In that time, in the salt pond time, they were good times. The people was very industrious and they didn’t had nothing, no other alternative but the salt pond. Everybody used to work their own garden. When the time come for the salt, you had to come out. That’s what they had. Everybody had to work to that. That was all the industry they had here.

They pick it. They go in the pond in the morning early, early morning. Everybody is in the pond, picking salt. Picking, throwing in a basket. They pick it out the pond, put it in a basket — bum! — you throw it in a flat. They do that all day.

When they get this flat full, they row it in to the shore. Then somebody there in the flat shoveling it out and the younger people come and they transport it on the shore, on the dry shore. You take it now from the spot where you take it from the flat, throw it on the ground, so all the water run out so it’s dry.

Afternoon, half-past two, three o’clock, Mr. John Gumbs come. He is going to come to measure it. He come to measure it and he is the one who putting down all those marks in the book. This is the reaping figures.

Everybody get up and going back and forth. Pack it. You taking it up, to big piles. As big as this house it used to be. You had to go up steps, ladders, to go up. You go up, you throw it down all the time. They got big, big piles. Oh, boy.

The boat used to be coming there every month. When it’s time for the boat to come for it to take it up to Guadeloupe, then they ship it in the little bags. They bag it up, but they don’t bag it before the boat come. It is when the boat come, they call, “The boat is here,” the people, everybody, is going to work.

The people go and they bag it. They had a small bag. I don’t know how much it used to be, but it was big enough for the children, because mostly children was going to do that. They put it on the head and they go and they had men by the seawater to take it from them, carry it to the boat. They take it from the children, carry it to the boat.

You carry bags on until the boat is loaded. They know how much the boat can carry. So that is how they do it. That’s how they do the salt pond.

John Gumbs die. Victor Gumbs die. Everybody dead like that and the people die and went away and the salt pond went going down. You couldn’t leave the salt pond. It had to be taken care of.

As long as rain falling, no salt don’t grow. The rainy season, the fresh water melts it away.
But when it come on the dry weather, up come the salt. Beautiful. There you get beautiful salt. It used to be a beautiful sight to see.

Find more true stories about life on St. Martin in Stories of St. Martin.

Forty years ago the Reverend Marcel Eugene Hodge opened the Les Alizés Guest House in Grand Case. This is the story of how he envisioned, built and opened the guest house, in his own words.

While I was working construction with Le Galion, chez Bernard — great man. He was so great. His money was not big in those days, but it was constant. He would never owe you one franc. So, I see he would come up on the job every day. Nine o’clock he come up. By eleven o’clock, he’s going back home because he got to go back to Marigot to be there to eat with his wife and children.

So, I said to the workers, “Look at this. This man only spends two hours up here. We are running the work. I’m doing the maintenance, we got other men there with us, the ladies are running it, this young man is the manager. Why can’t we get together and get a piece of land by the beach and make a small hotel?”

Well, they thought it was the craziest thing. They say, “Man, Hodge, we know you’re intelligent, we know you’re smart, but this is the foolishest thing I hear you say. How you gonna do that?”

It keep dawning on me, yes it could be done. So, when I came to the idea, I started the guest house here in ’82, ’83. I started to build here. Money was so flourishing in my pocket that to build three rooms, it take me three years.

But by 1985, the 25th of October, we opened up with three rooms. Nobody in the village gave me credit for doing it. They said, “Why don’t you take that and just rent them out by the month?” You could get $25 for a room, you know, so it would have been a month, I probably have $75. But I said “No, this is a guest house.” And they laugh at me. Some feel sorry for me.

One of the big men in Grand Case I really looked up to as the lawyer, the advisor, was the late Mr. Emile Tackling. He was our all-in-all, the one we looked to advice, for instruction. He said, “Son, I know you’re ambitious, but don’t work with that. That gonna be too difficult for you. Leave that to the big boys that can handle that, like your boss Bernard. Just you rent them by the month.” And I said, “No, Mr. Tackling.” We used to call him Pops. “No, Pops. I want to do this guest house.”

When I opened it, one day, nobody come. Just got a sign by the road: Les Alizés Guest House. Ten days, nobody come. Twenty days, nobody come. Twenty-five days, nobody come. And every afternoon friends would come up. Some would sympathize with me, some to laugh at me, “Hey preacher, what about the guest house, man? She full? She ain’t full yet?” I said, “No, not yet, they ain’t come yet.”

