“Originally that term was used privately among blacks; then one day Louis Sullivan, George Bush’s cabinet secretary, gave an interview to one of the white newspapers and he mentioned the term ‘Ink Well,’” explains Nelson as she sits in the rambling home that wraps around one of the most picturesque corners in Oak Bluffs, “and that’s how white people learned about the nickname we’d made up for our section of the beach. And then came that dreadful movie about the Ink Well. Not only was it insulting; it wasn’t even filmed here. They did it down in Virginia someplace.”
Nelson, who is the goddaughter of mil lionaire entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker, brought her children to all the beaches on the island—not just the Ink Well. Her daughter, Jill, a former Washington Post reporter, has written about the summers she spent there. Her son, Stanley, a filmmaker, has worked on projects focusing on the community. “I was not going to be intimidated by people who said the only beach for us was the Ink Well. So I brought my kids to all the beaches here.”
Like the Primms and the Browns, well-to-do families populate this beach throughout the summer. On any given afternoon, there are doctors from Philadelphia, radio station owners from Detroit or Pittsburgh, bankers from New York, attorneys and teachers from Washington, and journalists from Los Angeles. Everyone has one or two books stacked on top of issues of Essence, Vanity Fair, the New York Times , the Vineyard Gazette, and the black newspaper from home. Pen and paper are also de rigueur for copying down phone numbers of old friends one will inevitably see. It’s a perpetual networking scene.
“Unfortunately, there’s also this coarse element that has started showing up here on the Fourth of July,” says a New Jersey dentist as he looks up from the beach to a group of teenagers playing a radio and sitting on a railing overlooking the beach. “They obviously have no business here,” adds the dentist’s wife as she adjusts the umbrella behind her and rubs sunblock on her pale, lightly tanned skin. “All these loud, dark-skinned kids coming over here for the day . They nearly destroyed Virginia Beach—and now they think they can just plop themselves down here. Just because we’re black doesn’t mean we have to put up with this.”
“They think they’re fitting in, but they are clearly not our kind of people,” adds another woman as she drops the Vineyard Gazette by her side. “But I guess we can all tolerate them two days out of the whole summer. After all, they always just go back to wherever they came from.” A short walk from the Ink Well is Circuit Avenue, the main shopping street in Oak Bluffs, which consists of about two dozen shops, restaurants, and small businesses, and a post office. The sidewalks on the narrow street are jammed with people stopping and gaping at the slow-moving cars, straining to see who of their friends is back on the island. Among the newer institutions on the street is the dance club Atlantic Connection, which attracts young people, who line the street outside on Friday and Saturday summer nights.
With the increasing number of blacks visiting the island, there seem always to be new ways to separate the elite from the ordinary. Ever since I was a teenager, I recall that one popular method of establishing divisions was by asking every new face one question: “Do you rent, or do you own?”
It’s a question that you hear black people asking up and down Circuit Avenue as they bump into vaguely familiar black faces, or completely new black faces that seem inviting enough to welcome with a few words of introduction.
“If they’ve owned a house here for twelve years, I’d know ’em,” said a gray-haired woman, interrupting a bridge game that I sat in on recently.
“Well it’s supposed to be some fabulous place with six bedrooms,” added her partner. “Something like five thousand square feet, with a tennis court. And he’s a surgeon from Washington, and she’s a lawyer.”
“I’m telling you, Alma,” insisted the older woman. “Surgeon from D.C., five thousand square feet. I’d know ’em if it was true. Never heard of ’em.”
A third woman, also a longtime owner in Oak Bluffs, took a sip from her iced tea. “Well, that’s probably because they’re in Chilmark!”
“Ha! I knew it!” “Well, there you go.” “Okay, then.”
I looked around at the women sitting on the screened porch of a home not far from the town’s Waban Park. “What kind of black folks are going to be in Chilmark? Is his wife white?” “They must be hiding. Might as well be in Chappaquiddick. Or Nantucket.”
There was nothing more to say about the Washington surgeon to this group of women. He and his wife were so irrelevant, they were not worth further discussion.
Well is she or isn’t she? LOL
I could hear my aunt’s anxiety level rising through the phone line. “So, is she an AKA?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I answered.
“You don’t think so? Either she is, or she isn’t.”
I rolled my eyes as I looked over at Pamela, the woman I had just gotten engaged to. We were on the telephone from New York, calling relatives to give them the news of our wedding, which would take place in eighteen months. Most of my father’s relatives had already met Pamela. My Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Earl were my mother’s side of the family and knew few of the details. Aunt Phyllis already knew that my fiancée was from Detroit and had graduated from Harvard-Radcliffe, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Business School. But foremost on her mind were Pamela’s ties to Greek life.
“Well, no,” I finally responded.
“She’s not an AKA.” “Oh, a Delta?” she asked, sounding a little crestfallen.
My uncle interrupted on the line. “Now, Phyllis. Just because you’re AKA doesn’t mean everybody has to be.”
“So, she’s a Delta?” she asked again.
I looked over at my fiancée and started to feel a little embarrassed. “Aunt Phyllis, she’s actually quite nice.”
“I’m sure she is, Lawrence. So she’s a Delta?”
“Please, Phyllis.” My uncle and aunt were inextricably tied to black college life. He was an Omega who sat on the alumni board of Ohio’s Central State University. Aunt Phyllis, a teacher with two master’s degrees, had pledged AKA forty-six years ago at Wilberforce, the country’s second-oldest black college. She’s the kind of sorority member who finds it hard to believe that not every accomplished black woman would want to be in Alpha Kappa Alpha.
“No, I’m sorry, Aunt Phyllis, she’s not a Delta either.” “Oh, I see.” As I looked over at Pamela, a long awkward silence fell on the other end of the phone line.
I wasn’t sure what my aunt was thinking, but it was probably one of three things:
His fiancée is white.
His fiancée is in one of those lesser sororities.
His fiancée is not a Greek at all.
In the world of the black elite—where race, class, and black fraternity life are intertwined—I’m not sure which of the three assumptions about my fiancée would have been more shocking at the moment. It is an experience I encounter whenever blacks discover that I was not in a black college fraternity. What was certain was that my fiancée won a reprieve when it was revealed that her mother was an AKA and her father was an Alpha.