More from Juna Lee Poinfax

The Legend Of Water People

Excerpted From Fables of the Water People

Compiled and Edited by Lilith Bonavendier

In some ancient time of great honor and noble deeds, some millenium thousands of years before our own, Once Upon A Time, as they say in fairy tales, Melasine and the other Old Ones, male and female, ruled a great empire of extraordinary beings such as themselves, wholly human but also wholly aquatic.

Their findings suggest an amazing civilization existed long before the first Greeks erected temples to sea gods and goddesses. It is quite likely the fabulous worlds of Melasine and her kind had been in ruins for millennia when Neptune began paddling around Grecian male fantasies with his nubile nymphs and phallic trident.

Water is life, water is love, water is the womb. All the great religions believe so. Water People say the earth formed as an afterthought inside the glorious depths of great seas, hardening like the dull, dry pit of a luscious fruit. At the risk of insulting those Water People who believe Landers cannot possibly share our legacy, I must point out that if the sea is the mother of us all, then we must all be, at heart, both Water People and Land People. Do not all children float first in the womb as female beings? Thus all men begin in fluid, as women. Similarly, all Landers began as Water People. And all Water People began as the Old Ones.

Mermaids.

I rarely use that cartoonish term, but it does prove convenient for first impressions. Whether fact or fancy, the portrait of Melasine at Sainte’s Point indicates she is far more surreal and complex than a simple, popular name can surmise. I have no doubt she exists—an ancient, ageless, female being, isolated and reclusive, lonely and yet seductive.

Grandmother Deirdre Bonavendier's story.

My own grandmother, Deirdre Bonavendier, told me about meeting Melasine and learning, directly from her, the Water People’s mythological Ta-Mera legend. Deirdre was born in the mid-1800s, not many years after the passing of her grandfather, Simon Sainte Bonavendier, that heroic French Lander who captured Melasine’s heart. 

I must point out that Grandmother Deirdre was the granddaughter of a fully vested “mermaid” and the daughter of a halfling father who deserted his family. Her life was also shaped by the bittersweet mourning of her lovesick Lander mother (no one should fall in love with a first-generation halfling—it is useless.)

“Melasine had long since disappeared from her family’s circle by then,” Grandmother Deirdre said. “She was not a doting grandmother in the traditional sense.”

Indeed, neither Melasine nor her children were destined to stay at Sainte’s Point Island, Georgia. The three halflings Melasine and Simon birthed together during the late 1700s and early 1800s eventually left to roam the abyss. By nature they were loners, like their mother. (Dear Readers: Please see my addendum about genealogical clans for more information on volatile first-generation halflings.) 

No doubt Grandmother Deirdre was privy to rather unsettling accounts of her halfling father’s unusual physical appearance and abilities, as well as enduring a heartsick Lander mother who never recovered from being deserted. I urge you to keep all of her background in mind. I suspect Grandmother Deirdre sought to soften it through her storytelling. 

At any rate, Grandmother Deirdre insisted that as a child (during the Civil War) she met her Grandmother Melasine while attempting to lure a Union gunship into the shallows near Bellemeade Bay. The encounter occurred more than ten years after her Grandfather Simon’s death (he had lived to a manfully gracious Lander age of ninety.)

“Grandmother Melasine saved me from being captured by the Union navy,” Grandmother Deirdre told me. “I was about to be fired upon in the water when suddenly someone whisked me down deep and held me safely. I turned in those strange arms and gaped. I recognized Grandmother Melasine from her portrait as well as by sheer instinct, of course. Her skin glowed pale white, like the finest creamy silk, and her golden hair floated in trails as long as her body, swirling around her from head to fins. She was terrifying and beautiful; I settled with her on the bay’s bottom and couldn’t move or look away. She stroked my face with her long, webbed hands and sang to me without words. She was crying, still grieving for Grandpapa, though she had always known that he would grow old and die. ‘Such is the curse of my kind when we love Landers,’ she sang to me. ‘But it was not always so.’

'Please tell me your story, Grandmama,’ I sang back.

'Yes, brave child, I will give you that gift,’ she answered.

“And so Grandmother Melasine shared her memories with me. I saw an ancient alabaster city beneath the bluest water. I saw visions of all that Grandmother Melasine had known and been many centuries before she gave her heart to Grandpapa. And that is how I know that Ta-Mera really existed.”
 

---

The Beginning of Our Kind

Here is what my grandmother, and her grandmother—a mermaid—said about the beginning of our kind. And yours. 

When Melasine and the others like her -- both male and female – were young, they called themselves Tamerians, after their greatest city. The Tamerians openly ruled the coasts of the ancient world, creating amazing palaces in the waters, traveling across land via rivers and inlets and fantastically engineered channels which connected the great seas and freshwater lakes. Landers—pathetic, two-legged, short-lived humans--were deemed inferior and treated as servants or were driven to the wild interiors of the continents, where their shuffling, land-trapped ways could be ignored by the elegant and handsomely finned Tamerians. 

Ta-Mera was built more in the water than on the land, with submerged temples and fluid passageways, fine promontories of marble for sunning in the warm air, and broad canals of the most beautiful stonework, allowing Melasine and her kind to travel throughout their empire without ever leaving the water. (Dear Readers: You might want to look for an article from the magazine Strange Science, circa May of 1997, titled “The Mysterious Lost Alleys of the Ancient Coasts.” It’s inaccurate but fascinating, especially to those of us who know why those “alleys” truly existed.) The Tamerians were a far older race than the plodding Landers. They considered themselves a far more brilliant kind, far more talented, far more evolved. 

