Children of the Desolate

“Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith Jehovah.”

— Isaiah 54:1, ASV

An Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe

Mary Slessor never had a child of her own. She had, in the end, a household larger than most mothers ever know. She would stand in the middle of it sometimes, pretending to be at her wits’ end, and recite the nursery rhyme about the old woman who lived in a shoe and had so many children she didn’t know what to do. “I have only three girls at present,” she once wrote, “and I have nine babies, and what with the washing and the school and the palavers and the visitors, you may be sure there are no drones in this house.”

She was candid about her failings as a housekeeper. “I have not an elaborate system or method of work,” she wrote. “It is just everything as it comes. I am afraid my mind is not a trained machine. It only works as it chooses.” The mission frowned on missionaries adopting children, and her household was a constant strain on her money and her strength. She did it anyway. On Sundays there was tea at a big table in the hall, where Jean, Mana, Annie, Mary, Alice, and Maggie sat round her, with small boys and girls on the floor, and the boxes of treats from Scotland were opened.

Most of the babies who came to her died, or were returned to their families. But a core of children grew up in her house and were hers for life. The historian Jeanette Hardage counts nine. We know something about most of them, though less than we would like, and they deserve more than a list.

Jean

Jean, first called Janie, was the twin girl Mary had carried out of Old Town in 1883, whose brother had been killed. She was baptised in Dundee and grew up in Mary’s house. Her Efik name was Atim Eso. Her marriage in 1899 failed, and she came home. She adopted the motherless baby Dan and raised him as her own. As the years went on she became Mary’s right hand. She ran the household, cared for the babies and their mothers, taught in the school, and ran into the bush to rescue twins when Mary was too weak to go. In the Ikpe years she worked as a teacher and evangelist at a place called Nkanga, where she gathered some two hundred men and women to hear her preach, and Mary thought her the best Efik teacher she knew. Like Mary at her loom, she read with a book propped open wherever she worked.

For most of those years Jean worked for her board alone. Around 1907, Livingstone says, Mary “felt it was time to acknowledge her services,” and began to pay her a shilling a week. It is a small detail, but an honest biography should notice it. Mary Slessor gave everything she had to her work, and she expected her household to do the same, and Jean did, for almost nothing.

Mary loved her deeply. In 1907 a story about Jean, spread by someone in the district, reached Mary in Scotland, and she cut short her last furlough to rush back. Livingstone does not say what the story was. When she got home she found it was untrue, and she was “too grateful to be angry.” In 1909 doctors advised an operation for an internal illness Jean had suffered in silence for years. Mary was against it, and sent her to Duke Town for treatment instead. We do not know whether she was right. “Jean has as many faults as myself,” she wrote in 1913, “but she is a darling … and a treasure.” Jean nursed her through her last illness, went with her on her only holiday, and was at her deathbed. She died herself at Use in the influenza epidemic of 1918, aged about thirty-six.

Annie, Mary, Alice, Maggie

Annie came to Mary as a baby in the Okoyong years. Livingstone calls her “the drawer of water and hewer of wood, kind willing worker.” She married, and she and her husband joined the church together, and later led the services at Use while Mary was at Ikpe, and then worked at Nkanga. Their little boy died at the age of two, and was the first person to be given a Christian burial in the part of the Ibibio country where Mary was then working. A little girl followed, who used to run about the church at Use calling to “Ma.”

Mary, the “child of wonder” who had lain for five days by the market road, grew into what one visitor called “the smart, handsome favourite.” She had suitors in Okoyong and in the Ibibio country and turned them all down. “Why can’t I stay at home with you?” she asked. Then the government’s new motor car came to Use, and with it a young African driver named David, an educated Anglican from Lagos. He won her. They were married first before the District Commissioner, and Mary insisted that her daughter stay at home until they had been married in church as well. At the wedding breakfast the guest of honour was an old Muslim in white robes, a friend of David’s family, who had once taken Mary’s hand, kissed it, and told her that only God could make her such a mother to everybody. Livingstone notes that few tributes from white men had touched her more, “though she was half-afraid her feeling was scarcely orthodox.” David asked her to pray for them before they left, and she did. A baby followed.

Alice, another rescued twin, was steady and dependable, and later came to faith and said so. Maggie, whom one visitor called “fusionless,” meaning scatter-brained, was the youngest of the four girls Mary took to Scotland in 1898. When Alice and Maggie were older, Mary worried that, having no family and no betrothal, they had no one to protect them from insult, and she sent them to board at a mission girls’ school in Calabar. Their later lives are not well recorded. There are hints in the modern biographies that at least one of the younger girls had a hard life after Mary’s death, without her protection.

