Mary began to add up the money she could save and send home if she didn’t live in Duke Town. As she thought about it, she realized she would never be happy in such a “civilized” place. She longed to be out in the jungle sleeping in a mud hut and cooking over an open fire. She wondered whether there was a chance she might be allowed to do so. She had, after all, survived her first term in Calabar, something many other missionaries had not managed. She decided to ask for another assignment, this time in a more remote place. If she lived and ate like the natives, she would need hardly any money at all. Then she would be able to send most of the sixty pounds a year home to help pay the rent on a cottage for her mother and sisters.
After six months at home, Mary felt strong enough to take walks out of the city into the green, misty countryside. It was so peaceful there. On these walks, Mary thought about how she would handle speaking in churches around Scotland. Speaking in front of a large audience of adults had always been difficult for Mary. Sometimes her stomach got so tied up in knots she was unable to talk at all and someone else had to speak for her. This had not been so much of a problem when she had itinerated with the other two Marys before leaving for Calabar. They had both enjoyed speaking, and since they all traveled together, Mary left it to them to do the public speaking. Now things were different. Now that she was feeling better, the mission board would arrange for her to speak in a hundred or more churches around Scotland.
Early in 1880, Mary began her speaking tour. She would sooner have faced a leopard alone in the jungle than the crowds of people wanting to hear all about her missionary work in Africa. Somehow, she found the strength to speak. She decided it was best if she told stories to her audience, so she told them about King Eyo, about the witchcraft that ruled the lives of people in Calabar, and about the little boys in school who were learning to read the Bible.
When people asked Mary what she wanted to do when she returned to Africa, she told them the truth. More than anything, she wanted to go inland where no white person had settled before and work among natives who had never heard of Jesus Christ. The Okoyong people attracted her the most. In her heart, though, she knew there was little chance of her leaving the well-manicured lawns and tea parties of the mission compound in Duke Town. The Reverend Anderson did not approve of young, single women venturing off into the bush on their own, and his wife, with all her accomplishments and bravery, agreed with him.
Although Mary never overcame her nervousness at speaking to adult groups, she found herself quite at home talking to children, and she was much more successful at this. On a visit to the town of Falkirk, Mary visited the local school. Two girls, Janet Wright and Martha Peacock, were particularly inspired by what she had to say, and they asked Mary if she would write to them. Mary agreed, never imagining that she had actually inspired them to follow her to Calabar.
Finally, sixteen months after arriving home, the missions board decided it was time for Mary to return to Calabar. Mary wrote to the board begging them to allow her to move inland or, at the very least, out of Duke Town and into one of the empty mission stations that dotted the area. She waited nervously for a reply, but none came.
Meanwhile, Mary moved her mother and sisters out of the smoggy city into a sunny little country cottage in Downfield, a tiny village on the outskirts of Dundee. Mary promised that somehow she would send money to help support them, and of course, Susan and Janie still had their jobs at the cotton mill.
Mary sailed back to Calabar with the Reverend and Mrs. Goldie, who had also been home on furlough. The Reverend Goldie had lived in Calabar for many years and had compiled an Efik dictionary and translation books. Mary was glad for the opportunity to get to know him and to pour out her heart. The Reverend Goldie listened, and although he made no promises, he said he would do what he could to help her. He must have done something, because soon after Mary got back to Duke Town, she was told she’d been assigned to work in Old Town. She would be working alone and expected to make decisions for herself.
Mary was ecstatic. Old Town was only three miles from Duke Town, but it gave her the opportunity to try out her missionary ideas, and it was a step closer to the inland people. She wasted no time in packing her few belongings and asking a team of men to ferry her upriver.
As the men paddled, Mary thought about all she knew of Old Town. The town was not a place with a peaceful history, that was for sure. It was one of the four original towns where the Reverend Hope Waddell had begun his missionary work in Calabar back in 1846, but all had not gone well there. The chief, Willy Tom Robins, as he called himself, was a brutal man who would not listen to the missionaries. Instead, he chose to follow the customs of his ancestors. In 1855, Chief Willy had become ill and, realizing he was about to die, had all of his wives, daughters, slaves, and servants chained up inside his huge compound. He gave instructions to his oldest son that they were all to be killed when he died. And they were—hundreds of them. British traders in the town were outraged and convinced the British consul to bring a gunboat up the river and shell the town. The consul gave the missionaries enough warning so they could evacuate the town before it was bombarded. What the gunboats did not destroy of the town, the fire that followed did. Since then, the inhabitants of Old Town had rebuilt most of the town, but they still held a grudge against the British. While missionaries had been tolerated for short periods of time, they were hardly welcomed with open arms.
As Mary stepped from the canoe at Old Town, she glanced up to see a human skull dangling on a pole on the hill above her. She was startled. Was it a warning meant for her? She couldn’t be sure, but a shudder went down her spine as she led the way to the tiny mud and palm thatch hut where the last missionaries had lived. The structure was dilapidated, empty, and dirty. Mary and the men who had brought her upriver set to work making it a home again. About an hour later, they were done. The dead leaves had been sluiced off the floor with buckets of river water, a small iron cot had been set up against the back wall, and the door had been reattached to its hinges. Mary was delighted. “Thank you so much,” she said to the men. “You can go back to Duke Town now and tell them I’m all settled in.”
