La Maison Creole

The trip back to St. Lucia was remarkably and thankfully uneventful, but as ever delightful in its own Caribbean way. I had a few hours to fill before leaving Barbados so I spent it in my wonderful crummy car getting happily lost and unlost on rural back roads, hunting down unmarked heritage sites like Drax Hall, a spectacular plantation house that has been the site for in-depth archeological studies that I know I have read about at some point in the past. My LIAT flight left the usual 30 minutes or so late for the hop across to St. Vincent where we left off people and picked up some more and then made the even shorter hop across the 26 miles to St. Lucia. I hooked up again with Drive-A-Matic car rental (more on that later), and went zooming up island to Cap Estate and the home of my longtime close friend and craft compatriot Finola.

I believe that this lovely house – that would be ‘maison’ in French – is the first private home I ever stayed in in St. Lucia, way back in April of 1994 when I came down after hearing that I definitely got the Fulbright grant and would be moving to St. Lucia the following July. I had met Finola on my previous trip to the island in October of ’93, and then, as now, we had a lot to say to each other. At the time she was the Craft Development Officer for St. Lucia and was getting ready for a substantial ceramics study and training trip to Japan but then, as now, she made all sorts of things happen and all sorts of doors open and I would never be here doing what I am doing right now without her help and support. 

The house is a classic Caribbean house, low slung and rooted into the landscape, small bedrooms, large living rooms, and a big wide open porch that was filled with good food and good friends shortly after I arrived early on Saturday evening. As we looked out across Rodney Bay from the high perspective of the house the sun set and the sky blurred from blue to color to dark and the lights came up in the hills and valleys in the north of the island. 

Finola has a thing about clouds and skies and sunsets – something about the view from the porch perhaps ? - and since she is a really terrific photographer we get to see what she sees. The picture above is hers, as are the two below and I was sitting right there on the beach when she shot the image of the boats and I swear I never saw it, never noticed, would have missed it. 

Sunday I took advantage of the fact that she has an amazing jewelry workshop at home and made necklaces with the handmade clay beads I got from Choiseul potter Irena Alphonse last year, and then went off to the new S&S megastore to solve my burgeoning luggage problem (I seem to have acquired a few things too many in Barbados). S&S is like a giant dollar store; the business was established by Indian immigrants 30 or so years ago, always seems to stock exactly what you need at a price you can pay, and has been fabulously successful in St. Lucia. I got a really cheap 18” rolling carryon that will likely only last this trip but that’s okay cause that’s all I need it to do. Then of course, we went to the beach. Because its Sunday.

Renting a car in St. Lucia has become….problematic, because Drive-A-Matic is now the only agency that takes American Express and they are absolutely committed to having very new, very shiny, and very easily damaged cars that do an excellent job of taking tourists from the hotel to the restaurant and back. I, however, am heading south where the roads are rather more compromised and opportunities abound for scrapes and scratches and loud thumps on the underside of the vehicle. So on Monday morning, before I headed out for the southern wilds of Choiseul, I traded in my shiny sporty lime green touristmobile with its maximum 2” clearance for a far more sensible (but of course somewhat more expensive) two door jeep that already has its fair share of scratches and will be capable of climbing in and out of the potholes that I know are coming.

So off I went, down to Castries and over the Morne, into Bexon and up the long rainforest climb across the Barre de L’Isle, through the Mabouya Valley and I was sticking my camera out the window snapping pictures to try and visually describe what its like to drive these roads but somehow the images just don’t do it, don’t transmit that sense of acute hyperawareness that takes over when you drive on the left through the Caribbean landscape. Oh well – I tried. Anyway, when I passed the sign for the Fond D’Or plantation I got a little ways down the road before my brain said Wait A Minute and I turned around and went back to revisit this site that I saw with local historian and old friend Gregor Williams some many years ago when I was here for the 25^th anniversary conference of the St. Lucia Archaeological and Historical Association.

