Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [106]
Jannette Vanderhoop once walked around Martha’s Vineyard. It took her three September days, and she didn’t do it for fun; she could feel the coming autumn—could feel even the distant winter leaning in—and she suddenly wanted to walk. The Vineyard’s shore is sliding sand and cobblestone, left behind during the island’s glacial genesis. Both make for uncertain footing. “I don’t think people are meant to walk for twelve hours a day,” Jannette says now. “Especially with one foot lower than the other the whole time. I love the island, but it can get constraining.” At night she camped on the beaches; as she walked, she watched the sea, as though she were pacing a pen.
Jannette, a member of the island’s Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe, has enough energy that I’m entirely unsurprised by her walk. She writes poetry; she makes dolls, traditional clothing, wampum necklaces, leather pouches, and natural and recycled art. She’s putting the final touches on a modern fable. She’s thinking about a curatorial degree; she’s considering a cross-country road trip with her cat. When I arrive on the Vineyard in mid-October, it’s clear that much of it closes down after Columbus Day; signs read LAST DAY—THANK YOU! or SEE YOU NEXT YEAR. To fill the time, Jannette—a few years out of college, with a tied-back bundle of blond dreadlocks—goes to puppet shows, takes the tour of old haunted houses, whatever, and, at least that once, the island’s nonnegotiable borders had her walking the edge of the ocean.
Her first children’s book (“The first of many,” she says) is called Cranberry Day. Cranberry Day is why I’m on the Vineyard; it’s a holiday for the island’s Wampanoag, most of whom live near the western-most promontory of Aquinnah (it, and the dramatic gray, red, and orange Aquinnah cliffs, were called Gay Head until the tribe restored the original name). On Cranberry Day many Aquinnah Wampanoag go out to the tribe’s common lands, where they gather cranberries and beach plums and wild cherries that grow in low bogs amid the sand dunes. It’s one of the year’s last harvests and also a time of homecoming; the tribe has more than a thousand members, many of whom return each year to join the three hundred or so still living on the island (the Wampanoag name is Noepe, or “dry land”).
Jannette’s book follows Chris Hawksler, a Wampanoag fifth-grader, as he interviews a tribal elder to learn more about the history of Cranberry Day and how it has changed through the generations. “Never assume that a native child knows his culture—or the history behind it, at least,” Jannette says. “That’s just a stereotype.” Before Chris interviews an elder, he knows only that on Cranberry Day (a school holiday for the tribe’s children) he goes out to the common lands with his family, where they gather fruit, share food with family and neighbors, and gather for drumming that lets him feel, in his feet, what the drummers say is the heartbeat of Mother Earth.
The cranberry harvest once lasted from three days to as long as a week, with many families riding oxcarts to the common lands and camping among the surrounding dunes. It was particularly important for the tribe’s poor; in 1842, when crooked land deals had reduced Wampanoag ownership to Aquinnah, Christiantown, and Chappaquiddick, the cranberries were said to provide “a Staple means of support through the winter” for “the most Indigent of the Women and Children.” That year the Aquinnah Wampanoag asked the state legislature to take action against the “thoughtless White Neighbors” who had been gathering berries without permission, thus harming the tribe’s “means of a living and supporting [its] poor.” Within a few years, the tribe was levying fines on any nonmembers who took cranberries before the season had been open for ten days.
Back then much of the common lands consisted of a single huge bog among the dunes. Cranberries do best in acidic, wet—but not constantly soaked—soil; peat moss is ideal, and the main bog had plenty of it. Sand from the dunes blew over the vines, strengthening their roots;