Maria Fearing: Mother From Far Away

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[00:01:01] Martyrs and Missionaries is a production of Revive Studios.

[00:01:04] You're listening to Martyrs and Missionaries.

[00:01:08] I'm Elise.

[00:01:09] And in every episode, I'll bring you a new martyr and or missionary, the called and the brave.

[00:01:13] In this episode, we're covering the life of Mariah Fearing,

[00:01:16] a former slave who felt God's call to the Congo Free State.

[00:01:42] I actually stumbled across Mariah's story while I was looking for someone else whom I still haven't found.

[00:01:46] But as soon as I read her story, I knew that it was one that I wanted to share with you guys.

[00:01:50] And if you want to look her up, her name is actually spelled like Maria, but it's pronounced Mariah.

[00:01:55] Her story is not super long and there's not a lot of details,

[00:01:58] but there is enough to know what sort of person she was and the effect she had on her chosen mission field.

[00:02:03] At one point, someone else in her organization interviewed her and a short book was written,

[00:02:07] but I couldn't find it anywhere.

[00:02:09] So this account comes from several snippets I found across the Internet,

[00:02:13] as well as a book which features Mariah in one of its chapters.

[00:02:16] The book is called Alabama Women, Their Lives and Times,

[00:02:19] and you can find it on the Internet Archive if you're interested.

[00:02:23] So Mariah Fearing was born into slavery in July of 1838 in a small town outside of Gainesville, Alabama.

[00:02:30] Her parents also lived at the same plantation,

[00:02:32] but Mariah lived at the house of the slave master and his family while her parents worked in the fields.

[00:02:38] As a slave, her name was officially Mariah Winston after the family who owned her,

[00:02:42] but later she would change it back to her parents' name, hence Mariah Fearing.

[00:02:47] The Winston family were Presbyterians and Mariah grew up listening to Bible stories

[00:02:51] and learning the catechisms alongside the Winston children.

[00:02:54] They also learned of missionaries to faraway places like Africa,

[00:02:58] and it's here that many sources say her interest in missions began.

[00:03:02] And as she grew older, Mariah served as a nanny to the younger Winston children

[00:03:06] and she spent the first 27 years of her life as a slave.

[00:03:10] And after the war ended in 1865, Mariah moved to Gainesville

[00:03:14] and started working as a live-in nanny and a maid for another white family.

[00:03:18] We don't know what happened to her parents, but presumably they had passed away

[00:03:22] as they're not mentioned anywhere in any of her stories ever again.

[00:03:26] In fact, there's actually a note that says in the biography that I can't find anywhere,

[00:03:31] even then she refused to talk about her parents.

[00:03:33] So we're not sure, but they probably passed away.

[00:03:37] But she works in Gainesville for five years until she learns about the Freedmen's Bureau School

[00:03:41] in Talladega, about two and a half hours northeast of Gainesville.

[00:03:45] And the Freedmen's Bureau schools were a byproduct of the Reconstruction.

[00:03:49] The Freedmen's Bureau as a whole was established to provide food and shelter,

[00:03:53] clothing, medical supplies, and land to displaced Southerners

[00:03:57] as well as newly freed African-Americans.

[00:03:59] And the Bureau schools were set up to help educate the children of former slaves,

[00:04:03] but they also offered literacy classes for adults, which is what led Mariah there.

[00:04:07] The school, now known as Talladega College,

[00:04:11] is the oldest private historically black college in Alabama.

[00:04:15] And it was actually founded by two former slaves with the help of the American Missionary Association,

[00:04:19] which was founded for the express purpose of abolition and education.

[00:04:23] And the school found itself in high demand, and soon it moved into an old Baptist college,

[00:04:28] which I believe is when Mariah started attending.

[00:04:32] And the college struggled to provide adequately for students due to limited funds and inconsistent donations.

[00:04:37] So to lower costs, it expected students to work on campus to help discount their tuition

[00:04:42] and help keep the school running.

[00:04:44] And it's actually something that's not fairly uncommon today, at least among some Christian schools.

[00:04:48] There's even one that I know of in Missouri.

[00:04:52] It's called the College of the Ozarks in like southern central Missouri.

[00:04:56] And they do that, and it actually sounds pretty cool.

[00:04:59] But the school was closed during the summers, and so students often found themselves teaching somewhere else,

[00:05:03] waiting for the dormitory to reopen.

[00:05:06] And Mariah herself worked in the college boarding department.

[00:05:09] And without any exposure to former schooling, Mariah found herself taking classes alongside elementary school students,

[00:05:16] many of whom mocked her literacy.

[00:05:18] However, she persevered and completed her education up to the ninth grade level

[00:05:22] and then started teaching the younger grades.

