This is a night story. The old people never told it in the middle of the day, and I won't either. Wait until the light drops and the river starts to sound bigger than it is. Now, come.
Every big river in Jamaica has a mother. Not a "source." The engineers can keep that word. A mother. She lives at the river head, down in the deep part where the water is born, and on certain still mornings she comes up to sit on her rock and comb out her long black hair with a comb made of gold. Plenty people will tell you they never see her. Watch them when they say it. Almost nobody looks at the river while they are saying it.
Now the rules, because this story is really a set of rules wearing a dress.
First rule: if you ever see her, you do not point. Point your finger at the River Mumma and that finger can wither, or worse, the river will remember your face. Second rule: if you find a golden comb resting on a rock by the water, leave it exactly where it is. It is not lost. Nothing the Mumma owns is ever lost. It is bait, and whoever carries it home will hear the river calling them back at night. Third rule, and the old people say this one quietly: when the river comes down sudden and brown and full of temper, somebody has troubled her.
The Rio Cobre in St. Catherine keeps the most famous piece of her story. Under that water, they say, rests the Golden Table, and on the hottest part of a hot day it rises, shining, just beneath the surface. Greedy men once decided to have it. They brought a whole team of oxen, chained up the table, and pulled. The table went down. The chain went down. The oxen went down, and the men behind them. The River Mumma does not give up what is hers.
She is older than Jamaica, if you follow her back far enough. She carries the memory of Mami Wata and the water spirits of West Africa, kept alive on this side of the ocean in stories told after dark, and somewhere along the way she took in the mermaids the sailors brought, too. But she became her own self here. Every country gets the spirits it needs.
And think about what this one actually does. She keeps pickney from playing in deep water alone. She makes big men watch the sky upriver before they cross. She teaches a whole island that a river is a living thing with moods, that you tell it good morning, and that you do not take what is not yours. The old people had conservation long before anybody printed the word. They just called her the River Mumma.
So when a guide takes you up one of Jamaica's rivers, ask about her. Ask quietly, near the water. You will get a laugh first, almost always. Then watch the face behind the laugh. Somewhere back there is a grandmother, and a rock at the river head, and one hour when the water went very, very still.