Naomi Proctor

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

Naomi Proctor was born in 1727 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, a long straggling village of stone houses strung along a single road a few miles north of Philadelphia. It was a town of linen weavers, papermakers, stocking knitters and Quaker meetinghouse regulars, with a scattering of German Lutherans and Mennonites who spoke to each other in a dialect that the English neighbours found funny and the children found thrilling. The road that made the town also made its living, since farm wagons and drovers passed through it in a constant procession, and a girl growing up there learned early to judge a stranger by his boots and his manner of paying. Naomi was the daughter of Jonathan Shelby, born in 1703, a militiaman, and Florence Tilton Proctor, also born in 1703, a milliner. She carried her mother's Proctor name as a surname, in the custom by which the house passed its line through daughters, and she was a descendant of Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486 and joined two ledgers into one story. The household was an unusual mixture. Jonathan Shelby served in the county militia at a time when Pennsylvania's Quaker-dominated assembly was reluctant to pay for defence at all, so that the men who mustered did so half on their own account, drilling in a field with borrowed muskets and worrying about the border. Florence Tilton Proctor ran her millinery from the front room, making caps, hoods and bonnets for the town's women, and the two trades gave the family a double view of the world: the martial and the domestic, the loud and the quiet. Florence kept the White Ledger of the Yorkist side with the discretion of a woman who never wrote anything down that she could remember, and she taught Naomi to hold her tongue about it as a matter of household manners. The girl grew up understanding that there were things spoken of at the table and things not spoken of, and that the second kind were often the more important. Naomi had one brother, Jonathan Shelby Proctor, born in 1725, two years her senior and named for their father with the Proctor surname added in the family way. He was a solid, funny, unambitious boy who took his mother's side in most arguments and his sister's in the rest. Between them they shared the chores of a household where money was tight: carrying water, feeding hens, running errands to the Market Square, and fetching hides to the tanner. Winters were hard in that country. The Wissahickon froze, the road turned to iron ruts, and the Delaware was thick with ice. Summers were thick and sweet with the smell of hay and river mud, and the children swam in the creek until a Quaker neighbour scolded them off. The first great blow fell in 1742, when Naomi was fifteen. Her father, Jonathan Shelby, died that year, and the household was left with its debts and its shop. What he died of is not recorded in the surviving ledger notes, only that he did not die in the field, and that the militia company came in uniform to the funeral and fired a volley over the Germantown graveyard, to the disapproval of the Friends. Florence took the loss with her usual composure and went straight back to work, and Naomi, who was old enough to sew, was put to the needle in earnest. It was the making of her. She had quick, precise fingers and an eye for the hang of cloth, and by seventeen she was better with a seam than her mother. She took to the trade of seamstress, sewing shirts, shifts, aprons and breeches for the market women and the farm families, working by the window in good light, and later by candle when a deadline pressed. Her work had a particular character. Naomi's stitches were small, even and strong, and she was known in the district for garments that outlasted their owners. She had a reputation for honesty about price, which was rarer than skill, and she would tell a customer plainly when a length of cloth was not worth the making up. That directness drew people to her. The seamstress trade also gave her access to the intimate details of a great many households, the measurements, the mended patches, the bloodstained cuffs that came in for washing, and she developed a quiet habit of noticing what other people preferred to overlook. A collar that would not close over a bandaged throat, a shirt with a scorched hem, a child's dress cut down from an adult's after a death, each was an entry in a private ledger of her own that she kept in her head. She was never a hunter herself, and the family were clear about it: Naomi had no calling, no craft, no gear and no alias. But she was a very good pair of eyes. The Proctor women of the Pennsylvania branch used those eyes deliberately. Florence's millinery and Naomi's needlework meant that a stream of women passed through the house, each with news, and it was Naomi who sorted it. When a family in the German quarter reported an odd sickness, or a widow in Chestnut Hill mentioned that her husband had not been quite himself since the funeral, the information passed to the men who worked the roads at night. Her cousins among the Proctors hunted the valleys of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and Naomi supplied them with names, dates and a good deal of common sense. The Proctor ledger entries in the 1750s occasionally credit a hunt to a tip from a Germantown source, and in the family's private understanding that source was a seamstress with a thimble. The war with France came to the frontier in the 1750s, and the effect on Pennsylvania was immediate and frightening. The defeat of Braddock in 1755 brought raiding parties down on the western settlements, refugees streamed east into Germantown and Philadelphia, and the Quaker assembly was finally shamed into voting money for a militia. The seamstress trade boomed, since soldiers needed shirts and refugees needed clothes, and Naomi worked long hours to keep up. She sewed by the dozen for the volunteer companies, and she took in a family of displaced farmers from the Susquehanna country, feeding them from her own table for most of a winter. Her brother Jonathan Shelby Proctor marched with one of the new companies and came back sunburned and unhurt, which she considered a small miracle. Naomi never married. It was not that she was unattractive or unwanted; several men made offers, including a stocking weaver of good standing and a widower with a tanyard. She refused them without unkindness. By her own account she had seen how marriage swallowed the women she sewed for, and she liked the independence of having her own money and her own front room. Her mother Florence lived with her until Florence's death in 1754, when Naomi was twenty-seven, and after that she lived by herself in the house on the Germantown road with a lodger, a cat and a growing collection of mended things. Her brother visited on Sundays. She died in 1770, at the age of forty-three, and the family record gives old age as the cause. It was a phrase that the relatives used with a certain irony, since everyone knew that she had been worn out well before her time by close work in bad light and a life of unrelenting labour, and the neighbours who laid her out said that her hands looked those of a woman of seventy. Her brother saw her buried in the Germantown ground. In the White Ledger she has no tally beside her name, for she took no vampire and never claimed to. Instead a small note in a later hand records that the seamstress of Germantown was the family's best source of early warning in the Pennsylvania country for a quarter of a century. In the Slayerverse she is remembered for that rare and unglamorous kind of usefulness, the friend at the edge of the hunt who saw things first and said them plainly.