From toddlers to teens, these best friends have captured 12 summers on Martha’s Vineyard
TheGrio...
Orion and William’s annual photo tradition documents more than a decade of friendship at a historic summer destination for Black families.
Most childhood friendships leave behind scattered evidence, a few blurry phone pictures, a school portrait, whatever a parent happened to capture. Orion and William have something more deliberate.
In a post shared to Instagram by the account belonging to Julee Wilson (@misssjulee), she highlighted the pair this week, sharing that the two have returned to Martha’s Vineyard every summer since they were one year old and recreated the same photograph each time. Twelve years of images now sit side by side, tracking two boys growing into teenagers without either of them appearing to try very hard at it.
“It’s tiiiiiiiiime! These best friends have spent another dope summer on Martha’s Vineyard. They have been locked in since they were both less than 2-months old! I take a picture of them every year in our happy place. Scroll through to see all TWELVE years (since they were 1-year-old). Grateful for them and the village we have created,” the caption read, with the included IG handles of the other parents involved.
The appeal is obvious enough that the post traveled fast. Watching faces lengthen, hair change and shoulders broaden across a dozen frames does something a single picture cannot. It makes the passage of time legible. The most recent image shows the two on the sand, still grinning, still sitting shoulder to shoulder in roughly the same arrangement they settled into as toddlers.
The location gives the tradition an added dimension. Martha’s Vineyard, and Oak Bluffs in particular, has functioned as a summer gathering place for Black families since the late 19th century, when Black homeowners began establishing a presence on the island during an era when most vacation destinations were closed to them.
Inkwell Beach became a well-known anchor of that community, and generations of families have returned annually since, building networks that stretch across decades.
Against that backdrop, an annual photo reads as something more than a cute idea. It is participation in a much older practice: Black families treating a specific stretch of shoreline as a place worth coming back to, year after year, and building continuity out of the return.
There is also the simpler fact of the friendship itself. Sustaining a close relationship from age one through the teenage years takes effort from the boys and coordination from the adults around them, who had to keep showing up to the same place at the same time for more than a decade.
Whether the tradition survives college schedules and adult calendars remains an open question. But twelve consecutive summers suggests these two, and the families behind them, are not particularly inclined to let it lapse.