Maud Truxton Henderson
During the time we lived in Charles Town, West Virginia, we had a visit from an old friend from China days. Her name was Maud Henderson. Maud had spent most of her life saving those Chinese baby girls that their society had too often regarded as disposable. Mother told me the story of how she had stood at the gate of her compound and told the Japanese soldiers there that if they tried to come in and get her girls, they would have to do it across her dead body. This story alone made her one of my childhood heroes. Maud felt particularly close to my parents because she and my father both came from Lexington, Virginia, though they only met when we were in Shanghai. The last time we had seen her was just before we left China in 1940.
When she came to visit us in Charles Town, West Virginia, nine years later, her round face was as wrinkled as a dried apple and she was almost toothless. Her hair, peeking out from under her deaconess headdress, was white, and when she took off the headdress it barely covered her pink scalp.There are two things she said that I have remembered all my life. One was said as she was smacking her lips over some particularly delicious dessert my mother had made: “I’ve only got one tooth left, but it’s all right. The dentist says it’s my sweet one.” The other: “I was the last person Robert E. Lee kissed before he died, and now I have kissed you.”
There is, of course, a lifetime between that second sentence and the first, and although the last time I saw Maud she was eighty and I was sixteen, it is now that I am over eighty myself that I have been able to fill in those long decades between. As I mentioned earlier, Kate DiCamillo was fascinated by the story of the famous kiss and told me if I didn’t write about Maud, she would. But Maud was my hero, so I set about to find out more than the little I could remember from knowing her and hearing my parents talk about her. To my amazed delight, I found that her niece had donated many of her letters from China to the University of North Carolina and that there were a few letters from and about her in the Archives of the Episcopal Church. So over the course of a couple of years, I gave myself the task of putting together her life story. It’s not part of my family history, but it touches it, first in Lexington, then Charles Town and Winchester (where my parents lived for thirty years), and, most importantly, in China.
Maud was born in Lexington, Virginia, on the 4th of December in 1868—three and a half years after Appomattox, the daughter of Mary and Francis William Henderson. She had, in the words of the Psalmist, a goodly heritage. Her father’s two given names came from his two godfathers, Francis Scott Key (who wrote our national anthem) and Episcopal Bishop William Meade of the Virginia diocese and the son of one of Washington’s aides. Francis Henderson was commissioned an officer in the US Army when Polk was president and was appointed the first postmaster in San Francisco. In 1861, he left the US Army and became a captain in the Confederate army, and, although he was a lawyer by the time Maud was born, he was always called “Captain Henderson.”
The Hendersons were a military family. Francis Henderson’s father was an army surgeon who, reportedly, made his rounds with his cat sitting on the pummel of his saddle. On the anniversary of his death, his widow told the family that she had something to do. She arranged her treasured articles, putting the names of each person who was to receive each item with the item, and then, in Maud’s words, “fell asleep and did not wake this side.”
The young Maud became too well acquainted with those who did not “wake this side.” It began with her mother’s death when Maud was a year and a half old. She had a remarkable memory. She remembered her father carrying her in to see her mother, hoping his wife would rouse enough to see her only living child. Her mother opened her eyes, Maud recalled. She was to die on Midsummer’s Eve.
Maud also remembered, or perhaps was told of, a sweltering Sunday later that summer when she was sitting beside her father in the church pew. After she had marched animal crackers up and down the prayer book, she settled in for a morning nap. Later, on the porch at the home of their friends the Lees, it was revealed that Maud was not the only napper that morning. She was occupying her accustomed spot on the general’s lap when he asked her, “What do you think of a daughter who pokes her father in the ribs with her elbow when he is nodding his approval of the preacher’s sermon?”
The storied Southern general was a close friend of her father’s and made a particular pet of little Maud. Traveller, the horse who had carried Lee through the war, provided her first horseback ride. Then at the end of September 1870 came the evening of the famous kiss. Her father and the general had attended the vestry meeting together at the Episcopal church and Maud had been left in the care of Mrs. Lee and their daughter, Mildred. When the men returned, the general carried Maud through the kitchen and took a cookie from the jar that stood in the pantry to give to Maud. Then he kissed her and handed her over to her father. She did not remember—but knew from being told—that her father was summoned not long afterward to the Lees’ home. After the general had bade Maud and her father good-bye, he went into the dining room, where his family and supper were waiting. He sat down, but as he began the grace, his voice faltered and he slumped over the table, paralyzed by a massive stroke. He died two weeks later. Mrs. Lee told Captain Henderson that little Maud must be told that while others had kissed the general after that, Maud was the last one he kissed.
She remembered being taken to see the general as he lay in state in the chapel of Washington College, of which he had been president since the end of the war. She thought how impressive her friend looked in his gray full dress uniform and wondered why he would not wake and take her up in his arms as he always did. Some years later, with no prompting, she pointed out to Mildred Lee just where the cookie jar had stood on that long-ago evening.
So there were two great losses in Maud’s life before she turned two, but the next four years were happy ones. Her father was her constant companion and people remarked how droll they looked strolling about the Virginia Military Institute campus—the tall captain and his tiny lady, “the slowest couple on the quad.” There weren’t other children in her life, but she didn’t feel the lack of them. The adults who were her neighbors doted on her, one even supplying a Christmas Eve Santa who, Maud always believed, had actually come down the chimney. Her cats, Moses, Aaron, and Jim, were her playmates, though she admits much later that they should have been addressed as Mrs. Moses, Mrs. Aaron, and Mrs. Jim. Jim was the favorite. She and Jim played endless games of hide-and-seek and at night Jim would sleep on Maud’s bed.