[00:05:26] And to give you an idea of Mariah's heart, in 1877, the campus expanded to include a farm.

[00:05:31] And Mariah was the only student who gave up her own means to gift the farm three chickens.

[00:05:36] And Mariah never went on to be a formal teacher.

[00:05:39] She never completed the coursework necessary.

[00:05:41] But she taught classes at one of the buildings on campus and also worked as an assistant matron in the women's dorm,

[00:05:48] often sharing a room with students.

[00:05:50] And this is how she met two of her closest lifelong friends, Lillian Thomas and Lillian Gaunt.

[00:05:55] Even though they were over 20 years younger than she was, they would also later go on to become her mission colleagues.

[00:06:02] In 1894, when Mariah was about 56, her former roommate, Lillian Gaunt, came back to the school with her new husband, Henry Shepard.

[00:06:10] And they were in town from the Congo Free State, raising awareness for their mission there.

[00:06:14] And I want to talk a little bit about Henry Shepard because he was an important figure in Congolese missions,

[00:06:19] and he also helped shut down the horrible exploitation of King Leopold II of Belgium, who owned the Congo Free State.

[00:06:26] So Shepard was born about a month before the end of the Civil War, and his family adjusted well in the post-war era.

[00:06:32] He grew up fairly middle class and attended night classes at the Hampton Institute in Virginia,

[00:06:38] where Booker T. Washington was one of his professors.

[00:06:41] And then he went on to the Tuscaloosa Theological Seminary, where he met his future wife, Lillian Gaunt,

[00:06:47] even though they wouldn't marry for another 10 years.

[00:06:50] Shepard was ordained and then became a minister in Atlanta, but he didn't like how heavily segregated the city was.

[00:06:56] And he also had his heart set on being a missionary explorer to Africa.

[00:07:00] He sent letters to the Presbyterian Foreign Mission Board in Baltimore for two years, I think,

[00:07:05] and he received no response. So one day he got on a train and headed up there himself.

[00:07:10] And the director told him that they would not send a black missionary out without a white supervisor.

[00:07:15] But there was a white man named Samuel Lapsley who volunteered to be that white person who would go with him.

[00:07:21] And he saw Shepard as an equal in the work. So it wasn't strange at all.

[00:07:25] But the two were sent out to the Congo and stopped in Belgium on their way there,

[00:07:29] where they secured a visit with King Leopold, who greeted them enthusiastically and then granted them access to the Congo

[00:07:36] so that they could spread the gospel and then help bring civilization to the natives there.

[00:07:40] But his motives were far less pure. But the missionaries had no idea.

[00:07:44] And if you remember the story of Henry Morton Stanley, that's exactly what happened to him.

[00:07:48] He thought he was helping Leopold in one direction, and then it turns out absolutely not.

[00:07:53] It was horrible. But they were being exploited so that Leopold could exploit the Congo for resources.

[00:08:00] Leopold was using the Congolese to strip the land of ivory and rubber.

[00:08:04] He started with ivory and then the market shifted to rubber.

[00:08:07] And he had the help of a native tribe of enforcers called the Zapozaps.

[00:08:11] And each village had quotas to meet. And if the quota was not met, there were severe consequences,

[00:08:15] the most well-known of which was the cutting off of the hands and drying them to present to the authorities.

[00:08:21] And it's estimated that up to at least half of the population was killed under Leopold's brutality from both punishment and malnutrition.

[00:08:30] And Shepard helped expose all of this to the world by sending the images out to the Western world.

[00:08:35] And he even helped form one of the world's first humanitarian organizations.

[00:08:39] But when Mariah was interested in working in the Congo, none of this was super well-known.

[00:08:44] And at 56 years old, frail and weighing only about 90 pounds, she applied to go with the Southern Presbyterian Foreign Mission Board.

[00:08:52] And the Southern Presbyterian Foreign Mission Board was connected to the Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America.

[00:08:59] And if you don't know about the Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America.

[00:09:04] It's OK, because I didn't either until I had to write a paper on Woodrow Wilson and it came up there.

[00:09:08] So here's an interesting snippet for you about that.

[00:09:11] The Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America was founded as a it was it pulled away basically from the regular Presbyterian church

[00:09:21] because they believed that owning slaves was OK and they wanted to maintain their way of life.

[00:09:25] So they split off. Now, one of the founders of this church was Woodrow Wilson's father who helped.

[00:09:32] Actually, he let them meet in his parsonage, I think.

[00:09:36] And if you read any of Woodrow Wilson's biographies, you'll see that they say that it was unknown whether or not his family owned slaves.

[00:09:43] But actually, it's something worse than that, because they actually leased them from the church.

