A ‘Summer on Sag Harbor’ Is Worth Fantasizing — And Protecting

Sunny Hostin “feels different” in Sag Harbor.

“You see people that look like me and my kids,” Hostin said. “Usually, I’m the only one because, as a successful person of color, I’m usually the exception and not the rule.”

The TV personality has spent most of her life straddled between worlds, she said. From growing up as a “tough Bronx girl” living with her hardworking Black and Puerto Rican parents in public housing, to becoming a successful lawyer, journalist and host of ABC’s “The View,” her lived experiences might as well have been worlds apart.

Hostin finds she can be herself on the pristine beaches of Sag Harbor Hill. This historically rich enclave in the Hamptons is home to one of the only communities in the U.S. where Black people in the post-World War II and Jim Crow eras had access to beachfront property — and it’s the setting of her new fiction novel.

“Summer on Sag Harbor” is the second in a trilogy of beach reads that centers Black history and culture.

Hostin’s latest beach read is based in the SANS community — the Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest and Ninevah Subdivisions — which was formed in the late 1940s by middle-class African American families. She found solace in these neighborhoods when she was pregnant with her son Gabriel, who now attends Harvard.

Hostin was invited by the late Barbara Smith, whose restaurant in Sag Harbor closed in 2014. She stayed because of people like the late Bill Pickens III, the unofficial mayor of Sag Harbor Hills, who began summering here in 1946.

These important people make appearances as characters by other names to reflect on her own experiences and provide an opportunity for readers “that look like her” to see themselves in beach reads.

“I write about gentrification,” said Hostin, who has been a seasonal renter of the same Sag Harbor Hills house for two decades with her husband and two children. “No one wanted this, and now all of a sudden, the wealthy would rather be on this bayside.

“I’m really teaching the history of these important communities in this beach read — it’s almost like hiding vegetables for kids in something that’s really tasty,” she laughed.

Hostin, on assignment for work or jet-setting, said she would notice the lack of representation in beach reads that centered relationships between women of color.

This pleasure-seeking genre is often rife with wealthy white characters in exclusive settings; the Best Beach Reads for Summer 2023 from The New York Times features slow burning romantic-comedies about young elite women with quirky professions, housewives shopping on Nantucket, a mourning Oregonian family that find escape in Hawaii, and a seaside gatherings of college friends in Big Sur — remarkably, Crystal Smith Paul’s “Did You Hear About Kitty Karr” does confront what it means to be Black in Hollywood.

“Tony Morrison said, ‘If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,’” Hostin said. “So, I did.”

Hostin did her research.

Back then, much of the South Fork was still potato fields. The region was multicultural from more than a century before of free Blacks and European immigrants finding solidarity and family with Shinnecock and other Indigenous tribes. According to the Eastville Community Historical Society, the community was built around the St. David AME Zion Church in 1839 on Eastville Avenue to serve Sag Harbor whalers.

In the postwar period, the presence of the U.S. Navy and Air Force servicemen — who virtually took over Montauk — began to ease. Only a few people in hospitality, ignited by mogul Carl Fisher, were beginning to market the Hamptons for wealthy (and white) New York City investors to move next door. Meanwhile, at the same time as the dawn of suburbia at Levittown, SANS was also a burgeoning Black vacation hotspot.

Tourism boomed to Hamptons beaches in the 1970s, after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and the housing market crash of 2008-09. Soon, a preservation movement in Sag Harbor would push against the rapid resort redevelopment of these historically Black enclaves.

“You read a lot about Black trauma, and I’m tired of that,” Hostin said. “There’s been a Black bourgeoisie since the times of Frederick Douglass. I’m part of this, and I have so many friends that are part of it.”

“It’s the effect the Cosby Show had on all of us,” said Harriette Cole, a lifestyle magazine editor, best-selling author and media coach who is a frequent guest on NBC’s “Today.” Hostin told her during a talkback and book signing on July 6 at East Hampton Library, that the 1980s sitcom was not too far removed from her own life being an attorney married to an orthopedic surgeon.

“But we have erased a lot of that, unfortunately. Had I known about that, even as a kid growing up in poverty, I would have had something to aspire to. So, I’m going to write it,” Hostin said.

“It’s important for us to recognize that each of us has a truth, and when you bring it out, greatness is just waiting and scintillating,” Cole remarked. “You talk about protecting this happy place.”

In 2019, SANS earned a spot on the New York State Register of Historic Places and made its way onto the National Register of Historic Places just a few months later. In February 2023, the Village of Sag Harbor created the Historic Black Beach Communities Overlay District in an effort to further preserve this rare community. Despite concerns from neighbors over whether SANS should be reflected in the district’s name, Hostin, a member of the private homeowner’s association, praised “getting this place registered and recognized for the safe haven that it is and that has been for generations.”

Today, the identity of the SANS community has largely escaped the glam of Hamptons hedges and contemporary megamansions. The properties are modest and quintessentially shingle-style mid-century modern homes, sprinkled with the occasional colonial revival and beach bungalow.

Dr. Georgette Grier-Key, the executive director and chief curator of the Eastville Community Historical Society, said creating historical fiction around the SANS history can strengthen its preservation. “This is a complicated place, grounded in decades of oral histories,” Grier-Key said, also noting “Sag Harbor” by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead. “When created with care, fiction can empower the community and others around, what makes this place special.”

“I feel the need to educate on the identities of these communities. I’m very protective of it,” Hostin quipped.

In her 2020 memoir, “I Am These Truths: A Memoir of Identity, Justice, and Living Between Worlds,” Hostin revealed a childhood in the early 1970s finding a wondrous imagination in a South Bronx housing project, fueled by the diversity of ideals instilled by her Black-Puerto Rican extended family.

Her young mother — a teacher — would have her pore over workbooks at the kitchen table and read novels that were accelerated for her age. Her parents eventually scraped enough together to move to Manhattan and enroll her into the all-girls Dominican Academy on the Upper East Side. If Hostin was not challenged enough, she would make her own stories.

“I always journaled,” she said during a recent stroll on Haven’s Beach. “When my kids were younger, I wrote short stories for them, too, because there weren’t enough stories with representation and characters centering on kids that look like they did.”

The identity of what it means to be Black in America — or on the beach, in this novel — became foundational to her career as a federal prosecutor and later TV legal analyst. She was part of the groundbreaking ABC primetime newscast, “Soul of a Nation,” a six-part television documentary series in 2021 that aimed to put Black life in the U.S. front and center after the murder of George Floyd the year prior.

Also that year, Hostin released her debut novel, “Summer on the Bluffs,” which is set in Martha’s Vineyard and is currently being adapted into a series as the first major project for Sunny Hostin Productions alongside Octavia Spencer’s Orit Entertainment. Hostin said Spencer has already claimed the role of Cindy — who is the mother of the main character in the sequel, “Olivia Jones.”

All that is needed to get up to speed for reading “Summer on Sag Harbor,” which became her second New York Times bestseller at the May 2 release, is that Olivia, who is at the top of the financial world in New York City, inherits a summer home in Sag Harbor from her late surrogate father.

“I think Olivia speaks to women who don’t know their value, don’t know their worth, and are in this period of transition,” Hostin said. The book jacket says that Olivia is forced “to search for her authentic identity” in “her fight to preserve her new Black utopia” — like Hostin, the TV journalist and lawyer, said she needed to do to find herself.

Now an accomplished novelist, Hostin’s third manuscript is in production, featuring another historically Black beach community in Highland Beach, Maryland, which was the summer home of Fredrick Douglas and his second wife, who was white.