The crowd shrunk back, as if Lottie were offering them a poisonous potion. Finally, after some soothing talk, one little boy darted forward and grabbed a cookie. Soon he was licking his lips for the last crumb, and several other boys gathered up the courage to take a cookie for themselves. When all the cookies were gone, Lottie went back inside. She smiled to herself. Everything was going according to plan. If she was not mistaken, visitors would start coming to the house soon.
Sure enough, as she predicted, it wasn’t long before someone plucked up the courage to visit Lottie. It was the wife of the owner of the house, and she came asking to be Lottie’s laundress. Lottie agreed, and together they sat and talked and drank coffee, the one American luxury Lottie allowed herself. The next visitor was a man who wanted a job drawing water from the well for her. It was agreed that each day at sunrise he would deliver two buckets to the back door.
Within several days, Lottie had a steady stream of visitors to her new house. She was very pleased about how well her plan was working out. She wrote home in a letter, “We need to make friends before we can hope to make converts.”
When Lottie did go out, she took Mrs. Chao with her. Mrs. Chao introduced her to family members and friends, and through this quiet approach, Lottie was invited to speak to many people in their homes. Still, there were those who taunted her and called her a foreign devil. This time Lottie had made up her mind not to tolerate such behavior. If a child called her a foreign devil, she took the boy or girl to his or her mother and asked that the child be taught good manners. If a woman goaded her, she would turn and retort, “Do not call me a devil. We are both women, and we both come from a common ancestor. If I am a devil, what does that make you?” With this approach, slowly the attitude of the taunters began to change.
Something Lottie had not predicted helped her to become even more accepted in P’ingtu. Lottie had always thought that Western missionaries who dressed like the Chinese looked silly. She had even written articles for the Religious Herald stating as much. However, as winter arrived, Lottie was surprised by just how cold it got. She piled on two layers of flannel petticoats, her woolen day dress, and a thick shawl. Still the beating snow on the thatched roof chilled her to the bone. In desperation, she paid a neighbor to make her a Chinese-style jacket. Lottie was very pleased with the jacket, which was heavily padded and went nearly to the floor. More important, it kept her warm, much warmer than she would have predicted. Next she ordered a dark blue robe with foot-wide sleeves and black satin binding. She wore this over everything else she had on, like a huge overcoat. Once again Lottie was amazed at how much warmer she felt wearing the robe, so warm, in fact, that she didn’t take it off for weeks.
As soon as she went outside in her new garb, Lottie realized what a difference wearing it made. When she slicked her long black hair back in a bun, many people who passed her didn’t even realize she was a foreigner. And those who did recognize her were much friendlier. Lottie could see she had made a mistake in her stand against wearing Chinese clothing. Far from being silly, such clothing was helping her to become an accepted member of the town.
Lottie also found that her new wardrobe had another benefit. She now wore so many layers of clothing it was like walking around with pillows strapped to her body. When she made trips out into the surrounding villages, she hardly felt the bumps of the donkeys and the shentze!
Chapter 11
The Jesus Way
It is a small house just outside of Scottsville, with only four rooms, but I have outfitted it with new Victorian furniture. I have called it Bonheur.” Lottie read the letter written in her sister’s neatly sloping handwriting three times, trying to picture the little house Edmonia had bought for both of them. The sisters had received the money to buy the house when the last parcel of Viewmont land was sold off. Life at Viewmont seemed such a long time ago to Lottie. For a moment she thought about the picnics the family had on the lawn, with servants to anticipate their every need, and the dinner parties shared with neighbors where the conversation about politics and Greek literature and French art was always stimulating. It was as though it had all existed in another lifetime for Lottie. The genteel southern lifestyle of her youth was very far removed from the realities of living in China.
Lottie was sitting at her desk in the Little Crossroads in Tengchow when she read the letter. She had come back to Tengchow for a summer break. The summer temperature in P’ingtu was over one hundred degrees. The heat, mixed with stifling humidity, could quickly sap one’s strength, and to avoid that, Lottie had sought the more temperate coastal climate found in Tengchow. As well, Lottie had become desperately lonely in P’ingtu. She had to find someone to talk to in English before she forgot the language!
Her break so far was proving to be as much work as P’ingtu. As usual, there was far more to do than there were workers to do it. To make matters worse, a new Baptist missionary, Enos Davault, had died after battling “heart paralysis,” a polite way of saying he suffered physical problems as a result of a mental and emotional breakdown. The Davaults and the Joiners had been sent by the Foreign Mission Board to help staff the new mission stations that had been opened in Shantung province. Both families had been based in Hwanghsien. While her husband was ill, Enos’s wife, weak from giving birth and unable to adjust to the harsh climate of the area, took the baby and headed to southern China where the climate was more agreeable. However, she had not been able to adjust to the climate or the living conditions there and eventually returned to the United States.
At the same time, the Joiners had also left for the United States. The Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board had understood that James Joiner needed a break from conditions in China, and so they had sent him to Siberia. For some reason Lottie could not fathom, the board considered Siberia a good place to recuperate! When James returned from there he was in worse shape than before he left, and the board had no choice but to recall him to the United States before he, too, was overcome with heart paralysis.