[00:09:48] The Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America owned the slaves and then the families of that church then could lease out these slaves.

[00:09:55] So somehow far worse, it feels like to me. But this is the mission board that Mariah applied to.

[00:10:02] And they took one look at her age, health and education experience and denied her application.

[00:10:08] But she wasn't bothered. So then she kept trying until I allowed her to go as a self-supported missionary.

[00:10:13] After being a slave for half of her life, Mariah had achieved an incredible milestone, especially for black Americans at this time.

[00:10:20] She had saved up enough money to buy her own home.

[00:10:23] However, she didn't even hesitate to sell it to help pay for her way to the Congo.

[00:10:27] And with the money she got from the sale of her house, plus one hundred dollars from the women's group at a local church,

[00:10:32] she was able to buy a one way ticket from New York City to the city of Lubbo in the Congo and support herself for two years

[00:10:39] before the missions board decided to pick her up as a full fledged missionary.

[00:10:43] And she traveled there with her friend Lillian and the shepherds, and the journey to the Congo took them about two months.

[00:10:49] And then once they reached the Congo, they had to travel inland twelve hundred miles by wagon, riverboat and canoe to finally reach their mission station.

[00:10:58] And they arrived in the Cauza region in like south central Congo and about eighteen ninety four.

[00:11:04] And she shared a little mud hut with Lillian and she didn't write a whole lot about her missions experience.

[00:11:09] But there are a couple articles that do exist.

[00:11:12] And one of these articles details some of her first experiences exploring her new mission field.

[00:11:17] And I want to read a little snippet of something else unrelated before I read this article, because I think it's just kind of funny.

[00:11:24] And it's just these little historical tidbits are always interesting.

[00:11:27] But this is from the Cauza Herald and they say apologetic and instructive in big, bold letters.

[00:11:33] When this little paper was first published, it was our intention to issue it regularly each quarter of the year.

[00:11:38] But we were not prepared to fight an unruly unruly roller.

[00:11:42] Our first roller gave out completely just as the first edition was printed.

[00:11:46] The new roller did not reach us until the first of September.

[00:11:49] We trust that nothing further will interfere with our intention to issue future numbers on time.

[00:11:55] And the title of the actual article is called Visiting by Miss M. Fearing.

[00:11:59] Going around among the natives and visiting them in their in their different villages and seeing them in their homes is a very interesting experience indeed.

[00:12:06] Their lives are so unlike ours. One may gain quite a deal of knowledge of their customs and the everyday life.

[00:12:12] The natives are very glad to have us come visit them.

[00:12:15] They love to be questioned about their customs and things they are interested in.

[00:12:18] They take pride in telling us about their parents and they also like to have us tell them about our way of living.

[00:12:24] We see many things that seem strange.

[00:12:26] The other day on entering one of the little towns, my attention was attracted by the cry of a very young baby.

[00:12:32] On going into the house to see what was the matter, I found the mother with a four day old baby flat on its back, stuffing it with bread and water as she would stuff a chicken.

[00:12:41] She said she did it to make the child strong, but the baby did not enjoy this way of eating and I felt sorry for the little creature.

[00:12:47] Sometime ago I saw a woman going along as if she had a very heavy burden.

[00:12:51] When I drew nearer, I saw what the burden was.

[00:12:54] She had taken her husband on her back to carry him around because he had hurt his toe.

[00:12:59] The man seemed perfectly delighted at his wife's sympathy.

[00:13:02] I am thankful to say that there is quite an improvement in many of the natives, yet there is room for more.

[00:13:07] Will you not dear friends unite your prayers with ours for the uplifting of this people?

[00:13:12] Mariah was just one of many missionaries that were coming to the Congo at this time,

[00:13:16] and this large influx of missionaries coming to the country meant that a railway system needed to be made.

[00:13:21] And this was all part of how Leopold used the missionaries to advance his ultimate exploitation goals,

[00:13:27] because the railway would make it easier to maximize rubber profits.

[00:13:31] And Belgian officials taxed Congolese villagers in order to pay for the railroad,

[00:13:35] and if they couldn't pay the tax, entire villages were hauled off to work as slave labor.

[00:13:40] The Kauzai region was immune to this for a time, but many of these villagers were marched right past Mariah's village.

[00:13:46] And within a year of her arrival, Mariah was using her savings to help purchase girls from the Zapo Zap who were marching them past.

[00:13:52] And soon she was sharing her small hut with Lillian and five little girls.

[00:13:56] The Belgian officials often pawned natives off on the Catholic and Protestant mission stations,

[00:14:00] but they discouraged them from buying them from the Zapo Zap, although the reasons for that are unclear.

[00:14:06] But when Mariah arrived, the station already had 45 locals who worked essentially as servants in exchange for room and board.

