Summer in the Black Hamptons: a refuge of freedom and joy

Trymaine Lee: During the summers of my childhood in South Jersey, when the sun was bright and high, there were only a few ways to escape the heat. There was the ice cream man, but that was just a momentary fix. And of course, there was the log flume at Clementon Park, our rinky little budget amusement park, which was pure, unadulterated, chaotic bliss, but could be a bit pricey for all of us.

But the one place I remember most fondly was Atsion Lake. Tucked in the Pine Barrens, it was a lake filled with dark tea-colored water, with mushy patches and sharp sticks beneath your toes, which you couldn't even see. Going to Atsion Lake was a treat for those of us who didn't have money for plane rides or rich relatives to send for us. At Atsion, you didn't even pay per person to get in. You paid per car.

So we pile in, drive the 20 minutes listening to WDAS, the local soul and R&B station on the radio. Hand over a few bucks when we arrived and the day was ours. Sandwiches in baggies, sour cream and onion chips, cheap soda from Acme in the cooler, you'd see your neighbors, your cousins, kids from school and most of us wading in that cool, ugly, amazing water until the sun went down, were black. And it was beautiful.

In some ways, looking back, I can't help but think we were escaping more than the summer sun. We were finding the freedom to just be.

In a world where being black and free are not always congruent, black folks in America have always found ways of escaping the strictures of this country's invisible and sometimes geographic racial boundaries. And there are few more vivid illustrations of that escapism than our summer traditions.

Some were sent back down south to visit relatives. Others took road trips along well-worn paths to places like Atsion Lake. Still others created havens that would draw on more than just black tourists who were running from the heat of summer and the heat of racism. Black people have sought and built whole towns and resorts that became beacons of black self-sufficiency and independence, where families could swim and boat and fish and be their full selves in peace.

Teachers and artists, businessmen and women, working and middle-class folks, flocked to places with names like Idlewild in Michigan, Highland Beach in Maryland, Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts and Bruce's Beach in California. These black Edens drew generations of upwardly mobile black people who were shut out of white America during much of the 20th century.

Today, just a few of these communities remain predominantly black, if they remain at all. They've been done in by desegregation, the evolving whims of a younger generation of black families, and more recently, gentrification. But some of these havens have survived.

William Pickens: The tension was removed. It was friendship and fun, and games and solidarity. We stayed strong and we still are strong.

Lee: I'm Trymaine Lee. And this is Into America.

Today, with summertime upon us, we explore the traditions and legacy of summering while black in one of the last and shrinking black beach communities in the United States, an historic enclave in Sag Harbor on Long Island.

Pickens: It was unusual for African-Americans to find a place near the water or on the water.

Lee: William Pickens III spent almost his entire life going to Sag Harbor in the summers, first as a kid, then taking his own family out there for the season.

What age did you start going out there for the summers?

Pickens: Ten, I was ten.

Lee: Ten years old.

Pickens: And I'm almost 85. So I came out here at a tender age.

Lee: When he retired, he decided to live out there full-time.

Pickens: So I've been here 20 years. I was the first one in my family to retire here.

Lee: I met Mr. Pickens back in 2011 when I wrote a story about Sag Harbor for The Huffington Post. So I called him back up to talk about the importance of this place, its history, and his experience growing up in the Black Hamptons.

Pickens: I had an aunt who had a home here that she built in 1908.

Lee: Wow.

Pickens: And I came out, in lieu of going to camp in the '40s, I came to Sag Harbor. I didn't like camp, too regimented. So I came out here where I could fish and swim and run and bike and all that stuff.

Lee: So with all that initial appeal, you have to imagine 1908, America was a different place, but black folks were finding their way out there. What was the appeal?

Pickens: Well, it was bucolic, a country setting, on the water. So she liked it and heard about it and came out and bought a little house with outdoor plumbing, not inside plumbing. We had an outhouse.

Lee: That's old school, huh?

Pickens: Yeah, that was old school. But that was how our family first came to Sag Harbor 113 years ago.

Lee: Wow. And so you all were still traveling from New York, from the city?

Pickens: Yeah, from our home in Brooklyn. We had a townhouse in Brooklyn. And if the whole family was coming out, my mother would prepare lunch, sandwiches and put it in ice, put it on ice from the icebox. If you didn't have a refrigerator, you had an ice box and we would load the car. We had a Buick and dad would drive.

