Page 40 of A Vineyard Celebration

The four of them sat down to dinner. Wes felt jittery about what George would reveal about his family’s past, but he tried to stay in the moment. Karen discussed her work in the city’s arts council, and George talked about a newly discovered historical site outside of Providence. When Beatrice brought up the cardinal mailbox, Karen gushed with stories about their recent birding adventures in Scotland, and Beatrice suggested they all go birding together sometime. Wes watched her, mystified. Socializing was so easy for her. She slipped easily into any sort of company and any conversation.

After dinner, Karen suggested dessert, but Wes was too jittery.

“I think it’s time,” George said, guiding them to his study.

George’s study looked like something outside of time. Enormous gold-plaited frames hung paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; books lined nearly every wall; and he had two computers, a typewriter, and what looked to be hundreds of old notebooks. “I write everything down,” he said, “and then have to type everything up again. I love the old typewriter, but I'm afraid it’s not very practical these days.”

A glass box in the corner of the room protected Martha’s diary. Wes gazed down upon it, his fingers itchy. He wanted to pick it up and leaf through it, but he knew the paper was too fragile and would all come apart in his hands.

“It’s truly an extraordinary piece,” George said quietly.

“Quentin said the diary ends after she learns she’s pregnant,” Wes remembered. He was again struck with how easily he’d recalled that. “I’ve been dying to know what happened. If she stayed? Moved away? And what happened to her daughter?”

George gave him a soft smile that meant he’d learned everything. He sat at his desk and gestured for Wes and Beatrice to sit across from him.

“I’m friendly with a retired historian who lives on Nantucket Island,” he began. “He’s documented hundreds of letters, diaries, and photographs of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket from 1860 to 1880. I told him about Martha and the Sheridans and asked if anything in his extensive research had clued him in about what had happened. It took him more than a week to go through his organized files. But he found something that fit together well with Martha’s journal entries.

“Back in 1867, Matthew Sheridan was a thirty-two-year-old widower with four children. That’s quite young by today’s standards, of course. And the women on Martha’s Vineyard seemed to think so, too.

“My historian friend clued me in to a correspondence between a woman named Clarice and her daughter Nelly. Nelly was living in Boston as a young woman, and Clarice was trying everything to get Nelly to return to Martha’s Vineyard and start a family. Records indicate that Nelly was writing articles for a local paper in Boston at the time, which was a startling feat for a young woman back then.

“Clarice really liked Matthew Sheridan. He lived three properties away from where she’d raised Nelly and her boys, and she was friendly with all of the Sheridan children and even, for a while, Martha. She wrote about Martha in her letters to Nelly, explaining how strange it was that Martha had had to live in the basement all that time. Here’s a quote: ‘Martha seems just the same as the rest of us. She just wants to care for her baby. She just wants her husband by her side.’ It seems likely that Clarice was trying to use Martha’s plight as a way to guilt Nelly into returning.

“But in 1886, the letters change. She started begging Nelly to return home to ‘save’ Matthew from himself. Between Martha’s diary and Clarice’s letters, it’s clear that Martha and Matthew had fallen in love. This caused a great deal of pain for Martha. She didn’t want anyone on the island to know, because she was sure they would ‘chase her away.’ She was still Black in a predominantly White society. But Clarice was around too often. She saw right through them and started to spread rumors. Nobody believed it at first. But when Martha ended up pregnant in 1887, the island of Martha’s Vineyard created a hostile environment for Martha, Matthew, and their five children. Martha never writes down what she and Matthew discussed during this time. It’s not clear if he asked her to leave or if she left of her own accord. What is clear, however, is that she left Martha’s Vineyard when she was three or four months pregnant and traveled north to Canada to live with her sister.”

George grabbed his phone to show on the map where the Canadian village was located just sixty miles north of the United States-Canada border. Wes’s hands were in fists. He was struggling not to cry.

“I contacted the village—it’s called Forrester—and asked if they had any records of ex-slaves who’d come there during 1887. Apparently, they had a wonderful recordkeeper at that time. They even had photographs!”

George searched through his laminated files to pull out a grainy old photograph of a beautiful and fierce-looking Black woman. She was pregnant and carried a toddler on her hip. She looked as though she wore the weight of the world on her shoulders, but she was strong enough to take it.

Wes’s eyes filled with tears. The baby in her womb was his great-grandfather’s brother or sister. They’d been forced out of the original Sheridan House—away from their lineage and their beautiful island home. Because of racism. Because of the horrors of a long-ago country.

Beatrice touched his wrist. This was a lot to take in.

“Go on,” Wes urged George. “I want to know everything.”

George put down the photograph of pregnant Martha and Mary and folded his hands. “Martha gave birth to a boy that autumn. She named him Sheridan Smith.”

“Sheridan!” Wes cried. He couldn’t believe it.

“Sheridan went on to find a printing press company in 1891,” George said, showing him a laminated newspaper article that featured a photograph of Sheridan with his arms crossed, standing in front of his newly founded company. He wore a wide-brimmed hat that had been in fashion at the time. “He married a young Black woman named Sara and had five children. It’s difficult after that to see where all of the Sheridan-Smiths ended up. Some of them came to America; one traveled to Australia and was never heard from again. Others stayed in Canada. Here’s a genealogical tree for you,” George said, passing it over the desk. “But I don’t know if it’s of any interest.”

Wes read the tree slowly: names and birthplaces and death places he’d never once heard of. Wes Sheridan had always assumed he knew everything about the Sheridan family line. But this was a branch—or, rather, an enormous tree—that he hadn’t accounted for. His hands shook.

At the top was the name Martha Smith. She’d died of old age at ninety-two. Wes pictured her surrounded by friends and family who loved her. He imagined her so far away from that basement that it seemed like a bad dream.

“What happened to Matthew?” Beatrice asked.

“I believe he died in 1893,” George said. “He never remarried. After most of his children had gone, he built onto the house and made it into a bed-and-breakfast for those who visited the island. You could say that he was the one who put hospitality in the Sheridan blood.”

That night, Wes gathered everything George had copied for him on the hotel desk and gave it a second and third look. He gazed intently into Martha’s eyes, looking for clues. He read over snippets of her diary to get a sense of her personality. He was blown over by her poetic language and her will to live.

Beatrice approached him from behind and kissed him on the back of the neck. A shiver ran down his spine.

Wes turned to look her in the eyes. Everything felt so tremendously heavy. Sometimes he asked himself why were they going through with this wedding? They were old. They had already been through so much. So many people had come before them and struggled and tried and eventually passed on.

Somehow, Beatrice understood. She took his hands in hers and said, “It’s our job to keep going for them.”

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