16. Straight Against the Dead Wall
Chapter 16
Straight Against the Dead Wall
Amy spent her twenty-ninth birthday and Christmas with the Walkers in the town of Palamcottah (another English corruption of a Tamil name: Palaiyam-kottai), which had been the center of Christian work in Tinnevelly District for many years. The Anglican church in Palamcottah, like the one at Ooty, Amy thought “painfully English—built in the days when England did India’s work, but life inside is native, and I do enjoy it. Today before the service began the singers of the place marched down in fine style, and stood before the porch making a joyful noise with voice and cymbal, violin and tambourine.”
Walker, known as the Iyer (an Indian term of respect and affection), had been the chairman of the council of the Church Missionary Society, a position requiring much office work and, in 1895 and 1896, the painful task of purging the church rolls. It was a touchy matter, the weeding out of those whose names were on the registers but who were living as Hindus. Nominal Christianity was one of the most disturbing aspects of the missionary scene in Tinnevelly, and Walker was the object of calumny and scorn from those who could not see why the differences between Christian and Hindu needed to be so obvious. Other difficulties arose, and at last he felt he “could not go on turning the wheel in the direction it was turning,” and dropped it. His resignation was accepted just at the time Amy arrived in Palamcottah.
The Iyer, a master of Tamil by this time, understood very well Amy’s temptation to despair. During his own early struggles he had written to his sister, “It takes such a long time to get into the ins and outs of these Indian languages, and then, though you may know how to speak and what word to use, there is the enormous difficulty of proper pronunciation. However, on we go, trying and struggling. . . . I am only a stammerer in it yet.” He read aloud to Amy from his own journals, which showed the plodding and the groaning, so that she might take comfort in seeing that she was not the first to be discouraged.
“But you were discouraged because you had set such a high standard for yourself! “she countered.
Walker quenched that nonsense by a crushing, “You know nothing whatever about it!”
An exigent coach, he insisted that Amy go through drill like any soldier before professing to fight. This included the study of Tamil classics, poetry, and proverbs, essential if one was ever to learn to “think Tamil.” Remembering Misaki San’s interpreting for her in Japan, she chafed at what seemed a wicked waste of time when she might be giving out the Gospel through interpretation, “but Walker says it’s worthwhile and I am believing him straight in the face of my feelings.” A few months later she wrote, Never had a pupil such a teacher! But it is rather like a great Beethoven wasting his time over a stupid little scale-strummer.” She wondered how she had ever had the courage to tackle the job. “It was the courage of ignorance—pure ignorance!”
Her second exam was to take place in early February. She dreaded it. She marked the year, 1897, next to the portion of Daily Light for January 23, in which she found strong encouragement: “Hope maketh not ashamed. I am the Lord . . . they shall not be ashamed that wait for me. Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord.” Particularly comforting was the thought that God had once given words to a donkey.1 Perhaps it was not too much to hope that the God who opened an ass’s mouth would open hers and enable her to spout forth Tamil.
Walker, free now from administrative responsibilities, wanted to begin itinerant work in the villages. He saw in the new young missionary not only diverse and unusual gifts, but a deep and uncompromising spirit of discipleship. He asked her to pray about the possibility of joining them in village work and perhaps beginning a work for women. The invitation came as God’s seal on what she had longed to be doing. She prayed. The answer was yes, and in February they traveled by bullock bandy, a springless two-wheeled cart, the Walkers in one, Amy and Saral in another, to Pannaivilai, a day’s journey from Palamcottah. Of this method of travel Amy wrote, “It is, except for the Chinese wheelbarrow, the most tiring way of going about I ever came across. The Japanese kuruma is bliss in comparison.” Crash, bang, smash went the wheels on the rutted roads, jerking, pitching, lunging, and jolting the hapless passengers.
It was a clear moonlight night (we travel at night to escape the heat and to save time) and at first I couldn’t think of going to sleep, and walked ahead of the bandies, disturbing various flocks of parrots who passed uncomplimentary remarks in consequence. When at last I settled down to slumber sweet, Saral rolled over on top of me, bumping me black and blue. The bandy threw her at me, she said. Then we stuck in the mud and Mr. Walker had to help to push us out. I wish you could have seen us.
She was delighted with the big airy bungalow at Pannaivilai.
No superfluous furniture, curtains, or antimacassars2—just three big rooms, like three big barns with a hayloft overhead! In the bedroom barns, bed, chair, and table. In the center barn, table, chairs, plate press. A real barracks, truly! It is very cool to add to its charms, being so big and empty, and a wide shady verandah runs all round the house. We brought my baby organ, dear old Jappy texts, and what they irreverently call “my remarks” (Faith is the Victory, Christ is Conqueror) and we put them up and felt furnished. It is simply delicious being here, surrounded by brown faces only.