Then at nearly six, she was taken away from her beloved home and father in Lexington and sent to Charles Town, West Virginia, to stay with relatives. She was given no explanation for this move. It might have been an economic one, for while she was gone, the family home was rented out. Maud herself looked back on the years between 1874 and 1882 as her years of exile. From the time she was nine until she was thirteen and a half she was enrolled in the Episcopal Female Institute in Winchester, Virginia, eighteen miles to the east of Charles Town.
There is very little record of those years. I’ve only found two stories from them. One was that she asked to be confirmed by the Bishop of Virginia soon after the move, already planning at the age of nine to tell children in China about Jesus. Then there is in her later letters an extended account of an experience from the summer she was thirteen.
“Just before I went to Lexington in June, a friend living at Harpers Ferry was married and I was somehow included in the picnic for wedding guests and spent the day on Loudon Heights. I suppose we had something besides view, you can take that for granted, but my memory is the view, such a wonderful one, on a perfect day. The crowd started downhill and I stood looking drinking it in. They called me, I answered and stood looking down the Potomac, across the fields, and off in the far distant shimmering line which they said was Chesapeake Bay. As I stood I had a Psychic. It was as if a clear promise was given me ‘nothing will ever take it away, it is yours.’ And it has been my joy and refreshing through so many viewless days, or when no view would have been welcome.”
Her return to Lexington by coach was a joyful one. Her father warned her that all the cats but one had long ago disappeared, as the renters had disliked cats. Jim had been spotted in the neighborhood from time to time, but she was now a feral cat, and no one dared approach her.
Maud jumped out of the coach almost before it reached her front door and stood at the gate taking in the old familiar sights. Under the neighbors’ house she spied a cat. She was sure it was Jim. Maud called to her. The cat stood still for a minute, listening, then she bounded through the lilac bush, across the grass, and jumped up on Maud’s shoulder. As they entered the house, Jim ran ahead and leaped onto Maud’s old bed, curling up contentedly as she had in the old days.
Maud was obviously a bright and vivacious young woman. She bragged years later that she had once led the ball at the Virginia Military Institute, but she remained coy about the cadet who had invited her.
Two years after Maud’s happy return to the home she loved, her father remarried. His new wife was Maria Eliza Hamilton, the great-granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton, one of our nation’s founding fathers. Maria was from Maud’s account a wonderful stepmother to her husband’s teenaged daughter. She was a highly educated woman and was happy to share her learning and the books she loved with her eager pupil. Then when Maud was seventeen, Maria gave Maud the gift she had always wanted, a sister. Maud felt as though she was a second mother to little Louise, especially since the baby’s own mother was frail after the birth. Maria died when Louise was not quite a year old and Maud was eighteen. Meantime, Francis Henderson had become gravely ill.
On the last day of his life, he was too weak to hold Louise in his arms, but he asked Maud to bring the baby in to see him. “Oh,” he said. “I had so looked forward to her walking.” Maud carried her thirteen-month-old sister a few steps away and put her down on her feet. “Walk to Daddy,” Maud said, and the baby threw out her arms and took the few steps across the space to her father’s chair.
“Have I told you about that wonderful last evening?” Maud asked in a birthday letter to the grown Louise. “He was in coma and they wanted me to leave his bedside, but I would
not . . . He became conscious of my presence and called the old pet name, Dear Little Heart.” And then, “Just at the last minute his face was transformed with life and joy, and as he passed over to the other side he rapturously called: ‘Mary, my mother, my Redeemer,’” as though, Maud thought, he was greeting Maud’s mother, his own mother, and Jesus as he woke on the other side.
Although Maud was almost nineteen and had been caring for her sister since the child was born, on the death of her father, Maria’s family came to claim the baby and take her to live with them in South Carolina. It was decided that her father’s younger brother, Commodore Alexander Henderson, and his wife, Catherine, should adopt Maud and take her to live with them in Boston.
I do not know if Maud had met her famous uncle before she became his ward. More than distance had separated the two families. Commodore Henderson had entered the navy in 1851 and the following year, as a young officer, cruised the Far East with Commodore Perry. It was on that voyage in 1854 that Perry’s fleet sailed into Tokyo Bay and caused the Japanese government to open its doors to the West.
The young naval engineer went on to serve in the Mediterranean and South Atlantic, and in 1861 when his Virginia brother Francis was joining the Confederate army, Alexander returned to the States and served with distinction in the Northern navy throughout the Civil War.
In 1882 when the United States began the task of building a “new navy,” Alexander Henderson was made the engineering head of the Naval Advisory Board, designing the “new navy’s” first vessels and supervising the building of them. When this work was done, he became the Chief Engineer of the Boston Navy Yard, where he was welcomed into Boston’s elite society.
It was into this privileged household that Maud went in early 1888. We can only imagine that she arrived in Boston, physically and psychically exhausted, having, over the last two years, almost single-handedly cared for her invalid parents and her baby sister. She was now orphaned and bereft of the only member of her family still living, a toddler who would be likely to forget ever having known her.
Her Boston aunt and uncle seemed determined to help her enjoy life. At one dinner party she was seated next to the venerable Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose work she knew well, thanks to her stepmother’s tutelage.
Referring to a passage in Poet of the Breakfast Table, Maud said something to the effect that she understood that there was one path across Boston Commons that a young man must not ask a young woman to take unless he meant business. Which path was that? she asked Holmes.
“Ah,” she remembered the elderly doctor saying, “if I were only fifty years younger I would show you.”
But the life of luxury was not for Maud. Less than two years later she entered the Boston City Hospital Training School for Nurses, and after graduation went as a nurse to Hanover, New Hampshire, to what was known then as Mary Hitchcock Hospital. She made a lifelong friend there—this much I do know because in one of her letters from China, she reminds her friend of their climbing a New Hampshire mountain that reminded her of her “psychic” experience in West Virginia.