Fairmaid

The bucket handle dropped with a clink, and that was the sound that ruined it. The year was 1944, the place was the landing at Pakuri on the Mahaica Creek, and an Arawak schoolboy called Frank Bernard had walked down on his lunch break to fetch water. Two women were sitting on the dock with their backs to him, facing east, one in a blue bathing suit and one in black. White women were not impossible that year; American soldiers came and went from the airfield at Timehri, a few miles off, and passed through the reservation often enough to be a village joke. But no soldiers had come that day. The women turned at the noise, amused rather than startled, and he saw that one of them had a blind eye. Then they went into the creek together, and the water swirled hard, and a clear bright afternoon river went the colour of mud. Neither of them surfaced.

In Guyanese speech she is the Fairmaid. She is also the Mermaid, and also the Watta Mumma, and the three names are used for the same being by the same people in the same week. Guyana calls itself the land of many waters and means it: the Essequibo, the Demerara, the Berbice, the Rupununi and a lattice of creeks and trenches that run through cane fields and past the back steps of houses. She lives in all of it. The stories about her are common enough to be a genre in their own right, and Fairmaid stories are collected village by village by students at the University of Guyana alongside Ol’ Higue, the Bacoo and the Dutchman, which is a polite way of saying that nobody has stopped telling them.

Her portrait has held its shape across a hundred and fifty years of tellings. She sits at the edge of the water, usually on a rock, usually alone, and she combs her hair. The hair is long and shining and reaches her waist. She is beautiful and she knows it. She is shy of being watched, and if you come round the bend and see her she is gone into the river before you have finished registering what you saw. And sometimes, in the hurry, she leaves the comb.

That comb is the hinge of the whole tradition. Walter Roth, collecting among the Arawak and Warrau of the Pomeroon and the Moruca in the early years of the last century, wrote down the same detail for the Oriyu, the Arawak water spirit: she may be seen bathing on the banks of a stream, or combing her long hair with a silver comb, which she occasionally forgets and leaves behind in her hurry to return to the water when suddenly surprised. Roth was emphatic that his Oriyu, along with the Warrau Ho-aranni and the Carib Okoyumo, had nothing whatever to do with the African-Creole Water-mamma. He was drawing a line that his own notebooks kept smudging. The Amerindian and African-descended peoples of Guyana had been sharing a coastline for centuries by then, and today the English word mermaid does duty for both.

In the coastal tellings the comb is gold rather than silver, and the finder gets rich. That is the version people repeat cheerfully. The other version is that the comb is bait, put down on purpose, and that she comes for whoever pockets it. Among the Makushi of the Rupununi, who call her twingram, that debt is collected at night: she arrives at the house around midnight, again and again, and one morning the house is empty.

She works the land as well as the water. She comes ashore looking like an attractive young woman and lets a certain kind of man decide he is making a conquest, and she walks with him, and she walks him toward the river. What happens at the bank has two endings. Either she takes him under and he is never seen again, or she breaks his neck there on the mud. She is not kind.

None of which stops people courting her. Prayers are made to her and offerings are put down for her, and the return on the investment is money. Wealth is the thing she is always associated with, and the association is not a soft one.

The Makushi understanding of her is the most fully recorded, and it is startling. In Makushi she is twingram; the related regional name Tuenkaron is built from turen, water snake, and ka’ran, stranger. She is half woman and half fish, with legs and feet when she walks on land that turn to a tail the instant water touches them, and she is sometimes said to have a hole in the top of her head like a dolphin’s blowhole, which she keeps covered with a hat. Her hair runs brown to blonde to silver. Her eyes are sometimes blue. Makushi speakers describing her to the anthropologist James Andrew Whitaker between 2012 and 2018 kept telling him she looked like you guys, meaning European. One woman put it flatly: the water mama is the white man, they are prankuru, because prana is the sea and kru is the person that appears. The Makushi have been calling Europeans sea people since the eighteenth century, when the Dutch and the Brazilians were raiding their villages for slaves, and the beautiful pale thing in the river that steals people and lives in unimaginable wealth is that history, still in the water where it was left.

The wealth is described in modern terms without embarrassment. She lives in a city under the river with bright lights, buildings, cars and planes. What looks to a human eye like a stingray is her baking pan for cassava; the red-belly piranha are her lamps; a whale is a jet. Two people looking at the same stretch of water are not seeing the same objects at all.

Taking someone is a slow business rather than a snatch. She is said to carry a sweet-smelling vine flower whose perfume finishes you, or to tell you to shut your eyes and then give you something sweet to drink, or a kiss. Underwater the transformation is completed by feeding: you eat her food, you lose your human memories, you begin to see the way she sees, and someone bores the hole in your head. Menstruating women are held to be at particular risk, which is why the water for a bath gets carried up in a bucket.

And occasionally somebody is pulled back. A young man near Apoteri had been going into the river to a girl he said was more beautiful than anything on land, so his people ringed the spot where he always came up and dropped a lasso on him. He fought. He cried. He kept telling them to let him go, that he lived better in the water. They got him to the village and he would not open his eyes and would not eat, and the old cure was used on him: hot pepper burned into the eyes, prayers said over it, human food forced past a mouth that no longer wanted it. He recovered. They could not keep him there, because she kept coming to look for him.

That is the shape of her limits. She can be driven off by a wife who stands up at midnight and abuses her to her face. She can be worked against by a piaiman with pepper and prayer. Mostly she is defeated by the plainest rules imaginable: do not stay to watch, do not pick up what she leaves, do not go into the water when you have been told not to. Out at Lethem on the Brazilian border there is a club called Double Wheel where the water mamas are supposed to gather at night, close to the river and a short walk from the airstrip that brings foreigners into the interior. Whitaker went there in 2018. The waitress was a fair, light-haired Venezuelan woman, and at one point she took out a small hand mirror and began to do her make-up.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Fairmaid in Guyanese folklore?

The Fairmaid is Guyana’s water woman, a beautiful long-haired spirit who lives in the country’s rivers, creeks and trenches. She is also called the Mermaid and the Watta Mumma, and among the Makushi of the Rupununi she is the twingram or Tuenkaron. She is usually described as human above the waist and fish below.

Why does the Fairmaid leave a comb behind?

She sits at the waterline combing her hair and abandons the comb when she is surprised, or so one version goes. In the other version the comb is deliberate bait. Whoever takes it is said either to become rich or to be visited at night until she collects them, and the two outcomes are told by the same communities about the same object.

What does the Fairmaid do to people?

She comes ashore looking like an attractive young woman, lets a man believe he is seducing her, and leads him to the riverbank, where she either takes him under the water or breaks his neck. Makushi accounts add abduction into an underwater city, where a captive is fed her food, loses their human memories and is slowly turned into a water mama.

Why do the Makushi describe water mamas as white?

Makushi speakers routinely describe water mamas as fair-skinned, blonde or silver-haired and blue-eyed, and some identify them outright with Europeans, using the word prankuru, meaning people who came from over the sea. The anthropologist James Andrew Whitaker connects this to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Dutch and Brazilian slave raiders arrived by water, took people away and were never accounted for.

How do you protect yourself from a Fairmaid?

The safeguards are ordinary and behavioural: do not linger to watch her, do not pick up anything she leaves on the bank, and stay out of the water when you have been warned off it. If someone is already taken, a piaiman may burn hot pepper into their eyes and pray over it to break the hold, and in one Makushi account a wife drove a water mama out of her house simply by confronting her.

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