When the French people of St. Barths began arriving to St. Thomas in the 1700s, they settled in present day Frenchtown, more lovingly known as Carenage by the French community.
Frenchtown was officially established in 1850 after a large migration of Frenchies from St. Barths to St.Thomas took place. Traditional West Indian homes were built throughout the village, small corner shops began to open, and the people of Frenchtown worked to assimilate into the larger Danish community.
Life was incredibly difficult for the Frenchies at first. There were large communication challenges, as the Frenchies spoke patois and the people of the Danish West Indies spoke Danish. There was extreme poverty and the French people found out very quickly that if they intended to survive, they would need to teach themselves the arduous work of fishing and farming expeditiously.
They would awaken early in the morning to begin their daily tasks, toil in the sun all day, and then in the evenings, they would gather in the village to be in community, pound melee, and share stories.
One of those stories would grow to have a life of its own and would be passed down from generation to generation over the span of 100 years. As you can imagine with the passage of time various details of this story have shifted and transformed, but the central theme of the story and the lessons it has to teach us, has always remained the same.
It is said that there was once a witch that lived in secret among the Frenchtown community. This witch wasn’t an ordinary witch; she was known to be one of the most feared entities in the Caribbean region, coined with the name Soucouyant. This Soucouyant would leave her home at night, under the cover of darkness, peel off her human skin and would take the shape of a ball of fire.
The people of Frenchtown began having strange occurrences take place around the village. In some instances, people would report seeing a ball of fire flash across the sky at night. There were also rumors that people in the neighborhood were waking up with bruises on their bodies of unknown origins; all that would be left behind was two little holes where the Soucouyant had sank its teeth into their flesh.
A handful of children had even come forward to indicate that the Soucouyant had been inviting them into her home and had allowed them to feed her pet jumbie grains of rice that she kept in a glass bottle. She warned them that if they made a mistake and fed the Jumbie an odd number of grains of rice, it would grow large, break out of the bottle, and wreak havoc on the small French village of Carenage.
As such, the people in the community grew frightful. Children were required to be home by the time the sun set, prayers of protection were said by the families every morning and every night, and people began sprinkling salt along the thresholds of their doors and windows to ensure that the Soucouyant couldn’t enter their home through the cracks.
As time went on, fear in the community did not subside, in fact, people grew increasingly afraid to leave their homes, and the bustling busy little village of Carenage came almost to a standstill.
One day, a handful of men in the community came together and decided that enough was enough and that they were going to finally rid the village of the dreaded Soucouyant. They concocted a well laid plan among themselves and that night they hid in the brush around her home, and waited until she transformed into the ball of fire and left for the evening. Once she was no longer in sight, they went into her home and sprinkled salt all over her human skin that she had left behind. The salt immediately destroyed the skin and they knew when she arrived back at dawn, unable to get back into her skin, she would be destroyed by the light of the rising sun.
The men left the home in high spirits, sure that they had brought resolution to the problem of the Soucouyant. Days and weeks passed with no sightings of the old witch. The French village of Carenage began to settle back into the feeling of safety. Children were allowed to galavant again. The Frenchies hung around in the village after work, talking, gossiping, and sharing stories and life before the Soucouyant resumed.
While no one has seen the witch in its human form to this day every so often, the people of the Frenchtown community still report seeing a ball of fire fly over the bayside at night.
The story of the Frenchtown Soucouyant has been preserved for over 100 years, not by digitization, not by books, and not by photograph, but by the unwavering commitment of Virgin Islanders to uplift oral tradition in our community. This story is significant because it highlights our inter-connectedness to our fellow Caribbean communities. While the Virgin Islands doesn’t directly acknowledge the Soucouyant in its culture, this entity is recognized largely on the Caribbean islands that have substantial French influences such as Martinique, Grenada, and Trinidad.
When Frenchies came from St. Barths, their assimilation into the Virgin Islands community encouraged a melding of two worlds and underscored the complexities of identity in this region of the world.
The rich tapestry of oral tradition in the Caribbean region, and more specifically, the Virgin Islands, is one that is fueled by love. Prior to books, paper, pen, quill, and ink, storytelling laid the framework of the passage of generational wisdom, protected centuries of sacred spiritual practices, and kept the hearts of families beating to the tune of the same drum despite the forced displacement, labor, and separation of millions of African and Indigenous people. Storytelling is one of the purest embodiments of love, love that has been left behind by the people who came before us.
When we uphold oral tradition in our community and take time to impart the stories that have shaped our communities on to future generations, we carry the mantle of resistance against the westernization, commercialization, and over modernization that is often ubiquitous in colonized communities.
Stories like that of the jumbie, Cowfoot woman, Soucouyant, mermaids, witches, and shapeshifters are threads that bind us to the people who walked these lands, toiled these lands, and tended these lands far before we came to be. When we do our part in preserving the rich stories of our past, we venerate the lives and contributions of our ancestors. We also steward opportunities to engage in critical dialogues around culture, history, and the intrinsic values that shape our Virgin Islands community.
Sometimes as West Indian people, we don’t recognize the privilege of what it means to grow up in and be a part of such a rich diverse tapestry of culture. We are born with the privilege of being able to trace our families several generations back, we are able to inherit land deeply connected to the fabrics of our bloodlines, and we are privileged to stand at the alter of our heritage knowing that our ancestors paved the staircase and cemented the table. This culture, and more importantly this feeling of belonging is a gift that many in this world spend their lives searching for never having found. And yet, “our navel cord bury here.”
So finally, as stewards of cultural preservation and as people who are undoubtedly devoted to the Virgin Islands, the most profound gift we can offer the generations of Virgin Islanders who will one day walk these streets, swim in these waters, and bask in this sun is the gift of tradition that all of us had the privilege of being born into, the gift of culture that our ancestors didn’t deny us, and the gift of safeguarding the stories that bind us to the love seeded into the land.
