Will Johnson

My full name is William Stanley Johnson, but everybody knows me as Will Johnson. I was born here on Saba in 1941. I grew up here, of course. All my ancestors have been here since 1629. One of my great-great-grandfathers, Commodore Richard Johnson, was the governor for a few years, so I have deep roots here. I've been the senator for the island for 16 years in Curacao, I've been acting governor for 16 years as well. And sometimes there was no governor, so I was de facto the governor. For 32 years,I was elected to the Island Council. For 20 years, I was elected as commissioner.

I was born over in a village then called Behind the Ridge, above the sulfur mine. My mother hated Behind the Ridge — she said it was “behind the face of god.” She was always worried that the children would drop over the big cliff there. When she was pregnant with my brother Guy, she was feeding a bull in the pen and he threw her over the wall. My mother was 6’1”; she survived the fall, and Guy survived too. He became 6’4”, he was a gentle giant. Once she lost her wedding ring while feeding the cow. Years later, up in Sandy Cruz, my brother Aaron was farming potatoes and when digging up the soil, there was my mother's wedding ring.

For me personally as a boy, there were no distractions. No television, no radio, no electricity. So after school was over, you had to fill up your day as best as possible. We cooked on wood. My mother was a noble-looking woman, and she said that her only regret was that our hair was always smelling of smoke because she had to cook out in the yard on the old coal pot. I got about 10 coal pots around here in memory of her. So after school, you had to help out the house by going into the woods looking for dry wood for cooking. Every house would have to have a cow, and sometimes two, and then you'd have to go cut grass for the cow because the cow was stationary. You had to bring food for it but it was double-purpose because manure was used to cultivate the ground for when we planted potatoes and so on.

We only had glorified goat trails between the villages, a little cement here and there. We had no airport, no harbor, or no electricity, no motor vehicles, the first motor vehicle was a Jeep that the administrator brought onto the island. Saba people are well traveled because most of them were captains or sailors, we had many large schooners of our own. We had direct trade with New York, we had about five or six schooners that would go regularly to New York — taking passengers, lumber for houses, salt from Sint Maarten, sugar cane from Saint Kitts — and they'd be up in New York, depending on the weather, in 12–14 days. We also had a navigation school here that the Dutch government approved. The people that were good at their lessons became captains. They produced over 100 licensed captains from Saba. At one time at the beginning of the last century, we had about 2,500 people living on the island, and 700 people’s profession was listed as a seaman.

At the age of 13, I went to a boys' town on Curacao. People thought it was an institution for bad boys, and I'm not saying that I wasn't bad, but the institution really provided a place for the boys from Saba, Stasia, Sint Maarten, Bonaire, and Aruba because we did not have higher education. At that time we just had up to the seventh grade here, so boys’ town had a great influence on the rest of my life because it was strict like military training. Your day was completely regulated from the time you woke up at five o'clock. You could study carpentry or masonry, do mechanical stuff. And within six months, I was able to learn Papiamento. It came in very good for me for the rest of my life because I was acting chairman of the parliament there for a year, and the debates were in Papiamento, the legislation was in Dutch, and I'm a native English speaker.

At that time, I remember Sint Maaten had 83 motor vehicles on the entire island, and half of them didn't work. Because if the car broke down, you would have to send by snail mail to Sears Roebuck to order the part. And sometimes the wrong part came, so at no time were there more than 20 cars on the road, you know? When I finished school, I was offered a job in Sint Maarten by the then-governor, Mr. Beaujon. I worked in the post office primarily but also in the treasury, assisted the judge when he came upstairs at the court, assisted a notary public, and also the lady from the Curacao bank. Anytime I was given the opportunity to replace somebody, I would take it because it was a new learning experience. And then in 1962, I got involved in politics, and that has been my main vocation all the years. But people don't describe me anymore as a politician, you know — they just say I'm a historian.