Soon Sallie trotted up on her donkey beside Lottie. “Martha has decided we should head northwest,” she said. “We are going to a village we have never been to before. We’ll probably be the first white people many of the Chinese there have ever seen. That should draw us a good crowd,” she added with a laugh.
Lottie laughed, too, though a little nervously. This was very different from a buggy ride in the Virginia countryside.
Finally they reached the village Martha had decided they should visit first. As soon as they entered the gate, a crowd of men and boys gathered around them. “Foreign devils,” they said to one another in Chinese.
At Martha’s command, the coolies put down the sedan chairs and helped the women out. Lottie rushed over to her sister. “Eddie, what are they saying?” she asked, looking at the gathering crowd.
“They’re calling us foreign devils,” Eddie replied, “but don’t worry. That’s the first thing they always say.”
“And what else are they saying?” Lottie asked, frustrated that she was the only one who could not understand what was being said.
“Well,” continued Eddie, “they’re trying to decide whether we are men or women. They are confused because we’re not wearing trousers like Chinese women.”
“Oh,” Lottie responded, looking down at what she had considered to be a perfectly feminine dress.
Edmonia pointed to a group that had gathered near a corner. “Look over there,” she said. “There’s a group of women we can talk to.”
Lottie grabbed her sister’s arm and started walking through the crowd of men toward the corner. As she did so, she questioned Eddie. “But I thought the women stayed inside their courtyards all the time.”
“Well, that’s true in the big cities like Tengchow, but in the villages, customs are much more relaxed. Most of these people are farmers, and they can’t afford to hire someone to run errands for them.”
Lottie nodded. By now she and Eddie were approaching the women, who stepped back into the shadow of a building as the missionary women came nearer.
“At least they didn’t run away,” Lottie whispered.
Finally several of the Chinese women plucked up their courage and began asking questions.
“What are they saying?” Lottie asked impatiently.
Eddie laughed. “They want to know all about you! They want to know if you are married and why your mother-in-law let you travel so far from your homeland without your husband.”
“Oh,” Lottie replied. “You can tell them I am a woman just like them, and that I have no husband. I came here to tell them some very important news about a God who loves them.”
As Edmonia spoke to the women in Mandarin, the women fingered Lottie’s silk dress and tugged gently on her ringlets.
“They certainly are curious, aren’t they!” Lottie exclaimed to Eddie.
“You wait until we stop for lunch. We’ll have quite an audience then,” Edmonia responded.
“It’s time to get organized,” Martha called out, her booming voice cutting through the air. Lottie turned to look at her. Martha was carrying a large scroll that she quickly unraveled. On the scroll were the words in Mandarin to a Sunday school hymn titled “Happy Land.”
“Hold this up, please,” Martha instructed Lottie.
Lottie stood and held up the scroll while Martha and Sallie sang the song a couple of times. One by one the children joined in. They were fast learners. Martha picked out one child who had mastered all the words and gave him a copy of the hymn that had been hand copied onto red parchment. This stirred competition among the other children, who soon were all clamoring to show that they, too, had memorized the hymn.
The women stayed in the village for an hour or so, giving out red hymn sheets and talking to the women before moving on to the next village. They continued this pattern throughout the day. At one village, a very hostile man ordered them out of the area, and so the women moved on. And Eddie had been right; the easiest way to draw a crowd was to sit down and eat lunch. As they sat down for lunch, people of all ages crept closer and closer to the missionary women as they pulled objects from their picnic hamper. Everyone seemed particularly impressed with the forks the women used, as well as the napkin rings. Lottie felt like an exhibit at the zoo, but she was glad to see that the people of the surrounding villages did not appear to be frightened of them.
As she ate, Lottie thought of the meals she and Eddie had shared back at Viewmont. Their mother had always been particular about holding polite conversation and not staring at anyone else seated at the table. What would she have thought if she could have seen her two daughters eating lunch surrounded by a sea of curious brown faces? It was a long way from being pampered southern belles to being hardworking missionaries, but Lottie was sure her mother would have been proud of what her daughters were doing.
After lunch Sallie taught a hymn to all the people who had gathered to watch them eat, and then Martha talked to them for about twenty minutes. When the crowd grew restless, the women clambered back into their sedan chairs and moved on.
Lottie was exhausted and exhilarated by the time they arrived back in Tengchow that evening. She and three other women had single-handedly presented the gospel to hundreds of men and women who had never had the opportunity to hear it before. She could hardly wait for the next opportunity to get back out into the villages.
Chapter 8
Fallen Apart
Lottie, I have to go! Help me pack,” Eddie yelled as she burst into the upstairs bedroom the two sisters shared.
“What’s wrong?” Lottie asked.
