Ask a Badass

I was born only twenty years after the end of slavery, less than a day’s walk from a battlefield. A young black girl in the Reconstructed South soon learned to fear the other, and I crossed through to Texas and New Mexico as a teen girl alone. I know what it is to live under threat from those who look different. I was alone because I, too, knew what it was to be the other.

I was born in a close-knit town and into a boy’s body. I knew it wasn’t who I was. I knew I was a girl before I knew just about anything else. My mother loved me as I was, letting me go to school in a dress and finally calling me by my real name, Lucy. There were others, though, who were less kind. I was left all that confusion behind, but I didn’t realize I was leaving community too. I floated alone from job to job, single room to single room. I even married someone who kept me as alone as I’d ever been.

When I arrived in Oxnard, California, the little community was booming, with room for all sorts as it expanded. I catered for the wealthy, becoming a confidante to many a hostess. They pretended not to know about my other house of business. Maybe some of the women didn’t know, but their husbands surely did. With success came the security of money, but also the community I didn’t know I was missing. I should’ve saved against darker days, but I found myself giving to charities and community groups. During the war, I bought bonds and threw going-away parties for our young soldiers. If one of them fell, I grieved with the families.

This community that encircled me, I had every reason to keep at bay. I knew the violence of men and the hatred of white for black. I had spent more than twenty years apart, though, and I wanted to find a space in the sun, so I looked very carefully at what was around me. There were white people to avoid and men to disappear from. They exist in every town. But in learning to sell to my customers, I learned how unique each person was. Seeing each individual allowed me to finally find a place for myself.

I believe that there still would be a place for me there, with some of them. Some of the women who were my friends, some of the men who sported nights in my guesthouse, I think would find their way back. What I ache for from my life in Oxnard is not the businesses, but the way they bound me to the town, the way people looked up to me and courted my generosity.

It was the government that uncovered the secret of my birth. The army that I’d supported charged me with fraud for getting the subsistence checks due a soldier’s wife. A Los Angeles judge sentenced me to men’s prison in men’s clothes, stripping me of the fashionable sensibility that the people of Oxnard had admired for twenty-five years. I stood in that court said, “I defy any doctor to prove I am not a woman. I have lived, dressed, and acted just what I am, a woman.” They offered no proof, but passed judgment anyway.

What I learn from my life is that the system is an unthinking brute. The people within the system may be all manner of person. Like picking the bones from a fish, we must train ourselves to remove what an ugly culture puts on a person and see only the flesh beneath.

Lucy Hicks Anderson