Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  A flamboyant man, McCue galloped through the countryside in his two-wheeled gig, his long brown hair streaming back from a high forehead. He spoke his mind from his hogshead pulpit and was subsequently chastised from time to time at the presbytery meetings he was consistently tardy in attending. During heated arguments he was known to threaten to remove his parson’s coat and resort to his fists, and “he could tell comic stories in a manner irresistibly ludicrous,” wrote an acquaintance. He died Sunday morning, September 20, 1818, when he was thrown from his horse on his way to preach. He left eleven children. A son, William, one of the county’s first physicians, died soon after, and William’s widow, Ann Barry McCue, married pioneer John Allen in 1821. Three years later, Allen and Elisha Rumsey, who also had a wife named Ann, founded a small settlement on the Huron River in southwest Michigan Territory which they christened “Ann’s Arbour,” now Ann Arbor, Michigan.

  Nelson Bell’s maternal great-grandfather, a classmate of John McCue, was the Reverend William Wilson.1 His daughter Elizabeth married John McCue’s grandson Thomas, and they built a plantation in Augusta County which they named Belvidere. The modest, two-story brick house, where Nelson Bell’s mother, Ruth Lee “Cora” McCue, was born, was used as a Confederate hospital during the Civil War. In 1864 when Sheridan stormed the grain- and cattle-rich Shenandoah Valley to burn the Confederacy’s breadbasket, Elizabeth McCue slipped a gold coin from her shoe and paid the Union officer in charge to leave the property without burning the barn.

  Family lore has it that thirty-three years later Elizabeth McCue saw a photograph of this man and recognized him as the new president of the United States, William McKinley. Her daughter Betty immortalized herself in the valley when another band of Union soldiers appeared at Belvidere and an officer moved from room to room dropping lighted matches in the closets. Betty followed close behind, stamping them out. When the officer then demanded the brooch she was wearing, she slapped it into his palm, pin first.

  “Madam!” he exclaimed as he returned the brooch and bowed, “I admire your spunk!”

  Elizabeth McCue’s daughter Cora was a strong-willed, practical woman who as a child had a bit of a temper. The living room door at Belvidere still bears the scars young Cora inflicted when she beat it with fire tongs after spats with her brother William. In 1882 Cora married distant cousin James Bell, as handsome as he was impractical, with more of a penchant for spinning colorful yarns than minding his store. Cora handled the family finances. She supervised their three children and indulged her interest in world affairs and foreign missions through reading and entertaining furloughed missionaries.

  A bit of a daredevil, Cora decided on one occasion when a missionary was visiting to make an impulsive visit to Belvidere. Since her husband had taken the horse-drawn wagon to work, she had no transportation to the train station at the foot of the mountain. Cora recalled that there was a handcar at the mine, and she and the missionary, who knew nothing about such contraptions, hopped aboard. The track ran past the store and James Bell looked up just in time to see the runaway car streak by, its handle seesawing madly.

  “That looks like my wife!” he exclaimed as the car derailed, propelling both Cora and the missionary into a thicket.

  When Nelson Bell was six, his mother moved the children to Waynesboro to begin school. Her husband joined them later and began working as a salesman at a local shop. From the start, young Nelson showed that he had inherited the best qualities of his ancestors. He was a devout Christian and unshakably loyal to the Presbyterian tradition of his family. He was a talented athlete, whose intelligence and agility produced maddening spins and intricate strategies on the tennis court and baseball field. As he matured, his fondness for baseball grew into a passion, and by age sixteen he was the captain of his high school’s champion team.

  He quickly distinguished himself as a pitcher with his own version of the knuckleball. The ball was gripped firmly in his fingertips, and he stood perfectly straight and still, the shadow of his cap hiding his eyes as he cut them left and right, checking the bases. Slowly, he cocked his body like a catapult and snapped forward, sending the unspinning cowhide sphere floating toward the plate where it either jumped over or dove under the befuddled player’s bat. In every cheering crowd, a willowy, gray-eyed blonde watched, her milky complexion flushed beneath a sweeping hat.

