American and African Missionary Society

The American and African Missionary Society is the organization named in connection with Corrine, Samuel, and their children’s missionary work. Their service links ministry among communities in the American West and the poor of a southern town to a planned African mission. Through Nettie’s recruitment and education, the Society’s work becomes a route to Africa and to the building of a school, while the journey carries meanings of faith, learning, and diasporic belonging.

Identity and Mission

Corrine, Samuel, and the children are described as members of a group of missionaries associated with the American and African Missionary Society. Before going to Africa, they had ministered to Indigenous people in the West and to poor people in their town. These assignments are presented as preparation for the work they believed they were born to undertake: missionary service in Africa.

The account identifies the group’s practical African project as helping children and establishing a school. It does not detail the Society’s formal structure, leadership, or wider operations; its place in the narrative is conveyed through the work and decisions of this missionary family and the people who join them.

Nettie Joins the Mission

Nettie’s journey begins not with a longstanding plan to go to Africa but with an opening in the missionary party. A woman expected to accompany Corrine and Samuel to help with the children and school married a man who would not let her go. At the same time, Nettie could find no work in town. Although Africa had often been discussed by Corrine, Samuel, and the children, Nettie had not thought of it as a real destination for herself.

Her education makes the decision possible. Miss Beasley had taught her to read, study, and write clearly, and, more importantly, to keep learning independently. When Corrine and Samuel invited her to help build a school, Nettie accepted on the condition that they teach her what they knew so she could become useful as a missionary and a friend they would not be ashamed of. They agreed, and Nettie describes this as the beginning of her real education. Her entry into the Society’s work is thus bound to both a concrete need for a replacement and her determination to prepare herself for the role.

The Journey to Africa

The missionary party’s passage to Africa follows a route through Europe. After walking through London and studying England on a map, Nettie and her companions sailed from Southampton on July 24 and reached Monrovia, Liberia, on September 12, stopping at Lisbon and Dakar along the way. The account places that outward journey beside Nettie’s painful questions about how people of African descent came to be separated from Africa, and why love for those who separated them could endure.

The first sight of the African coast gives the crossing a religious and ancestral significance. Nettie recalls that the sight moved her, Corrine, and Samuel to kneel on deck and give thanks for seeing the land their parents and ancestors had longed to see again. The passage therefore presents missionary travel not simply as movement toward an assignment, but as an encounter with a place understood through family memory and the history of the diaspora.

Letters, Family, and the Mission’s Longer Arc

Nettie’s connection to the Society’s work is also lived through communication with Celie. She explains that writing to Celie relieves the loneliness she feels when she cannot write, comparing that isolation to the feeling of being unable to pray. The letters make the mission legible as more than a professional calling: it unfolds alongside separation from her sister and the need to sustain an intimate family bond across distance.

Nearly thirty years later, as Nettie anticipates returning home, she reflects on the long silence between herself and Celie and on how little she can tell Adam and Olivia about their aunt. She shares her concern with Samuel, who urges trust and faith in Celie’s resilience. This later moment does not describe the Society’s institutional activity, but it shows the extended personal course of the African mission: the work and the years abroad have become inseparable from Nettie’s family life, her correspondence, and the approaching prospect of reunion.