And when we get 29 days, a couple passed through here on a Volkswagen. They were overnighting in Philipsburg and they were going on a three-mast sailing boat somewhere in the Caribbean. They came because, they said, “This is a fishing town and we wanted to stay here for the night, and we saw the sign and we came.”

And they said, “How much a night?” And I said, “25 US dollars per night for the one room.” Don’t ask me how big I was. I felt so big, so important. After three years of building, now I’m getting my first $25.

After they left, we started to get one, two people come in. Sometimes all three rooms went, sometimes one, sometimes two. But, up to when Irma came three years ago, twelve months a year, we were never empty for six nights. The most we stayed without guests would be five nights. But the sixth night, for sure we got guests.

Find more true stories about life on St. Martin in Stories of St. Martin.

In an interview in 2018, at the foot of Sentry Hill, Cynric Griffith told the story of the first time he met the Queen of the Netherlands and other stories of his career as an artist and teacher.

My name is Cynric Griffith. I was born on the island of St. Kitts, the first of January, 1919. I came to St. Martin in 1956 and from then on, many other things has been happening.

I’m a portrait painter now, I paint landscapes. I’m from the Renaissance, the days of Rembrandt. I’m still painting. Not actually painting, but doing pen and ink drawings and so on, you know. Well it seem to me that every subject matter that I work on, it’s a part of me, you know? I have no choice, I can pick up my brush and my palette and start working with oil paint. The next time I could get the pen and ink, next time watercolor.

When I was at the Pasanggrahan Hotel, my boss told me that “The Queen is coming!” And she was staying at Little Bay Hotel. He said, “I need you to help, and serve her, and you has to have a white coat, and a black tie and a black pants.”

Mr. Wathey [the island Commissioner at the time], he came to me one day and said, “You know, the Queen is coming here, and what you’re going to do, you’re going up into the hill and you’re going to paint a picture of the area where the Queen is going to cut the ribbon for the new airport.”

So I did that, and when the Queen came, I was asked to serve her coffee. Mr. Wathey gave me the painting to deliver to the Queen, I think that was a couple hours after I gave her coffee. And she looked up at me and said, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” I said, “Yes, I served you coffee!” And this was the way it went. From that day on, they always, when she’s coming, invite me to receptions and so on.

I got a call from the St. Maarten Academy, this new college. They said, “Would you like to teach?” I said, “Yes.” So I went into it and I taught there for nine years.

And there was no shop, no store that sells anything like [art supplies], so I brought a stock of materials. The school did not have any paper and things to work with, so I gave it to them all. I would bring them all up here in this very place, all up in the hills. We used to walk it all the way up and look around and paint all the houses, anything that we can see.

Today, I get some surprises. When I’m sometimes sitting outside on the porch, I hear a voice,“Is that Mr. Griffith?” So I look up and say, “Yes, who are you?” “Don’t you remember? You use to teach us and take us all up in the hills to draw.” You know, it makes you feel good. I have achieved something, I have given something. And it goes on like that from day to day.

Find more true stories about life on St. Martin in Stories of St. Martin.

Local poet and entrepreneur Tamara Groenveldt shared some of her favorite St. Martin Christmas traditions in an interview in 2019:

Every family would do their potato pudding and on Christmas day they would visit different families and of course you would be exchanging foods. And of course, coconut tarts, guavaberry tarts, that’s a very big one at Christmas time.

We have sorrel, I like the juice, I’m not a big drinker. We have lime punch as well. We also have guavaberry punch. That’s a staple at Christmas time. Every family has a bottle in their house. And everyone usually knew how to make their own guavaberry rum as well. You would usually get the guavaberry and you put it to soak for at least a year. And then that would be what you would serve the serenaders when they would come by at four o’clock or whatever time in the morning.

So we still have serenading happening in Grand Case. We have a group of people who have decided to preserve that part of our history and they would go and they would serenade every year. It is important to me because growing up, I remember serenaders coming to your home. And it would be persons like Tanny and the Boys that were playing string band music. So they would come with like, the bath pan and the triangle, the grater with the afro pick. And they would be playing this traditional music.

They would usually sing something along the lines of “Open the door because the dew is falling on us.” So they would call your name, they would say “Charlie, open the door, open the door, for the dew is falling on us.” And so then you would have to get up at three to four in the morning, whatever time it was, and you would open your door and you should always have something prepared to give to the serenaders.

