Good Morning POU! And in our final post about “Our Kind Of People”, we couldn’t leave out Oak Bluffs!
“So, Maggie, who’s here?” my mother asked.
“I saw Velma yesterday. And Anna had a book signing on the boat Thursday afternoon. And some of the Links from Philadelphia came up last week.”
“And what about Donald and Charlene? I heard they were looking at some property over in Vineyard Haven?”
“Looking at? ” the woman asked while rolling her eyes. “You’ve obviously been gone one summer too long. That place was built, moved into, and landscaped nine months ago—all three thousand square feet of it.”
“Well, we spent last summer in Sag Harbor. You know how much easier the weekend commute is.”
Maggie shrugged without empathy. “Well, no one said this stuff was easy. You can’t be in both places at one time. You know you really have to pick.”
My mother didn’t miss a beat. “Well, I picked and I’m back. We’ll be at the tennis courts this morning and the Ink Well this afternoon. So call me—and tell everybody I’m back! Tell ’em I’m back!”
That was the rallying cry that I remember hearing at the beginning of each summer that we spent in Oak Bluffs, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. When my parents spotted their good friend Maggie Alston strolling along Circuit Avenue, the summer had officially begun.
This was long before the groups of black college students started coming in the 1980s. It was before President Bill Clinton’s highly publicized 1994 Vineyard vacation with Vernon Jordan and the Kennedys. It was before Black Dog Tavern T-shirts had become a cheap cliché—seen on the backs of people who couldn’t even find Vineyard Haven on an island map. For three months each year, the three-block stretch of stores on Circuit Avenue and the short strip of sand along Seaview Avenue—which we blacks call the “Ink Well”—was the center of our universe. It was black heaven—a world that few of us could abandon, even for half a summer. Unless, of course, we wanted to get left behind.
Even though we’d been going there since I was two years old, such was the arrogance of black privilege on that island that it never even occurred to me that white people had summer homes on Martha’s Vineyard until I was ten or eleven years old.
Of course I saw white people at the Flying Horses, at Our Market, and at the tennis courts off South Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs. But I assumed they were just passing through as guests of black people who had homes there, or as unrooted tourists. Just people passing through a place that was ours. But of course Martha’s Vineyard had white families.
The black neighborhoods of Oak Bluffs were dwarfed by the white sections in the town and by the white population that dominated the rest of Martha’s Vineyard. But I was a summer kid who defined the resort by the boundaries of the black neighborhoods and by whole days and evenings spent with our extended black family in our all-black tennis tournaments, all-black yachting trips, all-black art shows, and all-black cookouts, and the white vacationers had no relevance for me.
Black family vacationing in Oaks Bluff in the 1930s – from the Smithsonian
As I grew older, I saw what my younger and more naive, self-satisfied eyes had missed. As an adolescent, I finally paid notice to the racial lines that long ago had been drawn between blacks and whites on Martha’s Vineyard. I eventually even saw the many hierarchies that existed within the groups of blacks who summered there. But in spite of these changed perceptions and my newfound confrontation with reality, the one unalterable impression that remains today is that when vacationing among our own kind, in places that have been embraced by us for so long, there is a comfort—and a sanctity—that makes it almost possible to forget that there is a white power structure touching our lives at all.
[…]
The Ink Well
Jacquelyn and Bill Brown own an 1869 modified Campground-style house that has a view of the beach. “Initially we were going to buy a place in Newport,” explains Bill Brown, an MIT graduate, who first visited the island in the late 1960s and stayed at Shearer Cottage, “but what attracted us to Oak Bluffs years ago were unique factors like the Ink Well. We didn’t want to be spending summers in places where we were the only blacks. Our kids got enough of that during the school year.” Longtime Vineyarder Alelia Nelson laughs when she hears people talk about the Ink Well.
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