Driving in I was immediately greeted by guide extraordinaire Paul who has been working at Fond D’Or for 20 years, and as you always do on this island various details of life, family, and occupation were exchanged between us because its good to know who you are talking to. When I told him where I was from Paul told me that his father went to Jacksonville, Florida to cut sugar cane and never came back and had seven kids here and nine in Florida. Goodness. So we chatted about our mutual friend Gregor and Paul told me all sorts of details about the site and off I went to walk through the remnants of wind, cattle, and steam-powered cane crushing equipment and bits of the buildings that housed them. The site is primarily used now for outdoor performances during the annual St. Lucia Jazz Festival in May, and what’s left of the plantation buildings are perpetually under threat by the persistence of fig trees.

The walls of the sugar boiling house are intact, and the huge copper boiling pans rest characteristically and decoratively alongside, but as at other sites like this I cannot escape imagining what it might have been like to work in such a hell hole. It’s hot today, it will be hot tomorrow, hot and damp and sweaty and what must it have been like to be a slave to those boiling pans in a long room with a low ceiling and hot hot wood fires burning continuously during the cane cutting season, pouring the hot hot sugar syrup from one pan to the next as it slowly thickened, day after day and night after night until all the cane in the fields had been cut and crushed….

Back on the road, lunch is starting to sound like a good idea so I head for my very favorite scenic highway “snackette” on the heights above the eastern town of Dennery. The view is truly spectacular, and while they really outdo themselves with food on the weekends, at lunchtime most days you can get nice fresh local food – today it was a grilled tuna kebab with garlic sauce, a roasted bake (sort of a dense round bread roll cooked on the barbecue) and lo and behold a Coke Zero. Could be a perfect lunch.

From there you follow the two lane highway that rings the island, rolling through Praslin and Micoud as you close in on St. Lucia’s second largest town, Vieux Fort, its name pronounced as an interesting amalgam of the French and English history of the island (vieux = old in French). First you pass the giant stadium that was built for the Cricket World Cup several years ago but is now serving as the temporary site for the major medical facilities in the south; the old buildings of St. Jude’s Hospital down the road are being completely renovated. Then you go round the bend onto the four lane concrete road that was part of the World War 2 American construction of what is now Hewanorra International Airport, along the Vieux Fort ‘bypass road’, past the KFC, the bank, and the supermarket and you’re headed back into the agricultural south. 

Balenbouche is as always a welcome sight; the Lawaetz family live in the main plantation house and guests stay in cottages scattered about the surrounding yard intermixed with breathtaking landscaping. The history of this maison creole dates back to the 18^th century and the longterm French occupation particularly in the south of St. Lucia – the north is far more British in character – and Uta has filled Balenbouche with amazing European antiques and linens, spectacular tropical flower arrangements, and beautifully integrated local materials and artifacts. This time I’m staying in the Calabash Cottage, a new one for me and very delightful but of course you must make your peace first with the ever vigilant dog pack – Garcon, Zoe, Moose Boy, Yuna, Sean Sean, and darling Chai who was just a puppy when I was here with the students in 2010 (that’s her on her back). The first night I went a little too quietly up the back stairs into the main house and the dogs came boiling out of the kitchen barking as tho the apocalypse was in process.  

Dinner with the family was just lovely - vegetable soup with Lucian pepper sauce, organic greens grown by a farmer’s cooperative on Balenbouche land next door (wonderfully sharp arugula and finely shaved red cabbage), lightly fried and salted breadfruit from the tree in the yard, and a half frozen local Piton beer. And strawberry cheesecake. Yeah. And a lovely night’s sleep in my beautiful cottage listening to the rain fall now and then and wondering if the clothes I’d washed and hung on the line would dry…zzzzzz….And while I won’t go into too much detail this sure is a far cry from the wacky studio apartment where I stayed in Barbados run by She Who Must Not Be Named and her five dogs for whom you must very very carefully open and close the wonky double gate every time you drive through but no matter how hard you try you’ll get blamed in rather graphic terms for their escape in the middle of the night and her subsequent violent awakening at 5:00 in the morning. Needless to say, the vegetarian restaurant and onsite yoga classes promised online were not exactly available, and the interior décor ran to plywood cupboards and plastic lawn furniture.

