Smallpox and Silence

“For though the fig-tree shall not flourish, Neither shall fruit be in the vines; The labor of the olive shall fail, And the fields shall yield no food; The flock shall be cut off from the fold, And there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in Jehovah, I will joy in the God of my salvation.”

— Habakkuk 3:17-18, ASV

No Baptisms

About seven years after she went to Okoyong, Mary was persuaded to write down an account of her work there. It was never published, and Livingstone found it among her papers. It begins with a protest.

In these days of high pressure men demand large profits and quick returns in every department of our commercial and national life, and these must be served up with the definiteness and precision of statistics. This abnormal and feverish haste has entered to some extent into our religious work.

She said that the methods and standards of business were “utterly foreign to the laws of Christ’s kingdom,” and that she shrank from reducing the working of God’s Spirit in people’s hearts to “any given number of figures on a table.” Then she gave the figures anyway, and they were stark. There had been no baptisms in Okoyong, and no communion services. No ordained minister had ever lived there. There were no formal candidates for church membership. Women, boys, girls, and a few men said that they had put themselves in God’s hands. One free-born woman of good position had suffered persecution for Christ. That was all.

She was honest about why. She was one woman, running a dispensary, a school, a court, a house full of rescued children, and a refuge for runaway slaves and threatened wives. She built and repaired her own buildings. There was no baker, no butcher, no laundry, no water supply, and no help except what the people lent her. The evangelistic work of the station, she wrote, was “manned year by year by the magnificent total of one individual. Is it fair to expect results under such circumstances?”

That was a rebuke to her Church, and she meant it as one. But she did not blame the Church alone. The report also says that the results had not been what they would have been “had we been more faithful and kept more in line with the will and spirit of God.” She always wrote “we” in her reports, never “I.” She believed she was a fellow-worker with God, and that both the failures and the successes were shared.

When friends asked about progress, she used to say, “There is not much progress to report, and yet very much to thank God for.” And she would add, “After all, it comes back to this, Christ sent me to preach the Gospel, and He will look after results.” She remembered a single line from a sermon she had heard long ago in her mother’s church in Aberdeen: “Between the sower and the reaper stands the Husbandman.” Paul had said the same thing: “I planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth anything, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:6-7, ASV).

Akpap

In 1896 the people of Okoyong began to move away from Ekenge. Like farming peoples everywhere who worked the soil hard, they moved on to fresh land, and a new market had grown up at a place called Akpap, further inland and nearer the Cross River. Even Ma Eme moved to a distant farm. Mary saw that she must follow, and the mission agreed to build a new house there. Long before it was built, she moved into a two-roomed shed with no windows and no floor, and from there, Livingstone says, she ruled Okoyong as if from a palace.

Then disaster came. A new baby brought an infectious disease into her household, and four of her children died of it. Soon afterwards smallpox swept through the region and killed hundreds. She spent hours every day vaccinating people, and when her supply of vaccine ran out, the mission engineer, Mr. Alexander, helped her take lymph from the arms of people already vaccinated with a penknife and pass it on to others.

At Ekenge, where the epidemic was worst, she turned her old house into a hospital. The sick poured in, and everyone else fled, and she could find no one to nurse the patients or bury the dead. Ekpenyong, the elder chief whose poison beans she had once carried off, caught the disease and died, and she buried him. Then Edem, her own chief, who had taken her into his compound eight years before, fell ill. She fought for his life day and night. He died in the middle of the night. She was alone. With her own hands she made a coffin, laid him in it, dug a grave, and buried him. Then she walked through the dark, wet forest to Akpap and threw herself on her bed as dawn was breaking.

The carpenter Charles Ovens, who had come back to build the new mission house, arrived that morning with Mr. Alexander. They found the hut silent at eleven o’clock, and inside, Mary, grey and exhausted. “I had only just now fallen asleep,” she said. It was some time before they found out why. Two days later Alexander went to Ekenge to fetch materials from the old house, and found it full of corpses, with no one living anywhere near. The house was never lived in again, and the forest swallowed it.

“My Four Bairns”

News came from further up-country of people fleeing the smallpox, leaving the dead and dying in their houses, and dying in the bush themselves. Mary wrote:

They have no helper up there, and know of no Saviour. I am just thinking that perhaps the reason God has taken my four bairns is that I may be free to go up and help them.

It is a hard sentence to read. A mother whose four children have just died wonders whether God took them so that she would be free to help others. Many Christians today would not say it, and would not want anyone to say it to them. But it was her own way of refusing to believe that the deaths were meaningless. She was not explaining suffering from the outside. She was trying to find a way through it from the inside.

She did not find it easily. Livingstone says that for a time she had “no heart for anything.” He calls it an unusual note, and a sign that her strength was failing. We would call it grief, and perhaps depression. It would not be the last time.

