Ana Navarro

Spouse of William Adams Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from the House of Navarro.

Ana Navarro was born in 1875 at Bandera, Texas, and lived fifty-nine years as a laundress in San Antonio, where for thirty years she washed the linen of a good part of the Westside, the boarding houses of the river and the officers' quarters of Fort Sam Houston. She was the daughter of the machinist and slayer Ramon Navarro, The Rough Tinder, of the House of Navarro, the Tejano ranching families who guarded the San Antonio missions. In 1903 she married the newspaper compositor William Adams Proctor of the White Ledger line, and they had one daughter, Beatrice Navarro Proctor, born in 1904 and dead in 1956. Ana herself was not a hunter, although she was brought up by one and kept his pistol to the end of her life. She died in 1934 of kidney failure, aged fifty-nine. The family papers give her mother no entry. What they record is a woman who took the White Ledger's name at her wedding and kept her father's beside it, who ran a laundry that the Proctors used as a listening post, and who is remembered for a cedar box under her bed. She was born at Bandera because that was where her father's people lived. Ramon Navarro had been raised in the cypress country on the Medina, and when his wife's time came in the winter of 1875 he took her out of San Antonio, where he had been a year at a machinist's bench, to his aunt's house in the hills, a rough cedar-picket house with a dirt floor and a good well. Ana was delivered there on a cold night in the first week of February, by the aunt, with a goat in the kitchen and the hounds in the yard. The family papers do not say what became of her mother, and Ana, asked, used to say that her mother was a woman who had left a great many things behind her and a daughter among them. She was brought back to the Westside at six weeks, in a blanket, on her father's saddle, and the hounds followed. She grew up in a house where the latch was checked twice. Her father was a silent, exact, short-tempered man who came home at dusk smelling of machine oil and went out again at night with a tin lantern, and the women of the Navarro family, who lived on the same street, took her in for her meals and her clothes, and taught her what a girl needed to know. She learned to keep a house, to make tortillas and to iron a shirt so that it would pass inspection by an officer. She learned to read the notices outside the church and to write a fair hand in the ledger at the corner shop. From her father she learned nothing that he taught, and everything that he did, which was to watch a door. She said that she had spent her girlhood in a household in which everything was in its place and nobody was allowed to explain why. She went into laundry at fifteen. It was the trade that was open to a girl of the Westside with no dowry and a good pair of arms. The washerwomen of San Antonio worked at the irrigation ditches and the river bank with their tubs and boards, in a long line of sleeves rolled above the elbow, and they were the best-informed society in the town, for a wash-line tells more than a newspaper. Ana was quick, strong and exact. She learned to boil whites, to blue and starch, to iron a collar, to get blood out of cotton with cold water and salt, and to keep a separate tub for the things that did not come out. By twenty she had her own tubs, her own line and a small room off the street with a copper and a mangle, and she took in washing from the boarding houses, the cafes and the lodging rooms of the Westside, for a price that was lower than her rivals' and a finish that was better. The work was a service that the White Ledger understood long before she did. A laundress sees what comes out of pockets. She sees the torn sleeve, the stained cuff, the scorched lapel, the silver filings in a seam, the bundle of splintered cedar wrapped in a shirt. She sees, above all, who sends a coat for a wash at four in the morning and who does not come back for it. Ramon, who was not a man to ask favours, asked her to tell him if a particular kind of mark came through the laundry, and she, who had been trained in a house where questions were not answered, did not ask why. She said that she washed what she was given and mentioned what she found. For six years she put a scrap of paper in his pocket when something was wrong, and he always came to the laundry by the back door, late, with a sack of his own. Her father's death in the spring of 1900 was the defining night of her life. He had gone out to the churchyard at Mission Concepcion, where there had been trouble with the graves, and he was struck from behind as he knelt to read the ground. He finished what he had gone to do, walked the two miles home and sat down at the kitchen table, where she found him an hour later holding a cup that he had not drunk from. He died two days after, without speaking more than a few words. She was twenty-five. She washed him herself, and buried him in the Navarro plot, and was given the pistol and the silver-tipped stakes by an uncle who had guarded the missions for thirty years, who told her, with some courtesy, that she was not obliged to use them. She did not. She put the stakes in a cedar box, and the box under her bed, and the pistol in the box, and they stayed there to the end of her life. She had already met William Adams Proctor. He was a compositor at the newspaper, a round, pleasant, exact young man of twenty-three who had been sent by his mother, Emma Adams, the boarding-house keeper on Alamo Street, to find a laundress who would take a large and difficult commission of sheets. He came to the door of the laundry on a Monday, in a black apron, with a sack over his shoulder and ink on his collar. She examined the sheets. She said that they had been boiled in the wrong water. He said that his mother would be glad to learn it. They talked for an hour in the yard, and he returned every week for a year, at first with the sheets, and then without them. In the winter of 1899 he asked her father, in his own parlour, for permission to marry her. Ramon, who was known on three rivers for his temper, received him with a courtesy that astonished the family, and poured him a glass of mescal, and said that a man who brought his own sheets was a man who knew what he wanted. They waited out the mourning. The wedding was in the spring of 1903, at the church of San Fernando, when she was twenty-eight and he was twenty-six, and the Proctors, who were Methodists and outnumbered by the Navarros, stood in a block at the back in clean collars, looking at the statues. The Navarro women, who had prepared the feast for three days, took charge of the Proctor women at the door and did not release them until the following morning. Ana took the White Ledger's name, and kept her father's beside it, and the house that they took on the Westside was a place where both families came and where neither felt out of place. Her mother-in-law, Emma Adams, who sent her sheets to the laundry for the three years that remained to her, said that she had found the only woman in San Antonio who could get a cattle king's collar white. Their daughter Beatrice Navarro Proctor was born in 1904 and lived until 1956. She was not called to the work. Ana, who had taught her to iron at four, taught her to count at five and to lock a door at six, and she grew up in a house where the laundry smelled of bluing and the pistol was in a box. The laundry grew. By the Great War, when Camp Travis and Kelly Field filled the town with soldiers, Ana had four women working for her and two mangles, and did the linen for three officers' messes and the boarding houses of the river. She boiled sheets through the influenza winter of 1918, for a hundred and forty beds, and burned the ones that could not be saved. She said that there was a particular smell, in the autumn of that year, that a laundress did not forget. William died in 1925 of a cancer, at forty-eight, and she was a widow for nine years. She ran the laundry through the Depression years, when the soldiers still needed clean collars and the Westside had no other work, and she gave credit to a good many families and was repaid by most of them. Her kidneys began to fail in 1932. She stayed at the tubs as long as she could stand, and died in the spring of 1934, aged fifty-nine, in her own bed, with her daughter beside her. The cedar box was found under the bed, as she had said it would be. The pistol was clean. The stakes, which had not been touched since 1900, were wrapped in a good white shirt, starched and ironed, and on the collar, in her small and upright hand, was pinned a slip of paper that said only that it had been done properly. Ana Navarro is remembered in the Navarro family as the laundress of the Westside, the daughter of the Rough Tinder who took her husband's name and kept her father's. In the Slayerverse she stands for the washerwomen and housekeepers of the borderlands, the women who saw what came out of the pockets of the hunters, kept their counsel and left a pistol in a box, unused, as the sign of a war that she had chosen to keep at the edge of her house.