On Martha's Vineyard, Black filmmakers are in the spotlight

When I finally had a chance to sit down with pioneering rapper Slick Rick, one question nagged in the back of my brain:

Where was the eye patch?

Slick Rick, whose given name is Ricky Walters, was blinded in his right eye as a child and developed a habit of wearing stylish eye patches since his early days in the mid-1980s performing with Doug E. Fresh's Get Fresh Crew. In 2020, one multicolored, diamond-encrusted version was auctioned by Sotheby's . But when we met Saturday at the Martha's Vineyard African American Film Festival, he was chilling behind a pair of mirrored shades — looking less like a hip hop pirate than a moneyed man of leisure summering in the playground of the Black bourgeoisie.

"This, to me, feels like an upscale Black environment," he told me backstage, after I ha