# The Lutheran Pioneer_St. Louis_1929_S61
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

60

THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

I could not tell the matron that I did not be-
lieve her, but my mind —I can frankly say now —
registered disbelief in her statement, and so yours
would have done if you had been confronted by
what I saw.

A slim, very small, delicately formed girl. She
was thirteen years old, I afterwards discovered.
Where have I seen eyes like her’s before? Perhaps

in some wounded deer or a hurt, frightened babe.
eyes,

Wide, innocent set in a childlike, innocent

the only thing to do.” Piecing together the inco-
herent story, this is what I learnt.

This child-wife had gone to live with her hus-
band and his mother. In due course the baby came.
It was small, very small (the mother was twelve
years old at the time) ; it was of a dark-brown color,
and lastly, greatest crime of all, it was a girl!

The mother-in-law was infuriated that her son’s
child was not a boy, and she blamed it all on the
girl-mother. , “My son,” the mother used to scream,

Our Church at Alexandria, La.
The pastor is Rev. E. R. Berger, a son of our St. Paul’s Church at Lutherville, La.

face, and on the ground the baby, two months old,
and many girls do not call that size in dolls their
largest.

L.wwas told that this small, weak girl had killed
her mother-in-law with the scythe she used for
cutting grass!

“Why did you do this ghastly thing?” she was
‘asked. The question changed the whole expression
of her face. Rage, black rage, despair, yearning,
and desperation chased each other across Hes coun-
tenance.

«J murdered my mother-in-law because it was

“4s not black; my son is big and strong, and this,”
kicking the baby with her foot, “is small and black
and a girl. This is a devil, and you are its mother.”
In this fashion she used to rave every hour of every
day for the two months of the baby’s life, ill-
treating, starving, and abusing the child-mother,
spitting on, and despising, the baby.

The little mother’s eyes flamed as she gathered
her baby to her bony breast. “And if she were
here I would do it again. I’m not frightened,” she
added. “Let the Sarkar do what they like with me,
but I know none will so ill-treat my baby. She
is not a devil, she is mine.”