In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

One highlight of the summer season on the Vineyard is the Cottagers’ annual house tour. For day-trippers, summer folk, and year-round residents the tour provides a unique opportunity to enter the private domiciles of Oak Bluffs. The houses included on the tour often have historical value, famous occupants, and unique renovations or design features. One year’s home featured an extraordinary array of antiques; another showcased the house of now-deceased novelist Bebe Moore Campbell. To outsiders, the house tour offers an opportunity for lessons in cultural and architectural history. The tour indulges voyeuristic activity that either promotes simple house envy or encourages visitors’ desire to acquire such unique homes. One pleasure of studying a writer so firmly grounded in a specific place is the requisite visitation of those sites that appear in her writing. In July 2005 and July 2008, I toured ten houses featured on the Cottagers’ tour. In 2008, several homes on the tour were located in Dorothy West’s Highlands. West’s home was not included, but the anecdotes I acquired—some spontaneous, others solicited—enriched my understanding of the neighborhood history West inhabited and fostered. For instance, on the porch of the Coleman house a member of the Cottagers told me the story of how West’s editor “Jackie O” would sit cross-legged on the floor when she came to visit because West had her papers spread all over the house. The house tour, an annual event that renders private sites temporarily public, provides the narrative frame that 147 Cottager’s Corner From far and near cities, from a variety of professions, from a range of cultural and civic involvements that crowd their winter calendar, the Cottagers are steadily arriving for a summer season in which much of their time will revolve around Cottager’s Corner, once the old town hall in Oak Bluffs, now the increasingly busy center of community oriented activities. —Dorothy West, “Cottager’s Corner” 7 DOROTHY WEST’S PARADISE 148 allows me to follow the evolution of West’s column and its unique role in both documenting and representing the black presence in Oak Bluffs. “Vacation-Minded and Island-Oriented” “Cottager’s Corner,” the original title of Dorothy West’s column in the Vineyard Gazette, began in 1967 and continued until her death in 1993 under the name “Oak Bluffs.” “Cottager’s Corner” may have begun as an article in 1967, but by 1971, when the organization acquired the old town hall on Pequot Avenue, Cottager’s Corner became and still is also the name of a building that functions as the headquarters of the women’s organization. Like Dorothy West’s cottage, the building is also a stop on the African American History Trail. West proudly recounts the building’s pivotal focus for residents; moreover, West acknowledges that the organization’s purchase of the building “gave the Cottagers and the town a vigorous measure of pride.”1 From 1967 to 1971 “Cottager’s Corner” named both a building and a newspaper column; thus, a Cottager is a person who inhabits a cottage as well as a member of a women’s organization.2 The slippage between people and property is evident in West’s column and her oral histories. The mutability of the term “Cottager” reinforces the significance of place as a crucial element in understanding the unique character and composition of the black colony in Oak Bluffs. Robert Hayden subtitles his lay history African Americans on Martha’s Vineyard “A History of People, Places, and Events”; this qualification underscores the relationships between the main subjects covered in West’s aptly titled column. Reading the early installments of “Cottager’s Corner” drives home the importance of location as a factor that shapes social relations and nurtures kinship ties during the more than one hundred years that blacks have lived on the island.3 Over three decades, West expanded her focus from the local microcosm of the black colony to incorporate national and international topics—politics, ideology, the arts—and revealed how a specific local history can act and participate in the global community that comprises the African Diaspora. Founded by twelve women in 1956, many of whom where already members of national black women’s organizations and historically black sororities, the Cottagers developed a specifically local group that both emulated and diverged from the types of organizations that sparked the African American women’s club movement at the end of the nineteenth century...

Share