And it was a long trip in those days. You didn't have all these super highways. It was a four-hour, five-hour trip and there were only gas stations every 40 or 50 miles, so.

Lee: Wow.

Pickens: And then we’d get to Sag Harbor and we'd unpack the car and go to our own, by then we had our own home in 1950. So we unloaded and began to enjoy the wonders of Sag Harbor as a family. It was country.

Lee: Yeah.

Pickens: Far different than Brooklyn. You went from concrete to sand and dirt and noise to quiet. There was an enormous difference in the quality of life, the space and the clean air and the stars at night. In Brooklyn, you had smoke coming out of chimneys and you never saw the stars. But here, they were clarion clear. And you could see the Betegeuse, the Little Dipper and the Big Dipper. You couldn't see them in New York.

Lee: Yeah.

Pickens: But you could see him out here in Sag Harbor. And at one point, I knew all the names of all of the stars. But that was years ago when my mind was a lot sharper. For me, it was a great change from Brooklyn and I loved it.

Lee: How often would you all go out there?

Pickens: Well, I came out in the summers in those days. No one lived here year round, except the Shinnecock and Montauket families pretty much. But for African-American families, year-round existence wasn't possible then. So it was a summer retreat, Memorial Day to Labor Day.

Lee: Yeah.

Pickens: And that 90-day period was when you had family and friends come out and that's how we did Sag Harbor. And then one day in the '50s, some guy named Colin Powell showed up from the Bronx and we became friends. And we both went into service later in our lives and he stayed and did pretty well.

Lee: He did all right himself. I think he did all right.

Pickens: Cole did okay.

Lee: And what were some of the summer traditions that your family would take part in?

Pickens: Well, we rode our bikes. We had BB guns. We swam a lot. I hit the beach, played baseball. Remember that Jackie Robinson had just joined the Dodgers, so all the black kids out here and the Indian kids, the Shinnecocks and Montauket, we're all playing baseball thinking we can be the next Jackie Robinson.

Lee: That's amazing.

Pickens: There were bicycle races, this kind of thing. It was very simple. Nothing too elegant or strategic, but fun. And then there were some fishing trips. My father bought a boat and he'd like to go fishing for porgies and this kind of thing.

And adventure, we would hide and seek, the kids would play hide and seek and all the children's games that we brought out from Brooklyn and the Bronx, put Johnny-on-the-Pony and ringolevio. We played those games out here. It was fun in the woodlands, because you could hide better than you can in the tenements of Brooklyn.

Kids had more freedom. You weren't monitored 24/7. And you learn a lot about yourself and your friends. There was more free time or your own time and you learned how to do things and how to experiment. If you didn't feel like you could do something in Brooklyn, you could try it out here. And it helped us all to grow into manhood.

Lee: It sounds like it was a means to escape the hubbub of the city and city life, but in many ways escaping racism and the gaze of white folks where black people would come together and be who we are together. Is that accurate?

Pickens: Well, it removed the racial tension that is omnipresent in America where white resentment works its way into your daily living. Here, a community of people who knew each other, had gone to college together, had worked together and lived together in Queens, or Brooklyn, or New Jersey or Connecticut.

So we did not have the police looking at us with askance and saying, "We don't really trust you guys, you're newcomers. We're going keep an eye on you." We didn't have that here.

We did not have the daily tension of the white power structure looking at us over our shoulder, monitoring our behavior, didn't have that. We were a sort of a closed society here where our mores and folkways were ours. They weren't imposed on us. They were generated by us. Big difference, big difference.

Lee: Why were communities like these in Sag Harbor safe spaces for black people?

Pickens: Well, back then, the town which was 99 percent white, they were workmen in town, the plumbers and the architects and you name it, gas providers. And our relationship became interesting because they needed our money because the war had ended and this town was struggling financially. And black folks injected a lot of cash into this society. So our relationship was fine, but there wasn't social intercourse, though.

It was the African-American families all sort of knew each other. There were just 12 of us at one point, 12 families here in Sag Harbor Hills, but we all knew each other, including my grade school principal. He was here, much to my chagrin. I thought I’d left him in Brooklyn, but he bought a house right in front of ours, so.

Lee: What did it mean to look and see this community, this burgeoning community of hardworking, industrious, beautiful black people?

Pickens: Well, it was interesting because you had judges and lawyers and doctors and dentists, and you had bus drivers, you had taxi drivers. We didn't have any differentiation among professionals versus the non-professionals. We were friends and family and your title did not matter. It did not matter. Our first house guest was Langston Hughes.

