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...
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