Mary Slessor's Decision to Go to Calabar

I was sorting hymnals in the vestry when the letter arrived from the Mission Board. Mary stood by the door, the envelope still in her hand, the afternoon light catching the red in her hair. She did not smile at once. She asked if I would walk with her to the river wall so she could read it aloud without the others crowding in.

The words were plain. They had accepted her for Calabar. She folded the paper carefully, as though it might tear, and said only that she must tell her mother before the evening service. I watched her shoulders settle under the weight of it, the same way they settled when a loom beam jammed and she knew the fix would take all night.

Three days later she packed for Edinburgh. The training course would last three months. She left most of her good dresses behind and took only two changes of plain cotton. Before the train pulled out she pressed a small parcel into my hands for her mother and sisters, the weekly amount she had been sending from her weaver’s wages. She said the Board would pay her now, but the money must still reach Dundee.

I kept the household informed while she was away. Her letters came every fortnight. One described the lectures on tropical fevers and another the drills in simple medicine. She wrote that her hands, already quick from the loom, found the dispensary work familiar. She did not mention loneliness. When the three months ended she returned to Dundee thinner, her skirts shortened by two inches, and announced she would cut her hair before sailing.

The Wishart congregation met after the Sunday service to present the gold watch. The minister spoke of the years she had taught the infants’ class and visited the sick. Mary stood with her hands folded, eyes on the floorboards. When they placed the watch in her palm she thanked them once and said the time it kept would be spent where it was most needed. She did not promise to return.

On the fourth of August I travelled with her party to Liverpool. The docks smelled of tar and fish. The SS Ethiopia lay at the quay, her hull streaked with soot. Mary’s trunk was small enough for one man to carry. She wore the shortened skirt and a plain blouse, her hair already cropped close beneath a cotton bonnet. At the gangway she turned and gave me the watch to hold for a moment, as though testing its weight one last time. Then she took it back, climbed the plank, and did not look over the rail again.

The voyage lasted five weeks. I received two letters posted from the ship. In the first she described the heat that settled on the decks after the Bay of Biscay and the way the other passengers still dressed for church on Sundays. In the second she wrote that she had begun to study the Efik phrases the captain’s steward knew. She asked me to tell the infants’ class she would send them drawings of the birds she saw.

Duke Town appeared on a morning of heavy rain. The mission house stood above the mud huts, its corrugated roof glinting. Missionaries who had been there since the forties came down to the landing stage. Mary stepped ashore carrying her own bag. Within a week she was teaching in the schoolroom and measuring quinine in the dispensary. She ate the local yam porridge because it cost less than tinned meat from home, and the difference went straight back to Dundee.

Her first letters from Calabar described the children who came barefoot and stayed to learn the alphabet. She noted the sound of the language in her own mouth and how quickly the women in the market began to answer her. She stopped wearing the heavy bonnets the other women kept and went about with a cloth tied over her head. The red hair and the Dundonian vowels still marked her out, yet the people began to call her by an Efik name within the month.