Day 225 - Flack Attack

Flack Attack. That is what the newspaper headline said. And it was what everyone in Barbados talked about for several months.

Image of Roberta Flack by ronwired,
via Flickr.com

To explain, let me go back to the consular section where most of us were new to Barbados. The Consul General, Tom, had arrived just a few months before I did. The Consul, Margaret, had been in Barbados about a year. I arrived about the same time as David, the only other vice consul who had prior experience doing consular work. The remaining two vice consuls, Evan and Dave, arrived a few months later.

Evan always seemed to have visitors. Friends, relatives, college and high school classmates, former neighbors all seemed to find their way to Barbados to take advantage of Evan's hospitality. He is a great guy, so he and his wife welcomed them all, even those they barely knew.

But then Evan's sister came to town. She wasn't there on vacation like all of Evan's other visitors. She came on business. She worked for Roberta Flack who had concerts scheduled in Barbados. That was the reason for the newspaper headline.

That made Evan very popular with our Bajan colleagues. Everyone wanted to meet Roberta Flack. But the real story wasn't who wanted to meet her, but who Roberta Flack met. She wasn't on the island long, but in that short time, she met a coconut vendor who stole her heart.

The island had lots of coconut vendors. Mostly they sold iced coconuts for the refreshing water inside them. Part of the purchase was the show as they pulled out their collinses, a local name for a machette, and chopped off the tops and inserted a straw as they handed over the chilled coconut to the buyer. Roberta's coconut vendor must have had something special to offer, although it wasn't obvious to anyone else.

Once the Flack party left Barbados, Evan became Roberta's new best friend. She had Evan's sister call to ask him to issue a visitor visa to her coconut man. Evan explained to his sister that he really couldn't be the one to accept the application because of the appearance of a conflict of interest. But he must have given her some tips on how a coconut vendor could improve his apparant ties to his home country because Roberta bought him a house on the west coast of the island. That's about the point when the next newspaper headline, The First Time Ever She Saw His Coconuts appeared.

Image of coconut vendor by matt.hintsa,
via Flickr.com

A few months after all the public attention died down, the coconut man ended up at my visa window. I didn't recognize him; he didn't have classic good looks. There wasn't much at all that made him remarkable that I could see. He wasn't tall. He didn't dress particularly well. And he had a new occupation listed on his application. Instead of coconut vendor, he listed his occupation as groom. Since I could think of a lot of meanings for groom and none of them suggested any great ties to Barbados to explain why he would return at the end of a short stay, I asked him what kind of groom he was. He replied that he groomed his horse. I asked him who owned the horse, and he said he owned it. He then handed me a paper, one of the only times that seeing a document earlier would have cleared up the story. The letter was from Roberta Flack, addressed not to the coconut man but to the consular section, in which she explained she would be sure he returned to Barbados after two weeks because he had responsibility to care for the race horse she had bought him.

All did not end well for the coconut man. He returned to Barbados and his new house, but he didn't meet Roberta's cultural expectations. She had expected him to be loyal, perhaps even faithful. When she traveled to Barbados to surprise him, she really did surprise him. He wasn't alone.

I don't know, but I suspect there might have been another Flack Attack at that point.