When they turn a corner near the boardwalk, Julián gasps at the sight of mermaids - throngs of them, of every size, shape, gender, and color. Julián takes her hand and follows her out of the house, through the streets, wondering where she is taking him. Just as he is rejoicing in his self-creation, grandma returns from the bath, frowns, and walks away.īut she quickly returns to unsink Julián’s heart by handing him the perfect finishing touch for his mermaid regalia. Like a miniature Scarlett O’Hara, he transforms the window curtain into a long skirt, tying its end to resemble a mermaid’s tail. When Julián’s grandmother goes to take a bath, an idea alights to his enchanted mind: He sheds his boy-clothes and fashions a headdress out of a fern. “Abuela, I am also a mermaid,” he tells his grandmother shyly, the way one whispers a closely guarded innermost truth. One day, on the subway ride home, he glimpses three beautiful women dressed as mermaids. Whenever Julián goes to the swimming pool with his grandmother, he dreams of being a mermaid. “If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.” Both the vulnerability and the courage of that world-telling are in direct proportion to our sense of otherness - to how far the teller diverges from society’s centuries-old, dogma-proscribed, limiting ideas about the correct way to be a human being.Ī lovely celebration of the courage to tell the world who you are comes in Julián Is a Mermaid ( public library) by Jessica Love - a sweet story of loving acceptance and the jubilant inner transformation that takes place when one is welcomed to be and to dream beyond society’s narrow templates of being and dreaming.

“You’ve got to tell the world how to treat you,” James Baldwin argued two decades later in his fantastic forgotten conversation about identity with anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Cummings offered in his advice to aspiring artists. “To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,” E.E.

Julián Is a Mermaid by Jessica Love