THE SECOND TIME AROUND

By John Skow

Dorothy West is a tiny, talkative, 88-year-old brown woman writer who lives and works -- and these days amiably inscribes books and serves tea to a procession of admiring visitors -- in the upper-middle-class African-American community of Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard. Brown is her word, used carefully and with mild amusement, because among the Massachusetts resort island's summering black aristocracy, light has always been right, and shadings of color are measured with precision. When West was a child, as she relates in The Richer, the Poorer (Doubleday; 254 pages; $22), her new collection of stories and reminiscences, her extended family included cousins "pink and gold and brown and ebony," and her light-skinned, lighthearted mother used to say, "Come on, children, let's go out and drive the white folks crazy."

For several months now, West has cheerfully endured her role as the much praised new pet of that crows' chorus, the U.S. literary community. ("Come in. Just sit anywhere," she calls to autograph pilgrims at her front door, pausing in a phone conversation with a reporter. "Now, dear, where were we? Children. Yes, I should have had a dozen, but I couldn't have one. Children like me; I'm about their size.") Jacqueline Onassis, an editor at Doubleday and a summer resident of Martha's Vineyard, read the old writer's short pieces in the Vineyard Gazette, the island's weekly newspaper. She took to visiting West each Monday, and egged her on to finish a long-stalled second novel. When The Wedding (Doubleday; 240 pages; $20), a wry view of color and status in Oak Bluffs, was published in February, its dedication read: "To the memory of my editor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Though there was never such a mismatched pair in appearance, we were perfect partners."

Book-page editors were charmed by The Wedding and its elderly author, not simply because of the Onassis connection and the novel's considerable merits. The astonishing truth was that this was West's second time around as fame's darling. She was, in fact, the last surviving member -- ''the Kid," they called her then -- of a group of formidably gifted black writers of the late '20s and early '30s, the period of the Harlem Renaissance. This flare of talent included poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes and novelists Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston. While still in her teens, fresh out of Girls' Latin School in Boston, West tied for second with Hurston in a short-story contest. After that, Hurston and the older black writers took her into their world as prodigy and mascot.

She wrote short stories for the New York Daily News and twice, as the Depression deepened, founded black literary journals. But the Harlem Renaissance had lost its early brilliance, and at heart, West was less a New Yorker than a black version of a proper Bostonian. Her father, who was born a slave, had built a thriving produce business in Boston and was prosperous enough to buy a summer home in Oak Bluffs. By 1943 West had moved there to live. Five years later, her first novel, The Living Is Easy, was set in the affluent world of proud black achievers.

West's elders raised her to believe that work and luck could beat poverty and that racial prejudice could not hold her back. She could see the pomposities of their world, but she felt more comfortable with accomplishment and pretension than with the confrontational bitterness of black anger in the 1960s. Asked the reason for her relative silence during that period, she mentioned the Black Panther movement with agitation. With such voices roaring anger, she had felt, her own would not be heard.

When she did resume work on The Wedding, she did not mock the black aristocracy of Oak Bluffs, at least not much. "Blacks needed an aristocracy," she says. "Those doctors and lawyers and their wives giving fancy parties were important." But racial ironies are the substance of her novel, and West sees them clearly. The half-white grandmother of a prosperous colored clan can barely bring herself to hold a cute, brown granddaughter. And the patriarch, a renowned doctor, is troubled that his light-skinned daughter is marrying a white man. The problem is not so much the fellow's whiteness; it is his profession, or lack of one, that rankles. The prospective son-in-law is a jazz pianist.

An awkward ending mars the novel, and too easy plotting weakens the short stories of the new collection. West's strength is as a witness to a long-gone world. She knows the feelings of a not-very-smart man who pushes himself to a law degree he doesn't really know what to do with and of a stone-broke father giving his small son a penny to buy a moment of joy. She gives a vivid picture of her own mother and muses, "I still cannot put my finger on the why of her. What had she wanted, this beautiful woman? Did she get it?" These are a writer's hard questions. Late news is that West, writer, is at work on her next project, a nonfiction history of Oak Bluffs' black upper crust. ^1