Grrlz2Men

HISTORICAL

Moll Cutpurse
Albert Cashier
Mary Reed
Catalina de Erauso
James Barry
Mulan
Frances Clalin
Deborah Sampson
Brandon Teena
Billy Tipton

FICTIONAL

Yentil
Victor in Victor/Victoria
Luke Hamilton, "Backwards to Oregon" and "Hidden Truths"
Billty Baxter, "Black Banner"
Kate, "Rebeccah and the Highwayman"
Elisabeth/Elias von Winterkirche, "Beloved Pilgrim"
Alix, "Shield of Three lions"

Becky Baxter seizes a chance opportunity to escape her drunken mother and threat of sexual servitude to her mother's unsavory friend to take a ship bound from Bristol to the New World. Of course to do this she must masquerade as a boy named Billy. On the ship the cook stumbles across Billy's secret and seeks to take advantage of it when out of the salty blue come pirates, Captain Logan Corder and his band of mostly nice guy cutthroats. It's a pirate ship and Billy, along with other crew, are given the chance to join them or die. This begins Billy's education into piracy, a swashbuckling adventure. She grows to respect Logan and the other pirates, the more so when they moor at Paradise Island, a settlement of pirates from numerous ships and their women. Billy learns to use weapons and participates as a boarder in several captures of ships. As usually happens in these "grrlz2men" stories she learns also to enjoy the freedom of pants and lack of restrictions on her life.

Ironically when the notorious and quite historical pirate Mary Read comes onto the scene that all seems to change. Reed's own story parallels Billy's, having been a crewmember on a ship taken by pirates who accept the pirate offer to join them. Calico Jack Rackham is the pirate captain who also has aboard ship Anne Bonney, who dresses and acts like a man but does not herself conceal her gender. Mary tells Billy about how Anne, becoming entranced of "Mark Read" tries to kiss him, forcing Mary to say, in essence, "I'm a girl, so you can't kiss me." Mary sews a beautiful petticoat with her own piratical hands and tells Billy to wear it to remind herself that she is a girl. When Logan happens to walk in on her while she is doing the "I enjoy being a girl" bit, the jig is up and Billy returns to being Becky.

That is when a book full of dash and daring do gets murky for me. Typically Becky should take what she has learned about how being a girl doesn't mean you can't leap from ship to ship on a rope and wield a cutlass and stab people like any boy. Instead she seems to revert to a sort of passivity. It's not that Logan and the rest starting to treat her like a girl but that Becky accepts the coddling and, as far as I could tell, is content to be the responsibility of other people. The book lost some of its strength to me with that regression.

The Black Banner follows history rather well; showing how stricter enforcement of anti-piracy laws brings the era of romantic piracy to an end. Rackham is tried and executed, Bonney and Reed imprisoned, and back at a much-reduced Paradise Island community Corder decides to sail for home. Coming in to land near where hiss brother's farm lies, the ship wrecks on rocks, and Logan Corder is captured. Finding Logan's family Becky joins them in trying to find a way to free Logan from hanging. A happy ending complete with a marriage keeps the novel from ending on a grim note. Unfortunately Becky's minimal activity in these final sequences just cements my sense that she learned nothing but how to take care of others. Perhaps the author wanted her to become a more appropriate little girl.

With pirate stories these days you have two choices, to be realistic about the savagery of pirates or to say to heck with anything but a fun, dashing story and make them romantic and appealing. The Black Banner teeters in an effort to create a balance, Logan trying to stand for some sort of chivalric piratical ideal, offering democracy to his me, treating women gallantly, only killing those who resist being captured, and more of that sort of moral ambiguity. This takes more than a little willingness to equivocate and blur the edges of morality. Had the author made Logan less of a swashbuckling hero this could have just almost worked? Instead it felt like the standard tacking on an overlay of modern sensibilities onto another age.

The best things about this novel are its numerous colorful and endearing characters, both pirates and honest folk, its fidelity to the history of the time, and its willingness to at least approach gritty realities about death and desperation. If you can just relax and overlook the ambiguities and Becky's failure to have her lessons from being a boy stick, you will have a rip roaring good adventure.

The Black Banner is available in paperback as well as on Kindle. The publisher offered me a review copy but I chose to purchase it myself. I also, by the way, bought a copy for my neighborhood kids' reading program.

Albert D. J. Cashier was a soldier serving in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He was born Jennie Irene Hodgers in Clogherhead, County Louth, Ireland, on Christmas Day in 1843. Jennie Hodges emigrated to the United States sometime before 1862 at which time she was living as a man named Albert Cashier. Cashier joined the 95th Illinois Infantry Regiment, part of the Army of the Tennessee under General Ulysses S. Grant from Belvidere, Illinois, where he had been living.

Cashier was thought by fellow soldiers simply to be smaller than most men and a bit of a loner, but it would be many years before anyone suspected his biological identity as a woman. He served in approximately forty battles, including the siege at Vicksburg, the Red River Campaign and the combat at Guntown, Mississippi, where the regiment suffered heavy casualties. he remained in the army until August 17, 1865, when all soldiers were mustered out.

