Honoring Sergeant Carter by Allene Carter Read Free Book Online

China.
    Eddie’s father was born in 1877 in Trinidad, Colorado.He lived in Colorado Springs, Kansas City, and El Paso before arriving in Los Angeles. Mary Wilhelmina Stuart, Eddie’s mother, was some twenty years younger than his father. She was variously described as “colored,” “East Indian,” or “Hindu.” Her father was an Englishman and her mother was from India.

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    In Los Angeles, Eddie’s father worked as a cook for wealthy families. A first marriage ended when his wife died in a traffic accident. At some point the elder Carter underwent a powerful conversion experience, which hit him with such intensity that he threw a pot of soup he was cooking into the air. The experience also launched him on a lifelong career as an evangelist. He soon developed a reputation for his colorful and powerful rhetoric. One witness praised his thunderous sermons as a “wonderful combination of scriptural reference and great emotional enthusiasm…not expository preaching but more experiential preaching.”
    His style was so effective that it even won him a blessing in the form of his marriage to Mary Stuart on May 2, 1915. Speaking in church years later, Mary described his effect on her. “When I first came to this country from Calcutta, East India, I joined the Catholic Church, intending to become a nun. Later I became a Seventh-Day Adventist, but still I never knew God in peace. I met Mr. Carter, and through his life and teaching I found Jesus in his saving power.”
    Mary was only a girl when she married Evangelist Carter—and like many younger women who marry older men, she may have felt in awe of him—but over the next ten years of marriage she grew into a self-confident woman who was also a powerful speaker. She told of having a vision of “a vast body of water, and beyond were a great multitude of Hindus.” Her “vision” may have been the genesis of an irresistible calling that propelled them to India, where they hoped to “establish holiness.” They were not the only ones called. The Holiness Church had a program of establishing missions in foreign lands. Already it had missions in South America and Palestine.

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    Whatever the genesis of the move, in early May 1925, some 235 people gathered at the church mission hall foran emotional farewell service, and the Carter family set sail for India aboard the steamer Korea Maru. A passport photograph showed the family at that time. The elder Carter was dressed formally in a jacket, vest, and tie. Beside him stood Mary Carter, a lovely young woman in a modest dress with a wide collar, her hair pulled straight back. Eddie Jr., his eyes somewhat veiled, stood close toher, just behind her left shoulder. Miriam, with a ribbon in her hair, was placed in front between her parents, while William stood behind his father’s right shoulder.

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    After a stopover in San Francisco, the ship arrived in Honolulu, where the Carters posted a letter to their church. They were thankful, they wrote, that none of them had gotten seasick “while others are sick all around us.” An appeal for divine help was promptly answered: “We had some very rough weather for a few days and nights so Sister Carter and I spoke to Father about it andthat settled it.” They also reported holding a service—“a good meeting,” they thought—on the boat the previous Sunday. Eddie would have just turned nine years old; William was seven and Miriam was four.
    On June 25, 1925, some six weeks after their departure, following stops at Yokohama, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, the family finally walked down the gangplank in Calcutta, a congested city then under British colonial rule. They arrived with only 150 rupees to their name. They spent the first night