Amy gathered those brown faces around her whenever she could. A group of “heathen boys” who attended the mission school listened to the story of Solomon, illustrated by a picture roll. Amy was alone, without Saral to interpret, and felt “like a bird in a cage too small for it. But oh, it was worth it all to be able to do, or to try to do, even so little as this. It’s simply blissful to see that they understand.” She told them how King Solomon had prayed not only in public (this did not seem strange to them—school always opened with prayer) but also alone. Did any of them do that? No. They could not possibly do it at home, one of them said. “So I told them they could in the jungle. They could easily go away there and be quite alone with God.” One boy said promptly, “I will!”
One day three boys came asking for Bibles. Amy was astonished, for they were from “Christian” homes. Hadn’t they got Bibles? No, they hadn’t. Hadn’t their parents? No. There wasn’t one in the house. Had there ever been? They weren’t sure. Amy, thinking she must have misunderstood their Tamil, went to Mrs. Walker who confirmed it all. Off they went to visit the Bible-less house. One scrap of an ancient bit of the Psalms was found. After prayer and talk the father agreed to buy a Bible.
“Do you see what this sort of thing means?” wrote Amy. “How can the Heathen know that He is the Lord when God is not sanctified in these people called by His name? For sanctified they cannot be when the Word is held in such small account Will you pray for these Christians of India? All round them there is the awful darkness of heathendom, and the darkness conquers the light unless that light is truly Divine.” She learned of one congregation in which hardly a soul was converted, and whole villages of professing Christians with hardly one who understood what the name meant. There was a great palaver over what “giving up sin” might mean—surely not the breaking of caste or the burning of idols? Killing an insect or stealing a little rice while husking—such things might be sinful, of course. Toward these “heathen Christians and those who made no pretense of being Christians Amy felt pitiful, purposeful love.”
No wonder that when the hottest weather came in April, requiring the customary trip to Ooty (“so one s brains won’t liquefy ), Amy wished she could be allowed not to go. The Walkers believed it was best, so up to the hills they went. There were the usual pleasant sociabilities, some “of a most Christian character, such as “picnics finishing up with prayer,” but it seemed “cruelty and wickedness to waste a moment when natives are waiting in the dark.”
Amy gave readers of her Scrap letter a “deep look down” into that darkness in the form of the story of a girl named Pappamal. She was of high caste and wanted to become a Christian. “This is very rare, and means no end of difficulty to the Mission, as it is invariably followed by the closing of houses, emptying of schools, and endless law troubles, for the Hindus leave no stone unturned to wreck the work and injure the workers, and, if they can get at her, secretly poison the convert.” Seen against the background of Tinnevelly’s conflicts in the past, such violent reaction is not surprising. So long as Christians were limited to certain castes and posed no threat to the ancient and powerful cultural structure that is Hinduism, they could be tolerated. But for a girl to declare independence from caste and family in this fashion was an outrage. Pappamal was over sixteen, hence legally free to choose her own religion. She begged a missionary for help in escaping by night from her parents’ house. Help was given. The parents found her, pleaded with her to return, but she stood fast. The Mission felt bound to protect her from “certain death” and decided to send her to Ooty. It was just at the time Amy was leaving for the hills, so she saw Pappamal safely into the hands of a Bible woman there.
Trouble erupted at once in Palamcottah. People who had been friendly glared at the missionaries. Doors of houses once open were slammed shut. In Ooty a man was seen prowling the mission compound, and soon the truth came out. The whole thing was a plot. He and Pappamal wanted to marry. As Hindus they were forbidden to because they were of different castes. She was to profess faith, escape from home, find asylum; he was to follow, profess faith also, then they would marry as Christians. That was not the end of the story. It came out bit by bit that the girl’s parents were a part of the web, having connived to bring shame on the Mission, charging it with the crime of seducing a minor (she was not yet sixteen, they said). The Bible woman immediately wired Pappamal’s father to come and take her. He refused, so the Bible woman personally escorted her to Palamcottah and publicly returned her to her family. She was shut up in solitary confinement. Word went round (and was confirmed by lawyers) that she would be killed, but in such a way as to evade proof. “Oh the dark dark deeds of this dark land!” wrote Amy. “It seemed like throwing the lamb to the wolves, only alas, the lamb herself was a wolf in disguise.” Pappamal claimed that the missionaries had bribed her to leave home.
