|
NOTE DE L'ÉDITEUR
: For those who would like to know what it was like growing up on the
island of Martha's Vineyard in the 1880s and '90s, these verbatim
recollections of the four Eldridge sisters will be a treasrure to read
and savor. In recent years « The Vineyard »,
seven miles from the Massachusetts mainland, has been one of America's
most popular summer places for artists, writers, and other creative
people — as well as for vacationners and sailing folk in general.
The daughters who tell of the island's
past are Nina, Mary, Ruth and Gratia, born between 1878 and 1885
in Vineyard Haven. The « Captain », their
father, was a freethinking visionary, teeming with ideas, among
them publishing charts and a Tidebook that continues as a family
enterprise to this day. Their Ohio-born mother was an activist
who took for granted that she, a woman, was a person as much as
any man — an early suffragette. The upbringing of the
girls was healthy and purposeful, full to overflowing with events
and excitements. As one of them said about their evening jaunts
to Cottage City (now Oak Bluffs) — all of three
miles away — « anything and everything might
happen at any moment ».
A great deal did happen, too, without benefit of television, movies,
automobiles, electricity, and the many other props on which existence
today seems to lean and depend. For one thing, Vineyard Haven was then
an important port-of-call on the New England coast, with a harbor where
as many as 35,000 seagoing vessels might drop anchor in a year. And
their crews inevitably stopped in the Captain's chandlery for whatever
they might need, from rope and lanterns to newspapers and mail, and, of
course, the charts and Tidebook to assure them of safe navigation
through New England waters. The world, in a sense, journeyed to their
door.
Fortunately, the girls did not forget what it was like, and, though
three of them are now gone, they wrote or tape-recorded these
reminiscences of a time and an environment that embodied qualities and
values we view today with nostalgia — and perhaps some regret
that it cannot still be a little like that.
[…]
The narrative has been skillfully edited, with interpolations and an
afterword […] by Eliot Eldridge Macy, son of the second sister,
Mary, and himself a longtime resident of the island. Photographs of the
family from the period, and detailed maps of Vineyard Haven as it was
then enhance the graphic vividness of this memorable book.
|
| EXTRAIT |
I
remember our first visit to the general store [at Menemsha] when we saw
several people sitting around not making a sound, only smiling, just
smiling away. It was awhile before we realized they were deaf and
dumb 1. At that time there werre seventeen
deaf-and-dumb people at Menemsha. They were born there and mostly
related. Interestingly, the deafness and dumbness has died out. The
same families are there, but none of the members is deaf and dumb. Once
we were walking to the center by the road, which was longer, and a man
picked us up. Both his mother and father had been deaf and dumb. He
made noises to his horse, the strangest noises you ever heard.
☐ p. 110
|
|
|