[00:14:13] But Mariah would soon change that system for the better, definitely for the better.

[00:14:17] But she wrote of the beginnings of her new work in a letter to her church back in Talladega.

[00:14:21] She said, Lillian and I have four little native girls to train.

[00:14:25] I have one special girl that the doctor gave me for my own.

[00:14:28] I'm trying to teach her how to sew and do housework of which she knows nothing.

[00:14:32] Pray for her conversion. Topinga is her name.

[00:14:35] Mariah worked hard to learn some of the local languages, and then she eventually spoke a mixture of English with a few of the local languages mixed together.

[00:14:42] And that seemed to work pretty well for her.

[00:14:44] And she also taught the girls to read and to know the basic precepts of Christian doctrine.

[00:14:49] And also some hymns. And then she traveled around to local villages to share the gospel.

[00:14:54] And Mariah also revolutionized the way her mission was being run.

[00:14:57] Prior to her arrival, the missionaries were struggling to care for the ever increasing number of refugees.

[00:15:02] And the support they received from the organizations was often inadequate to this task.

[00:15:07] And then to add to the difficulty, the gospel was falling upon deaf ears.

[00:15:11] And in the first four years of the mission, there were no converts.

[00:15:15] So Mariah decided that the girls should learn a trade, something they could use to support themselves.

[00:15:20] And it seems so basic to us now, but at the time it just wasn't being done, at least in the Congo.

[00:15:26] And this was also an area in which Mariah had a great deal of expertise.

[00:15:30] And she also knew how to teach. So she was a perfect fit for this work.

[00:15:34] So Mariah became known as the place to go if girls wanted to learn how to sew blankets and clothing, cook, keep a kitchen, wash and iron, and learn sanitation techniques related to the home.

[00:15:45] Many of the girls went on to continue working at this mission or other missions, or even to marry other Congolese Christians.

[00:15:52] And Mariah was in the Congo for 20 years. And in her tenure, she cared for as many as 20 to 100 girls at a time.

[00:15:59] And the girls gave her the nickname Mamu or Mamuwa Mputu, which meant mother from far away.

[00:16:05] And Mariah helped raise two generations of girls, which is an incredible blessing considering she never married or had children of her own.

[00:16:13] And in 1915, when she was 77 years old, she'd been in the Congo for about 20 years.

[00:16:18] She traveled back to Selma, Alabama to have a minor medical procedure done so that she can continue her work at the mission, which she paid for with her own savings.

[00:16:27] The mission board decided, however, that she needed to retire due to her age and they refused to send her back to Africa.

[00:16:33] There's no written record of how she felt about that decision, but it must have been a very difficult one to hear.

[00:16:39] And the board also declined to send Lillian and her husband, as well as a fellow missionary they had met while in Africa, back as well.

[00:16:46] So Mariah lived with Lillian and her husband until Lillian died in 1930.

[00:16:51] And then she moved in with her nephew until she died in 1937, two months before her 99th birthday.

[00:16:57] And that means she could have kept going in the Congo for another 20 years, which is crazy to think about.

[00:17:03] But she didn't spend her time in America idly.

[00:17:06] She volunteered with her local church, where she taught Sunday school until she was 93 years old, only taking a short break to recover from a hip fracture.

[00:17:13] She also helped establish a Congolese art exhibit in Mobile.

[00:17:17] And even despite the Great Depression, she continued to send money back to the Congo to support her former mission.

[00:17:22] And I think Mariah is one of the oldest missionaries we covered on this show, at least in terms of when she went to the mission field, because she was almost 60,

[00:17:32] which is retirement age, even by today's standards.

[00:17:35] And I think it really just goes to show you that age or life experience is no obstacle when you allow God to use you.

[00:17:41] And in fact, Mariah's difficult life experiences of being enslaved the first 30 years of her life and later working as a domestic helper, a nanny and a teacher were all directly applicable to helping those girls learn to support themselves and experience a life changing power of the gospel as well.

[00:17:58] And it reminds me of what Joseph told his brothers in Genesis, that what you intended for evil, God used for good to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today.

[00:18:10] I hope you enjoyed learning about Mariah's story and enjoy learning about the other stories on this podcast as much as I enjoy researching them and telling them to you.

[00:18:17] And I also enjoy hearing specifically how they impact you guys.

[00:18:21] And if you want to leave us a review on Apple or Spotify, then feel free.

[00:18:25] I enjoy reading reviews.

[00:18:27] I enjoy reading emails.

[00:18:28] However you want to reach out is always fun.

[00:18:30] And as always, thank you for listening to Mariah's Missionaries.

[00:18:33] I'm Elise.

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