There was not much more Mary needed to do before she could start her missionary work. She had already decided to live as much like a native as she could, and that cut out a lot of extra work she would have had to do to keep up European ways. She ate food she bought cheaply at the local market, such as maize, beans, yams, fruit, scrawny chickens, fish from the river, and, of course, palm oil. And because she was eating local food, the food was easy to store, unlike the butter, bacon, mutton, eggs, flour, and sugar that she had eaten in Duke Town and that had to be stored carefully to keep out moisture and bugs. Mary no longer needed to store such food but was able to go to the local market each day and buy fresh food. She could also employ a local girl to cook the food for her without her having to train her to make shepherd’s pie or scones. The only thing Mary did not want to do without was her cup of tea in the morning, and she allowed herself this one luxury. The money she saved living this way she sent home to help support her mother and sisters.
Gradually the people of Old Town warmed to Mary. Mary already knew some of the local boys who had attended school in Duke Town at various times, and she made friends with their families. Mary’s first concern was to get those boys back into school. She set up a classroom in Old Town as well as in the nearby villages of Qua and Akim. She also had a supply of medicines with her that she used to treat sick people. Before long, she was also being asked to mediate arguments between the local people.
One morning, not long after arriving in Old Town, Mary opened the door to her hut, and there, lying on the ground, was a tiny sleeping baby. As Mary picked up the child and cradled it in her arms, she looked around for some clue as to who had left it there and why. She found none. Holding the baby in one arm, she lit the fire she’d set the night before and made a pot of tea. She spooned some into the baby’s mouth, wondering what to do next.
As the sun rose in the sky, Mary’s helper arrived. “You have a baby,” she said to Mary, not sounding one bit surprised.
“Yes, I do,” replied Mary, “but I don’t know where it came from.”
The girl shrugged her shoulders as she squatted beside the fire. “You are a god-woman,” she said. “The babies will be brought to you.”
The statement did not invite further discussion. From living in Duke Town, Mary knew that at times there were many uncared-for infants in the villages. Human life was not valued very highly in Calabar, and no one could be bothered raising another woman’s baby. If, for instance, a slave mother died, her young children were killed and buried with her. The people believed that slave babies weren’t worth the effort to raise. Worse still were the twin killings. All over Calabar, the birth of twins was seen as an evil curse. Custom demanded that both twins be killed within hours of birth, and the mother was either killed or put out of her house. Since anyone who tried to help the mother was also cursed, most of those mothers who were not killed normally died within a week or two anyway.
Mary guessed that this baby’s mother had died and some family member had brought it to her to raise. That night she thanked God for allowing the baby boy’s life to be spared. Despite being separated from his mother and milk supply, the baby began to grow. Soon Mary was taking him with her on her Sunday rounds.
On Sundays, Mary employed two boys to carry a pole with a bell slung from it. When she got to a village, she would ring the bell and wait for people to gather. If they did not, she would go and find them and bring them back to the meeting area. She would lay out a tablecloth on a flat surface, open her Bible, and preach. After the service, people would beg Mary to visit the sick. It was normally nightfall before Mary and her entourage arrived back in Old Town, where one more service was held, this time in the chief’s compound. Most of the village came to watch the little red-haired missionary speak to them in their own language.
Just as Mary’s helper had indicated, many other babies followed the first, until Mary’s single-room hut was filled to overflowing with babies in woven baskets. Mary made a special trip to Duke Town to ask for help. Her plan was for another single woman to come and help with the children and free her to continue preaching and treating illness. Mary would help the other missionary set up an orphanage and train some of the local girls as aides.
When Mary arrived at Duke Town, she knew there would be no helper for her in the near future. Sickness was once again claiming the lives of missionaries. Mary arrived just as Mammy Anderson fell ill. The Reverend Anderson had become sick first, and Mammy had nursed him tirelessly, just as she’d nursed Mary when Mary had malaria. The Reverend Anderson survived, but the strain of nursing him hastened his wife’s death. Losing Mammy shocked everyone, including Mary. Everyone had assumed that Mammy could survive anything. Soon afterwards, Mrs. Sutherland, the woman who had taken Mary under her wing when she first arrived in Calabar, became ill and died. Mary sobbed loudly at her funeral. For the first time, Mary saw firsthand why Calabar was called the white man’s grave. She wondered who would be next.
Chapter 9
Honored Guest
In late 1882, two men from the Foreign Missions Board in Scotland came to assess both the missionary work and the missionaries at Calabar. They spent several days with Mary, including a Sunday on which they followed her through the jungle from dawn to dusk as she made her regular rounds of the surrounding villages. By the end of their stay, the men were exhausted! One of them wrote of Mary in his report, “Her labors are manifold [many], but she sustains them cheerfully. She enjoys the unreserved friendship and confidence of the people and has much influence over them.”