So they would want the bush tea, or they would want the guavaberry rum. If you have the potato pudding. And every household that they visit, you have to have something to offer the serenaders, ‘cause they’re coming and they’re playing for you. They’re out on your porch and they’re just playin’ all this music: “Mama make your johnny cakes, Christmas comin’!” It was amazing.

Because those persons in Grand Case still do it to keep tradition alive, it really helps me to feel the Christmas spirit. And I feel like when, some years ago, when there were all types of laws that came into being to regulate serenaders, I think that’s what actually helped our tradition of serenading to go down the drain. Because what happened was, according to how I understand it, persons who came to live on the island, who were not familiar with serenading, they started calling the gendarmes and the police and saying that these persons are disturbing us when we are trying to sleep.

Now traditionally, it is St. Martin tradition for you to come in those wee hours in the morning to serenade your friends and family and neighbors with beautiful St. Martin music. Now those persons who actually put the complaints in, they do not understand who we are as a people or what we do as a people. And by putting those laws and regulations in place, telling persons that, okay, you need to now get a permit to serenade, you know a lot of the locals felt like, “Why do I need to get a permit to serenade? I’ve been doing this for many years. It has never been a problem. This is who we are. I’m just not going to do it.”

So they refused to do it and that was what, in my opinion, helped the serenading part of our tradition to go down the drain. So kudos to the persons who are actually trying to revive it and keep it alive so that the younger generation can come in and know, or at least feel what it felt like to be serenaded by your neighbors or family or persons even coming from the other side of the island, the southern side of the island, to play music for family and friends at Christmas time.

Special thanks to the Les Fruits de Mer oral history team: Laura Bijnsdorp, Veronica Duzant, Charlie Gombis and Vida Hodge.

Learn more about Tamara’s company and their traditional St. Martin baked goods: St. Martin’s Sweetness.

Christmas House is one of St. Martin’s most popular and unique attractions. It is a tradition that goes back over 30 years and has touched many thousands of lives. It can bring a smile to anyone in the world, and it is also a deep expression of St. Martin culture.

It all started as something simple. Bernadine Arnell Joe decorated her own home, and it became a place for family and friends to enjoy the holiday spirit. In her words, “We started from scratch. We made a little tree and the neighbors would come and the children would come and then it start growing. Then you start putting it outside and then people start coming and now it’s very popular.”

Today, Christmas House is still at the home of Bernadine and her daughter Monique Joe. Monique is the President of the Good Friends Association, which was created in 1987 to manage Christmas House as it grew.

Monique remembers family working together to create something for the neighborhood children: “My mother used to do a little Christmas deco in the yard and the neighbor children used to come around. I also had an uncle in The States who used to send little decorations. When I finished my studies, I also wanted give the children a little party in the yard and from there it grew to the Christmas house.”

The Christmas House has always been free. Visitors can make a donation, but there has never been a fee to enter. In the 1980s “the island was bloomin’.” Local merchants would provide candy and toys for the kids. Today, grants and supporters like Super U help make Christmas House possible.

It was designed for kids, but as Monique says, “and of course we have the goodies for the parents. Mom always used to make the cake and the puddin’ and the punch, so we are famous for that.” Celebrating the local heritage of the island is a big part of the experience: guavaberry punch, coconut tarts and other local Christmas traditions are always shared.

After Hurricane Irma, many assumed that Christmas House would not be open in 2017. The house was damaged and many of the decorations were lost. As Bernadine recalls, “when I looked out the morning after, I thought this is it. All the stuff was put aside outside there, messed up.”

But Santa himself seemed to send a message. “There was a Santa standing up on the roof there, looking out at the street. And I said, but this is a sign. And then we had some flowers from garlands that stayed up from last year and they were still there. I said, with all this destruction and these things stay there, we have to do something. And with that spirit, we did something.”

Hurricane Donna struck St. Martin on September 4th, 1960. It caused extensive damage and several deaths. Josianne Fleming-Artsen recounted her childhood memories of Hurricane Donna in an interview in 2019:

My name is Josianne Fleming-Artsen. I was born in Aruba because my parents went to Aruba for the Lago oil industry. At that time my father was moving around. Moved from Santo Domingo to Aruba and we were born there. Lago laid off the St. Martin people first who were working in Aruba and so we were to return to St. Martin in 1960.

