Angela Haddad

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Angela Haddad was born in 1969 at Savannah, Georgia, and is living today in Savannah, where she works as a diner waitress and, in the family's private reckoning, as treasurer of the White Ledger's flower fund. She is a woman of the House of Proctor, descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and she was never called to hunt, so that she is not a vampire slayer and has no alias, archetype or craft. She is the only child of the electrician Ralph Haddad and of the bookkeeper Gladys Proctor Thorne, and the niece of the slayer Joseph Thorne, The Wild Falcon. She has not married and has no children. Her mother died in 2010 and her father the following year, and the family remembers her as the cousin who kept the books and the casseroles moving after they were gone, and who can tell, from a card in a plain envelope, which of three hundred relatives has had a bad month. She was born in the first week of the January of 1969, in the back bedroom of her Lebanese grandmother's house on a street of narrow clapboard porches near Forsyth Park, and not, as everyone assumed, in Memphis. Gladys, who was twenty-one and a very sensible woman, had come down on the train at Christmas to spend the holidays with Ralph's mother, a stout, black-eyed widow named Mrs Haddad, who kept a grocery, a statue of Saint Charbel and a settled opinion that a first grandchild must be born in the family home. The baby came three weeks ahead of schedule, in a cold snap that put ice on the live oaks, and Ralph, who had been rewiring a church in Memphis, drove through the night in a truck with a bad clutch and arrived at breakfast to be handed a daughter and a plate of eggs. They stayed for six weeks. In later years, whenever a cousin asked why a Memphis child should have a Savannah birth certificate, Gladys said that the Thornes had always been born where the railway or the grandmother required. She grew up in the brick house in Memphis, in a kitchen that held a ledger, a set of pliers and a pot of stuffed grape leaves, and she is still, by the testimony of everyone who has eaten with her, the finest cook in the cousinhood. Her mother taught her to keep a book at ten, in a green cloth ledger with a pencil on a string, and her father taught her at twelve to turn off the power before touching anything, which she has applied to many situations that had nothing to do with wiring. She was a placid, sunny, round-faced girl who was quick to laugh and slow to be offended, and she was never any trouble. When her cousins, the daughters of her uncle Joseph, came down from Alabama for the holidays, they played in the yard with a wooden spoon and a length of rope, and Angela, who was the youngest of them, was always given the part of the rescued person, which she said was the most honourable role. She was told what the family was at sixteen, on a Sunday evening in the spring, by her parents together, in the way that Gladys herself had been told. Ralph did most of the talking. She listened, with her hands in her lap, until he had finished, and then asked the Thorne question, which was whether there was anything she could do to help. Her mother, who had begun to cry from relief, said that there was. It was not the hunting. The Ledger's Memphis house, she explained, had never lacked hunters, and had always been short of someone to feed them. Angela was to be the one who remembered that people had to eat, and sleep, and be paid, and be buried, and who did not forget to send a card. She went to the teachers' college in Memphis and took a certificate, and for six years taught third grade at a school near the freight yards, where she was loved by the children and tolerated by the principal. She liked it, but not enough. She had a restlessness for which she had no name, and a quiet fondness for the diner on the corner of her street, where she had worked on Saturdays as a teenager and where, she said, she had learned more about human nature in an afternoon than in a term of child psychology. In 1999, when her paternal grandmother in Savannah, by then eighty and a little unsteady, wrote to say that she was lonely, Angela put her books in boxes and drove the four hundred miles, and she has been in the city ever since. She took a job at a diner a few blocks from the river, a long, bright, noisy room with a pie case, a pressed-tin ceiling and a grill that has not been cold since the Truman administration. She has worked the morning shift there for more than twenty-five years. It is a good post for a Ledger cousin. A diner, in Savannah, is a kind of public square. The shrimpers come in at five and the nurses at six, the dockworkers and the tour guides and the old gentlemen from the squares, and by eight a good waitress has been told a hundred small facts about the city that no newspaper prints. Angela, who listens as she cooks, with attention and no fuss, has a memory for who was in on a Tuesday and who was not, and she has twice, without explaining it, passed a fact to a cousin that turned out to matter. In 2001 she was pouring coffee when the television above the cash register showed the first tower and the whole room fell silent, and in the long minutes afterwards, she says, she refilled every cup in the place, because it was the only useful thing she could think of to do. In the pandemic years the diner went to take-out and she worked the window in a mask, writing names on bags, and a number of her customers, who were old, were eventually taken in meals by her on the way home, without being asked. When her mother died in 2010, she was forty-one, and she inherited, along with a recipe box and a tin of buttons, the flower fund that Gladys had run for thirty-seven years. It had a ledger, a bank account in Memphis and a rule that no cousin should ever be asked to explain. She read it, in a hotel room on the night of the funeral, from the first page to the last, and found on the last page a line in her mother's pencil that said that all accounts were paid. She resolved, there and then, that she would keep it going. She has done so ever since, from a rented flat over a bakery in Savannah, by telephone and post, with a spreadsheet that she says is a concession to modernity and a green cloth ledger that she says is the real thing. In 2019 the fund paid for her cousin Wilma Thorne's funeral, and for the tickets of the family who came to it, and her aunt Wilma Reyes, who was grieving and who did not care for being fussed over, wrote a note of thanks in a round hand that Angela keeps in the ledger's front cover. She is a short, comfortable, quick-moving woman of fifty-seven, with her father's dark hair going grey and her mother's laughing mouth. She has no great opinion of herself, and the cousins would tell you that she is wrong about that. She does not carry a pistol, and she has never wanted to. She carries an order pad, a pencil behind her ear and a small notebook in her apron that holds the birthdays of three hundred people in five states. Her cousin Teresa Thorne rings her, in a crisis, before she rings anyone else, to ask not what to do but whether there is any food in the house. There generally is. Angela Haddad is remembered in the Proctor family as the Savannah waitress who kept her mother's flower fund and never let a cousin go hungry or uncounted, the cheerful niece of The Wild Falcon who found her own way of serving the Ledger. In the Slayerverse she stands for the kin of the White Ledger who were never called, the cooks, the card-senders and the keepers of the funeral lists, who held the hunters' families together through every bad night and never asked to be thanked.