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In
Print: Islanders tell their rich and moving tales
September 15, 2005
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Marjory Manter Rogers (left) with Martha's Vineyard Historical Society director Matthew Stackpole and oral historian/author Linsey Lee at a book signing at the Grange in West Tisbury last month.
Photos by Ralph Stewart
Ted Morgan (left) and Bob Carroll, both of whom are featured in "More Vineyard Voices," share stories at the August 10 book signing.
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By Russell Hoxsie
"More Vineyard Voices - Words, Faces and Voices of Island People" Interviews and Portraits by Linsey Lee, The Vineyard Oral History Center of the Martha's Vineyard Historical Society; 344 pages; $33.95, paper.
Linsey Lee is a small woman, diminutive. Her eyes sparkle and she speaks with a soft voice. However, she writes large and with love. When she handed me her book she first leafed through nearly the whole volume to show me the photographic portraits as if she were holding her new-born and was undecided whether actually to give her up to me. I had leafed in and out of her first "Vineyard Voices" for several years and probably read every word. I never imagined she could equal that effort. As I read on into "More Vineyard Voices," a coffee-table-sized volume with beautiful cover design by Steve and Peg Zablotney, I realized she had done more than that. She has culled from hundreds of hours of transcribed interviews for her oral history and taken almost all of the photographs accompanying the text herself, with help from Mark Lennihan, MC Wallo, Patrick Winkleman, Pat Tyra, and Dorothy Brickman. Seventy-seven portraits of Islanders emerge from all walks of Island life. Her media are the interviewees' own words and black-and-white photography. As she says in her introduction, "The stories … span the era from the early 1900's to the 1960's and ‘70's, with stories and memories from parents and grandparents reaching back to the 1850's."
Her "friends" come mostly from my generations and I became immersed in experiences both strange and familiar. A distinct feeling of "the old days" exists: the familiar and still longed-for family gatherings, Sunday evenings around the radio with Jack Benny and Fred Allen, unprogrammed after-school hours with friends, pick-up baseball and football in a vacant lot and biking over country roads for nothing more than the pleasure and exercise. Unfamiliar experiences of tragic lives and unbelievable encounters also take their place here: death in the holocaust, families separated by poverty in the Great Depression, siblings living for years in an orphanage or farmed out to uncles because their families could not keep enough food on the table. Details almost jump off the pages into real life.
Whenever I came across my friends and acquaintances among the interviewees, I remembered events I'd forgotten but often asked why I hadn't known more about these things before. A kind of joy permeates the book, even with the sadness and losses recounted. The thread that gathers them all together, I think, is the Vineyard connection. Many spoke of the evanescent quality of the Island that became central to their lives, outlasting all other impressions. Islanders born on-Island spoke of their heritage here on Martha's Vineyard. A few counted up to 10 generations' worth. Jews described their origins in Europe: poverty, fear of Russian Cossacks, loss of their historic homeland and their welcome or unwelcome arrival in America. They described the cementing ties of Jewry for their few isolated families in the early years and the importance of their religious life together and their hard work. A recurrent theme is the coming of a large Portuguese community from mainland Portugal and the Azores. Their culture has extended itself into our whole community. Who does not have a multi-colored crocheted afghan or an appetite for linguica and chourizo? Their place in the religious, political and social community has been welded firmly in place, their service in the armed services well honored. African-Americans described similar patterns of adjustment, hoping that the prejudice they encountered at first, although much improved now, might eventually be erased altogether. Their strengths were in their own separated communities forced by the prejudices of the times in which they arrived. They became the bellwethers of a new day, forging strong ties to the Vineyard and influencing life here to a high degree. Masters and servants were a familiar theme among all newcomers, the wealthy summer people in Edgartown and their maids, cooks, and gardeners. Through it all, incoming Vineyarders rose above the negative concerns and learned how to develop their own talents and move on.
Dramatic are the many accounts of service in World War II, a parachutist jumping near German lines and subjected to heavy fire, a medic watching his friend die despite his best efforts to save him, along with pleasant memories of deep friendship made under enormous stress and reunions in the States after the war.
Cultural diversity on the Island is a treasure that Ms. Lee preserves as she records the stories of her friends. She possesses a knack for propelling the speaker's authenticity from each page, colorful language and all. We learn of the hardship of a cold seat in the outhouse, the early morning riser waiting inside for the first user to clear the ice and warm the seat before she runs out-of-doors. We see a selectman thoughtfully assessing his day's work over a lobster trap and remember him with the same concerned look sitting at the selectman's table in annual town meeting. We hear how the rural delivery postman exults in spreading verbal mayhem along his route by riling everyone he meets with an unwanted, unasked-for opinion. I hear my beloved office nurse of 25 years saying I was the second man in her life and two other nurses who too generously give me credit for keeping them in work for many years.
These stories of Island men and women, independent yet bound by the sea, will resonate with countless other rural and small-town communities in America. Linsey Lee's oral history captures the spirit of Martha's Vineyard and its people. Her flawless photographic images capture the anatomy of their faces and, more importantly, their mood, their hair and wrinkles, their smiles or bemusement, their pride or shyness, their glamour or plainness, their health, their postural idiosyncrasies, their humanity. She has produced a beautiful book with authentic words and distinguished portraits, a daunting job well done.
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