Bereft

“Whom have I in heaven but thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides thee. My flesh and my heart faileth; But God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.”

— Psalm 73:25-26, ASV

Janie

Mary spent most of her second time at home with her mother and sisters at Downfield, a village on the edge of Dundee to which she had moved them on her first furlough. She saw few people, and gave most of her time to nursing the baby she had brought from Calabar. The little girl was baptised in the Sunday school of Wishart Church and given the name Janie, after Mary’s youngest sister. In later records she appears as Janie Annan Slessor. She was the first of Mary’s African children, and she would be with her, with one short interval, until the end of her life.

It is worth pausing on what it meant to bring a rescued twin to Scotland in 1883. In Calabar the child was believed to be accursed, and the woman who carried her was taking on a share of that curse. In Dundee she was a curiosity, a “living illustration,” as Livingstone puts it, of the work of the mission. Mary took Janie with her to the meetings where she spoke, and audiences were deeply moved. It is easy to be uneasy about that today. But the child was loved, and she was alive. Her brother was not.

A Recruit

On a visit to her old friends the Doigs in Edinburgh, Mary met a young woman named Jessie Hogg, who worked in the same city mission where Mary had helped before she sailed. Jessie had heard a great deal about her and was eager to meet her. Within five minutes Mary turned to her and asked, “And what are you doing at home? What is hindering you from going to the mission field?” “There is nothing to hinder me,” Jessie said. “Then come,” said Mary; “there is a good work waiting for you to do.” Jessie Hogg applied, was accepted, and reached Calabar before Mary did. She served there for thirteen years and became one of the women the Africans called the mothers of the mission.

A letter Mary wrote at this time to a friend in Dundee shows how she thought about working among the poor. It is one of the clearest statements of her convictions that survives:

Nothing, I believe, will ever touch or raise fallen ones except sympathy. They shrink from self-righteousness which would stoop to them, and they hate patronage and pity. Of sympathy and patience they stand in need.

She went on to say that the poor also needed teaching, real knowledge of the Bible as a whole, not only the favourite passages used at evangelistic meetings. “I am pained often at home,” she wrote, “that there is so little of depth, and of God’s word, in the speeches and addresses I hear.” The factory girl who had been scolded for her lack of education had become a woman who thought the Church often underestimated what ordinary people could understand.

No Men in the Room

In January 1884 she told the Committee that she was well and ready to go back. The women of Glasgow, however, asked that she be kept at home for a while to speak to women’s meetings around the country, and for some months she travelled and spoke. She found it an ordeal. She was so shy that it was often simply impossible for her to open her mouth if men were present, and she would make it a condition that there be none in the audience. When a distinguished minister had been asked to chair the meeting, the problem was usually solved by putting him somewhere behind her, out of sight. Livingstone says these meetings taxed her strength more than the work in Africa.

In December the Committee gave her permission to return, and decided to send her, for the time being, to Creek Town.

Cut Adrift

Then her youngest sister, Janie, fell seriously ill. The doctors said that only a milder climate would save her. Mary was torn between her sister and her work, and she came up with a plan she would never have proposed for herself. She wrote to the Committee early in 1885 that she could not go to Creek Town unless she was allowed to take her sister with her, and to build a small mud house where the two of them could live apart from the other missionaries. By living on local food, she explained, she could go on supporting her family.

The Committee, as Livingstone puts it, received the proposal “with a certain mild astonishment,” and refused it. It is not hard to see why. A sick young woman from Dundee would hardly have recovered her health in Calabar. Mary then took the advice of a lady from Exeter and moved her sister to the south of England. She wrote to the Committee asking whether, if she were free to come back later, she would be allowed to, or whether she must consider herself finally separated from the mission. The Committee replied kindly. It regretted her troubles, said it would welcome her offer of service again, and continued her home allowance until the end of April. Mary thanked them, and accepted the allowance only until the end of February. She would not take money for work she was not doing. For a time she had cut herself adrift from the service of the Church.

She settled her sister at Topsham, a small town on the estuary of the Exe in Devon, in a house found for her by a deacon of the Congregational church. The records of that church show the family living at 48 The Strand in 1885. Her mother came south to join them. Janie began to improve. Mary joined in the life of the Congregational church and spoke at its meetings about Calabar.

Then another blow fell. Her sister Susan, a dressmaker in Scotland, died suddenly in Edinburgh in April 1885. Livingstone says she collapsed as she entered the house of Mary’s friend Mrs. M’Crindle. It was Mary who registered the death. She was now earning nothing, and she alone had to provide for her mother, her invalid sister, and the African child.

“I Have Given You Back to Him”

She needed to go back to work. Before she applied, she told her mother that she wanted to go up-country, into the unreached interior, if the opportunity ever came, and asked whether her mother would let her. Mrs. Slessor’s answer stayed with her all her life. “You are my child, given to me by God, and I have given you back to Him. When He needs you and where He sends you, there I would have you be.”

The Committee reinstated her gladly. There was talk of a new advance into the interior, and in the meantime she was to go to Creek Town. Friends in Topsham promised to look after her mother and sister. Then, a month before she was due to sail, her mother suddenly failed and took to her bed. All Mary’s arrangements collapsed. She was, says Livingstone, “like a wild creature at bay.” She prayed, and the next day she wrote to an old friend from the factory in Dundee, asking her to come and keep house. The friend came. Mary wrote her long, careful letters of instructions for the journey, forgetting no detail that might make it easier.

