The White Queen of Okoyong Part 11

When she was not doing these things she was busy about her own doors.

She had now a new house with a room underneath, and here she taught the day-school and held services and Bible cla.s.ses and preached on Sundays.

And there were always the Court and the palavers and the dispensary and the building and repairing and cooking and digging and a hundred and one other duties. So absorbed, indeed, did she get in what she was doing that often, as in the early days at home, she lost count of time.

Sometimes she did not know what day of the week it was. Sundays had a habit of getting mixed up with other days. Once she was found holding her services on a Monday thinking it was Sunday, and again on a Sunday she was discovered on the roof hammering away in the belief that it was Monday.

She ruled with a firm but kindly hand. The hard and terrible times she had come through had changed her a little. She had still the old sweetness, but she could be stern, and even rough, with the people, and she often spoke to them in a way which a white man would not have dared to do. Those who were brought up to Court for harming women she punished severely. If any chief challenged what she said, she would take off the slipper she had put on as part of her simple Court dress, and slap him over the bare shoulder with it.

Yet she was never afraid. She went about alone by day and night, and never carried a weapon. She had no locks on her doors. Once a murderer was caught and nearly torn to pieces by the mob before he was chained and brought to Ma to be judged. She heard the evidence, and ordered him to be sent down to Duke Town for trial. Then she took off his irons, and sent away the guard, and bade him come into the house, where she sat down and talked to him earnestly for a long time. He was a big man, violent and sullen, and he could easily have knocked her down and escaped into the woods. But he listened quietly, and allowed her to lead him to the room below, where she fastened him in for the night.

Only once in all the years she spent in Okoyong was she struck, and that was by accident. There was a quarrel and a fight, and she went into the press of excited men to stop them. One of the sticks. .h.i.t her. A cry of horror arose:

"Ma is hurt! Our Ma is hurt!"

Both sides at once fell on the wretched man who held the stick, and began to beat him to death.

"Stop, stop!" Ma cried. "He did not mean to do it."

And it was only by using all her strength and forcing them back that she saved his life.

And so the years wore on, and the new century came. "A new century,"

said Ma, sitting dreaming in her lonely little house. "What will it hold? It will at least hold His loving kindness and care all the way through, and that is enough."

For fifteen long patient years Ma gave her life to Okoyong, and she had her reward, for it became a land of peace and order and good will, the bad old customs died away, and the people were slowly but surely becoming the disciples of Jesus.

It was a wonderful thing for a white woman to have done alone, but Ma would not take any credit for it; she said it was no power of her own that had won her such a place in the heart of the wild people: it was the power of Jesus working in her and through her. _He_ was the King of Okoyong, and she was only His humble servant-maid.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JANIE.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LILY-COVERED ENYONG CREEK.]

CHAPTER VII

Tells of a country of mystery and a clever tribe who were slave-hunters and cannibals, and how they were fought and defeated by Government soldiers; how Ma went amongst them, sailing through fairyland, and how she began to bring them to the feet of Jesus.

On some quiet summer day you may have been wandering through a country lane when you suddenly felt a whiff of perfume, fresh and sweet, and wondered where it could have come from. You looked about, but there was nothing save a tangle of green wood. You searched the hedges, and went down to the brown stream below the bridge and along its banks. The fragrance was still scenting the air, now strong, now faint, but you could not find its source. Then suddenly you came upon it--a sweetbriar bush, hidden away in a lonely and lowly spot.

Ma Slessor was like this modest briar bush. The influence of her goodness spread far and near, and the fame of her doings reached peoples who lived hundreds of miles away. They said to one another, "Let us go and see this wonderful White Mother"; and they left their villages and travelled through forests and across wide rivers and creeks, risking capture and death at the hands of hostile tribes, to seek her advice and help. Some of these visitors spoke languages Ma did not understand, and they had to talk to one another in signs. Chiefs in districts she had never heard of sent her messages: "Oh, Great White Mother, come and dwell with us, and we will be G.o.d-men." Escaped slaves from cannibal regions, who had been doomed to be eaten, fled to her for refuge. All received from her a kind welcome and food, and, best of all, had a talk about the Divine Chief who was to be the real Saviour of Africa.

