like ours came together, shared similar

  Norman Hall

  values, education, and exposure, had our freedom—we could basically run the streets and our parents didn’t have to worry—and we were also able to form friendships with people from all over the country. Even though it’s changed since those times, it is still community, a small community.

  The experience that we had as children is gone in the sense that we all lived in the same area, everybody knew everybody. You could walk down Circuit Avenue and there was hardly one person who you didn’t know and speak to. Our parents knew one another, and there was a sense of belonging to a town. Not only did you live in a town, you belonged to it, because each kid was everybody’s child. I had aunts and uncles who reached real deep, and they were no relation to me. It gives you confidence when you’re a kid and you have this extended family. When you go home, go back to school, you just know that you’ve got people all over the place who are going to look out for you, who you can always call on. That was something that made life very secure as a child. In moving here year-round, I wanted to find out if that could be repeated for my children.

  You have an influx of younger families who are moving here and looking for community. Now it is pretty much an international community. My wife is Dutch, and we can be in Cronig’s, the supermarket, shopping, speaking Dutch to our children, and lo and behold someone will come up and start speaking Dutch. It’s happened numerous times, and these are people who live here. It has really become a haven for folks looking for the peace of mind they can’t find where they previously lived. They give up city life, the cosmopolitan environment, to seek something which is believed to be more embracing for their soul and spirit. That’s what it came down to for me. I knew that my spirit was free here. When it was time for me to decide where I really wanted to raise my family, it was here.

  When I built my house I met hundreds of people, and I found that more than half of the people I knew from childhood. I grew up with them. Consequently I began to hear their stories, and it was painful. I saw people whose families had lived here for three or four generations seriously struggling with whether they could continue to live here and raise their children here. It was a rude awakening to see that people who really are the magic of the island, the glue that holds it all together, are being forced out because it’s become so expensive.

  There’s an influx of money here: old money, new money, high-tech money, and Hollywood. Our parents were professionals—doctors, lawyers, and engineers, those were the people who bought here. Now it’s kind of changed, so if you’re not a corporate CEO, actor, or someone who’s making millions, it’s very difficult to live on this island.

  You see what has happened in the Hamptons, in many of these resort towns: Wealthy people buy everything up, spend a few weeks, and these towns become ghost towns most of the year. And yet your labor force has to be imported from somewhere, they’re just there to work. It matters because you lose the element that makes the island magical. The people who love this place, who just give their all every day to go out and work at the post office, the firehouse, the hospital, the schools. These people are becoming resentful, and you can see it as a dynamic affecting the community. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines the median income for a family of four in Dukes County as $66,1000. That median makes it virtually impossible for year-round residents to buy a home on the Vineyard.

  I have gotten involved in the movement for affordable housing here and am on the board of the Island Affordable Housing Foundation. My wife has just joined the board of the YMCA they’re building here. My involvement comes from being a member of this community.

  The Vineyard is a place that has so much potential to be a model community for the world. Everybody knows about it, it’s had so much notoriety over the past few years. But if we don’t create interest groups that dialogue about the things that mean something to them, we will lose that opportunity, that wonderful sense of community. These days there’s a tendency for people to come up and make it a showplace where they can bring their little exclusive cliques and groups of friends. That’s what happens in the summertime now, everyone wants to go home and say they’ve been here and partied with so and so, been to this person’s house. That gives me an empty feeling about a place that has meant so much to so many.

  This island is our roots, the ground beneath our feet. A place we know we can go to and feel peace, be at home, be embraced by genuine people who you have something to exchange and share with. My concern is the future of the Vineyard. And if you don’t do anything about it, you’re part of the problem, as they say.

  Me, my mother, Leil, my daughter, Misu, and my brothers, Ralph and Stanley, 1985

  �
��Who wants to run me over to Tony’s?” my mother asks most nights from the time she arrives on the Vineyard in May until she leaves in September.

  Tony’s is Tony’s Market on Dukes County Avenue, right down the street from the baseball field and in back of Circuit Avenue. Founded in 1877 and family owned, Tony’s is Martha’s Vineyard’s equivalent of a New York bodega, the small, cramped store that thrives in cities and towns across the country. Wherever they are situated, these stores open early, close late, and sell a little bit of everything. They are where you go for a cup of coffee and doughnut at the crack of dawn, diapers, aspirin, or ice cream at night, and everything else in between. Here, you can get just about everything you want: hairpins, butter, syrup, a sandwich, eggs, wine and beer, film or a disposable camera, produce, newspapers local and national, batteries of all sizes, condoms, toothpaste.

  What Tony’s Market and, in my experience, most other stores like it also have are the machines necessary to play the state lottery and rolls of one, two, and five-dollar scratch tickets. It is these that my mother is interested in.

  “Leil wants to go to Tony’s. Can you drive her?”

  “I’ll take her, but I’m running a bath. Can you watch my water?”

  “Whoever’s going, can you bring me some garlic for the fish?”

  “We’re out of juice, too.”

  “If they have any double A batteries, would you get me some?”

  “And some coffee ice cream,” someone calls out.