The Extraordinary Life of Dorothy West exhibit opens this weekend at the museum and spans Ms. West’s life in Boston, Harlem, Moscow and on the Vineyard.
At Christmas there is giving, and in the happiest instances, giving with joy is part of it. This act of love is not a natural instinct.
My undaunted mother took me to see the moving picture version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In my safe world I knew nothing of slavery, not even the word.
A Christmas story by the late Dorothy West, an Oak Bluffs writer and last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance.
Cherene Sherrard-Johnson’s biography of Oak Bluffs writer Dorothy West might never have been launched but for a startling revelation that upended the researcher’s corner of the literary world.
Ms. Sherrard-Johnson, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, described to an Island audience Thursday how Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color emerged from the ashes of her work on a 19th century female writer who was considered part of the black literary canon.
Editors’ note: The following essay written by longtime Oak Bluffs columnist Dorothy West first appeared in the Vineyard Gazette on August 9, 1985.
By DOROTHY WEST
