The warmth of cold-water ports

I’m writing from the last stop in our journey, a sweet hotel on the main drag in Port Jefferson, NY, a small village nestled against a harbor that opens to Long Island Sound.  

The local literature refers to Port Jefferson as a “charming village,” and the description fits on one level. Port Jeff, as the locals call it, has the requisite narrow roads, “quaint” (if huge!) Victorian houses, and lots of mom-and-pop shops (mostly catering, it appears, to tourists). It also hosts an annual Charles Dickens weekend in early December featuring a charity ball (in the local community center) and shows by assorted local artists (community theater, singing groups, arts and crafts shows, etc.). The location is far enough away from the frantic, congested world of New York City to serve as a destination for weekends away, and compared with The City, it is definitely, at 7800 residents, a “village.” But it feels a bit artificial, this studied quaintness, and the prices definitely reflect an expectation that big bucks will be spent in its charming shops. Sure enough, the chamber of commerce tells us that after the demise of the main industry, “Port Jefferson reinvented itself as a vacation spot. The ferries brought visitors, and bathhouses opened around the harbor.”

Still, it really is a lovely setting, the hotel is flat-out cool (we’re in a third-floor room with gables), breakfast at the local coffeehouse/café was excellent, I enjoyed my walk through town and along the shore, and I am absolutely content to spend a few days in the village of Port Jeff.

But enough of the travel guide. It’s my morning walk I want to write about. I took a long stroll along the harbor shore, and en route, I encountered a number of interpretive signs that sketched the history of the industry for which the town was known in the 1800s and early 1900s: they built ships here. I always love this sort of information, love imagining what life was like in that era, in this place, for folks with differing stations in the village social system. Today, one bit of information in particular jumped out at me: The shipbuilding operation really surged when the local company was recruited by the US government to build ships during WWI.

The reason this was so salient to me has to do with a book I’ve been reading: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. Through the individual stories of a few people, this book tells the larger story of the “Great Migration” of millions of African Americans from the South to the North.

Starting in the late 19^th and continuing through the mid-20^th century, they left to escape Jim Crow and to find decent work in northern cities—especially along the east coast (Washington DC, NYC, Philadelphia), in the Midwest (Chicago, Detroit), and on the west coast (Los Angeles, Oakland). “The Great Migration,” author Isabel Wilkerson writes, “would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched.”

“Its imprint is everywhere in urban life. The configuration of the cities as we know them, the social geography of black and white neighborhoods, the spread of the housing projects as well as the rise of a well-scrubbed black middle class, along with the alternating waves of white flight and suburbanization—all of these grew, directly or indirectly, from the response of everyone touched by the Great Migration.”

A section I read just last night explains that the greatest mass movement occurred when folks had something to move to as well as something to escape from. That something was jobs, and the precipitating event was WWI. The nation badly needed workers to operate the industries that were necessary for the war effort. But the traditional source of cheap labor in the North—namely immigrants—slowed by over 90% during the war because immigration was largely halted. So companies seeking cheap labor looked to the other group who had always worked for paltry wages: African Americans. They sent recruiters south, where they (often secretly) planted the idea that jobs were plentiful in the North, workers were needed for the war effort, and “Negroes” would be welcome there. It worked.

So now you get the connection between my book and my walk. Port Jeff must have been even smaller in the early 1900s, and many local folks were likely off to war or to war-related jobs in larger cities. Who was left to build ships? Did the local shipbuilding company recruit Blacks from the South? Might Blacks have sought “a warmer sun” in this cold-water port? Would they even be drawn to a “charming village” on the north shore of Long Island? Maybe not. Most folks who moved north for jobs sought out locations where they already knew people—family or friends who had come before—and where they had connections. Chances are slim that there would be such communities in Port Jefferson. But, I thought to myself, maybe … I searched for any indication in the interpretive signs and photos, but saw no recognizable African American presence.

All of this led me to reflect, as I walked, on the distribution of people by “race,” what Wilkerson called “the social geography of black and white.” When we live apart, located in and identified with particular neighborhoods, the notion that we are different is constantly reinforced. Black people are the ones who live over there, down there, white folks think. Whites live over here, up here. Clearly, we conclude, they are different from us in ways that matter. “Race” serves to explain that difference.

While we were in Maryland last week, we went to the Smithsonian to see a new exhibit on human evolution. It was a great exhibition, really informative, with lots of hands-on elements and very accessible explanations of all sorts of stuff. The science of human evolution made such great sense as presented here. As I walked through this exhibit, I was struck by how carefully it presented and reinforced the fact that all humans are the same species, that there is no such thing as “race,” that about 99.9% of genetic material is identical in all humans. And yet, we have all learned to believe, at some level, that race is real. I belong to one race, whereas some other people belong to different races. Even if we can say that the “races” are equal, at some gut level, we still believe (because we’ve been so well taught) that race exists as a defining characteristic. And to some degree, we all enact that belief in our lives.

Not surprisingly, Blacks in the Jim Crow South wanted to escape from the daily oppression that shaped their lives. They wanted to experience, in the words of poet Richard Wright, “the warmth of other suns.” Yet, their migration didn’t end their oppression. Racism persisted, if in different forms, in the North. It was a different sun, but not necessarily a warm one. Race was still assumed to exist, and differences between races were not questioned by most folks—certainly not by the US government, which still sorted military enlistees according to “race.” If Black people came to Port Jefferson to build ships during WWI, they almost certainly wouldn’t have been welcomed into the social scene that now holds a Charles Dickens ball each December. It is likely that the established residents would have lived apart from the new ones arriving to work in the shipyards. As if they were different beings, different races. 

The village publicity is silent on the question of African Americans’ presence at any point. Yet census data cited in Wikipedia’s discussion of Port Jefferson indicate that 18.7% of the population was African American in 2000. When did they come and why? And where are they in this apparently white village? What is the geography of black and white here, and when was it established? On the other hand, data from the “city data” site on Port Jeff show a much lower proportion: 1.5% African Americans. No wonder they seem scarce. But why this discrepancy? Inquiring minds want to know!

It’s an odd confluence of experiences: the book, the story of local shipbuilding during WWI, and the Smithsonian exhibit. Combine these with my recent posting about the meaning of Thanksgiving, and you have a raft of convoluted reflections floating through my mind on this cloudy day in this sweet hotel in the charming village of Port Jefferson.

Ah, life is so complex.