When this columnist visited First Baptist Church in Raleigh, he met Frances Ward Brooks, who pulled out of her pocketbook a small piece of blue and white china, a figurine of a porcelain cat. She remembered that in her childhood it always occupied a place of honor in her grandmother’s china cabinet. She shared that family lore indicated it once belonged to Lottie Moon, the famous Southern Baptist missionary to China. And that was about all Frances knew at the time. It was a mystery!
Fred Anderson
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Every good Baptist boy and girl, like Frances Brooks, who grew up in the South knew the name of Lottie Moon and something of her epic story. Every December, Lottie Moon’s story was told almost alongside the story of the babe of Bethlehem. The reason, of course, was the annual Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions.
Lottie Moon herself had proposed that Woman’s Missionary Union take an offering in the Christmas season to secure funds for new women missionaries who would work in China. The leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Foreign (now International) Mission Board realized that Lottie Moon needed reinforcements and they appealed to the new Baptist women’s organization to secure the necessary funds.
In 1888 the national WMU under the leadership of Annie Armstrong launched the Christmas offering. The first goal was $2,000, but instead women gave $3,315.26 — enough to send three new women missionaries. One of those was a 30-year-old woman from Eureka Baptist Church in Corapeake, N.C., in the swamp and farm country in the northeastern corner just below the border with Virginia. The missionary’s name was Fannie Knight.
As a child, Fannie felt called of God to be a missionary in China. The lure and lore of China missions had spread even to remote country churches. It is conceivable that Fannie, as a teenager, must have had some inkling of the work of Lottie Moon, who in 1873 had been appointed by the Foreign Mission Board. Eureka was constituted just five years after Lottie’s appointment and it is probable that country Baptist folk in eastern North Carolina received Baptist literature and knew about the missions work.
Fannie Knight applied to the Foreign Mission Board to be one of those assistants to Lottie Moon. In her landmark biography of Moon, Catherine Allen quoted from a letter sent by Moon to Annie Armstrong, the leader of WMU: “Please say to the new missionaries they are coming to a life of hardship and constant self-denial. They will be alone in the interior and will need to be strong and courageous. If the joy of the Lord be their strength, the blessedness of the work will more than compensate for the hardship. Let them come ‘rejoicing to suffer’ for the sake of the Lord and Master who freely gave his life for them.”
To her fellow Virginians, Lottie appealed for assistants among their “choicest women – women who would be missed at home, whose going would make a gap in the church work and in the social circle, women full of zeal, faith and consecration, no longer young.”
The mystery of the porcelain cat may have been solved.
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In a leaflet published as a memorial tribute to Fannie, Martha Foster Crawford, an early missionary who knew her in China, wrote that Fannie was “the first to respond to an urgent appeal from Miss Moon for aid in a prosperous work opening at P’ingtu.” The writer continued: “In July 1889 she reached Tung Chow in company with [other missionaries]. No one who saw her there can forget the serious but joyful eagerness ….”
Fannie Knight — like Lottie Moon who went before her — entered a strange culture far removed from everything she had known in her upbringing. Everything was different: the food, clothing, housing, religions, traditions, family dynamics and many dialects. Just to live and survive in such a cultural shift required a strong personality.
Allen pictured the tenderness which Lottie Moon displayed in grooming the new missionary. “A teacher was engaged to help with study of the written language, while Miss Moon gradually introduced her to Chinese custom. Chinese clothes were fitted, a Chinese name was selected for her, and preparations were made for P’ingtu.” Fannie Knight shared the home with the older and already famous missionary. She became a part of the church which was constituted at Sha-ling village, only the fourth Southern Baptist church in North China.
A photograph from the times shows the younger Knight sitting at the feet of the older Moon and wearing a similar hair style. Allen’s biography suggests that Lottie considered Fannie as her protégé, “the answer to her prayers, the one whom she could drop her mantle, knowing that the work would go on.”
“The two lone women became deeply attached to each other. Fannie Knight considered Miss Moon to be the most courageous, useful, heroic, gentle of persons. ‘I think I might safely say that no missionary is making greater sacrifices than she,’ Fannie wrote to her family.”
Finally, with an assistant in place, Lottie was confident to leave the field long enough for an overdue furlough in Virginia. When she returned, she was eager to resume her work with Fannie. But things changed. Fannie met and “hastily married” William Duncan King, a recent missionary arrival. Tragically, Fannie contracted smallpox while on her wedding trip. In her last hours she requested to hear someone read from the Bible: “Read me something about green pastures and still waters.” The young woman from North Carolina was buried “on the slope of the Chinese sacred mountain, Tai San, hers the first missionary grave in this region.”
Frances Ward Brooks did not know the full story when she showed me the porcelain cat. Of course, she knew pieces. Eureka was her home church and she vaguely knew about Fannie Knight. As a child, she may have been told about the connection. This summer, when going through family papers, she discovered that her grandmother, Frances “Fannie” Knight Ward Kelley, was a cousin of the missionary who bore a similar name. And it is possible that the cat’s secret is now revealed and its provenance explained. The porcelain cat is a tangible reminder of friendship and sacrifice.
As for Lottie Moon, the famous missionary died on Christmas Eve 1912, exactly a century ago this December. Her ashes were buried in Crewe, Va., where her brother lived. She remains the most recognized name among Baptists in the South. Her name and cause raises millions of dollars to support the International Mission Board. Her work likewise continues wherever there are Baptist missionaries in service.
Fred Anderson ([email protected]) is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and the Center for Baptist Heritage & Studies.