There is always a “pride goeth before the fall” theme in mythology, and the Ta-Mera story may be just such an instructional tale: Perhaps the Tamerians abused their hold over the Landers, treating them as a lesser tributary of the familial sea, and the Landers finally rebelled. Or the Tamerians worshiped inconstant gods who smote them for frivolous injustices. Or they were doomed by the ordinary afflictions of both Land and Water Kind—greed, envy, lust, and jealousy. 

Whatever the curse that descended upon them, it inspired all the great fables of the world since. Is it not true that in the storytelling traditions of every major culture we find tales of unthinkable disasters, which cleansed the world and restored order? Of course, among Water People these tales have a certain irony. For example, in our version of Noah’s Ark, the world was destroyed by a great drought. 

Be that as it may. Some terrible cataclysm abruptly destroyed Ta-Mera and the vast empire it anchored, along with all the Landers--except three young men -- and the Tamerians -- except Melasine and two others—young mermaids named Acarinth and Leirdrela. 

In some accounts the three surviving Landers are described by Water People as barbaric and low (typical Landers, some insist) and are assigned names commiserate with such an unpleasant portrayal. A web-footed priest writing in fourteenth century England named the Landers Gumaldin, Fray Daval, and Altenhop--names from the classic storytellers’ lexicon of bumbling demons and clownish villains. 

Even modern Water People coax their children to sleep with disparaging comic tales about the three Landers. In many bedtime stories the trio become drooling lechers named Squat, Frag, and Goop, and children are assured that our finned foremothers nobly consorted with them only for purposes of repopulating the ocean with Water People. 

Most Water People, however, prefer a more romantic and sympathetic image of the three legendary Landers -- who are, after all, our mythological ancestors. They call the threesome by handsome names that were assigned to them in a classic eighteenth century narrative written by a Bonavendier relative, the infamous Victorian singer and poetess Emilene Merrimac Revere (Molly’s great-grandmother,) of Boston, Massachusetts. To quote a verse:

Stalwart and true, by Ta-Mera’s princesses enslaved
Devoted lovers, bound to earth yet fulfilled in water,
We shall whisper their mortal names on shores kissed by eternal tides,
And forget them not in fluid rhyme:
Beckrith, Padrian, and Salasime.

Beckrith, Padrian, and Salasime. The mates of the three Tamerians and the mythological founding fathers of all Water People. They were pureblooded, two-legged, ordinary Landers. After the great cataclysm nothing was left of either Land People or Water People except those three gentlemen and our three ladies. A classic dilemma. 

Even if you were the only man left on Earth . . .

Melasine, Acarinth, and Leirdrela fell in love with the men. The Tamerians were not yet creatures of determined solitude. That came later, during centuries of loneliness and loss. But after many years their devoted Landers died, and also their halfling children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – all mortal. 

As the centuries passed, every lover and every child left them. The three Tamerians realized it would always be so. Thus they began to harden their hearts against Landers and even halflings, to stay alone, until some rare man lures them into love again or some descendent earns their sympathy. 

So they cannot resist loving us. In their souls they cherish their mingled descendents, neither Lander nor Tamerian, neither earth nor water, but the best of both.

And that is a truth I believe.

Every time I recount Grandmother Deirdre’s story I feel a bit defensive. Popular modern myths say Melasine, Acarinth, and Leirdrela continue to take lovers among the men of the earth and to birth new generations of extraordinary descendents. The more pragmatic among Water People insist that no such finned ancestors ever existed and certainly don’t exist now, and that variations in our skills and physiology are mere vagaries, easily explained by random intermingling among our kind. (Dear Readers: I will not get into any wilder claims here, but do please read my addendum about clans.) 

Many Water People claim (as, in fact, we Bonavendiers do) to be only a few generations removed from either Melasine, Acarinth, or Leirdrela. We engage in endless debates over reported sightings and encounters with the three. A certain snobbery demands that one not only claim a member of the trio as near kin but also show proof that the link actually exists. 

That proof is always suspect, however. The portrait of Melasine at Sainte’s Point has generated spirited controversy among Water People for two hundred years. Some fervently accuse us of fraud. Did she actually pose for the artist, or was her image merely conjured up by social climbing eighteenth century Bonavendiers? I assure you, dear readers, she posed.

Regardless, let us all be proud of whatever talents we have inherited, however and whenever, at every level of clan and kinship. I fully admit that my native Southern fascination with family history is as strong as my devotion to my kind. And thus I am calling, as I said to begin with, for pride and unity. 

Like Deirdre, I do believe in legends.

And I do believe, Dear Readers, that we are all One People, only separated by fluid degrees.

Land People fight and struggle and yearn to find magic in their lives. Water People hide behind that magic but realize the loneliness of it. As for Bonavendiers, add to our psyche the spoiled attitudes of a silver-spoon upbringing in the deep, coastal South, and you have that most dangerous of all combinations (and here I stoop to use two common stereotypes.) 

Southern belles who are also mermaids. 

Gilding the magnolia, to say the least.

Now you know.

| Deborah Smith Home | Mer Home | Introduction | Mer FAQs | Mer Council | Mer Legends | Mer Clans | Mer Wisdom | Famous Mer | | Mer History | Water Hyacinth |