ST. LOUIS, St. Martin (August 7, 2003) — The Duzansons, one of St. Martin’s traditional families, just found out that in 1848, one of their direct ancestors wasted no time in defying the evil slave system on the island.
he news from over 100 years ago, reached the Duzansons during their first family reunion over the weekend of August 1, 2003, at the Flamboyant Hotel in Nettle Bay.
At the gathering, with its theme of “Celebrating over 100 years of family unity,” older head Mrs. Ermine Emmanuel-Duzanson stated: “My father, Jean-Louis Duzanson, told us the story of how his grandmother, Richardson, was a slave in Dutch Quarter and how in 1848 when slavery was abolished in Marigot, his grandmother wrapped up my mother Catherine Rose Richardson and her sister in some clothes and crossed over the mountain at night and settled in Colombier, as a free person.”
The book National Symbols of St. Martin points out from written records of the period that physical slavery ended on the entire island of St. Martin in 1848, based on the Emancipation proclamation in the French colonies in May of that year. As evidenced in the Ponum song, the news was hidden from the enslaved in St. Martin by their European enslavers until July. As soon as Emancipation was declared in the North, Blacks in the South, such as the Diamond Estate 26 in Cole Bay, started protesting and running away to the North or French part of the island. Within days, the authorities in Great Bay (Philipsburg) declared a process verbal to end the barbaric system in the South or Dutch part of St. Martin—because the soldiers from Willemstad would not have arrived in time to control the majority of population that had refused to return to the plantation as slaves.
Catherine Rose’s mother was one of the St. Martiners who did not wait for the process verbal but took flight to freedom immediately upon hearing of the Emancipation in Marigot.
Catherine Rose grew up in Colombier and became the matriarch of the present-day line of Duzansons after marrying to a Duzanson. Out of that union came five children, Jean-Louis, George-Edouard, Marie, Richard and William. Those five children are the forebears of prominent St. Martiners such as authors Louis Duzanson and Daniella Jeffry, cultural activists Urmain Dormoy and Shujah Reiph, Commissioner Roy Marlin, former world champion kick boxer Marco London and long-distance runner Steve Duzanson.
he Duzansons August 2003 family reunion brought together over 250 family members from throughout the Caribbean, the USA and Europe. One of the key organizers of the reunion, Millie Duzanson-Baptiste, stated on Conscious Lyrics radio magazine that, “the purpose of this reunion is to remember the past, celebrate the present, and touch the future.”