Carlina Jules-Taylor talks with Pat Ganase about her journey to Tonci Chocolate, recently presented at the 2024 Trade and Investment Conference.
In Dominica, my mother Marie Jules taught me to make drinking chocolate. Her father was an overseer on an estate with cocoa, coffee, coconut. She grew up with cocoa. Her mother, my grandmother, used to process everything on the estate. They squeezed sugar cane daily and boiled the juice to make visou (thick, almost crystallised syrup) which was used to sweeten cocoa and coffee. My grandfather kept cows, so there was fresh milk to add to cocoa.
This estate was in La Plaine. I grew up in Roseau. My father was a fisherman. So my mother left the country and lived in a part of Roseau near the sea called Newtown.
Everyone loves coffee, but poor people could not buy a lot of coffee at once. She would roast and mill coffee and sell the ground coffee by the spoonful. She also made cocoa sticks to sell for cocoa tea. She bought her first cocoa mill around 1976-77, and still uses it. We did not know about making chocolate then.
My mother still processes cocoa for tea. She still makes coffee. She used to buy the dried cocoa beans in the market, make and sell the sticks. She also made fudge – we call it coconut cheese – and sugar cake, which we call tablet.
She was happy not to have to go out and work. She ran her own business, cooking for doctors, professional people. It meant she could be at home when the children came from school. By the time she stopped working, she had one girl and three boys. I was born after she stopped working, the youngest and I grew up with my mom at home. She visits us in Tobago to help us.
In Dominica, the school day ends at 1 pm. We had a mid-morning break at half-past ten. But after one, you were free. It was a shock to me to see children still in their uniforms late in the day in Tobago.
Life was very simple: 8 am-1pm, school. In the afternoon, you could be in the library, in the beach, having an afternoon rest. Later in the afternoon, I would go to the fisheries to wait for my father’s boat. Newtown was one of the first villages to set up a fishing co-op. There were bakeries all around; you could get bread for breakfast and afternoon bread for supper. After that, the bread was stale.
[caption id="attachment_1099751" align="aligncenter" width="450"] Marie Jules comes from Dominica to Tobago to help out Randy and Carlina Taylor. -[/caption]
At secondary school, the afternoons were full of activities. I learned to play the violin. My father would take me to snorkel the reefs. He was not a talkative person so it was a good way to spend time together.
I met Randy Taylor at the University of Southern Caribbean, where I worked towards a degree in vertebrate zoology with a minor in chemistry. We were married in 2006 and moved to Tobago, to the home where his great-aunt and great-uncle raised him.
I worked at the Scarborough Library for ten years. Our first son Tadijah was born in 2013 after many miscarriages. Tonci (pronounced T
