Finding Martha's Vineyard by Jill Nelson

Author:Jill Nelson [Nelson, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Jill Nelson
Published: 2019-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

Adelaide Cromwell

worked very hard, had his own business, and had probably seen enough of the island; like the men who were in the war and their wife wants to go to Paris, but their feeling is, “I had all the Paris I needed in the Second World War.”

I always liked the country kind of life. Not really country, now; I didn’t want any horses and cows. We didn’t have a summer home when I was growing up in Washington, but I used to go to Camp Atwater in Brookfield, Massachusetts, in the summer, so I knew this general area up here, New England, and it just seemed a nice place to go away for the holiday. I wasn’t going to go all the way down to Washington in the summertime, only a fool would go to Washington in the summer. I never was much into the social world here, that’s not my style. I have some good friends here, but I do think a crucial point was Edward having the house and my mother liking it here. And mother died up here, so it was a good thing for her.

I got to know more and more people as they came, mostly through other friends. When my son, Tony, was growing up, I couldn’t imagine not going to the beach every day. I meet people now and they don’t go to the beach. I like Eastville Beach, but my friends don’t, so we go to the edge of the Oak Bluffs beach, on the other side of the last jetty, down near where Barbara DePasse lives.

The early blacks who came here for recreational purposes, not those who worked in service, they felt a comfort with themselves, they knew who they were, and most of them came from Boston and from Providence. Dorothy West’s father had money, Barbara Townes’s grandfather had a lot of money. Like some whites, they didn’t make it themselves, but they came from some idea of money.

As Dorothy said, and I agree with her, “Then the New Yorkers came.” They brought a whole different set of values. In New York, things depend a lot on material wealth, although I think in fairness you have to say that New York has that level of intellectuals, but they didn’t have the same opportunity to manifest it as say, you had in Washington, where you had the universities where you could be an intellectual. In Boston, I call these Blacks “the other Brahmins,” they thought they were living up to the values of whites; they imitated their lifestyle and their values. Other than being a doctor, or a dentist, or a lawyer or minister, you didn’t have

that level of intellectuality in New York. But you did have that artistic thrust that brought notoriety and prominence. So when that package came on this scene, it seemed to me that they set up a different set of values. They didn’t absorb or coalesce with that earlier group.

Undoubtedly, the New Yorkers were more ostentatious, in their play, their dress, their lifestyle.

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