‘‘We live on the main road across from the stand-pipe.” That is how I learned from my mother to direct anyone to our house. We were country people, my father an agricultural labourer, my mother a seamstress. I was the firstborn. We lived in a small two-bedroomed chattel house. The house was originally a deep red but had become faded over time. It had a little verandah, just big enough to hold two chairs. As a little girl growing up in 1950s Barbados, I often watched my world from one of the chairs on that verandah. I was allowed to sit at the window, but I preferred the verandah, and my mother gave in to my wishes after a while, because we lived in a safe space in a small rural village where everyone knew everyone.
Those were interesting times. Major social and political changes were in process in Barbados and across the region. New labour parties were challenging the domination of the conservative planter class. We now had one man, one vote. Across from that stand-pipe was my introduction to my community, its life, its politics. I learned that in the upcoming election, people were planning to “drink up all o’ Walcott rum and vote for Labour”. And they did.
At that time, most people did not have piped water in their homes. They fetched their water in buckets from village stand-pipes. From early in the morning, my neighbours moved back and forth to the stand-pipe across from our house and in front of Mr Roett’s shop. It was a small shop attached to the side of what we used to call a wall-house. It was a bungalow, built with concrete blocks, painted cream and a mellow green. The Roett family lived there, Harold Roett, his mother, wife and four teenaged sons.
Mister Roett owned a piece of land which stretched behind the house down into the gully and another piece on the other side. He grew sugar cane, bananas, plantains, sweet potatoes, yams, eddoes and cassava. The Roetts were better off than just about anyone in our village, and I am sure they could have afforded piped water in their house, but the stand-pipe right in front was so very convenient that they came to think of it as theirs. Mister Roett’s wife never queued for water. The person at the front of the queue would always cede to Mistress Roett. Mistress Roett had never asked for this privilege; it was conferred on her automatically by people who knew their place.
You see, the Roett family, in addition to being better off, had a little “colour”, and Mistress Roett was a married lady. Anyone else who broke the queue would be unceremoniously pushed out of the way and roughly asked, “Wait, who you t’ink you is?” And if it was Bertha Greenidge in the front of the queue, my mother would come and drag me inside to protect me from the “rassholes” and “God-blind-yuhs”, cause when you start Bertha, like a hot engine, she took time to cool down. In the meantime, the interrupter would learn “where she mudder get she from, why she can’t help juckin’ in and how she ain’t got no effin manners”, among other things. But that same Bertha deferred to Mistress Roett whenever she came out to fetch her water.
Conversation would abate while Mistress Roett filled her bucket. When she stepped back into her house, the submissiveness ceased, and things returned to normal, with more spirited exchanges amongst the women. It was almost always women or children who fetched water, rarely the men. Sometimes there was the occasional comment: “Them fair-skin people feel because they got a li’l colour that them better than the rest o’ we.” But no one ever challenged the status quo. That was until Gladys Forde came to our village.
Gladys was a young woman of, it was said, only twenty-five, a strapping country girl, tall and strong. She came from St Andrew to be the wife of Beresford Bishop, a man twenty years her senior. Beresford was a quiet, hardworking, God-fearing man. He raised pigs and fowls, and he had a plot of land. He worked from sunup to sundown six days a week and served his Lord on the seventh. He had lost his first wife tragically; she had had a heart attack, quite unexpectedly. He was left to raise their five children. He met Gladys through the Pentecostal church. Some say it was an arranged marriage. “The Elders give she to he to help raise them children.”
Gladys had arrived just as school finished for the long summer holidays. In a very short time, the stand-pipe gathering was talking about how she took care of those children and how she helped Beresford in the land. “She ain’t frighten to get she hands dirty at all.” Her new neighbours came to consider her “a very serious woman”. What they meant was that she was businesslike in all her dealings. The Bishops’ house was about two hundred yards uphill from the stand-pipe. The Bishop children rotated water-carrying duties weekly during the vacation. But when they returned to school in September, Gladys took over the task.
One morning, as Gladys got to the front of the line, Mistress Roett stepped in front of her. “Excuse me. It is my turn. Go to the back of the line,” said Gladys in a firm tone. Mistress Roett looked Gladys up and down, looked away, and then proceeded to put her bucket under the tap, as if she had not heard or even seen Gladys. Gladys Bishop shoved the bucket away. There was some pushing and Mrs Roett slipped on the wet, mossy cement surface, fell to the ground and cried out, “Oh, God.”
Somehow, I knew that this wouldn’t end there, and I called out, “Come and see this, Ma.”
Harry Roett appeared and, seeing his wife on the ground, asked, “Wha’ happen?”
Mistress Roett jabbed a finger in Gladys’ direction. “She push me down!”
Harry’s right hand flew back, and he delivered a swift slap to Gladys’ jaw. The slap rang out; Mrs Gaskin from down the road would claim, weeks later, that she heard it from in her house, one hundred yards farther along. Gladys stumbled, but she didn’t fall. She recovered, looked around at the rest of the gathering, listened to their silence, turned, and strode toward home.
My eyes followed her, then returned to the stand-pipe. Mutterings, steupsing and quarrelling had broken out at the stand-pipe. “But she ain’t had no right pushing down Mistress Roett, though….” “She deserve wha’ she get.” Harry Roett joined in, his voice raised: “She just come ’bout here and feel she can disrespect people.”
Suddenly, Harry became aware that the rest of the group was looking past him. He turned and saw Gladys striding toward him, an axe handle swinging from her right hand. The crowd backed away. Harry advanced toward Gladys, raised a finger of admonishment, and said, “Now listen....”
The length of carved pine, weighted at the end, rose up in the air then quickly came down, missing Harry it seemed at first, but it turned suddenly, horizontally, and hit into Harry’s left side with a thud. The blow bent him over sideways and there was a loud escape of air from him. Before he had time to recover, the axe handle rose again, came down and curved into Harry’s right side. He hollered and collapsed. I started to cry. Mistress Roett wailed and begged the Lord for mercy. My mother hugged me tight, tight. Gladys Bishop retrieved her bucket, placed it under the tap, turned and cast defiant eyes around the gathering. With her bucket full, she turned and headed back up the hill, bucket in one hand and the axe handle swinging in the other. That woman didn’t say a word to a soul.
The stand-pipe crowd remained silent for a moment. My mother told me, “Don’t move from here,” as she dashed across the road. Mistress Roett put out a hand to her husband who cried, “Oh, Lord, muh ribs, muh ribs.” My mother and two other women helped to get Mr Roett up on his feet and into his house. He moaned all the way. The crowd tripled in size as neighbours ran out of their houses to find out what was happening. Voices buzzed as witnesses told their stories simultaneously. “He did want some licks ever since, you know,” someone said, to murmured agreement.
The following day, a plumber arrived at the Roett household and started to run pipes into their house. Mistress Roett was never seen at the stand-pipe again. In time, Mr Roett recovered from his injuries.
The events of that morning were etched into my four-year-old mind. I had witnessed brutality for the first time and was repulsed by it. But I had also witnessed a woman standing up for herself. I had seen how people responded to power. I had seen courage, I had seen cowardice, and I understood that one person could achieve change. There were times in my career when the memories of that morning came back to me, as I faced challenges, as I competed with some who had a better start in life than this woman who was schooled at the stand-pipe.