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Before running water was installed in most Bajan homes, most
villagers got their daily water from the standpipe at the center of the village. The
standpipe acted as a community center of sorts where gossip and bickering took place.
Everyone in the village had to go to the standpipe for water, and enemies couldn't
avoid one another.
The people waited in long lines with buckets or barrels on their
heads to collect water for home. The standpipe was a central hub of activity in the
village, though today they act as little more than occasional water fountains.
In one of my Caribbean poems, I address the contrast between the
standpipe's roles through the evolution of time:
Bajan Standpipe Song
At the village heart, where the standpipe is,
water empties into searing air,
mirages ripple, and a little blackbird,
a little black memory-bird,
hops around, pecking at pebbles
and sipping at the water drops
before they fall and disappear
into the parched earth's yawn.
He flits between the feet
of forgotten people as they wait in line
to fill the buckets on their heads.
"You there," a woman cries,
gesturing to her son before he runs
to play a game of tag. "Get your sister
and tell she to start the callaloo.
Buy two eddoe off Roxanne,
pick de taro out back our door."
The boy trots down the road toward the sea,
where chattel houses stretch
like a row of untrained guards
protecting the rock from advancing waves.
Near her feet, two children squat
around the edge of a quick-drawn
ring, playing marbles in the dirt.
A blue-white ball flashes across the space,
collides in patterned ricochets
and scatters the others outside
the circle they have come to know.
The little girl with braided hair
gathers them together near her knee,
aims the blue-white ball, and shoots again.
The black black bird hops between waiting feet
as voices swell and feed the fire.
"Come on sweet thing," a young man says,
his arm around his girlfriend's waist.
"Put your bucket down and come back home.
The water can wait for later."
He smiles, soft and sweet,
his eyes full up with promise.
She turns away. "You think you
know? You don't care.
The rain barrel's half-empty.
The children scream up a storm.
My mama's ill: I got to watch
over she. All you bring is trouble."
"Someone got to love you too."
They walk off, past forgotten memories
of standpipe fights,
when people bickered
over borrowed sugar
and just whose cow ate the field.
The blackbird pecks again beside the man
whose mind is caught in rumshop tricks;
then the bird flies off,
high above the fields of sugarcane.
He heads directly toward the sun;
far below, illusions fade
to the drip drip drip of a standpipe leak.
-SNH
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