July 3, 2005

HABITATS/Martha's Vineyard; An Island, A House, A Family, Summer

It faces east over Nantucket Sound and north toward the neatly clipped turf of Ocean Park (that's the ''Amity'' town green you'll remember from ''Jaws,'' and it still flaunts a lacy white gazebo at its center).

The house is a town landmark, rangy, matronly and shingled, 12 rooms with a broad porch skirt and a dainty white fence, the leader of the ring of the more girlish and diminutive gingerbread houses that circle the park. Like ''The Big House,'' the star of George Howe Colt's 2003 memoir of summers past, it is an archetype and an idea as much as it is board, shingle and lathe.

Colt's Cape Cod house held a history of fading WASP fortunes; Ms. Nelson's house, a major character in her gentle memoir, ''Finding Martha's Vineyard: African-Americans at Home on an Island'' (Doubleday; $27.50), frames a parallel tale of privilege, but with a happier ending.

Within it, Ms. Nelson, the author of the rather more feisty memoirs ''Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience,'' a hilarious and deadpan account of her years as a reporter at The Washington Post, and its follow-up, ''Straight, No Chaser: How I Became a Grown-Up Black Woman,'' weaves her own family history on the island with the reminiscences of other African-American regulars, like the writer Bebe Moore Campbell, the Washington power broker Vernon Jordan and Tonya Lewis Lee -- a lawyer, television producer and relative Vineyard newcomer who first arrived with her husband, Spike Lee, in 1992.

''Here, we were not the only one,'' writes Ms. Nelson, ''or one of the very few, as was so often the case where we lived, worked and went to school. There was no need to be the exemplary Negro here, or to show white people that we were as good or better than they were, to conduct ourselves as ambassadors for integration and racial harmony.''

Ms. Nelson's book is also a coming-of-age tale -- or a coming-to-terms tale -- about how life in a family home goes on without its matriarch. Ms. Nelson, the third of four children, writes about how her mother, A'Leila Ransom Nelson, a large personality in a tiny frame and Jackie O. sunglasses, had ruled the family's island summers beginning in 1955.

Since her mother's death in 2001, Ms. Nelson, 53, is finding her own way here.

Not that she's having any trouble. In the last week of June, Ms. Nelson, ever competent, always feisty, was simultaneously reminiscing, painting a wicker table, reading the directions for and assembling a mini Weber grill, and swinging gently on the wicker swing on the covered front porch -- her mother's favorite perch.

''I used to tease her that I'd have her stuffed when she died and sit her right here,'' Ms. Nelson said; she described her mother's backhanded wave, which snagged most passers-by. Instead, Ms. Nelson bought a bench from the Friends of Oak Bluffs and had it inscribed with her mother's name and the words ''A Queen Among Women.''

It is planted square in the frame of the porch's ocean-facing window. That afternoon, it was host to a constant stream of ocean gazers, while its sisters to the left and right remained empty. ''My daughter, Misu, says, 'It's popular, just like Grandma,''' Ms. Nelson said.

Ms. Nelson's mother was named for A'Leila Walker, daughter of the famous hair-care millionaire Madame CJ Walker, for whose company Ms. Nelson's grandfather was the general manager. Early advertisements for the company fill an upstairs hall here. When they were teenagers, Ms. Nelson, her sister and their two brothers began to address their mother as ''Leil.''

In 1968, Leil bought this house with her husband, Stanley Earl Nelson, a dentist turned spiritual seeker, for $35,000, Ms. Nelson said. Ms. Nelson's father had proclaimed it his since their first summer here in 1955. ''He is as large of a personality as my mother,'' Ms. Nelson said.

When Ms. Nelson's parents separated in the early 1970's, her father spent the winters here, inhabiting just the back two bedrooms (there are six), the kitchen and the lofty attic. The attic is now filled with a few beds -- a teenage crash pad -- and a pair of undulating and strangely hairy lime green chaises, relics from the 1970's that face north toward Buzzards Bay. Mrs. Nelson, the president of the Madame CJ Walker Manufacturing Company, based in Indianapolis, and a librarian at City College, came every summer from New York City with their four children.

When her parents finally divorced in the late 1970's, Ms. Nelson said, her mother bought her father out of the house, then valued by a judge at $90,000. In a gesture that speaks volumes about Ms. Nelson's mother's personality, and her commitment to her family, her will dictates that the house can be sold at market rate only if three of the four children agree, and that if one child wishes to sell his or her interest the value of that share not exceed $22,500, or one quarter of the figure dictated by that judge so many decades ago. (The house's market value is now more than $1.5 million, with annual taxes of $15,000.)

Ms. Nelson raised an eyebrow and her paintbrush and said dryly, ''She's ruling us from the grave.''

A big house and a long summer can accommodate four grown children and their families, said Ms. Nelson, whose grandchild, Busayo, is 3 and who will arrive in August with his mother and his father, Yohance Maqubela.

Though Ms. Nelson lives in New York City with her partner, Flores Forbes, chief strategic officer of the Abyssinian Development Corporation, she is mostly here without him. ''He's not that into the opening-up ritual,'' Ms. Nelson said, referring to her annual spring visit to the house, the first of the year, once performed with her mother.

Mr. Forbes is not the handyman type, Ms. Nelson said. ''I had to confront my own sexism,'' she said. ''I want all men to be handy. But he's not and that's O.K.''

She flipped the new grill, now fully assembled, onto its new legs. Ms. Nelson is certainly handy enough.

In the last decade, while her mother was still alive, Ms. Nelson's father returned to the house, too, coming for a few weeks every summer. ''My mother was a serious cook, she'd make baby back ribs or lamb, the sort of meal with one starch and the vegetables, and there were always leftovers,'' Ms. Nelson said. ''And my father, the wheatgrass drinker, would get up in the night and eat those leftovers.''

After more than half a century and four children together, these things happen. A big house, like a long life, can accommodate many contradictions.

Published: 07 - 03 - 2005 , Late Edition - Final , Section 11 , Column 1 , Page 1