Tuesday morning I headed once more up into the hills of Choiseul below the Gros Piton to find Irena Alphonse at her house, making pots as always, this time an order of small canawi (cooking pots) to be used as sauce servers for the very exclusive Dasheen restaurant at the spectacularly sited Ladera Resort – it was built up high on the ridge between the two Pitons and has the most astonishing view. Irena’s house and workshop, like most of the homes here, has been a progressive affair; what is now the bottom floor was once the whole house and she has just kept building.

After a while we jumped in the car and went to find Catty Osman but she was in Castries for a special celebration for her cousin Bernadette, who is a Catholic nun and was being honored for 25 years of service. The one time I met Bernadette it was  completely unexpected while I was searching the archives at the Folk Research Centre in Castries for old images of potters and she just happened to be in the building for an unrelated function. Delightful lady. As we were leaving Irena noticed that Catty’s sister and next door neighbor Agnes was making pots in her workshop so we went over to say hello and while they got caught up in the local creole language that I am deeply ashamed to never have learned I watched Agnes, mesmerized as always, while she worked on an order for two very large flower pots, assisted by her daughter Trudy who picks the rocks from the clay.

From there we took the winding roads down the hill to Choiseul village to visit an extraordinarily personal museum project called La Maison Creole in the home of Mary Theresa Paschal, a St. Lucian woman who lived in Paris for 32 years and worked in the Victor Hugo Museum, the Petit Palais, and the Pavilion des Arts and vowed to make her own museum when she returned to Choiseul to build her house (which is what many many St. Lucians do at the end of their working lives abroad)

I had seen the hand-lettered signs on the road last year and tried to visit but no one seemed to be home so since Irena knows absolutely everyone I figured I’d take her with me and sure enough even though it was all closed up it was, in short order, all opened up for me and Irena. Mary Theresa has been obsessively collecting artifacts of pre-tourist St. Lucia for many years, as well as African furniture and sculptures, local folk art, and, of course, pottery, lots of pottery.

Even I can’t summon up adequate adjectives for this one; it was just…amazing. And she had quite a few examples of something I’ve wanted to see for quite some time, whenever I stumble over it again in my research materials. Once upon a time there was a man making wheelthrown and kiln fired ‘goblets’ right in LaFargue next to where the Choiseul Secondary School is and the government-funded Arts and Crafts Centre. It’s been long gone in living memory, but people can still remember using these vessels to offer water to guests and visitors in homes and businesses. Since this is the only historical example I know of that involves wheelthrown pottery made in St. Lucia I have a million questions about it but it was great to finally see these marvelous little pots .

Back to Irena’s; she recently acquired an electric potter’s wheel that a friend saw and salvaged from an abandoned pottery project in Soufriere and she was able to find someone to get the motor working again but hadn’t yet tried it out. With a voltage transformer and very long extension cord running over to the house we got it running, and it seemed only fitting that the first pot I should throw on Irena’s wheel would be a goblet, the symbol of hospitality in a maison creole.

I am GOING to post this blog entry tonite so I won’t go into any detail about today but Irena and I went off to Mamiku Plantation to dig clay – its particularly nice clay, we got some last year when we were excavating the suspected old plantation kiln. We brought it back and I chopped some up with a machete, slaked it down in water rather quickly and shoved it through a makeshift screen (wire mesh and an old metal wash basin ) and set it out to dry. Came back to Balenbouche filthy dirty and headed straight down to the beach with Verena, Tanja, Colin, and a pack of happy dogs. I’m really looking forward to throwing more pots, and tomorrow I hope to interview Irena’s mother who was of course a potter and STOP ! STOP WRITING AND GET THIS POSTED !