Hannah Proctor

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

Hannah Proctor was born in 1815 in Danville, Kentucky, and worked for forty years as a midwife in the horse country and river settlements of the Bluegrass. She was the elder daughter of the circuit preacher Hob Thorne and the midwife Rebecca Bowen Proctor, and the sister of Minnie Proctor Thorne. She never married. She was not a hunter, and she took a certain pride in it, but she inherited, with her mother's bag and her mother's notebook, the White Ledger's western watch over the births of the Kentucky country, and for four decades she delivered, by the family's count, nearly three thousand children and entered in a small book every one that came into the world wrong. She died in 1873 of what was called old age, at fifty-eight, in her mother's house at Lexington, having attended, in her last year, the delivery of a great-niece. Her father, Hob Thorne, born at Limestone in 1787 and dead in 1839, was a Methodist circuit rider, a Thorne by blood and a preacher by choice, who travelled the horseback roads of the western country. Her mother, Rebecca Bowen Proctor, born in 1792 and dead in 1857, was a midwife of the Shenandoah and then of Kentucky, whose night calls took her into every kind of house. Hannah was born at Danville, the old town in the central part of the state where the first constitutional convention of Kentucky had sat, during a stretch of the circuit on which Hob was preaching. Her mother delivered her, alone, in the parsonage, having sent away the neighbour who had come to help. She said that she could not well have a baby without a midwife, and had thought it only sensible to be her own. She grew up on the circuit. Her first years were spent in a covered wagon, in the company of her father's saddlebags and her mother's black bag, and her first memories were of the creak of the wheels, the smell of wet horse and the long, slow hymns that her father sang, in his rough baritone, on the road. They stayed in parsonages, farmhouses, taverns and the homes of Methodist families, and moved on every few days. She learned to sleep anywhere. She learned to get up at four, to eat what was put before her and to make friends in an hour. Her sister Minnie, born the year after, in Maysville, was her constant companion, and the two girls grew up in the back of a wagon, telling each other stories. It was her mother who taught her the work. Rebecca took her, at eight, on a night call to a farm near Georgetown, and left her in the kitchen with a kettle, and from that night Hannah was the apprentice. She learned to boil water, to fold linen, to warm a blanket, and to keep a frightened husband out of the way. At twelve she was allowed into the room. She stood at the foot of the bed, with a basin, and watched. She saw what a woman looks like in labour, and what a midwife does, and in the next ten years she saw it a hundred times, and by eighteen she could have delivered a child in her sleep. It was a hard apprenticeship. A midwife in the backwoods of Kentucky in the 1830s was called out in every kind of weather and to every kind of house. She crossed swollen creeks on a mule. She slept in barns. She delivered children in cabins with dirt floors, in mansions with mahogany beds, in wagons, in hayricks, and once, on a Sunday morning, in the vestry of a church. She saw, as Rebecca had, the whole of the country's life, and saw it at its most exposed, and she learned that her trade was a trust. The trust was not only for the mothers. It was a custom of the Proctors of the White Ledger that a midwife was the first to learn, in any district, of things that were wrong. The young mother who had not been seen in daylight for a year. The infant born with marks at the neck. The household in which the cellar door was locked. Rebecca had entered such things in a small notebook, by place and date, and sent a copy each season to the Proctor cousins of the valley, and Hannah, who had been told the reason for it at sixteen, took over the book. She was so exact about it that the cousins called her the Registrar. She noted not only the facts but the hour, the weather and the house, and she was never wrong. She lived for most of her working life at Lexington, in the house on Mill Street that her mother had taken when Hob died. The two women shared it for eighteen years, and worked side by side. Rebecca, who was getting old, took fewer calls, and Hannah took the rest. The house was at the centre of a web of women. The wives of farmers, the sisters of slaves, the daughters of horse breeders and the widows of Methodist preachers came to its door at all hours, and went away with advice, a cup of tea and, often, a slip of paper with a name. It was a great deal more than a practice. It was an intelligence service, run out of a kitchen, and it reported to the White Ledger. Hannah was a tall, spare, pale woman, with dark eyes, a long nose and the big, capable hands of a midwife, and she had a slow, deliberate way of speaking that calmed the most frightened patient. She was a person of decided opinions, and she held them quietly. She believed in fresh air, clean linen and hot water, in an age when most doctors thought them eccentric. She disliked whiskey, which had been the cause, in her experience, of a great deal of unnecessary trouble. She did not like the forceps, which she thought were used too soon, and she said so, in the presence of two physicians, at a dinner party, to the general silence. She never married. She said, with some humour, that she had seen so many marriages at the moment of their consequence that she had no illusions about them. It was true, but it was not the whole truth. There was a doctor, a young, earnest, sandy-haired man from Transylvania University, who admired her for ten years and proposed three times, and who was told each time that she could not leave her work. He married at last, and she delivered his first child. He said afterward that it had been the most instructive afternoon of his medical career. She was close to her sister. Minnie, who ran a shop in the same town and was married to the hunter Callum Thorne, was a constant visitor, and Hannah was a devoted aunt to her nephews, Hob Proctor Thorne and Henry Thorne Proctor. She delivered both. She delivered, in the course of her life, most of the children of the White Ledger's Kentucky cousins, and was godmother to a large number. She kept a small tin of peppermints in her bag, for the new mothers, and one for the older brothers and sisters, who were waiting in the passage. The Civil War was a difficult period for a midwife. Kentucky, which had declared its neutrality and lost it, was overrun by armies and raiders, and the roads were unsafe. Hannah, who was forty-six when it began, went on with her calls. She was stopped, on the pike, by Confederate cavalry, and by Union pickets, and on each occasion she produced her bag and asked whether the gentleman wished to assist. She was always let through. A woman in labour, she said, had no politics, and nor, in the circumstances, had her midwife. Her mother died in 1857, and she was alone for the last sixteen years. She went on working into her fifties, and trained three apprentices, one of whom, a young woman of the Thorne connection named Ada, took over her practice. She stopped in the summer of 1872. She died the following spring, at fifty-eight, in the room where her mother had died, with her sister beside her. She had, in her last week, asked that her notebooks be sent to the Proctor cousins at Harpers Ferry, and that her bag be given to Ada. Hannah Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the midwife of Lexington, the Registrar, who wrote down every birth that came wrong. In the Slayerverse she stands for the midwives of the White Ledger, the women who stood at the first hour of a life and, in the course of it, kept a record of the night.