That was the first time I flew on an airplane. I was maybe seven or eight years old, I think around that age. We came to St. Martin and we landed on this very simple airport. I think that was the first of August, around that time. The hurricane came a month later. That hurricane was Donna.

That was the first experience of us with the hurricane. In those days we had no phones and all of that and no weather reports. My father probably learned a lot when he was at Santo Domingo. He knew about the weather. He knew about birds. He knew about these things.

I remember him being in the garden and it was a very quiet day and there was no breeze; it was like the quiet before the storm and he said, “Something is going to happen.” He was looking up, he said, “The birds are going in a strange direction.” He said he’s going to bar-up the house because he said we have to get ready for weather. That same night around twelve o’clock Hurricane Donna came and destroyed St. Martin.

I remember that night because I was my father’s girl, so my daddy anytime he was up I’m up too. I remember him trying to keep the windows down and the doors that were in between. I was like, “What is going on here?” When we got up the next morning, I remember seeing all the trees were like, no leaves, everything was like a war zone in St. Martin.

I remember every morning, every day, the government brought us food, rations we called it at that time. A big truck would come and you would get water. You would get oil for cooking. You would get flour because flour was a good commodity. You could make your Johnny cakes and you could make bread. Those three things, I remember clearly that we received on a very regular basis.

Fast forwarding, all the repairs that were done were done with jollification. People would help each other repair their roofs, whatever needed to be done. It would be people coming together on a weekend, Saturday and Sunday was to help each other. The owner of the house would then prepare a big pot of food and everybody would chip in and help. That has been going on since I know St. Martin.

Special thanks to the Les Fruits de Mer oral history team: Laura Bijnsdorp, Veronica Duzant, Charlie Gombis and Vida Hodge.

Folktales can do many things. They can help explain the world around us. They can connect us to our past. They can tell us how to live our lives and how to tell right from wrong. They entertain us.

Folktales are often strange or magical. They are not necessarily meant to be taken literally. But often there is some truth in them. In several old folktales from St. Martin, we can learn something about people, nature and the connection between the two.

The book Folk-Lore of the Antilles, French and English collects folktales recorded in the 1920s on many islands. Many of them were recounted by young people, and many of them include birds and other animals.

The story Cockroach Fools Fowl was told by 13 year-old Samuel Saty of Marigot. In the story, a cockroach pretends to be sick so a chicken will feed it. The chicken gives it pap, a thick drink made from arrowroot or other starch. When the trickery is discovered, Fowl is so vexed he swallows the cockroach whole. Though chickens don’t make pap, they do spend much of their time looking for—and swallowing—insects.

Pigeon Wife was told by Hilton Liburt, an 18 year-old from Philipsburg. In this story, someone was stealing a farmer’s corn from his field. The thief was his wife, who was a pigeon. She was eating the corn in the field at night. People and birds sometimes do compete for food. When people replace wild areas with farms, birds may eat the crops because their normal food is gone. This can be a problem for both farmers and birds.

The story Bo Pigeon and Mountain Dove Race for the King’s Daughter comes from St. Croix. A pigeon and a dove agree to race for the chance to marry a princess. In a twist that may be familiar to many St. Martiners, they agree to each drink a demijohn of rum before the race, but the pigeon drinks water. The dove is too drunk to fly and loses the race. The native Blue Pigeon is usually seen high up in the sky, and the Mountain Dove is often on the ground so perhaps this tale was invented to explain why these birds act the way they do.

Do you have a favorite local folktale? Tell us by writing in to The Daily Herald or info@lesfruitsdemer.com.

Flowers brighten our lives and decorate gardens and landscapes. On a tropical island, there are countless beautiful varieties and something is always in bloom. Each flower also has a story, and here are three of them.

Yellow Sage is the national flower of the country of Sint Maarten. Also known as Orange-yellow Sage, it is a variety of the species known as West Indian Sage. Other varieties of West Indian Sage flower in a variety of colors. The plant can grow into a large bush—two meters tall and just as wide. Native here, it has also been brought all over the world. It is used in plant medicine, as a natural fence and to control erosion with its extensive roots.

The Flamboyant tree is known for its beautiful flowers. Each summer, these trees explode into brilliant reds, oranges and yellows. Though native to Madagascar, it has been popular in the Caribbean for hundreds of years. On St. Martin, this tree has a special connection to emancipation. When emancipation in Dutch colonies took place on July 1, 1863 the Flamboyant was in full bloom, and freed St. Martiners carried branches of its beautiful flowers as they celebrated.