Cashier returned to Belbidere, Illinois, and later relocated to Saurmin, Illinois, where he held a number of laborer jobs, inclluding farm hand, church janitor, and city lamplighter. One of his employers built him a small one-person house where he lived for many years and which is currently being restored as a landmark. Under his Cashier identity he voted before women's suffrage, and he claimed and received a veteran's pension from his service from 1862-1865.

It is believed that Cashier kept his secret until a family he ate with at their house asked a nurse to check on him, but they never revealed his gender. Some years later n 1910 when Cashier was hit by a car and broke his leg, the doctor who attended him also learned the truth, but he also never revealed what he learned. Not even a year later on May 5, 1911, Cashier was moved to the Soldier and Sailors home in Quincy, Illinois. He lived there until his mind deteriorated and was moved to the Watertown State Hospital for the Insane in March 1913. He could no longer hide that he was female and was forced to wear a dress from then on until his death on October 10, 1915.

Albert Cashier was buried as he wished in his full army uniform which he had preserved for over 50 years. His tombstone read "Albert D. J. Cashier, Co. G, 95 Ill. Inf." The executor of his estate took nine years to track his identity to Jennie Hodges from Ireland, but no convincing record was found of suitable standing to award his estate. It totaled nearly $150,000 and deposited with the treasury of Adams Vounty, Illinois. In 1970 a new tombstone bearing both Cashier's names was placed on his grave.

There are two books about Cashier's life:

Also Known As Albert D. J. Cashier: The Jennie Hodgers Story, a biography written by veteran Lon P. Dawson, who lived at the Illinois Veterans Home where Cashier once lived.

My Last Skirt, a novel by Lynda Durrant.

by Kris Jackson

Sarah Edmonds was one of an estimated 200 women who disguised themselves as men and served as soldiers in the Civil War, but that's just one of her remarkable feats. When a childhood friend was captured as a spy and executed by the Confederates, she, then a soldier known as "Franklin Thompson", volunteered to take his place. She dyed her skin dark with silver nitrate and passed herself off as a young black man, probably the only transsexual, transracial spy in history. The ruse worked - no white person at the time would claim to be black, and no Confederate officers paid attention to "Cuff", the young Negro waiting attentively beside the table as they discussed battle plans.

At other times, she was an Irish peddler woman, a Negro seamstress, and a white Rebel soldier. There must have been times when she would have to stop and recall whether she was a man or a woman, a Yank or a Reb, a white or a black person today.
Her spy career came to an end when she contracted malaria. Unable to check into a military hospital - Franklin Thompson couldn't pass a physical - she went into a civilian hospital. When she was discharged, she saw posters proclaiming Franklin Thompson a deserter. She then gave up her career as a spy, a soldier and a man, and served as an Army nurse for the remainder of the war.

She published her memoirs while the war was still on. The tales she told seemed lurid, even incredible, but they have held up to scrutiny by historians. She eventually got an honorable discharge and a pension of $12 a month.

Sarah Edmonds was the inspiration for the character of Clarabel Emmer in Above the Fray, a Novel of the Union Balloon Corps by Kris Jackson. Kris Jackson is a writer and artist living in Massachusetts.

Better known as "Moll Cutpurse", Mary Frith was a notorious common criminal and cross-dresser in the late 16th and early 17th centuries in England. She was also called the "Roaring Girl", from "roaring boys", an appellation for young men who frequented taverns and raised hell wherever they went.

Frith was born in about 1584. She habitually went about in baggy pants and a doublet. her nickname is a pun, "moll" meaning a young woman of dubious character and "cutpurse" a type of pickpockedt, her profession. She first came to the attention of the public in London when she was arrested for stealing the staggering sum of two shillings eleven pence on August 21, 1600. She became so celebrated that in the ensuing years two plays were written about her, John Day's The Madde Pranckes of Mery Mall of the Bankside (1610) and The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker (1611). Though not particularly complimentary to Frith, these plays helped fuel the proliferation of outlandish stories about her

Not that Frith needed legends to add to her fame. She was allowed to perform on-stage at the Fortune Theater where she sang, played the lute and bantered, no doubt obscenely, with the audience. She did not always get away with her antics. In 1611 she was arrested for dressing indecently and sentenced to perform a public penance. Her performance was three hours long and heartfelt and maudlin, though it was discovered later that she had been quite drunk.

Frith married playwright Gervase Markham's son Lewknor Markham in a sham marriage only intended to keep her from being described by the authorities as a "spinster".

By the 1620s she was in business, by her own admission, as a pimp and fence. She not only provided men with female prostitutes but also young men for the beds of middle aged women.

One legend has her jailed for shooting General Fairfax during the English Civil War.. Another tells of her confinement in Bedlam and subsequent cure and release.

She reputedly stated no interest in sexuality of any kind.

Mary Frith died of dropsy in London on 26 July 1659.

There is a novel based on her life called Moll Cutpurse, Her True History: A Novelby Ellen Galford.