  Virginia Leftwich was born April 12, 1892, in Richmond. She was the oldest of four children, two boys and two girls. Her father, Douglas Lee Leftwich, was a traveling salesman and an expert cabinetmaker with a magnificent baritone voice. Shortly after Virginia’s birth, her family moved to Charlottesville, then to Waynesboro, where she lived five blocks from the Bells’ three-story house.

  Her ancestors included high-ranking military officers, scholars, and physicians. She was descended from William Wertenbaker, whom Thomas Jefferson had appointed in 1826 to head the library of the University of Virginia. Her uncle was the prominent Princeton University historian Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker. Another relative was novelist and foreign editor for Time magazine Charles Christian Wertenbaker, who would scandalize the family when he was told in 1954 that he had incurable cancer. Rather than suffer the physical and mental ravages of a slow death, Charles Wertenbaker slashed his wrists in his home off the Bay of Biscay in southern France. He watched himself bleed to death while his wife, Lael Tucker, dripped morphine into his wounds to dull the pain. She published several accounts of her husband’s suicide.

  Though Virginia Leftwich and Nelson Bell had been acquainted as children, it wasn’t until high school that they fell in love. Fragile in body, Virginia was stubborn and valorous in spirit, with a sensitivity to stress that would make pain an integral part of her life. After graduation, Nelson entered Washington and Lee University while she studied nursing in Richmond. He had intended to study law, but his plans were dramatically altered by a seemingly insignificant event. On a winter’s evening in 1911 when the air was sharp and stars shone like pin pricks in black, Nelson and a friend strolled across campus spinning their career plans as young people do. Abruptly, his companion slowed his pace and turned a shadowed face to him.

  “Nelson,” he asked, “did you ever think of becoming a medical missionary?”

  As the two figures paused on the frosty grass, words emerging in smoky puffs, Nelson knew without equivocation that come morning he would switch from law to premedical. He had been caught in the wake of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, launched by American evangelist Dwight L. Moody in 1886. Since that time, thousands of America’s most intelligent and attractive young men and women had enlisted to achieve the evangelization of the world in their generation.2

  Nelson had heard his mother’s missionary friends tell of their experiences in China, a land of mystery on the dark side of the world, polarized by squalor and opulence. Few Westerners had dared go there, save the importers of opium or Christianity. Nelson had his mind made up, but baseball would almost scotch his plans. In 1913, while a student at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, he signed a baseball contract with the professional Virginia League after it was agreed that he wouldn’t have to play on Sundays. Two years later the team was sold to the Baltimore Orioles. To play in the major leagues had been a passion he had held in his heart since childhood.

  For weeks his conscience and ambition waged a silent struggle, and he resigned from the league. In May of 1916 the executive secretary of the Southern Presbyterian Foreign Mission Committee cabled him, inquiring if Nelson could leave for China immediately. One of the two American doctors at the Qingjiang General Hospital in North Jiangsu had died after a few months of service. Nelson and Virginia agreed to accept the offer, providing their departure could be delayed three months to give him an opportunity to get at least a little experience as a physician.

  Virginia abandoned her Baptist heritage and became a Presbyterian. Nelson received his medical license, and on June 30, 1916, they were married. They began their lives together in
the coal fields of West Virginia where he served a residency. In early November, they hauled their few belongings to Seattle, Washington, and sailed to the Far East. Two of the dozen Southern Presbyterians to join the China mission field that year, they docked in Shanghai’s International Settlement after nineteen days of turbulent waters and horrendous seasickness. They were met by Jimmy and Sophie Graham, veteran missionaries who would become two of the Bells’ closest friends.3

  “Poor Virginia Bell,” muttered one missionary woman to another as they eyed the slender blonde standing on the quay beside a small mountain of boxes and trunks. “She won’t last a year.”

