For when what was done to you is the thing you cannot put down. She was kidnapped as a small child in Darfur and sold five times, and she is here for what she did with that — which no one would have blamed her for not doing.
Saint Josephine Bakhita, pray for us.
She was born about 1869 in Olgossa, in Darfur, into a family with land. At around seven she was taken by slavers from the edge of her village and marched to El Obeid. She forgot her own name from the shock; Bakhita — fortunate — was what the slavers called her, and she kept it. She was sold five times. In the household of a Turkish general she was tattooed by a woman with a razor: a hundred and fourteen cuts on her breast, belly and arm, with flour and salt rubbed into them so they would scar. She said she thought she would die.
In 1883 an Italian consular agent, Callisto Legnani, bought her at Khartoum and treated her as free. He brought her to Italy in 1885 and she passed to the Michieli family as nanny to their small daughter; when the family prepared to return to Africa in 1888 she was left with the Canossian sisters in Venice, and when Mrs Michieli came to collect her, she refused to go. It went to court. In November 1889 the court ruled what nobody had checked: slavery had never been legal in Italy, and she had been free since she set foot on it. She was about twenty. She chose baptism, and the name Giuseppina Margherita Fortunata, and in 1896 she became a Canossian sister herself.
She spent the next fifty years in Schio, a small town in the Veneto — cook, sacristan, and for decades the doorkeeper, so that the children of the town grew up being let in by her. They called her Madre Moretta, the dark mother. In the war the town decided that as long as she was there no bomb would fall on it; none did. She died on the eighth of February 1947.
She was asked, more than once, what she would do if she met the men who took her, and her answer is on record from the sisters who heard it: she would kneel and kiss their hands, because if that had not happened, she would not be here, and would not be a Christian and a religious. That is not a saying. It is a woman with a hundred and fourteen scars, stating a preference.
She never learned to read well. She dictated her story in 1910 to a sister who wrote it down, and it was printed in 1931 and read all over Italy; people came to Schio to look at her, and she found this ridiculous. What it made of her, the town said, was somebody you wanted to be let in by. Her last words, as recorded, were to Our Lady.
Canonized in 2000, the first Sudanese saint; patron of Sudan, and — because of what was done to her — of victims of human trafficking, so that the eighth of February is now the world's day of prayer against it. Her body is in the church of the Canossian sisters at Schio, in a glass case, and the house where she kept the door is beside it. Darfur has nothing to visit; the village is gone.