The Mystery Of Memmie Le Blanc

 OK, I read about this fabulous case from another recruiting territory, and another century, in Michael Newton's book Savage Girls And Wild Boys, published in London by Faber and Faber in 2002.

WHAT AN INSPIRING READ. This is like "The Little Mermaid," only not fictional at all, and without the mawkish human sentiment that gums up the Hans Christian Andersen story.

Memmie was a mystery to her hosts. She was found fending for herself on the banks of the Marne in 1721, eating raw fish, root vegetables and frogs and running off like a lightning bolt if she spotted anyone coming. She also swam like a mink. She was eventually lured into human hands with an offer of more raw fish.

OR DID SHE LURE THEM?

They discovered that she had been painted black and didn't speak any language they recognized. After they scrubbed her paint off and taught her some French, she explained that she had been taken as a slave and painted black to look like the others, who were Africans. She arrived in France accidentally, while being transported to someplace new after her first owners sold her. Her slave ship sank in the Marne.

Her homeland, she explained, was somewhere that had snow on the ground much of the year, and her people had some sort of earth lodges to live in. They used tools like knives and clubs but -- here's the kicker -- no fire. The kids in this civilization learned to swim at the same time they were learning to walk. She never learned to withstand being in a room with a fire in it, and she couldn't even bear to have the windows closed in winter as long as she lived. At eight she could catch her own food and skin and eat it raw. She knew how to use a frog as a bandage, explaining she had once used it on the other girl who escaped from the sinking ship before they split up for good. She said in fact that her health had been ruined by the slavers and her first owners, who made her eat cooked food and stop swimming. People she stayed with speculated that she might be an Eskimo. Except she didn't look like one, and Eskimos are well known to use fire. Wikipedia suggests she was a member of the Fox Tribe in Wisconsin, but I never heard of any Indian tribe that didn't use fire. Besides, since when did a ship full of African slaves stop off in Wisconsin to steal a single little girl? DOES ANYONE BUT ME SEE THE PROBLEM WITH THIS STORY?

PRETTY MYSTERIOUS, EH?

Well not to us of course! This long-suffering operative, arriving onshore at a time when the public was fascinated with feral children and freaks of nature, was very much living the Little Mermaid life -- belonging in the water but never able to go home. She lived in miserable conditions in Paris, selling copies of a book a benefactor had written about her life, as long as history records her existence.

NEVER FEAR. SHE FINALLY GOT TO COME HOME, AND NOW DWELLS AMONG HER PEOPLE, IN WONDER AND GLORY WITH DAGON.