You may not know her name, but chances are that you recognize Clemencia Caleb when you see her.
She’s the news lady of Mafolie Hill. Posted behind the low retaining wall, just above the hairpin curve, she offers her papers with a broad smile and a heartfelt “Good morning.” If it’s hot, she has a bottle of water. If it’s raining, she has a slicker and an umbrella. Sometimes she has a companion. Sometimes she’s on her cell phone. But always she is there.
Caleb has been a newspaper street vendor for 28 years, most of that at her current location. She starts her day between 4:30 and 5 a.m. and stays at her post until 10 a.m. Monday through Saturday.
“More than 2,000 people pass by me every morning,” she said with what sounds like pride. They are traveling up and down the hill, but mostly down into town, headed to work, to school, to shop. Hundreds of them pause just long enough to exchange a dollar for a paper, quickly, to avoid hampering the traffic flow.
The transaction is brief, but somehow Caleb and many of her customers have managed to make a connection beyond the commercial. As she sat outside the Mafolie Hotel one day last week, talking about her life both on and off the job, every second or third vehicle passing by slowed as its driver caught sight of her and waved or called out a greeting. She never failed to respond in kind.
“I like making people feel good,” she said, noting that usually all it takes is a friendly greeting.
But sometimes people tell her their troubles, she said. “I tell them, ‘Leave it to God. Carry it to the foot of the cross and leave it there.’”
St. Thomas is her home, but Caleb has roots in Tortola. “I was born on the sea” between the two islands, she revealed.
Her mother was traveling to St. Thomas to have her child in what should have been sufficient time, but her daughter decided to arrive a week early. “I’m not really prompt,” she demurs.
It wasn’t always an easy life. Caleb attended Charlotte Amalie High School in the 1970s but became pregnant as a teen and dropped out of school a year early. She was determined to get her diploma, however.
Tragically, her first baby died shortly after birth. Three more children, several jobs, financial sacrifice and about 10 years later, she completed her GED. Her mother helped, she said, caring for the kids while Caleb worked and went to classes.
For much of her life, Caleb has held two jobs, sometimes three. She was working as a dishwasher at Blackbeard’s Castle Hotel restaurant when, she said, one day a manager asked if anybody knew how to make salad. As she recalls, she said, “Salad is easy,” and pretty soon she had diversified; she could be a dishwasher or a pantry cook, whichever was needed at a given time.
Her willingness to take advantage of opportunity is what landed her in the newspaper distribution business. To supplement her income, Caleb started helping a friend who sold newspapers above town, filling in for her when she was sick or needed a day off.
It wasn’t long before Caleb was offered her own site.
For years she started her day selling papers early in the morning, then took the kids to school, then headed to Café Amici in town to work the lunch shift as a pantry cook, picked the kids up from school, and finally headed for the East End to work from 4 to 11 p.m. at the Blue Moon Café. She’d get up the next day about 4 a.m. and start again.
In 2005 when her mother was sick, Caleb cut her working back to newspaper sales. “I stayed home and took care of her until 2009 when she passed,” she said.
There are some things you must do, Caleb believes, like caring for her son, LeRoy, who is mentally challenged and is now in his 30s. “I have him all my life,” she said, adding that if you have a child who needs special care, “that’s your main responsibility for the rest of your life.”
Her daughter, LaVerne, is married and lives in Tortola with her husband and three children. Caleb’s son, Theodore , is building a home on St. Thomas for his toddler son and the boy’s mother. Grandma can’t see enough of any of her grandkids.
Married in 1985 to Ellsworth Caleb, she said she knows a bit about how to make a lasting relationship. The key is communication. “Talk it out,” she said. “Don’t go to sleep mad. If it takes two hours, do it. Once you know where he’s coming from, and he knows where you’re coming from, you can meet in the middle.”
“Then you still gotta love each other,” she said. “And you got to joke sometimes. “
These days, Caleb brings a chair to work with her so she can rest her arthritic knees, and she squeezes a small ball to exercise her stiffening fingers. But she has no intention of retiring from the hill and deserting her loyal customers. “I haven’t taken a vacation in many, many years,” she said.
“I don’t need a vacation. I’m just going day to day.”