  Dressed in tailored woolens, hats, and gloves, the Bells gripped the sides of the rickshaw and squinted in the late morning sun. Tins of cheese, a Virginia ham, bolts of cloth, and medicines were secured by ropes on all sides, and the couple bounced through the crowded streets to the train depot. From Shanghai the train clattered slowly a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Zhenjiang, where a ferry carried the newly weds across the muddy Yangtze River to the Grand Canal.

  On December 5, the Bells boarded a launch that took them the remaining one hundred and twenty-five miles north to Qingjiang. Traveling this distance along the Grand Canal would take as long as two weeks when the water was low or choked with ice. But their sail lasted a brief forty-eight hours, the dank cabin below the deck full of Chinese chattering like magpies until dawn. Wretched on their slivers of sleeping shelves, the Bells had spent the noisy night hours stretching out and tucking their legs as they vacillated between being cramped and being cold.

  They disembarked at the Qingjiang quay and were surrounded by bartering rickshaw coolies tugging at their baggage to the shrill music of foreign tongues. Women nursing infants eyed the Americans with mild suspicion, and other Chinese squatted on the shore washing rice in the filthy water.

  The 170-bed Qingjiang General Hospital had been built two years earlier by Dr. James Baker Woods, a medical missionary in China since 1894. The small gray brick complex occupied a six-acre tract of land less than a mile from the canal and, as was true of every other settlement and city in China, was surrounded by a wall. Absalom Sydenstricker, father of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Pearl Buck, had founded the mission station in 1887.

  Beyond the north wall of the compound were barren fields where peanuts and sweet potatoes had been harvested two months earlier. In every direction, the expanse of bleak earth was interrupted by thousands of tan, conical grave mounds, kept clear of grass and weeds by filial caretakers who feared the wrath of the ancestors they worshiped. In this land of too many people and too little food, thousands of cultivatable acres were sown with only bones and veneration.

  During summers in Jiangsu, temperatures rose to 106 degrees and monsoon rains poured from the heavens until the Grand Canal rose from its bed like a watery beast and coiled over the earth, devouring the peasants’ mud dwellings. Fields flowed together into lakes as the farmers fled in crude boats and rafts or climbed the few trees, clinging to branches like tattered birds. As brightly colored paper and pottery idols washed away with livelihoods, the people wondered what they had done to arouse the malevolent spirits.

  When the land was dry, winds roared through the Gobi Desert and swept billowing sheets of yellow dust through Inner Mongolia, over the Great Wall, and fifteen hundred miles south into Jiangsu. Grit blotted out the sun and seeped under doors and through window frames and every other crevice. The people’s gods turned furies, ranging the earth to unleash all manner of terrors. Hailstorms battered tender life to death. Droughts scorched, and black clouds of locusts ravaged grain fields and gardens like a billion demonic buzz saws.

  It was during these times of tragedy that the Chinese turned to the missionaries and clung to them, seeking refuge in their compounds and begging food for their starving children. For a while, the people forgot prejudices and resentment and swallowed the foreigners’ religion and medicines.

  “God is not an idol,” the Westerners explained to a people who had more gods than they could count. “There is only one true living God who loves you and sent His Son to die as a sacrifice for your sins,” they’d say to the ragged prisoners as they brought bread and bandages to them in wretched prisons, where the whistling of the guards announcing an execution was as constant as the wind.

  Some Chinese understood. They believed what the missionaries told them. Others did not, and wondered what this Jesus had done to anger His Father so.

  The Chinese thought the foreigners a curious people, with hair and eyes the colors of wheat, sky, soil, and grass. Men had teeth like mules and women had feet as big as boats. They came from a cradle in the West where the sun, they said, rose while it set in China. The missionaries in North Jiangsu called themselves Southern Presbyterians, and the ones in the southern portion of the province called themselves Northern Presbyterians. The superstitious Chinese, who reckoned themselves one year old at birth, decided that these strange visitors must be at least one hundred years old when they were delivered from their mothers’ wombs.

