Naomi Eaton Proctor

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

Naomi Eaton Proctor was born in 1833 in San Antonio, Texas, in the German settlement on the river that would later be known as King William, and died in 1912 of cancer, aged seventy-nine, in Nashville, Tennessee, where she had spent nearly all of her working life as a seamstress. She was the daughter of the blacksmith and vampire slayer Albert Nichols Proctor, called The Wild Sieve, and of the shopkeeper Nettie Eaton, and the younger sister of the blacksmith Edwin Eaton Proctor. She never married, and had no children of her own, though she made the christening gowns of half the Proctor cousins in the middle South. She was not a hunter and did not wish to be mistaken for one. What she did, for sixty years, was to sew for the White Ledger and to pass its messages from hand to hand, and the family records her as the quietest and best-informed seamstress in the Cumberland country. The reason she was born in Texas is her father's. In the winter of 1832 Albert Nichols Proctor was asked by the cousins of the White Ledger to go west to San Antonio de Bexar, where the teamster Absalom Proctor, who was a kinsman and a slayer, was trying to hold a thinly peopled frontier that the Ledger had never been able to cover. He was gone, in the ordinary way, for some months. Nettie Eaton, who had no intention of being left in a Franklin shop with a toddler, packed her boy Edwin and a trunk and went with him, in a freight train of covered wagons, by Natchez, the Red River and the long road south across the prairie. She was delivered in the spring of 1833, in a stone house in the German quarter by the river, by a midwife whom the schoolmistress Catherine Oppenheimer had sent for, and the child was named for her paternal grandmother, Naomi Nichols. It was the only time in her life that Naomi went west, and she liked to say that she had been born on a frontier and raised on a counter. She was brought home to Franklin before she was a year old, and grew up in the shop. It was a small, bright, crowded front room, with a counter, a bolt of calico on a peg and shelves of buttons, ribbon and thread, and from her earliest years she was given a needle and a scrap of cloth and told to keep out of the way. She kept out of the way for the next seventy years. She was a slight, dark, exact child, with a way of tilting her head when she looked at a seam, and by ten she could put a sleeve into a bodice as neatly as any of the girls her mother employed. Her mother, who said that she had never seen a child so exactly made for her trade, let her sit at the back of the shop with a basket, and she sewed there in the dim light from the window while the Franklin ladies argued over hats. Her father's death in 1848 took her at fifteen, and it put the matter of her future into her own hands. She chose to go to Nashville. She had a cousin there, on her mother's side, who kept a dressmaker's room on the square, and at sixteen Naomi was apprenticed to her, and at twenty she was a journeywoman with her own clients. It was a good time for a needlewoman in the Cumberland capital. The town was growing rapidly, the planters of the middle basin came in for the season, and the new railway that joined Nashville to Franklin and to Chattanooga brought a stream of wives and daughters who needed to be fitted in an afternoon. She had a little room over a stationer's, a table by the window and a waiting list, and she taught needlework, on the side, to a class of girls at a church school, which was how the family came to remember her as a teacher. What she did for the Ledger she did with a needle and a good memory. A seamstress in a town of this size sees the women who do not see doctors. She saw the young wife who asked for a high collar in July, and the widow who wanted a black veil that would hide a pale face, and the lady of a good house who paid, on the quarter day, with gold coin that was a hundred years old. She took all of it in, along with a great deal else, and wrote to her mother, in the pattern-book hand of a dressmaker, letters that looked like orders for trimming. A line about a yard of ribbon meant a stranger in the parish. A request for two dozen covered buttons meant that her brother should look to his shot. Her mother, who kept the shop, read them and passed them to Edwin, and Edwin to the cousins, and in this way the White Ledger had a window on the best drawing rooms of Nashville for forty years. She also made the gear. The hunters of the middle South came to Nashville, now and then, in a hurry and in a bad state, and a certain number of them found their way to the little room over the stationer's, where a slight woman in a grey apron sewed up a torn coat in an hour and asked no questions. She put hidden pockets in frock coats. She sewed silver thread into a cuff. She made, for her brother, a leather apron for the forge, and for her mother a great many mourning gowns, and for the cousins' children a line of quilts in a pattern of her own that looked like a garden and was, to those who could read it, a map of the old Watauga road. She was in Franklin in the autumn of 1864, when the armies met a mile south of the square. She had come home for a week, to help her mother. By the night of the thirtieth of November, the house and shop and forge were full of wounded men, and she was at the table with a pair of shears, cutting sheets into bandages, and it went on for four days. She said afterwards that she had not known that there were so many sorts of cloth. She sat up with a boy from Tennessee and a boy from Ohio on the same night and did not ask which was which. She never spoke of the smell. She went back to Nashville in December, and worked through the hard winter, and in the year after the war she made fourteen wedding dresses. She grew old in the room over the stationer's, with a cat, a canary and a tall window, and she sewed until her eyes failed. The Reconstruction years were slow, but the town rebuilt, and in the end she had a shop of her own, with two girls and a sign. Her brother Edwin came up by train every Christmas with a hamper and a hammered tin of shot, and they sat by the stove and compared their winters. The illness that killed her came on quietly, in the autumn of 1911, and she bore it with her usual exactness, finishing a christening gown before she took to her bed. She died in Nashville in the spring of 1912, at seventy-nine. The gown was found folded on the chair, every stitch straight. Naomi Eaton Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the seamstress of Nashville, the sister who sewed the cousins into their coats and their letters into their hems. In the Slayerverse she stands for the needlewomen of the White Ledger, whose neat hands and open ears gave the hunters of the middle South a great deal of what they knew, and who never once let a stitch show.