Lee: That's amazing.

Pickens: The great writer and poet. He was my father's roommate in college and he came here in 1952 and read some poems.

Lee: Was he just Langston, a family friend, he's Langston?

Pickens: Yeah, I call him uncle Langston. He and my mother were very tight because they had met in I’d say, 1925 when he was a student and she encouraged him in poetry. She would write him and say, "You should publish this." And he wrote back, and I have these letters, he wrote back, "Oh, I'm not famous." Yeah.

She would cajole him and encourage him. And then when he told my father that he had met this attractive woman in Philadelphia, my dad sought her out and finally married her.

Lee: Wait, hold on, let's stop the story right here. So, Langston Hughes was the matchmaker for your parents?

Pickens: Yeah, Langston Hughes went back and told his roommate that there was this fox in Philadelphia.

Lee: You got to meet her.

Pickens: And you got to meet her and pop met her and he wanted to marry her, but his father said you got to finish law school first before. He said, I don't know if I can leave her out there available. I'd better marry her, so.

Lee: Better hurry up.

Pickens: So they made a deal. He married her in 1930 while he was still a freshman in law school. He wasn’t going to wait until graduation in 1932. He said, oh.

Lee: No, there's a fox out there.

Pickens: Hello. So anyway, but Langston was instrumental in putting them together.

Lee: Mr. Pickens, when all this is going on, Colin Powell is a friend of yours. You got uncle Langston, did you realize then even as a child that there was something special about where you all were?

Pickens: I took it as sort of ordinary because they were my parents' friends and colleagues. They weren't celebrities. But we never thought that this was such a super special place that we were so different from our friends back in Brooklyn.

Lee: Wow. When did this start to grow?

Pickens: Well, it grew in the '60s. It started growing in the late '60s. It was during July of 1962, I had just spent three years in Japan. I came back as a first lieutenant in the Air Force and wasn't thinking about getting married. I was thinking about coming back and set up my bachelor pad.

Lee: I'm right with you.

Pickens: It was 1962 that I spotted some beautiful girl walking up the beach in an orange bathing suit.

Lee: You can still see the color, you can still see it now.

Pickens: Yeah, I can see and she had shades on and she was beautifully tanned. And I said to one of my old friends, a young lady who hadn't seen me a while, I said, "Who that?" And she said, "That's Pat Brannon." I said, "Where does she live?" "Oh, she's from way down there in Nineveh."

I said, "Well, introduce me to her." She said, "Oh no, you go introduce yourself, right?" So I did. And once I confronted her and she's going along to work, I went to her, introduced myself and said, "How about a movie date?" And that was it.

Lee: Mm-hm.

Pickens: So it was a partnership that was formed right here at the water's edge in Sag Harbor. So I owe a lot to Sag Harbor.

Lee: I will say it's amazing how much your life is kind of intertwined and tangled with Sag Harbor.

Pickens: Yes.

Lee: You met your wife there, your friends.

Pickens: Not Brooklyn.

Lee: Right.

Pickens: At Sag Harbor. And I'm sitting there, you know, drinking a beer and I said, "Who that?" And I found out who that was.

Lee: Yes.

Pickens: And I married her.

Lee: Wow.

Pickens: And we were married for 51 years.

Lee: Wow.

Pickens: So, we'd be married 57 if she’d lived.

Lee: You became an adult and married and had your kids out there. What is some of the memories you had of bringing your kids out there?

Pickens: Well, it was wonderful because our first born was a daughter, Pam, and she had her first birthday party here and her second birthday party here. She’s had a party almost, because she was born June 1st, so we celebrate in Sag Harbor routinely her birthday.

And my sons came out here when they were born and have enjoyed growing up out here. This is a part of their life that they don't want to give up. It's central to their being.

Lee: After the break, Mr. Pickens talks about the origins of the black community in Sag Harbor. And we also hear from his son, John. Stick with us.

We're back with William Pickens.

Stepping back a little bit and go further back in history, obviously you mentioned the ‘60’s, the black communities in Sag Harbor were growing, right? You all were out there a bunch. But what about black folks in Sag Harbor, period, like how did we first get out there and when?

Pickens: Because of the whaling industry.