  To many, the missionaries were yang gui zi, or foreign devils, who had been disgorged from East India Company ships along with the opium traders during Queen Victoria’s reign. The people of God and traders of “foreign mud,” as the drug was called, fell under the same anathema. The missionaries were no different from those who forced opium down China’s throat. Many Chinese believed that the missionaries were ambassadors of a wicked imperialism and devoid of respect for Chinese government and culture.

  The Bells could not have entered China at a more politically unstable time. The Manchu dynasty had become increasingly corrupt since the beginning of its rule in 1644, and in 1911 had been overthrown. The Chinese had turned to the West for hope, believing that they too could enjoy power, affluence, and advanced technology if China became a democracy. The Republic of China was born, founded by Western-educated Sun Yat-sen. His successor, Yüan Shih-kai, appointed chieftains or warlords to govern the eighteen provinces, believing that he could exercise central control over them and their armies.

  “Official bandits,” as the peasants called the soldiers, roved about raping, pillaging, and murdering while warlords fought among themselves for dominance. Wealthy landlords fled the countryside for the safety of city walls, leaving irrigation and flood control systems unattended. The fruits of democracy were marauding, flooding, and droughts. For the peasant once oppressed by the empress dowager, the new republic embodied a more formidable randomness and terror. For some intellectuals, it was time to study other foreign ideologies, such as Marxism.

  What the official bandits left in their wake the local criminal element crept in like rodents to devour. The “dirt bandits,” as they were called, were civilians who tilled the soil by day and, disguised, raided their neighbors by night. Dirt bandits were fond of kidnapping children and selling them into slavery or prostitution. If ransom was the objective, notes would arrive in small bundles containing a severed ear or finger. Another gory reminder would follow if payment was delayed. Though missionaries were not immune, they made it known that they would not pay ransoms under any circumstances.

  Final disillusionment with the West came with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, when the West gave Japan former German concessions in China’s mountainous Shandong peninsula. It was a gift that was not the West’s to make and symbolized to the Chinese that China was perceived as inferior, unworthy of the rights that other nations enjoyed. Less than a year later the Comintern sent three members of the Bolshevik party to China. Within months the official Chinese Communist Party had been organized.

  In describing the political and economic scene in China, the missionaries used the word chaotic repeatedly in their letters and diaries. At night, rifles cracked in the countryside beyond the Bells’ compound wall, shattering smooth silence like firecrackers. In the hospital, Dr. Bell did not always know whether he was treating a bandit or an innocent peasant. On one occasion, he recognized his bandages on a c
riminal’s head impaled over the city gate. None could predict when Chinese sentiments would turn antiforeign, as they had in the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, when churches were burned and Christian missionaries and their Chinese converts were murdered. Life and death, the Bells believed, were as much a part of God’s Providence as their traveling to China had been.

  1. William Wilson became of interest to his descendants in 1912 when Staunton-born Woodrow Wilson became the twenty-fifth president of the United States. Family legend has it that he was a descendant of William Wilson, but intensive study of family pedigrees has never been able to verify this claim. Woodrow Wilson’s biographer, Arthur S. Link of Princeton University, observes that when Woodrow Wilson was elected president of the United States, all of his relatives came out of the woodwork. William Wilson and kin were not among them.

  2. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 2:1019.

  3. Jimmy and Sophie Graham are not related to Billy Graham.

  2

  CHAPTER

  A Second Little Nuisance

  RUTH

  Ruth was a very normal child but above the average in spirituality. I’d say she was rather deep in her feelings. She was a very thoughtful little girl, and she was pretty, with curly hair and big hazel eyes.

  —Margaret Sells, former missionary to China

  In late spring 1920, wheat and barley fields in the North Jiangsu lowlands burgeoned with the most promise in forty years. Chinese peasants in shapeless gray-blue trousers worked silently as the earth warmed to imminent summer. The collectors of night soil wove through the crowded streets of Qingjiang, stinking buckets swinging from bian dans across their shoulders as they headed to replenish fields.