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The Spanish-American War interrupted her time in Hanover and she became for the duration head of the camp hospital at Montauk Point, Long Island. She was barely thirty, but despite her youth and tiny height must have become a figure to be reckoned with. With the end of the war, she turned once again to her childhood dream of telling Chinese children about Jesus and enrolled in the Episcopal Church’s training school for deaconesses in New York City. Maud was ordained as a deaconess in 1903 and then set out for China. She was not to see her native land again for forty-three years.
The picture of Maud in the 1903 class of deaconesses shows a serious, determined face—the face of a young woman ready to take charge, and in her early letters from China, she is doing just that. But she had a run-in with an Episcopal bishop who wanted to house former prostitutes in her school for girls, and after briefly joining another mission where she was considered too liberal for their liking, she decided to go out on her own.
Many female babies were abandoned in those days, and Maud was determined to give abandoned girls a home when they had none, providing them with schooling and the skills to make a living and, when the time came, arranging for a good marriage. St. Faith’s, as she called her compound, was financed entirely by donations, some from friends abroad and some from admiring Chinese benefactors.
Over the years hundreds of babies and girls would call Maud “Mother” or “Grandmother.” Her letters, mostly to her half sister, Louise, whom she hadn’t seen since Louise was a tiny child, tell of the joys and hardships of life behind the walls of St. Faith’s. There was the occasion when a tiny blister on her finger turned into a blood infection that nearly took her life. The Episcopal Mission doctor suggested gently that if she had anything she wished to attend to she should do it at once, for “I think tomorrow you will be too weak.”
Maud with one of her many children.
“In an instant,” Maud wrote, “flashed into my mind my father’s last words, ‘Mary, my mother, my Redeemer.’” Despite the fact that she had parted ways with the Episcopal Mission years before, the Bishop of Shanghai, who was ill, sent the mission treasurer to help her put her financial affairs in order, and a priest came to have Communion with her and talk about where she wished to be buried. But Maud, crediting much prayer and good doctors, survived to continue her life with her children at St. Faith’s.
There were no easy times during Maud’s years at St. Faith’s. There was a worldwide depression, so funds were always scarce. China was in perpetual political turmoil. Although the nation became a republic in 1912 under Sun Yat-sen, there continued to be struggles among various local warlords and the rising Communist party. Shanghai was an international city—part of it a French concession and another the so-called International Concession, which included former British and American concessions. The Municipal Councils in these areas excluded Chinese members, and the police and civil servants were foreigners. Even the names of the streets reflected foreign imperialism—such as Jessfield Road, on which St. Faith’s was located.
The international presence offered a certain degree of safety for foreign residents until 1937, when the Sino-Japanese War began. At this point refugees poured into the city. Those who had grown up in St. Faith’s came home and the compound was full to overflowing. The final straw that winter occurred when thieves broke in and stole everything from a Christmas gift of beef to rice, beans, and utensils.
“Bombs, rumours, refugees, measles, simultaneously. One day in the thick of it Grandma [as everyone including Maud herself called her] exclaimed, ‘Where’s the fun?’ . . . [The answer came from the group] ‘On Grandma’s face!’ Yes, Grandma saw the joke. She had asked the question in fun and they had seen the joke.
“Grandma once lost her sense of humor—my daddy had long ago charged me never to lose it because any one finding it might have such a hard time. Well I knew I was up against it because I had lost my sense of humour, and was weeping for it! Will I ever live to see how funny it is to cry for your sense of humour and as the thought came, the rainbow shone through. My sense of humour was welcomed back with a hearty chuckle.”
August, 1938:
“Here we are at it again. Glory [gory] thrust upon us. Now on to Sept. Your New York papers today will be telling you that things are easing up a bit around Shanghai for now. . . For some days I was busy receiving and fixing up refugees. ‘Boy’—faithful helper for over a quarter of a century—was off in the Chinese soldier zone collecting his wife and son and little daughter. One little one already here. I was listening to every knock on the door hoping it was their arrival. They arrived after a trying detour safe and sound. Once, I was opening the door, as I thought for his family, one of ‘my girls’ of twenty-seven years ago was standing there asking if she could come in—‘Come home to Grandma?’ One baby in her arms, another yet unborn, and three daug
hters and a son. They had walked miles, such a detour. Nothing but the one outfit of clothing they wore. The father too was there. Of course they came in. They were so worn and tired. Roadside food was scarce these days.
“As I write the airplanes are droning overhead, just overhead. One never knows what may happen—by accident or malice prepense. Shrapnel meant for another airplane fell on the roof, close by me in the court where I was standing with several members of the family. Roof tiles were broken and thrown aside. The hot piece lay smoking on the roof, and on touching broke into four pieces. I am not an enthusiast about collecting red-hot war trophies, but I am treasuring these bits. No one was hurt. If the largest, if either, had struck us we would not now be telling you about it. The boom of cannon and anti-aircraft fire has been quieter these last few days, and the noise of the machine guns. And I sleep wonderfully well—truly. And with this great family for every reason I must keep everything as normal as possible. Kindergarten, grade school and sewing hours, prayer time as usual though for 143 big and little I stand looking on, encouraging to quietness, the kindergarten songs are punctured by the boom of cannon.
“Age seventy (Chinese count [in China everyone becomes a year older on New Year’s Day]), temperature hovering around in the nineties 85.6 yesterday, hotter today. One of my former pupils, an orphan boy is living here and working in the Stadium, adapted as a soldiers’ hospital and full of the wounded, quite nearby. Another ‘child,’ pupil once, then teacher, goes to another hospital for night duty tonight. We are in the thick of it.”
There was no mail going out in those days, so the letter begun in August is continued in September and is still being written in November.