In the evenings, Ovens watched her lead family worship in the shed. She sat on the mud floor with her back against the wall, the boys and girls in a half-circle in front of her, and behind them baskets full of twin babies. She prayed very simply. Then they sang a hymn she had written in Efik to the Scottish tune “Rothesay Bay,” and she kept time with a tambourine, which she used to tap on the heads of girls whose attention wandered.

A friend wrote to her about the great crowds at the Church’s synod in Edinburgh, and she answered:

It is easy to be good with all the holy and helpful influences about you. Away up here among heathenism, working away with the twos and the threes and the tens, one almost forgets that there are crowds who would die for Christ. … But Christ is here and the Holy Spirit, and if I am seldom in a triumphant or ecstatic mood I am always satisfied and happy in His love.

The Shy Speaker

In 1898 the mission council insisted that she take a furlough. Her clothes had been eaten by ants and she had nothing fit to wear, but a box arrived from a church in Glasgow with everything she needed, including a warm shawl for the voyage, which she took as an answer to prayer. She took four girls with her: Janie, now grown up; Mary, the child of wonder, aged five; Alice, about three; and baby Maggie.

She was more famous than ever, and shyer. At a drawing-room meeting in Glasgow, finding men in the audience, she stood up and could not speak, and finally turned to them and asked, “Will the gentlemen kindly go away?” When told they would be disappointed, she asked whether they would kindly go and sit where she could not see them. At Stirling she asked a gentleman who had slipped in to hide behind the lady in front of him. When people praised her she left the room until they had finished. In Edinburgh, overwhelmed by the welcome, she broke down, and then insisted that her work was no more remarkable than that of any other missionary in Calabar. “They all work as hard or harder than I do.”

She pleaded for workers, using the language of her age: “When Sir Herbert Kitchener, going out to conquer the Soudan required help, thousands of the brightest of our young men were ready. Where are the soldiers of the Cross? … Why should the Queen have good soldiers and not the King of Kings?” She also said, in words that would echo in her later life, that her work in Okoyong was done. She wanted an ordained minister sent to take it over, and she wanted to go further inland.

Three Years Alone

She returned at the end of 1898, and the plans to send her help broke down. For the next three years she was alone at Akpap, apart from occasional visits from women missionaries in Calabar. She had long spells of low fever and sleeplessness, and once spent three months in bed. Many of her letters from these years are dated “Midnight,” “3 A.M.,” or “Just before dawn.” She confessed that “our poor wee services here take as much out of me as the great meetings at home did.”

Sometimes the darkness came through. “All is dark,” she wrote, “except above. Calvary stands safe and sure.” And: “Life apart from Christ is a dreadful gift.” She wondered whether she would ever go home again. “How could I leave the bairns in this dreadful land? Who would mother them in this sink of iniquity?” She dreamed of a bit of land and a small house of her own, where she could “stay out my days there with my bairns and lie down among them.”

There were signs of change too. Six boys of free birth whom she had taught were now Christians, and were holding services in the villages. Two were sons of the most powerful chiefs. Once, as she and Mr. Alexander sat at breakfast, a woman came in without a word and put a large calabash on the table. Mary thought it was food and said they had already eaten. The woman said nothing. Mary lifted the lid. Inside were twin boys. A woman had brought her twins to be saved rather than thrown away. Some parents began keeping their twins at home, and Mary told the chiefs that if anyone blamed a misfortune on them, she would “make palaver.” “I feel the smallness of the returns,” she wrote, “but is the labour lost? A thousand times No!”

On 21 December 1899, according to the small marriage register Mary kept in Efik, Janie married a young man named Akibo Eyo, whom Mary called her best scholar. There was no church wedding. The two took an oath before a chief and before Ma Eme that each would marry the other alone, a pledge of faithfulness in the only form that would bind in Okoyong. (Some modern accounts give the date as 12 December.) The marriage did not last. “Difficulty and disappointment came,” Livingstone says, and Janie, now usually called Jean, came back to Mary’s household, where she stayed to the end. A baby whose mother had died in childbirth was brought to the house, and Jean took him as her own. He was named Daniel MacArthur Slessor, and Dan would become, after Jean, the best known of Mary’s children.

The Fig-Tree

The prophet Habakkuk wrote the words at the head of this chapter when he knew that invasion and ruin were coming to his country. He imagines a farm in total failure: no figs, no grapes, no olives, no grain, no sheep, no cattle. And then he says, “Yet I will rejoice in Jehovah, I will joy in the God of my salvation.”

That is not the joy of success. It is the joy of a person who has lost almost everything and discovered that God is still there. Mary Slessor’s years at Akpap were a time of empty fields. Four of her children died in a single epidemic. Her chief and protector died while she nursed him, and she buried him herself. She worked alone for three years, often ill, often sleepless, with no baptisms to report. And through it all she wrote that she was “always satisfied and happy in His love.” Not always triumphant. Not always cheerful. But satisfied. The psalmist says, “Weeping may tarry for the night, But joy cometh in the morning” (Psalm 30:5, ASV). The morning, when it came, would come in a place she did not yet expect.