Whaling was the economic arm of Sag Harbor in the 1830’s. You needed to have men who would be willing to go for a year and a half away from America to whale, to go out to the Pacific. They had to go around South America. There was no Panama Canal, so when you signed on a ship here, a few blacks, some Africans, Cape Verde Islands, from Harlem, from Brooklyn, a token number, became shipmates on these whaling craft. And they would be gone for 18 months.

So really the first African presence in Sag Harbor. So you're going back to the 19th century. But by 1900, John Hope, the great scholar from Georgia, his wife went from Savannah, Georgia to Sag Harbor by boat, she was going to live in New York, but she got off the boat in Sag Harbor and liked it so much that she rented a room and then built a house.

That's how the middle class black folk and the university folk heard about Sag Harbor, John Hope, the great scholar. And then my aunt who was a teacher heard about it, and they were friends, she was friendly with this woman, Ms. Hope, because she had taught at Tuskegee and gave her the idea, "Well, come on out," right?

So it started very small. It wasn't until the '30s that more African-Americans came to Sag Harbor and there was a schoolteacher who taught at Brooklyn Technical High school and he came out and built four or five little cottages for his friends and he rented them out. And that started more volume of coming to Sag Harbor back in the '30’s. And the depression was on. So folks weren’t taking fancy vacations.

Lee: Right. Right.

Pickens: But Sag Harbor afforded you a fishing opportunity and kept trying coming out by train and boat to check it out. But you weren't buying property then, property was not for sale. That didn't happen until after World War II.

Lee: Wow.

Pickens: When all this land became available.

Lee: So Sag Harbor as we understand it is on Long Island. But kind of talk to us about the black beach communities within Sag Harbor.

Pickens: Well, there are three beachfront communities.

Lee: Mm-hm.

Pickens: Azurest which was the first one, that was founded in 1947 by two sisters. And it all started very innocently after World War II that all this land was available and the people who owned it needed money.

Sag Harbor Hills then came along, the owners here, this family from Virginia, they owned all this property that we have here now and he thought, "Okay, I'll do what they're doing in Azurest and find a lot of willing customers if the price is right who are African-American."

So that's how this happened. And Nineveh was, the impulse of Nineveh came through my father-in-law who helped sell the lots to all his friends, Nineveh Beach, "Give me 400, 500 bucks and we can get ourselves some property."

Lee: Wow.

Pickens: And they did. The thing that made this different was that you could own the waterfront. You couldn't do that in Oak Bluffs or Idlewild.

But here, you could own the bay front, you can actually own property that would guard against intrusions on the beach. That was the fundamental difference. And that's why the beachfront lots went really fast because the men and women recognized that, "Well here's a glorious opportunity." We had our own beach and that was a big difference. Beachfront ownership.

Lee: Have folks in the community been able to hold on to that sense? Has it changed at all?

Pickens: Well, it's changed a little bit. But I think there's a determination now that the families who can stay here will stay here.

Because to replace this is almost impossible. It was wonderfully accessible for us. But now it's accessible to everybody. And all we can do is guard against the encroachment by staying here and paying our bills, paying our taxes, improving our properties, that's the only way we're going to survive this.

Lee: What percentage of your neighbors are black now or actually what percentage of your neighbors are white now? Has the demographics of the place changed dramatically?

Pickens: Well it's changed. And in one community, in one of the communities it's 55-45 now white, others at 70-30. So that's about it, 70-30.

Lee: Wow. Yes.

Pickens: But one community has gone over that.

Lee: The stakes are that high though. If you don't hold on to it, it will be gone forever?

Pickens: Oh, it be gone forever. Once it's gone, forget it.

Lee: Hmm.

Pickens: To buy back, forget it. If you had a house for $100,000, now it's going to cost you $3 million to buy it back.

Lee: Wow.

Pickens: I mean, that's the economics of the day.

Lee: Yeah.

Pickens: And that's the threat. That's a threat. There was no interest from the larger community until maybe 25 years ago.

Lee: Hmm.

Pickens: They would drive by, never turn off the highway to see what was going on over here.

Lee: Right.

Pickens: This was a black enclave. Maybe they thought it was dangerous or maybe they thought it was a waste of time. But it wasn't until the mid '90’s that the white population began to look at Sag Harbor as an investment opportunity. So it's about 25 years. But the first 50, hey, no problem.

Lee: Hmm. You know, Mr. Pickens, I want to ask you this, your family has been there for so long, and I wonder when you reflect on it all, what your hope is for your family's legacy in Sag Harbor?

