The Mer-Child: A Legend for Children and Other Adults

By Robin Morgan

Love transcends all barriers in this modern fairy tale 

When the Mer-Child learned the story of the Little Mermaid, he recognized it as the account of his mother and father, the beautiful mermaid and the human man for whom she sacrificed everything. But that love had left their offspring, the Mer-Child, stranded between worlds, as unwelcome in the realm of the sea as in the earth above. Never fitting in, he has been left to wander, searching for friends, his silvery tail fluttering mournfully in the waves.


One day he notices a little girl sitting on the beach. Her father must carry her to and from the shore each day because her legs are paralyzed. Her father is black, her mother white, and she is as much an outcast in both communities as the Mer-Child is in his own. Slowly, warily, they find kinship, both in their differences and in their similarities, and they form a bond that changes them forever. What each learns about the value of being different makes this modern-day fairy tale a new classic, with two memorable characters and an enduring message.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781497678118

Robin Morgan

Award-winning poet, novelist, journalist, and feminist leader Robin Morgan has published more than twenty books, including the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful and Sisterhood Is Global and the bestselling The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism. Her work has been translated into thirteen languages, among them Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Persian. A recipient of honors including a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and former editor in chief of Ms., Morgan founded the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, and with Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem, cofounded the Women’s Media Center. She writes and hosts Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan, a weekly program with a global audience on iTunes and WMCLive.com—her commentaries legendary, her guests ranging from grassroots activists to Christiane Amanpour, Anita Hill, and President Jimmy Carter.

Book preview

Once upon a time that may or may not come again, there lived a Mer-Child.

He had pale green skin translucent as sea-foam, and his body sloped to a tail that glittered like a prism in the sun, each scale reflecting a different shimmer of the rainbow—crimson and cobalt, lilac and gold. His hair was surf white, ringleted as the froth that crests a wave. But his eyes were the strangest of all: they were speckled and whorled like the spirals of the sundial shell.

He was very beautiful.

His mother was a mermaid, his father a human. Long, long ago, they had fallen in love. For her sake his father, a mariner, forsook his own kind and entered the depths of the sea. His comrades thought him lost. The sea folk, in turn, forsook the mermaid, pronouncing her lost, for mermaids were not supposed to love mortals. The sea folk would not even own the mermaid’s child, because it was half human. Only the dolphins pitied the lovers, and remained their friends.

Still, the mermaid and her mariner had one another. They loved their child dearly, of course. But their suffering had made them forever grown-up, and they were now a special kind, complete unto themselves. The Mer-Child had no one of his own.

He was very lonely.

Sometimes he played with the young porpoises, leaping along the surface of the sea, stitching together air and water with one long graceful thread of motion. Sometimes he sang with the great whales. Sometimes he joined in the favorite game of the whiskered walruses—in which you deliberately entangled yourself in seaweed chains and then tumbled through the depths, bouncing lightly against the coral reefs and bonking into one another.

But the Mer-Child was, after all, not a young porpoise. Or a great whale. Or a whiskered walrus. He never quite belonged.

And he was very lonely.

He had tried to play with human children. The first time he ever saw one paddling about in the water, he swam right up and, not knowing what else to do, bonked playfully into it as he would into a friendly walrus. The child screamed and darted back to shore, where it babbled about sea monsters and was cooed over by laughing adult humans.

Another time, there was a tiny girl. She was not afraid, but she tried to catch the Mer-Child and drag him up onto the beach. He barely escaped.

Once, he saved a child from drowning, bearing him to the shallows and peeping from behind a rock while he staggered safely onto land. But when the child blurted out what had happened, his parents didn’t believe him, and they forbade him the water again all that day for telling such a "tall