On three layers
to one of America’s most unique historic beaches.
The small town
of Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s
Vineyard, includes one of America’s most historic
African American resorts, a summertime community with roots more than
a century old and a vibrant contemporary
presence. That community has long designated its preferred stretch of the
Oak Bluffs town beach “The
Inkwell,” a name that was originally conferred out of racial bigotry but
that (at least as I understand it, and I’m directly descended from one
of the island’s foremost historians!) was subsequently and lovingly adopted
by the African American community itself. Indeed, scholar and frequent Islander Henry Louis Gates
Jr. named his genealogical and historical organization the
Inkwell Foundation, a detail which nicely ties together the site’s past and
present roles and meanings in African American and American life.
The Inkwell and
Oak Bluff’s African American community are also the titular and principal setting
for one of the more unique recent American bestselling novels, Stephen Carter’s
The
Emperor of Ocean Park (2002). Carter, a law professor who has gone on
to write many more, equally successful works of fiction, was famously
paid a seven-figure
advance for Emperor, which combines
multiple genres (it’s a murder mystery and legal thriller that’s also an academic
satire, historical novel, and romance) into a work that’s not always more than
the sum of its parts but is always readable and compelling. And as its titular
emphasis on Martha’s Vineyard’s African community suggests (Ocean Park adjoins
The Inkwell), Carter’s novel is at its heart a historical and sociological
study of that community, and of the complexities of identity that arise from
its combination of race, class, and family history (his narrator is the son of that
titular emperor, a preeminent African American judge).
Similarly
connected to those complexities of identity, community, and history is another frequent
summer visitor to Martha’s Vineyard, President Barack Obama. Political
commentators have often linked Obama and his family’s Vineyard vacations to
those of his Democratic presidential predecessor, Bill Clinton; conservative
commentators have used the vacations to argue that Obama is out of touch
with most Americans. But others, including
many Islanders, have instead linked the Obama family’s
time on the Vineyard to the island’s historic
and contemporary African American communities. That Obama’s vacations could
be read as either deeply connected to those communities or entirely distinct
from them is a reflection not only of his own complex American identity, but also
of the evolving history and story of this complex and potent American beach and
site.
Next beach
context tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
What do you think?
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