Pickens: Well, first of all, I want it to continue. I'd like my children, grandchildren to continue to enjoy this place because it is so special and accessible.

I do have some worries about the future. I feel attached to this place and my children are attached to this place. And that attachment is so strong that I'm sure they will resist as long and as hard as they can of vacating this land. My hope is that my great, great, great grandchildren will have a shot at this place. And I just have one grandchild, right?

Lee: Yes. Oh, they got to get to work. John, you got to get to work.

Pickens: Hello. Hello.

Lee: Is he right there? Is John right there?

Pickens: Yes, Johnny’s here.

Lee: Mr. Pickens' son, John, was sitting next to him, helping him with the recording. I met John on the beach in Sag Harbor 10 years ago. He's the one who hooked me up with his dad. So I got him in on the conversation.

John Pickens: What's up, Trymaine?

Lee: What's up, brother? How are you feeling, man?

J. Pickens: Hanging in there.

Lee: Yes. Well, I want to ask you, man, obviously talking to your father about the legacy of your family out there, is it pressure on you and your family?

J. Pickens: It's all the pressure. I don't have any kids. I don't have a wife. Like this man made miracles out here literally. Found his wife and made a life and still had Brooklyn, still had Queens, still had Harlem.

Lee: Hmm.

J. Pickens: In existence. And this.

Lee: Yes. Hmm.

J. Pickens: So now that we're here, we're just trying to still show that it's alive and a living place. It's not a dying place. You don't come here to die, you come here to live.

Lee: Yes. Hmm.

J. Pickens: You come here to see your friends, you come here to run outside, you come here to take your shoes off, you come here to let your dogs run.

Lee: Hmm.

J. Pickens: You don't come to hide, you come here to thrive.

Lee: When you think about your generation, the next generation, are you concerned that folks will sell off and folks will look for the money and not be able to hold on to it? Is there a real concern?

J. Pickens: You have something like that. But then you have other generations where their families are working hard to keep this. See, it's different for us because it didn't cost us.

Lee: Mm-hmm.

J. Pickens: This was already given to us. We just had to maintain it. And that's a cost in itself. But for us, it's maintaining our own piece of life and our own piece of liberty and our own piece of justice and this is where we found it and this is where we've carved it out for everyone else.

So you don't have to come in and fight to earn these things because the respect is already understood. The thing about these keys, they don't change if you don't change them. The locks stay the same. I still have the key that my grandma had to the door because it's the same key and the same lock.

Lee: Wow. Yeah. So how has growing up out there changed you?

J. Pickens: Well it’s changed me and in that it's just given me a well-rounded experience.

Lee: Hmm.

J. Pickens: I mean, it might be something more of a privilege, but it's an experience. It's like being able to come out and see your neighbors and know your neighbors, but how your neighbors know and see you.

Lee: Yeah.

J. Pickens: They have to see you out on that water enjoying it. They have to see you driving down the beach to know that you're here enjoying all rights and privileges.

Lee: Mm-hmm. All of them.

J. Pickens: You're not excluded from anything.

Pickens: Mm-hmm.

Lee: Mm-hmm.

J. Pickens: The door is open and the love is real and this is God's country. We are still in God's country. Without freedom, there is no joy. And we have found joy and freedom.

Lee: Mr. Pickens, what's it like when you hear your son John describe his experience and how much it’s meant to him, what does it mean when you hear him speak about this community that you helped kind of nurture and build?

Pickens: Well, it means that it worked.

Lee: He-he.

Pickens: It mean that the time and effort we put in to establish this as a viable community over the last seven decades, that that feeling has emerged in our children and grandchildren, that boy, we are lucky. We're pretty lucky to have this in our lives and we have to figure out a way to preserve it and nurture it. And so when I hear my son John extol the virtues of this place, I smile, because I know.

Archival Recording: I know I'm not alone in missing that man. I wasn’t alone in celebrating that man. Being here to be. Being able to show his strength and his wisdom.

That man used to get up every morning just to go pick up sticks in the yard. Most people get up, they call a landscaper and complain about it and say, "You need to do this and do that or do this." This man got up and did it himself. He was an amazingly humble and quiet man.

But his friendships and his stories and his insane ability to be witty and precise and just thoughtful and compassionate for everyone he encountered. And together, we had a magnificent existence, my father had a magnificent existence.

END