05/06/2026
Picture Memphis in the winter of 1869. The Civil War has been over four years and the city is scrambling back to life like a cat that fell off a porch railing. Cotton money is moving down Front Street. Two hundred sixty-seven saloons are open for business in a city of forty thousand souls. The Mississippi smells like the Mississippi. Faro and keno are licensed by the city, which tells you most of what you need to know.
And on Jefferson Avenue, between Main and Second, three "low varieties" are lit up every night, every one of them what a respectable woman would cross the street to avoid.
One of them is Broome's.
Twenty-five cents at the door. Three dollars for a private box. Doors at half past six, curtain at half past seven. Proprietor: H. H. Broom. Stage manager: J. S. Berry. The bill, as the *Memphis Daily Appeal* tells it on January 16, 1869, runs to "Sentimental and Comic Singing, Dancing, Farces, Burlesques, Sensational Dramas, Negro Acts, etc." That "etc." is doing a great deal of work.
Now imagine the room. A long bar down one wall. A small stage. Pretty waitresses circulating with whiskey. A chorus of song-and-dance girls. Cigar smoke thick enough to cure a ham. And somewhere in the program, on a night nobody bothered to write down properly, the bill includes a male impersonator billed as Marie Hinkle.
A male impersonator, in 1869 Memphis, on a Jefferson Avenue stage.
She came out in a frock coat. She came out in trousers. She came out in a top hat, and possibly a moustache penciled in with burnt cork, and she sang in a voice the *New York Clipper* once said was so convincing "one is apt to imagine that it is a man who is singing." She would have done a swell-about-town number. She would have done a soldier song, the war still fresh enough to land. She would have done the patter and the wink and the slightly drunk rake on his way home from somewhere he should not have been.
And by the end of the run, two of Broome's chorus girls were fighting over her.
Now, was that a setup? Did H. H. Broom or J. S. Berry plant that item with a sympathetic editor over at the *Avalanche* to put a few more bodies in the seats? Probably. Variety-hall managers did that sort of thing every other Tuesday. Did it mean the affections were invented? It did not. Memphis girls in 1869 did not throw a punch over a person they were not interested in throwing a punch over.
Here is the thing. "Marie Hinkle" was almost certainly not her real name.
The name on the British and American playbills, the name in *The Era* and the *Clipper* and eventually the *New York Sun*, was **Annie Hindle**. By 1869 she was the only woman in America billing herself as a male impersonator, and she had been raking in money doing it since she was a teenager in Lancashire.
Born in England in the 1840s. On stage at six years old. By 1864 advertising in *The Era* as "Great Serio-Comic and Impersonator of Male Characters." Earning thirty pounds a week, which would buy you a small house. Sailing for New York in August 1868 with her adoptive mother, billed as "the greatest male impersonator in the world," and meaning it.
She married a man within weeks of landing. He blacked both her eyes inside six weeks and she was done with him. She would never marry another man.
She would, however, marry several women.
The first was a jig dancer named Nellie Howard, in Washington, D.C., in late December 1868. The marriage license read "Charles Hindle." Nellie and Annie were performing together at the Varieties Theater in St. Louis by February 1869, which is exactly upriver from Memphis, which puts Annie Hindle one steamboat ride from Broome's.
That is how Marie Hinkle ends up on a Jefferson Avenue stage. A misprint, a stage name borrowed for a Mississippi run, a touring contract she was working around. Pick your theory. The geography is right and the timing is right, and she is, in that season, the only person it could plausibly have been.
The full life that came after that Memphis winter is almost too much to relate without sitting down. In November 1870, back in Washington, "Charles Hindle" married another male impersonator, a woman named Blanche Du Vere. In June 1886, in Room 19 of the Barnard House in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Annie Hindle married her dresser of five years, a woman named Annie Ryan, with a Baptist minister officiating and a female impersonator named Gilbert Saroney standing as best man. The newspapers the next morning ran headlines like "Man or Woman?" and "Married Her Maid." Annie and Annie fled to Cleveland and lived as wives, openly, until Ryan died of an illness in 1891.
In 1892 Annie Hindle married a third woman, Louise Spangehl, in Troy, New York. The minister, the *Pittsburg Dispatch* reported, "believed Miss Hindle to be a man." She was, by then, what q***r history would later learn to call out and proud, except the words did not exist yet. She just lived.
She drank too much at the end. She took dime-museum bookings. She got arrested once in Buffalo for being drunk on a public street. Her last documented stage appearance was October 1904, in Dayton or Cincinnati, and after that she vanishes from the record entirely.
Somewhere in there, for one Reconstruction Memphis winter, on a Jefferson Avenue stage twenty-five cents to enter, she gave the city the shock of its evening and let two chorus girls swing at each other over her. Memphis, which has always been a wilder town than people are willing to give it credit for, printed the item and got on with the night.
Which is the part worth keeping. Memphis had her. Memphis still has her. The building is gone. The playbill spelled her name wrong. A hundred and fifty-six years of yellow fever and fire and polite amnesia have done their level best to lose the whole story.
She was here anyway. The q***rest thing on the Jefferson Avenue bill in the winter of 1869, drawing a crowd, getting reviewed, breaking hearts, and going right on doing it.
Worth raising a glass to. Worth writing down. 🍸🖋️
