Sometimes at night I’m awakened from a dark foreboding nightmare, not sure of where I am in the world. Shaken and unmoored, eventually I’m calmed by familiar shadows, my dog sleeping at my feet, his breathing even and steady, and a gradual awareness that I’m home, in my own bed, the monsters are not coming for me. Less than a month has passed since the presidential inaugeration. Shadows and uncertainty lurk even in daylight, knowing that my favorite news show won’t bring hope or solace. Our TV sits on the kitchen counter, a blank screen, voices waiting behind the void to tell me about events and people too jarring to process.

I prepare breakfast for my 96-year-old mother. She still reads the news voraciously, the New York Times, The LA Times. We both relish the Vineyard Gazette when it arrives in our Venice, California mailbox a week later than publication. Vineyard news is not all gloom and doom. Good news buoys us, like the support Vineyarders extended to 49 Venezuelan immigrants when the governor of Florida shipped them to our Island. Suzanne dePasse being celebrated at a lovely Harbor View fete for her long overdue induction in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. And my mother’s favorite this year, elementary school students improving their reading skills by reading aloud to Molly, a great Pyrenees therapy dog lying on a blanket in the classroom.

There was other good news, a play I’d written, Miss Maybelline’s Nocturnal Flights of Fancy was produced by the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse, (supported with development funds from the Martha’s Vineyard Community Foundation). Miss Maybelline is a fictitious Oak Bluffs character, a woman of color, 100 years old, based on the lives of my mother and her friends of 40 years.

Jeanna Shepard

Jeanna Shepard

Pondering a possible future life for Miss Maybelline’s Nocturnal Flights of Fancy, MJ Bruder Munafo, artistic director of the playhouse, shared written comments and critique from the theatre audience. One wondered whether a broader audience for the play existed, theatre-goers who had never been to Martha’s Vineyard. Could they relate to the Vineyard’s history and culture?

In the process of writing this play, I had never considered that question. Which leads me to another question, asked by those who have yet to cross the waters to discover for themselves: “What’s so special about Martha’s Vineyard?” It is a question I’m sure that those of us lucky enough to call the Vineyard home, have been asked as well.

It’s hard to sum up pleasures too numerous, various and deeply rooted in specificity to explain simply. But one thing does stand out, my love for the Vineyard has much to do with my experience as an African American woman — a label I have often pushed back against throughout my whole life, being categorized, put in a slot, defined by sex and race alone, especially in my professional life as an artist and writer.

But when thinking about the Vineyard, my love of this place seems to have everything to do with color. Here, away from the mainland, I feel completely safe, at home. Not like an outsider, or “the other” but an integral part of the community, interwoven in the fabric of the Island and most particularly the part of the Island that I call home: Oak Bluffs.

Jeanna Shepard

Jeanna Shepard

Here, it seems that skin color doesn’t have a stigma attached to it. I’ve never given my son, who grew up here every summer since he was six years old, “the talk,” a lecture about “driving while Black” on the Island. Here, I could feed him breakfast and shoo him off to play with his friends, never wondering if he would return at night trembling after an encounter with the police. Here, away from Los Angeles, he could be free to grow up without looking over his shoulder, second guessing his steps or having to adopt a subservient behavior.

Yet there is no denying that incidents of hatred and bias have occurred here — reminders that this place is not without evidence of the systematic racism and attitudes ingrained in the foundation of our nation. They do not magically vanish in the waters of the Sound when we sail here.

In Miss Maybelline’s Nocturnal Flights of Fancy I wrote about the purge of African American homeowners from the Island’s fairytale like Campgrounds. In the 1880’s, its governing body purged Black and Wampanoag property owners, ordering them to move to the backside, then the fringes of the campgrounds — eventually, forcing them to lift houses from their foundations and carry them across Duke’s County Road, uphill to School street.

Miss Maybelline relates this story in one of her flights of fancy. Dwelling not so much on the racist deed itself, but on the community that was forged on the periphery, the love and bonds that exist today.

To my knowledge that kind of egregious segregation has not occurred here since. Even so, Blacks still cleave together clannishly, as do other cultures on the Island. But interwoven between these pockets of cultural familiarity is a sense of diversity and harmony, racial and cultural intersections, whether intentional or by happenstance, an atmosphere of inclusion and intermingling. It feels like a small microcosm of what is possible, on our narrow sliver of Island, 23 miles long, off the coast of America.

There’s a magic formula in writing that has to do with universality, the quality of being shared by all people in the world. It’s a mysterious phenomena, difficult to explain in theoretical or logical terms, “the more specific, the more universal.” It works by honing in on the details of one specific life, ideas, outlook and place in the world.

Somehow, by depicting one person’s unique set of particulars the human experience becomes relatable to everyone. A good example of this is when I share that the first TV script I ever sold was for Little House on The Prairie. The reaction from a cross section of people, all ages, races, ethnicities and walks in life is surprisingly similar. There is a universal acceptance and appreciation of a show that centered on white family’s experiences in Minnesota in the 1890’s, told mostly from the point of view of a young white girl with a distinctive personality. The transcendence of her specific particulars, the relatability of a character so unlike contemporary viewers, never ceases to amaze me — and is perhaps, the reason I plunged right ahead with setting Miss Maybelline on paper. It gives me hope that there will be life for the play not in spite of the fact that it portrays life on Martha’s Vineyard, but because of it.

When I first started out as a writer, there were no courses or how-to books about becoming a screenwriter. I had to look to writers who had come before me for a roadmap. I discovered that a scarce number of women had made a living writing, fewer still of color. But here on Martha’s Vineyard, to my amazement, there existed two female authors, Dorothy West and Lillian Hellman, who had paved the way. They became my role models. Their existence instilled in me the hope that I could do the same.

If in order to “be it” you first must “see it,” then hope exists in the beacon of light reaching out to America from Martha’s Vineyard. We are the example to those who may have given up on values of goodness, decency and just plain “getting along.” If this is the place that Black folks escape to feel safe in the world, a model of inclusivity and acceptance, then we must be doing something right.

I’m heartened and reminded that I don’t have to turn on my TV to get a message of hope for the future. I simply have to look around, appreciate what exists here, the rare specificity of our way of life on the Island. TV pundits and newscasters don’t have to tell me what I already know. Hope does exist. We simply have to honor our Island, respect its values, support its institutions and give back what it has given us. I know by example, our specifics, our reality, can be reflected in the world.

Kathleen McGhee-Anderson lives in Oak Bluffs and Venice, California.