Lottie sat and thought about the new Baptist missionaries who had joined her on the mission field during her fourteen years in China. There had been eight of them in all, and of those eight, three—Enos Davault, Ida Pruitt, and Mattie Halcomb—had died. Three of them, the Joiners and Enos Davault’s widow, had returned permanently to the United States. One, Weston Halcomb, had resigned from the mission and now worked for the U.S. consulate in Chefoo. Only one of the eight missionaries, Cicero Pruitt, remained at his post.
Lottie placed her face in her hands. What could she say in her letter home to the Foreign Mission Board? Even though the Southern Baptists had only one worker left out of the eight they had sent, they needed to send more, and more money as well. Lottie knew that the constant worry of the missionaries as to whether the board would have the money to meet the budget and pay their salary added greatly to the stress they felt in an already difficult situation.
Something was about to change among the Southern Baptists back home, however, that would greatly improve missionary life for Lottie and the other Baptist missionaries. The women in Southern Baptist churches had been meeting together for a number of years to encourage missions. They had formed small local mission societies and groups within their churches, but they had never banded together and been given “official” recognition from the powerful Southern Baptist Convention. In May 1887, women from many of these churches met together and decided it was time they had an official voice. With the help of many influential pastors, they pushed the issue until a resolution was passed to link the groups and recognize them as the Woman’s Missionary Union.
At the same time, Lottie had been inspired by a practice she had heard the Methodist women were following. The week before Christmas, the women encouraged all Methodists to pray and then give money to missions. Lottie, who noted that the Methodists took much better care of their missionaries, wondered why the Southern Baptists couldn’t do the same thing. She wrote a letter to the Foreign Mission Journal suggesting the church take up such an offering during Christmas 1887. The letter began, “I wonder how many of us really believe that it is more blessed to give than to receive?” Baptist women, feeling newly empowered by their official recognition, were looking for a cause to get behind, and they eagerly seized on the idea of a Christmas offering as a rallying point.
Lottie was thrilled to learn of this turn of events, though she would not hear about the eventual results of the offering suggestion for some time. She was on her way back to P’ingtu, where she received no mail at all. It had not been an easy decision to return there in the fall of 1887. Lottie was feeling weary, and amazingly, the Foreign Mission Board had approved a one-year furlough for her. Even though her throat hurt constantly from talking for up to fourteen hours a day and she longed to see her sister, Lottie was not yet ready to go home. Too much work still had to be done, and there was no one else to do it.
Before the mule train arrived to take her “home” to P’ingtu, Lottie wrote to the Foreign Mission Board telling them she would try to “hold on to next June [1888] if I find that my health justifies it. I have an intense horror of going home ‘broken down,’ to be of no use to myself or anybody else.”
As she wrote these words, she was thinking of James Joiner, who had gone home quite deranged. Lottie would rather not go home at all than go home in such a state. Her hope was that she could survive another year alone. She had no idea of the wonderful adventure that lay ahead.
Lottie had been back in P’ingtu only a week when three men visited her. They did not knock on the door (no one did). Instead, they walked right into Lottie’s house. Lottie offered them cookies and coffee and asked what they wanted.
“We have come on behalf of Dan Ho-bang,” said the man with the longest mustache. “We are from Sha-ling, and we have been sent to bring you back with us to teach us all the Jesus way.”
“You have?” Lottie replied. “And what do you know of the Jesus way?” she inquired.
“Not much, but Dan Ho-bang wants us to know more,” the man responded eagerly. “He came back from Hwanghsien, where he heard a man say that Jesus could remove our sins from us. Is that true?”
“Yes, it is,” Lottie answered.
“Then we have a shentze waiting outside the door to take you back with us.”
Lottie nodded. If Dan Ho-bang had gone to so much trouble to invite a foreign woman to speak with him, she was ready to go.
Sha-ling was ten miles from P’ingtu, and Lottie prayed the entire way there. She hoped there would be serious inquirers waiting when she arrived.
As the procession entered the small village of about fifty families, many people rushed out to meet Lottie.
“It is the lady with the heavenly book!” exclaimed one man.
“Yes, and she will tell us how our sins may be evaporated!” shouted another man, waving wildly at Lottie.
Soon the shentze came to a halt in front of a low gray house. A man came out to meet Lottie and bowed. “I am Dan Ho-bang, and I thank you for coming to my humble home. Please come in and have tea with us, and then would you be so kind as to answer our questions about the Jesus way?”
“Thank you,” Lottie replied, wondering how she was going to handle the situation. Both Chinese tradition and her own Baptist upbringing made it difficult for her to imagine talking directly to the men, yet they were the ones asking questions. What was she to do?
As she sipped steaming hot tea, Lottie looked around the room and came up with an idea. “Do you have some way to divide the room so the women can listen to what I have to say as well as the men? The Jesus way is for both men and women equally,” she said.