“Nothing’s wrong. Something wonderful has happened. Here, read this.” Edmonia thrust a piece of paper into Lottie’s hand. The words on it were written in Mandarin, and Lottie could read only bits of it, but she was able to pick out the name of Mrs. Lan. Mrs. Lan was a member of the Monument Street Baptist Church, which Tarleton and Martha Crawford had started.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Edmonia smiled, throwing clothes into a cloth bag. “Mrs. Lan went back to the village where she grew up for the New Year’s celebrations and started telling others about her faith. Now she has a huge crowd of people milling around the house where she was staying wanting to learn more. She has taught them all the hymns she knows and has read the Bible to them, and now she needs our help answering their questions. Sallie and I are leaving to go to the village at noon.” Eddie hugged her sister. “Isn’t it exciting?” she added, her eyes shining.
“Yes!” Lottie replied. “I wish I were going with you, but I guess someone needs to stay and help the Crawfords with the church.”
Edmonia nodded. “I’ll keep a journal and tell you all about it,” she promised Lottie, pulling tight the drawstrings on her bag.
Two days later another letter arrived at the Crawfords’ home, this time from Sallie Holmes. The letter said that so many people from the village were asking questions that the three women couldn’t keep up with the demand. Sallie wondered whether there was some way Martha could send more missionaries to help them with the task.
Lottie watched as Martha tried to comprehend the predicament the women were in. Were there really so many questions that Mrs. Lan and the two missionaries couldn’t answer them all? “This has never happened before!” she finally exclaimed. “It’s astonishing. Tarleton and I have worked so long here and seen so few results.” With tears in her eyes, she looked at Lottie. “We must go and see what we can do.”
“Wonderful,” replied Lottie, who had wanted to go with Edmonia from the beginning.
Martha persuaded the wife of a local Presbyterian missionary to go along as well. Soon the three of them were on their way to the village in sedan chairs.
What they found when they arrived at the village amazed them. A throng of Chinese people surrounded Mrs. Lan’s house. Some of them were singing hymns quietly while others stood in small groups discussing who Jesus was and why He had come to earth.
Once their bags had been carried inside the house, the three women joined Edmonia, Sallie, and Mrs. Lan and went straight to work. They walked among the groups of people, answering their questions and showing them passages in the Bible that talked about Jesus and the gospel.
It was long after nightfall when the crowd finally drifted off to their own homes. At daybreak they were back again, eagerly waiting with a fresh round of questions to be answered. Lottie helped in any way she could, but once again she was frustrated by not being able to understand all that was being said.
After two days, a core group of new Christians had developed, and it was necessary to work out how to set up a church in the village. The other missionary women had to get back to their own responsibilities, and so it was decided that Eddie and Lottie should stay and organize the first-ever Sunday service. As the other missionaries were leaving, Martha promised to send Mr. Mung, a deacon from Tengchow, to the village to preach the Sunday sermon.
The first Christian church service held in the village attracted a great deal of interest. As a result, Mrs. Lan and Mr. Mung agreed to stay on longer in the village to get the church properly established. Lottie and Edmonia promised that the other missionaries would take turns coming back for services, but for now it was time for the two sisters to get back to Tengchow. The new school year would soon be starting, and there was a lot of preparation to do.
It was a frigid Monday morning when Lottie and Eddie climbed into their open sedan chairs for the trip back to Tengchow. Lottie could not recall ever being so cold, not even when she had gone out in the middle of winter back at Viewmont. The wind whistled around her skirt, which she pulled tight around her legs. Lottie looked over to her sister and smiled. Eddie smiled back and waved. Nothing, not even the bitter cold, could take away the joy of the wonderful week that Lottie and Edmonia had shared. Things had worked out just as Lottie had hoped. Together they had proved that two single women were able to carry a full load of missionary work and do it well. What Lottie did not know was that this trip would mark the high point of Edmonia’s missionary activities. As she rode along in her sedan chair, Edmonia was becoming ill with typhoid pneumonia.
By the time they reached Tengchow, Eddie needed to be helped out of the sedan chair and carried inside to her bed. Lottie became alarmed when Eddie did not get better quickly. It seemed to her that missionaries were failing all around them. The wife of one of the Presbyterian missionaries had died, leaving behind four small children, one of whom was a deaf mute. A missionary man had suffered a nervous breakdown. He sat staring at the wall until finally the mission agency sent someone to escort him home.
Trying to put her fears aside, Lottie nursed her sister as best she could. Finally she began to see small improvements in the condition of Edmonia’s body, but not her mind. As she started to get better, Eddie became very angry and flew into uncontrollable rages over the smallest of things: a man carrying noisy chickens past her window, the soup that Lottie brought her being too cool, the letter she sent home several months before not yet being replied to. Anything and everything seemed to upset Edmonia.
Lottie had no idea how to help her sister. When school finally started up again, she tried to ease Edmonia’s workload. Eddie did not actually teach the boys herself now but had hired and supervised a Chinese teacher to do that. Lottie soon found that this situation tried her patience. Although the teacher Eddie had hired knew he would be required to teach the Bible, he also smoked opium and twisted Christian teaching whenever he thought he could get away with it.
What also frustrated Lottie was that deep down she wanted to help the little girls of the town. In her opinion they had fewer opportunities than the boys. Girls were married off while they were still very young and sent to their new husband’s home, where their mother-in-law took complete control over their life. Most girls could not read or write and had no knowledge of the world outside their town or village.