“September 6th. Pretty busy. Yesterday the temperature was 97.7 in the shade and plenty moist. Today about the same. In the meantime things are pretty lively, in and out . . . Today when the new land-lord, with his eviction bombs was serving his notice on the many years lord of the land, the Great Land Lord staged a thunderstorm. Such an afternoon—which was which? As I went my rounds, looking after [chores] and folks I found my silly brain saying over a rhyme that Mary Hunter used to say in the old days long ago:
‘Charlotte, when she saw his body
Carried by her on a shutter,
Like a well conducted person
Went on cutting bread and butter.’
“One has to ‘go on cutting bread and butter.’ I found myself seeing the old dining room at 85 State and the group around the table and smiling with them. . . . The food problem is not an easy one. Last week we were reduced to one egg. It was boiled for me for my breakfast, but I voted it to the nurse who was going out to be with the wounded soldiers . . .”
As terrifying as the period of bombing was, the time of occupation was worse. St. Faith’s was located on Jessfield Road next door to Japanese headquarters. Maud did not dare let any of her girls out of the gate for fear that they might be raped and even killed. She related with horror stories of twenty-four young women who answered ads for office jobs only to be locked in and their clothes taken away. Twenty-three were never heard from again. The twenty-fourth managed to obtain clothes of a Japanese man and somehow made her way home. Her parents, overjoyed to see her, were nevertheless concerned for her haggard appearance and, of course, begged to know where she had been and what she had been doing. “Oh,” she said. “I’ve been a little unwell and could not come. Now please just let me go to bed.” She went into her room and wrote a note detailing the horrors she had endured and committed suicide. “I still pray,” Maud said, “for strength to carry on, until this tyranny is passed.”
Marian Craighill, the wife of the Episcopal Bishop of Anking, told of visiting Maud in May of 1938. “Last Sunday afternoon Alma and I made an interesting call on Deaconess Henderson . . . I had heard a lot of how she lived absolutely like the Chinese around her and how she shared her bedroom with the babies and how she did everything for the orphans who came to her—your only credential seemed to be that of need. I went as far as the door with Pearl Buck in 1927 to see if she would take in her amah’s unborn child if it turned out to be a girl—and she had the only place that would, Pearl said. . . . With this introduction you can see my real curiosity as we pounded on the wooden gate in a narrow crowded alley off from Jessfield Road. At first we thought we would pound in vain, but finally we heard a voice and through the chinks we saw Miss Henderson, rattling with keys. As she opened the gate she asked us if we thought we could get in, for the courtyard was flooded and we had to crawl along benches. Right in front of us was the main room of the Chinese house she lives in, simply full of recumbent figures of young girls, taking their afternoon rest. They were covering every inch of space, and the wooden affairs they were lying on proved later to be their desks and benches, and still later their dining tables when they brought in a kind of orange peel tea as we were leaving. . . . They were all of them her old children, who had returned to her when the Japanese drove them out . . . [T]he thing that struck horror to my soul was that they are next door to Japanese headquarters, and she doesn’t dare let the Japanese know of the existence of these girls, so they literally never go out.”
After describing Maud’s own crowded bedroom with its faded pictures of the Lee family on her wall, Mrs. Craighill described Maud as “71 years old, dressed in an ancient Chinese type garment, with the charm of manner and the lovely voice of a cultured gentlewoman of Virginia.” [The Craighills of China, Marian G. Craighill, Trinity Press, 1972, from pp. 221–223.]
After Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, there are no letters from Jessfield Road. As I said earlier, my parents told me a story they had heard from someone, that when at last the soldiers came to take Maud’s girls, she stood in the doorway and said they would have to kill her first. Whatever the truth of that account, it is true that she was somehow able to stay on at St. Faith’s long after most foreign nationals had been taken to detention camps. She was finally interned, sometime in 1944. Sadly, I do not know what became of her beloved children and grandchildren when she was no longer there to care for them and protect them.
After the war ended, there was a flurry of correspondence among various persons in China and the United States, trying to figure out exactly what to do with Maud Henderson. St. Faith’s no longer existed and she was too old to start all over again. She was not the responsibility of the Episcopal Mission, having left its jurisdiction. She yearned to go “home” to Lexington, but the people who knew and loved her there were long dead, and their surviving children could not imagine what they would do if the elderly Maud should land on their doorsteps. Strangely, there are no letters from her half sister and her family. The only relative that stepped up was Thomas Hale, who was the husband of her cousin Elizabeth, the commodore’s daughter. In 1946, he arranged for her passage back to America and several stops along the way, though letters from her hosts seem less than gracious, asking, for example, that they be reimbursed for the cost of housing Maud for a couple of days. She had a visit to Lexington and was interviewed at length by the local newspaper. In the article she expressed her joy to be in the place that she so loved as a girl, but there was no permanent welcome there. It was finally agreed that she should have a place in the Episcopal Home in Richmond. It was from Richmond that she went to see her old friend in Hanover, New Hampshire, and later came to visit our family and revisit haunts of her childhood in Charles Town and Winchester.
It makes me sad to know that there were not many happy times after that. She began to decline physically and mentally and finally died in 1956 at the age of eighty-five.
The newspaper accounts of her return after forty-three years in China tell of the old lady I remember, recalling her special relation to General Lee and his family, bragging that she got respect from the commander of the Japanese detention camp when she told him that her uncle had sailed into Tokyo Bay with Commodore Perry.
“After her fruitless search for General Lee’s portrait in Commodore Henderson’s old sea chest,” a Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter relates, “Miss Henderson walked over to her bedroom mirror. Dozens of snapshots of members of her Chinese family are stuck around the edges of the mirror.
