Love or cocoa tea?

That cocoa tea, is a poison to me,
Everytime I drink it, I don't know where I'll be.
If you want to find me, yuh gotta look for me,
'Cause she got my head upside a down
wid a cup a dah cocoa tea.





What you just read is an chorus of a Bajan folk song called Cocoa tea. I woke up with that song in my head this morning after a conversation last night at my neighborhood shop.
In Barbados, almost every neighborhood has a shop. It's usually a tiny add on to somebody's house that sells some of everything from food stuff to soap and combs for your hair. We used to call some of these shops "rum shops" because they sold rum and the older men would hang around after work drinking, talking and playing dominoes.

No one really talks about rum shops anymore, and the shops have indeed upgraded - one of the ones closest to my house has a flat screen television and is like a side street theater on weekends. Now both young and old can be found hanging around "liming" and talking.
The shops are good for not just getting your groceries, but for often bringing together young and old. And where there are people, there is talk, and there are a hundred perspectives to every story.

I happened to be in the shop when the conversation arose about a young man who had moved  a young female and her four children to his house. While the woman worked in the day, he quit his day job to prepare the children for school, cooked and kept house until she returned in the evening, then he would go to his night job. The friendly debate of the topic was if the woman had given the man cocoa tea or not.

NOW for those of you who may not be familiar with the term cocoa tea, it is an expression used to indicate that a person is working Obeah (voodoo) on another. It is often said when a man does things that are considered "extereme" or in change of his character for a woman, that the woman has worked some sort of Obeah on him to make him behave this way.
The song above, Cocoa tea, was a cleverly crafted song about such, where the woman the writer was in love with, had mixed a potion and administered it to him in cocoa tea.

So the debate went on - some people stuck out that the man was simply in love, and love made men do things that they themselves would never dream they could do, while others derived that any bachelor who would willingly give up one of his income sources in these hard economic times to care for a woman and four kids that were not his own must be under the influence of some "dirty hand".

And what, you wonder, did I have to say?
"Can I have a pack of salt bread please?"

Haha - I leave you guys to ponder it. Love? Or Cocao tea? You decide.


Bisous!!xoxo