There were other visitors to Okoyong she liked less, slave-dealers from beyond the Cross River, who brought women and girls to sell. A slow fire of rage had long been burning in Ma's heart against this cruel system, and sometimes it burst into fierce flame. She would hear a sound of bitter sobbing, and go out to see a string of naked little girls being driven forwards by a man carrying bra.s.s rods on his head--the money which the natives use. She would be so angry that she would shake her fist at the trader and storm at him, but he would only grin and ask her which girl she wanted, and would then describe their good points just as if they had been so many fowls or goats. Sometimes there would be sick ones, or ones suffering from ill-treatment, and these the dealers would leave, and she would nurse them back to health, though she was always very unwilling to let them go again into the awful whirlpool of slave-life.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

She knew many of the dealers quite well, and often had long talks with them about the mysterious country from which they came. Whitemen had not yet entered into the heart of it, but Ma learnt enough to be sure that it was a far more wicked place even than Okoyong had been. It was called Iboland, and one of the tribes, the Aros, were so cunning and clever that they had become a power over a vast region. It was they who were the slave-stealers, seeking their victims everywhere, and selling them in markets to the traders. One of their best hunting-grounds was Ibibio, the country to the south, where the natives were poor and naked and miserable, and lived in little settlements deep in the forest, because of their fear of the slave raiders.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WAY INTO THE JUJU GLEN.]

The Aros believed that they had a wonderful _chuku_ or juju--which means the G.o.d of the Aros--in a rocky gorge down which a stream flowed. At one spot there was a dark ravine and a pool overhung by trees and creepers.

Here, amongst the white lilies, swam ugly cat-fish, with fierce-looking eyes, that were held to be sacred, and which it was death to catch. On a little island was a hut, guarded by priests, in which the juju was supposed to live. The people thought it could aid them in time of trouble, and came in great numbers to the shrine to ask advice and get their quarrels made up. Though the priests helped many in this way, they were cunning and greedy, and often acted very cruelly. They took the food and money which the visitors brought, and then said the juju wanted a living offering. So some poor man or woman was taken into the glen blindfolded, and the friends of the victim knew that the sacrifice was made by seeing the blood flowing past lower down.

Others who entered never came out again. The priests said they had been seized by the juju, and the blood-red river seemed to show this, but a dye had been thrown in to colour the water. These persons were taken far away in secret, and sold into slavery. Any that were not of much value were slain and eaten in the cannibal feasts.

Now that Ma's dream of conquering Okoyong had come true, she was dreaming other dreams, and the most fascinating of these was to go to this terrible cannibal country and put down the evil doings of the natives. She told the slave-dealers about it.

"All right, Ma," they said, for they liked her, and admired her courage.

"We, who know you, will be glad to welcome you; but we are not sure about the priests--they may kill you."

"I will risk that," she said; "as soon as I can get away from here you will see me."

In order to find out more about the tribes, she sometimes went far up the Cross River in a canoe, stopping wherever she could get shelter. On one of her journeys, when she had some of the house-children with her, the canoe was attacked by a huge hippopotamus. It rushed at the canoe, and tried to overthrow it. The men thrust their paddles down its throat and beat it, but it kept savagely nosing and gripping the frail vessel.

Great was the excitement. Its jaws were snapping, the water was in a whirl of foam, the men were shouting and laying about them with their paddles, the girls were screaming, Ma was sometimes praying and sometimes giving orders. At last the canoe was swung clear, and paddled swiftly away.

The story of this adventure is still told in Calabar, and if you ask Dan, one of Ma's children, about it, he will say, "Once, when Ma was travelling in a canoe, she was attacked by hippopotamuses, but when they looked inside the canoe and saw her, they all ran away!"

What Ma saw and heard made her all a-quiver to go into these strange lands, but she would not leave the Okoyong people until some one came to take her place. The Mission had no other lady to send, and so she could only watch and pray and wait.