Livingstone records one small scene from those last days. On Guy Fawkes’ night, when bonfires and fireworks filled the streets, Mary wanted to take her friend to a church meeting, and did not dare to go out among the crowds of rough young men. She was a woman who would soon walk alone into the most feared district of Calabar, and she was afraid of a Devon street on bonfire night. The contradiction is not a flaw in the story. It is the story. Courage, for her, was never the absence of fear.

The Turn of the Year

She sailed in November 1885 and was back in Calabar early in December. On New Year’s Day, 1886, she began a long letter to her mother and sister, full of love and cheer and news. She finished it two days later, when the mail from home arrived. “I was hardly able to wait for mine,” she wrote, “and then I rushed to my room and behaved like a silly body, as if it had been bad news. It brought you all so clearly before me. At church I sat beside the King and cried quietly into my wrap all the evening.” The letter ended, “Tell me all your troubles, and be sure you take care of yourselves.”

She never had an answer. Her mother had died at Topsham, peacefully, in December, within weeks of Mary’s sailing. Three months later, on 5 March 1886, her sister Janie died too, and was buried beside their mother in Topsham cemetery.

Mary was inconsolable. “I, who all my life have been caring and planning and living for them,” she wrote, “am left, as it were, stranded and alone.” And again: “There is no one to write and tell all my stories and troubles and nonsense to.” She asked hungrily for every detail of the last days, and for keepsakes. “I would like something to look at,” she wrote again and again. Even in her grief she remembered to repay the factory friend for the sixpences she had spent on stamps for her letters to Calabar.

On the night she heard of her mother’s death, she led her usual prayer meeting. She told no one what had happened. She thought her mother would have wanted her to go on.

Nearer Than Britain

Then she wrote a sentence that tells us more about the next thirty years of her life than any other:

Heaven is now nearer to me than Britain, and no one will be anxious about me if I go up-country.

It is a sentence of grief, and of something harder to name. For twenty years her life had been bound up with the needs of her mother and sisters. She had worked at the loom for them, shaped her missionary life around them, and lived on local food to send money home. Now there was no one to send it to. The ties that had held her to the coast, and to Scotland, were cut. She was free, with the terrible freedom of the bereaved.

The psalm at the head of this chapter was written by a man who had almost lost his faith. He had watched the wicked prosper while the righteous suffered, and it nearly broke him, until he went into the sanctuary of God and saw things differently. Then he wrote, “Whom have I in heaven but thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides thee. My flesh and my heart faileth; But God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.” Mary Slessor was not a psalmist, but she came to the same place by the same road. Her flesh and heart had failed. Everything she had lived for on earth had been taken. What remained was God, and a people who did not yet know him.

Creek Town

She was placed in charge of the women’s work at Creek Town, where she lived in part of the house of the veteran missionary Hugh Goldie. It was a season of famine and sickness. She lived on rice and sauce so that she could feed the hungry, and she had more fever than ever before.

Her household was small but lively. Janie, now about four, was “as wild as a boy,” and shared Mary’s bed, meals, and thoughts. Mary talked to her about the family in Scotland who had died, and the child never stopped praying for “all in Scotland who remember us.” One day a man appeared at the mission house, and Mary learned that he was Janie’s father. She had been told that both parents were dead. She asked him to come and see his child. He shrugged. “Let me look from a distance,” he said. Mary took him by the arm and drew him to the child, who was trembling with fear, and told her in Efik to put her arms round his neck. She did, and hid her face on his chest, and his face softened. After that he walked a long way every other day, with his new wife and a gift of food, to visit her.

There were others in the house: Okin, the son of a slave woman whose mistress wanted him brought up as a Christian; Ekim, the son of the king of Old Town, whose mother had given him to Mary years before; and Inyang, a big, steady girl of thirteen who did the cooking and washing and was kind to the little ones. There were rescued twins, and a baby whose mother had died after a charm was thrown at her door. When Mary asked the child’s owner, a daughter of an old king of Creek Town, to lend a slave woman to nurse it, the answer came back, “Let it die.” Livingstone’s comment is four words long: “She let it live.”

She found comfort in unexpected people. One was an old blind woman in Creek Town, who had nothing in the world except what the mission gave her, and whose hut was open to the rain. “Blind Mary is our one living, bright, clear light,” Mary wrote. “She knows the deep things of God. That old hut is like a heaven here to more than me.” Another was the king himself. King Eyo became her friend and confidant, and she often sat in his state room advising him on the affairs of his small kingdom and his dealings with the British.

In every letter home she asked for one thing. “Pray for us here,” she wrote. “Pray in a business-like fashion, earnestly, definitely, statedly.”

Forward

There was talk of sending her to one of the stations on the Cross River. But her mind was fixed elsewhere, on the people inland whom no missionary had reached. She was, says Livingstone, of the same order of spirits as David Livingstone, and she borrowed the explorer’s own words: “I am ready to go anywhere, provided it be forward.” In October 1886 the mission council in Calabar decided to send her to Okoyong, and informed the Church at home, adding carefully that this was in line with her own desire. The Church agreed.

It would take nearly two more years before she could go. But she had found the comfort Paul describes, the God “who comforteth us in all our affliction, that we may be able to comfort them that are in any affliction, through the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God” (2 Corinthians 1:4, ASV). She had lost her mother. She was about to become a mother to a great many people.