Today, one of the most commonly seen flowers on the island is the bright pink blossom of the Coralita vine. This non-native vine has covered many parts of the island, especially areas that were once used for livestock but are no longer managed. Although the flowers are beautiful and their nectar is well-loved by insects of all kinds, this vine tends to cover and smother any plants in its path. It also has potato-like tubers deep under the ground so it quickly regrows after being cleared. Of all St. Martin’s flowers, it is one of the most beautiful and problematic.

What is your favorite local flower? Tell us by writing in to The Daily Herald or info@lesfruitsdemer.com.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC provides an amazing look at the heritage of over 40 million people. A visit is a rich and rewarding experience for anyone. What would a resource like this look like on St. Martin?

The richness of the museum is a reflection of the richness of the culture it presents. The museum gives a detailed history of the black experience in America. But often cultural aspects are the strongest and provide us with our best connections to the past. Both African American culture and the Afro-Caribbean culture of St. Martin have countless facets to explore.

The histories of both places share the horrors of the slavery era and the challenges of sharing an era when black voices were suppressed and excluded from the record. One way of helping visitors connect with the lives of enslaved people was sharing objects and stories from everyday life, even an entire home that was brought into the museum and restored.

Another key method was using peoples’ own words to tell their stories and reveal history. From old letters and documents to recordings and interviews made more recently, much of the story was told by those who lived it. Seeing these words and hearing these voices helped visitors connect deeply.

The museum also drew heavily on culture and art. The African diaspora includes many of the greatest musicians, performers and artists of all time. Music and art were featured in their own galleries, but they were also used all over the museum, making other materials more engaging. Intangible culture and heritage were presented on equal footing with objects and documents.

The museum also had opportunities for visitors to share their stories and connect them to history. The Family Research Center helps visitors explore their genealogy to learn more about their ancestors. Reflections Booths located on the museum floor give visitors a chance to share their own stories.

All of these techniques could be used in a St. Martin Museum of Afro-Caribbean History and Culture. Right now, the story is not told as well as it should be, even though it is the history of most of the people on the island.

What Afro-Caribbean history or culture would you want to see in a St. Martin museum? Tell us by writing in to The Daily Herald or info@lesfruitsdemer.com.

Anyone who has spent even a little time on St. Martin is used to watching it change. Winter’s lush green hills are bare and bone dry in the spring. Beaches grow and shrink with shifting sands. Heavy machines cut into the hillsides to clear land for roads and buildings. Ponds are filled, great trees grow and die. Ruins collapse under the weight of centuries, or just the years since Hurricane Luis.

St. Martin may be almost unrecognizable to someone born here 80 years ago. But even a long human life is just a moment in the vast age of an island. St. Martin has been through even bigger changes, witnessed by people who are long since gone, and in the ages before anyone was here to see them at all. Here are a few of them.

Look in the direction of St. Barts and imagine not sea, but land, between here and there. Then imagine unbroken land continuing just as far on the other side of St. Barts. Imagine land extending for miles in almost every direction from the St. Martin of today, forming an island the size of Trinidad. It may sound impossible, but 12,000 years ago when the sea level was more than 100 meters lower, this is how St. Martin was.

Imagine your surroundings with every sign of human presence gone. Thick scrub full of thorny plants fills most coastal areas and lowlands. Explosions of bright blue flowers dot the landscape where Lignum Vitae trees are in bloom. In each ravine, massive trees have grown tall to capture sunlight in the canopy leaving a cool and open forest floor. Flocks of parrots fly over, chattering to each other, and huge colonies of egrets nest on the mangrove trees that surround every pond. This is the paradise that the first Amerindian people discovered here about 5,000 years ago.

Imagine a St. Martin 200 years ago, covered almost completely with fields of giant grass, with thick stalks twice the height of a person. The fields reach high into the hills, covering many places that have regrown trees in the centuries since. A few dozen plantation houses are spread around the island, built in wood on stone foundations. Somewhere near each one there is a raised ring where cows or donkeys circle, turning the giant rollers that crush the sugarcane. Near each mill there is a cluster of small wattle and daub homes. Most of the people on the island live in them, surviving day by day under an unimaginably terrible system of slavery that they would soon take a part in overthrowing.

What St. Martin era are you curious about? Tell us by writing in to The Daily Herald or info@lesfruitsdemer.com.