Susanna Tipton

Spouse of Amos Lister, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Susanna Tipton spent her working life among ribbons, straw and buckram, and it was a trade that gave her a window on nearly every household on the lower Delaware. She was born in 1712 at Chester, Pennsylvania, a river town of brick and frame houses on the west bank below Philadelphia, and she died there or near there in 1758, aged forty-six. The family papers record the cause as old age, which the Proctor women found a gentle phrase for a woman not yet fifty, and they used it without irony, since in that century a person who had raised a child, kept a shop and outlasted two epidemics was reckoned to have earned it. She was not a Proctor by birth and she was not a slayer, but as the wife of Amos Lister and the mother of the slayer Amos Proctor Lister she stands close to the middle of the White Ledger's Pennsylvania chapter. Chester in her girlhood was among the oldest settlements in the province, older than Philadelphia itself, and it had the settled, faintly shabby look of a town that had been important once. Ships came up the river to unload, the market house stood in the middle of the main street, and the Quaker meeting on one side of the town regarded the Anglican church on the other with the wary courtesy of neighbours who had long ago agreed not to discuss it. Susanna's people were tradesfolk of modest means, and nothing about her parents was preserved except that they encouraged their daughter to learn a genteel craft that could be practised at a table. She was sent as a girl to a mantua-maker and then to a milliner, where she learned to shape straw and silk, to pleat and starch, to pin a bonnet so that it would survive a walk along the river wind, and to keep a book of accounts in the round clear hand that the Quaker shopkeepers preferred. A milliner in the Pennsylvania of the 1730s was more than a seller of hats. She imported and sold ribbons, lace, gloves, fans, caps and the small linen goods that a household needed, ordering by sample from London merchants through Philadelphia factors, and she stood in the fraught middle between the Quaker plainness that many of her customers professed and the ribbons they secretly could not resist. Susanna understood both sides of the counter. She wore a plain grey gown of her own making, a white cap and a small silver thimble on a ribbon, and she was remembered as neat, quick and decidedly talkative, one of those people who can recall which family bought which shade of blue three winters ago. This was not gossip for its own sake. It was a craft of attention, and it made her more useful to her husband's work than she ever realised. She married Amos Lister in 1738. He was a riverboat pilot of twenty-three, born at Philadelphia, a man who knew every shoal and sandbar between the capes and the falls at Trenton, and who had the broad forearms and squinting patience of someone who spent his days looking at brown water. His father was the schoolmaster Norman Proctor Lister, known in the ledger as The Wary Wren, and his sister Mary Lister was a slayer, but Susanna came to the family with no knowledge of any of it. She learned gradually. The first hint was that her husband and his sister kept irregular hours and listened for particular things on the wharves. Then there were the nights he came back with river mud to the knees and a look she could not read, and once a long rifle wrapped in sailcloth under the bed that was not his. She asked him plainly, in the Quaker way, and he told her plainly, and after a week of silence she asked to hear the whole of it again. Her acceptance was practical rather than dramatic. She had already noticed, in the shop, the customers who stopped coming, and the houses that ordered black crape without saying who had died. When Amos explained, she recognised the pattern. From then on the millinery counter became, without any announcement, an information exchange. A woman who came in for mourning ribbons would be asked, sympathetically, about the funeral, and Susanna could tell from the answers whether the death had been natural. Sailors' wives who bought caps for their daughters mentioned crews that had come in short. She kept these observations in the back of her order book under the heading of sundries, and passed them on to her brother-in-law's circle of river hunters, and the White Ledger acknowledges several entries from the 1740s as resting on her memory. Their only child, Amos Proctor Lister, was born in 1739, the year after their marriage, and grew up in a household where a boat's-lamp and a hat-block stood on the same shelf. He took the calling and became a slayer, which brought both fear and pride to his mother, who had come to the work by marriage and did not want her son to pay for it in the coin she had seen others spend. She taught him what she knew, which was how to read a stranger's face over a counter, and she insisted, against the objections of the men, that he should learn his letters and his sums before he learned to shoot. The boy's later reputation as a meticulous record keeper owed something to his mother's account books. The wars with France on the frontier, which broke over the western counties in the middle 1750s, cast a long shadow over the river towns. Refugee families arrived from the backcountry with their farms burned behind them, and Chester, like Philadelphia, filled with strangers and rumours, and the militia debates in the Assembly, the Quaker objection to arms and the appeal for volunteers, were argued in her shop as freely as they were in the taverns. Some of the strangers were what they seemed, and some were not. Susanna's ledger of sundries was busier than ever, and her husband's absences longer. It was a hard time for a woman who was neither a fighter nor a bystander. She stayed at her counter through it, cutting ribbon for refugees on credit, and the Proctor cousins who passed through Chester in those years remembered her as the one person who always knew who was new in town. She died in 1758, just past her forty-sixth birthday, and the family recorded it as old age. Whatever the truth, she had been failing for two winters and continued to work at her table until nearly the end. Amos outlived her by thirty years and never remarried, and their son grew up to carry the White Ledger through the Revolution. The milliner's book of sundries was kept by the family for generations, its margins crowded with initials and small drawings of hat trimmings that concealed, to those who knew how to read them, notes on the dead. In the Slayerverse histories Susanna Tipton is counted as one of the many who never fired a shot and still earned a page.