Dan, Whitie, Asuquo

Dan, Jean’s adopted son, whose full name was Daniel MacArthur Slessor, went with Mary to Scotland in 1907 at the age of about six, and became almost as well known there as Jean. When he fell in love with the government motor car and its driver, Mary sent him off to the Hope Waddell Institute at Duke Town, “in terror for the safety of his body and his morals.” He was the best educated of her children. He was with her in her last year, helping in the school and interpreting. He lived until about 1970, and in 1958 he wrote down his reminiscences of her, which are kept in Dundee and were used by later biographers.

Whitie, whose full name was Madge White Slessor, was the last twin Mary saved. She trained as a nurse. Asuquo, one of the last babies to join the household, went to the Hope Waddell Institute with Dan, and is said to have run away from school to go to sea. Of both their later lives little is known.

When Mary died, the girls wept in the night, and among the things they cried out was this: “We shall be counted as slaves now that our mother is dead.” It is a terrible sentence. Mary had given them love, a home, education, and a name. What she had not been able to give them was a secure place in the society around them, because by the customs of the country a child without a family had no protection. They knew it.

The Problem of the Women

That problem, the place of women without a family, was one Mary had thought about for years. In the Ibibio country, Livingstone says, a woman had no place outside the harem. A girl who was not betrothed to someone had no protection in law, and could be insulted or injured with impunity. Women who became Christians, or who were driven out as twin-mothers, had nowhere to go.

Mary concluded that the root of the problem was economic. Until women could support themselves without depending on men, they would never be free. Some of the more thoughtful women told her frankly that they saw no future for themselves except the harem. So she began to plan a settlement: a home in the countryside where her own girls, twin-mothers, abandoned children, and Christian women with nowhere else to go could live and support themselves by farming and simple industries, such as laundry, baking, basket-making, weaving, and shoemaking. It had to be based on the land, and it had to pay for itself. She did not believe in homes that were kept alive by money from outside.

As a European she could not buy land. So she arranged, with the government’s help, to acquire it in the names of Jean and the other girls, and to give the mission a permanent interest in it. In 1908 she fixed the site at Use, near Ikot Obong, where she was living. The government sent fruit trees: mangoes, guavas, pawpaws, avocados, and pineapples. She began to think about rubber and cocoa. She bought a cow, to save its owner from prison for debt, and it became famous in the mission as “Ma Slessor’s coo” for running away with the whole household, and once with two senior missionaries, hanging on to its rope. She did not want the settlement named after herself, and suggested it be named after Mrs. Anderson or Mrs. Goldie, the missionary wives of her early years.

The settlement never became the institution her friends hoped for. She did not want a large institution, and other places kept calling her away. After her death the Church raised money for a memorial home for women and girls in her name. But the idea behind it was far ahead of its time. She saw that the gospel had to give women not only a new heart but a way to live, and she saw that the way to live was work and land of their own.

The Last Visit Home

In 1906 she became so ill that a government doctor told her to go home or die. She did not go until 1907, when she could no longer walk more than a few steps. She took Dan with her. “Oh, the dear homeland,” she wrote. “How I long for a wee look at a winter landscape, to feel the cold wind, and see the frost in the cart-ruts … to take a back seat in a church.”

She was in Scotland from May to October. Her friends were shocked to see “an old wrinkled lady huddled in a corner of a carriage.” She visited her old haunts in Dundee with a friend from the factory, and met three women with whom she had begun mission work there nearly forty years before. On the night before she left, friends found her weeping in bed. She had been overcome, she said, by the feeling that she was homeless in her own country. “I’m a poor solitary with only memories.” When they told her she had troops of friends who loved her, she said, “Yes, I ken, and I am grateful, but it’s just that I’ve none of my ain folk to say good-bye to.” She never went back to Scotland again.

More Are the Children of the Desolate

The verse at the head of this chapter was written to Jerusalem in exile, a city that had lost its people and seemed to have no future. God told her to sing, because the children of the desolate would outnumber the children of the married. The psalmist says the same of God: “He maketh the barren woman to keep house, And to be a joyful mother of children” (Psalm 113:9, ASV). And again: “God setteth the solitary in families” (Psalm 68:6, ASV).

Mary Slessor was a solitary woman who had lost her own family and never married. She was also the mother of a large household, and the “Ma” of a whole region. The children of the desolate were more than she could count. They were not an easy family. Some died, some struggled, and some were left exposed when she was gone. But they were a family, and she loved them fiercely, and they loved her. James wrote that “pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction” (James 1:27, ASV). She did not only visit them. She took them home.