Mary Seacole and the Hotel She Built Herself

Mary Seacole grew up in Jamaica, in a boarding house full of sick people getting better.

Her mother was a healer. She knew which leaves brought a fever down and which roots settled a stomach, and she had learned it from the women before her. Mary followed her about the house from the time she was small, watching, and asking questions, and remembering.

By the time she was grown she was a healer too. She nursed people through terrible sickness in Jamaica, and in Panama, and she was very good at it.

Then a war began far away, in a cold place called the Crimea, and word came back that soldiers were dying of illness in the mud.

Mary sailed to London and offered to go and nurse them.

They said no.

She asked again, at a different office. They said no there too. Nobody would give her a proper reason, and Mary understood perfectly well what the reason was.

So she stopped asking.

She paid for the journey out of her own pocket — four thousand miles, by herself — and when she arrived she found a patch of ground near the fighting and built a house on it out of driftwood, packing cases and scraps of metal. She called it the British Hotel.

There she cooked hot food, and sold tea, and nursed the sick. And when the guns started she packed medicine into two bags and rode out toward the noise, because that was where the hurt people were.

The soldiers stopped calling her Mrs Seacole. They called her Mother Seacole.

When the war ended she came home with no money at all. So the soldiers held a great festival, four nights long, to raise some for her — thousands of them came.

Then she sat down and wrote the story of her life, and it is still in print today.

Goodnight, Mother Seacole. Sleep well.