“Get in up to your shoulders!” Caroline Hunter shouted to the reluctant bathers inching into Nantucket Sound, off Massachusetts. “Trust me: Up to your shoulders, you will warm up!”
At 7:30 a.m., the sun was too low in the sky to offer any real warmth. But once in the water, the crowd of nearly 400 did their best to get their blood pumping as directed by Hunter, an 80-year-old former chemist and high school teacher whose raspy voice has been leading the group for the past 38 years.
Every morning from the Fourth of July through Labor Day, a loose coalition of Black bathers who call themselves the Polar Bears meet at Inkwell Beach, a short stroll from downtown Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, and wade into the ocean to start the day. Of the many rites and rituals observed by those summering on the island, few have such a bracing Arctic bite.
This summer is the 80th anniversary of the group’s founding, by a wellness-minded innkeeper who “believed that an early morning swim was not only invigorating, but healthy,” an early Polar Bear recalled to The Vineyard Gazette in 2007. The gatherings have grown considerably since then; one dip last month drew 519 people.
Participants are instructed to arrive at 7:30 a.m., though latecomers are only lightly admonished. There is one requirement to become a part of the group: that you participate for the entire two hours it takes to do aerobics, honor ancestors, count off in the water and perform a secret ritual.
Membership confers a card granting access to the Facebook group as well as bragging rights. Every wader becomes part of a historic congregation that has plodded its way to the same part of the beach since the days when the island was segregated and Black swimmers were not allowed in parts of the five-mile beach, according to Hunter.
“This is the only space we could get,” she said. “We are keeping it.”
According to The Gazette, the tradition was started in 1946 by Black seasonal workers who were staying nearby. They wanted a place to exercise, swim and build community during a time when segregation limited where Black Americans could comfortably gather, especially in bodies of water. Every summer, those members met in the morning for swimming, water exercises, conversation and plain old fun before heading to work.
That Tuesday morning in August, Hunter parked her car alongside the boardwalk by 7 a.m. Her trunk was filled with sandy water shoes she lends out to the underprepared. The swimmers meet rain or shine, but they draw the line at thunder or lightning, she said.
“It is a wonderful way to start the day,” Hunter said of the group water aerobics. “It’s the community, it’s a fellowship. I tell people I hate getting up early and I hate cold water, but I come for what else happens here.”
“You can’t chitchat in the water, though,” she added. “You got to listen to the instructions.”
Those instructions are fairly simple: Kick up. Make circles with your shoulders. Twist at your waist.
“This preserves life,” said Tracé Gaskin, 66, who has been a Polar Bear since the 1970s. “My mother is 90 years old. She’s the oldest active Polar Bear right now. Getting in the ocean every day is healing. Every day that you go into the water, you are healed.”
For every Inkwell Beach veteran like Gaskin, there was a newcomer to the water. Melissa Hinckson, 63, a fifth-grade teacher from Brooklyn, said she was thrilled to become a first-time Polar Bear.
“It’s exciting!” she said, before joining everyone in the water. During the session, she became overwhelmed with emotion and started to cry.
“There is something about being with my people in the water,” Hinckson said as she toweled off. “This is part of my ritual now.”
Diane Clarke Streett, 76, gets in the water as much as she can during the summer, even if she needs to use her walker or enlist the help of her fellow Polar Bears. Slowly, while holding on to two friends, she trudged through the sand and into the ocean. Streett, a retired Delaware state judge, has spent 20 summers in Oak Bluffs — the traditional center of Black life on the island — and as a Polar Bear.
“It’s fun,” she said. “You get a thousand kisses here. But the way that people help other people, and the way the people have helped me get to the water’s edge and get in the water and come out of the water, just the support of people. …” She trailed off. “It carries you through the day, and it carries you though the year. A lot of people are here for a week or two on their vacation and they have to go back to work. They can be sustained by the thoughts and the memories of the Inkwell and the experience of the Polar Bears until they come back the next summer.”
There is something about returning. Several compared the morning gatherings to a family reunion.
“You see some of the same people year after year after year,” Streett said. “You see them grow and develop and age, including myself, and then you see the children and the grandchildren, and so it’s generations. It’s almost like a family.”
Regardless of the cold, there is something that keeps the Polar Bears coming back.
“The first time was hard because it’s so cold and you don’t know what to expect,” Nicole Thomas-Jackson, 53, of Richmond, Va., recalled of her first dip, one year ago. “The second time it’s much more enjoyable because you know what’s expected. You can really appreciate it more and appreciate all the people around you.”
Thomas-Jackson said she returned this summer for the “more spiritual” aspects of the ritual, like the calm moments when “everybody’s so quiet and peaceful and taking it all in.” She said she would be back again.
Once a Polar Bear, always a Polar Bear.
The post The Black Polar Bears of Martha’s Vineyard appeared first on New York Times.