Matters became worse. The Aros hated the white rule, and would not submit to it. They tried to prevent the Government opening up their country to order and justice and peace, and would not allow the officials to enter it; they blocked the river so that no white vessel, or native one either, could pa.s.s; they went on with their slave-hunting and cannibalism. At last the Government lost patience. "We must teach them a lesson," they said. So a warning went to all the missionaries along the banks of the river to come down to Calabar at once. Ma Slessor did not like the order. "Everything is peaceful in Okoyong," she said.

"My people won't fight." The Government said they knew that, but her life was too precious to risk, and they sent a special steamer for her and the children.

When she came she found several companies of soldiers, with many quick-firing guns, already moving up the river. They landed in the Aro country, and marched through swamps and attacked the hosts of natives who had gathered to bar their way, and defeated them. Still, the bushmen would not give in, and the soldiers had many a weary time in the trackless forests. At Arochuku they went down the gorge to the juju house, at the door of which they found a white goat starving to death.

Many human skulls and cooking-pots lying about told a gruesome tale. The place continued to be the scene of wicked ceremonies, and was at last blown up with dynamite.

Ma was sorry she had not gone to Iboland before the soldiers, because she felt that if she had done so she might have saved all the fighting and bloodshed. Now that a way had been blazed into the country, she was more than ever eager and impatient to go.

"The Gospel should have been the first to enter," she said; "but since the sword and gun are before us, we must follow at once."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

So while carrying on the work at Akpap, she began to explore and look out for some place that would do for an outpost. One day she left Akpap, taking with her the slave-girl Mana, who now knew English and her Bible well, and a bright boy called Esien, and tramped to the Cross River, where she boarded a canoe and paddled slowly upstream. By and by she came to another smaller river on the west, which seemed to run far into the interior between Ibo and Ibibio, and there she landed on a beach at the foot of a hill. This was Itu, a famous place, for it was here that one of the greatest slave-markets in West Africa used to be held, and it was down this side river, the Enyong Creek, that the slaves were brought in canoes, to be sold and sent over the country, or shipped abroad to the West Indies or America.

"A good place to begin," Ma said; and she landed and climbed up the steep bank to the top, where she had a beautiful view over the shining river and the green land. "Oh, yes," she repeated, "a bonnie place to begin."

Once more she lived the gipsy life. She opened a school, made Mana and Esien the teachers, and started to build a church. The people, who had so long trembled in the shadow of slavery, were so pleased that they did all they could to help her, and the children of the village tumbled over one another in their eagerness to "learn book."

When she left for Akpap again the chiefs gave her the gift of a black goat, and she tied a piece of string to it and led it to the beach, where the Mission boat picked her up and took her down to the landing-place for Okoyong. She was bareheaded and barefooted, but in high spirits at the success of her trip, and she went away gaily into the forest, leading her goat and singing:

Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was white as snow!

Mana did a wonderful work at Itu: she taught the women and girls to read and sew, held prayers in the chief's yard every night, and preached on Sunday; and just because she loved Jesus, and tried to be like Ma, she soon had hundreds falling under the spell of the new way of life. This humble slave-girl did not fall away like others. She and Esien remained always true disciples of their Lord.

"If only some one would come and help me at Akpap," Ma prayed, and her wish was answered, for another brave woman, Miss Wright, one of the Mission agents in Calabar, offered to go up and stay with her, and after that everything was easy, for Ma Slessor loved Ma Wright, and Ma Wright loved Ma Slessor, and both loved the bairns, and the bairns loved both, so that it was a happy company which lived in this African forest clearing.

By this time Ma's own special family was complete, and no more members were added, so we can look in upon them and see who they were and what they did.

First, of course, came Janie, who was now a big la.s.sie, very kind, and full of sympathy for everybody. She spoke English fluently, and, like Ma, was a constant reader of the Bible; few white boys or girls, indeed, know it so thoroughly as she did. She was Ma's right hand, and could do almost anything, indoor or outdoor, clean, cook, carry a load, build a house, or work in the fields. But she liked working outside best, and, although a twin, had many friends amongst the people.