“Oh, Susie, Susie!”

“When my father and my mother forsake me, Then Jehovah will take me up.” — Psalm 27:10 (ASV)

Mary's house became a refuge for babies: sick ones left with her to nurse, unwanted ones brought to her, abandoned ones found in the forest.

Many of them died. She dressed each one, laid it in a box among flowers, held a service, and buried it near her house. The little cemetery, her biographer says, “became full of tiny graves.” Ovens tried to comfort her in his own way: “Never mind, lassie, you'll get plenty mair.” The story of Mary and the twins is a rescue story. It is also a story of a woman who kept opening her door knowing that often she would end up digging another grave.

Some lived. One baby girl, whose mother had died, was thrown into the bush beside the market road because of a quarrel between families. She lay there for five days and six nights before women passing by heard a faint cry and mentioned it in Mary's yard. Mary went at once. Ants had injured the baby's face, but she lived, and the same people who had thrown her away came to play with her, calling her “the child of wonder.”

Then came Susie. Her mother, Iye, was a slave woman who was treated well until she gave birth to twins. The English traveller Mary Kingsley happened to be visiting and saw it. Iye's clothes were torn, her treasured basins smashed, and she was driven from the village. The babies were crammed into an empty gin-case on her head. Mary ran barefoot down the forest path, met her, and carried the box herself, because nobody else would touch it. She didn't take Iye down the village path, which would then have been counted as polluted. She stood in the blazing sun while the people cut a new track straight to her house.

The boy had already died from injuries he received when the babies were forced into the box. The girl lived. Iye herself wouldn't hold her, and sang a lament: “Yesterday I was a woman, now I am a horror, a thing all people ran from.”

They named the baby Susie, after Mary's sister. She became the darling of the house. At fourteen months she pulled a jug of boiling water onto herself. For thirteen days and nights Mary hardly put her down. In the dark she'd hear a tiny voice, “Mem, Mem, Mem,” and a little hand held up for a kiss. Early one Sunday Susie died in her arms. “Oh the empty place, and the silence,” Mary wrote. “Oh, Susie, Susie!”

But the village gathered round the grave of a twin, the thing they had once run from, and a leading woman of the old religion stood and praised the white mother's God for the child. Iye, who had grown to love Susie, said, “I have done this. God hates me.” Mary had always refused to buy slaves, but she made one exception. She paid ten pounds for Iye's freedom, and years later Iye was baptised.

A myth needs checking here. Mary Slessor did not end the killing of twins in Nigeria. It had been banned in Calabar before she arrived and went on in some places long after she died. In 1898 she said she had saved fifty-one twins. What she did was carry protection into places the law didn't reach, and wear down fear by living with it. Late in life she came to believe it was better not to take twins away from their mothers at all, but to help families keep them.

The psalm imagines the worst: even your parents abandoning you. For these babies that was real, out of fear more than cruelty. God's answer was a tired woman who went and picked them up.

One thing to do this week: find one way this week to stand with someone others avoid: the new kid, the one people laugh at, the one sitting alone. Sit with them. Carry the box.