Only a few days later word came that the parents had, in fact, nothing to do with the plot; Pappamal had poisoned her mother so that she was unconscious when Pappamal escaped, and the father had been degraded by his caste, who refused him fire and wood. It was all the work of the suitor. The girl’s horoscope had disappeared so no one could prove her age. Then the mission lawyer asked the mission to bribe the father’s side of the case, as he feared it was going against them.
India was a land where “the veriest child can baffle the keenest. The Eastern mind and soul seems to me like a cabinet of secret drawers—you never know when you get to the last one.”
Amy was staggered by the “terrible taking it for granted” that Pappamal would die. “I don’t know about North India, but everywhere in South India there is only one answer when you ask why high caste converts have to be sheltered away from their homes, and why it is impossible for either a Mohammedan or Hindu woman to confess Christ in baptism while she lives at home. And that one answer is: It would mean death—or worse . . . As one of the lawyers said, ‘She will be found down a well, and they will say she found her pain too much to bear and so put an end to it. Often it is so.’ ”
Two boys of the Vellala caste, one of the highest, told Amy that if they believed what she was telling them from the Bible they would be “beaten until they were dead.” Her answer: “It would be the greatest honor in all the world to be beaten until you are dead for Christ!”
Happily Amy’s brains did not liquefy in Ooty, but unhappily she came down with a fever that put her out of commission for two months. Always able to find something to thank God for, she learned during this time what true friends the Walkers were, she like a dear elder sister, he a wise strong elder brother. To them Amy was tungachie, little sister. In what Amy called “this happiest of missionary homes” she recovered, but language study suffered. She told her friends at home of the marvel of being able at last to understand Walker’s sermon, adding a note in the margin, “but I expect it was only because it was an easy one.”
Once in a while the thought that she would rather be in China came back, but she worked away faithfully where God had put her, teaching her Brahman boys whenever they turned up, spending a half hour in the evenings with Royal Jewel, “the jolliest little chap, very much in earnest (I hope).” The Indian headmaster of the mission school offered to give her two hours a day of Tamil if she would teach the schoolboys to sing hymns. Women came in the evening and learned from the Wordless Book, with its black, red, white, and gold pages, representing sin, the cleansing blood of Jesus, the purity He gives, and the glory to come. These women could argue. “God is everywhere, you say. Then He is in the stone, the tree. So we may worship the stone and the tree. Why not, if God is there?” Amy was heartened by reading the letters of Henry Martyn, earlier missionary to India, who wrote, “I have rightfully no other business each day but to do God’s work as a servant, constantly regarding His pleasure. May I have grace to live above every human motive, simply with God and to God.”
There were small excitements, such as the boys bringing her a freshly killed cobra and a scorpion that measured nine inches from nippers to tail tip. She was bitten by an unidentified “puchie.” Since the pain was not great enough for an older scorpion and too great for a hornet, Amy took it to be a “young and innocent” scorpion. “All this is fine fun for me—I can’t sober down into a proper missionary.”
There were dialogues of an altogether sober nature with a new munshie of a high caste, with whom she felt she came “straight against the dead wall of Hinduism.” He asked her to translate into Tamil an English tract he had brought. “Let us meditate on the All-Pervading Spirit, the Fountain of Bliss, the Incomparable One, Eternal, Immaculate, Incorporeal, Omniscient, Unalterable, Holy, Distant, and yet near, Light dwelling in tranquility, All-Comprehensive, Possessor of Perfect Felicity, pure intelligence, inexpressible, and inconceivable. . . .” Amy’s progress in Tamil was obviously far greater than she dared to admit, for she translated this description of God and then asked how, if he believed all this, he could worship stones.
Then came a perfect torrent of exclamations and asseverations and repudiations, like a pent-up river flood suddenly let loose. “I shall bow down to a stone tonight! I shall! Yes! I read you this book now and tonight I shall worship a stone! No! It is not a stone I worship! It is the Divinity who has condescended to meet us mortals by means of this stone. He, the Great God is All-Pervading. He has entered that stone, how I know not, nor do I ask to know.” Here he got beyond me and I could only listen and try to follow and catch the clue again. There he was, earnest, eager, far beyond me in mental power, and yet blind, bound in awful chains which no human hand could sever.
Amy, acutely aware of being, in herself, nothing more than a clay pot—ordinary, plain, fragile—knew that the pot held a priceless treasure which the old Hindu scholar had never seen: “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”3 Would God give these people eyes to see that light?
1. See Numbers 22:28.
2. Crocheted doilies to protect upholstered chairbacks and arms from soil, specifically from “Macassar,” a hair oil.
3. 2 Corinthians 4:6.