Blanche & Her Family Tree
- Hampton Law Firm ⚖️
- Jul 18
- 5 min read
Blanche is not her real name. If I used the name we have called her around the office for years, half the people reading this would know exactly who she was before I made it past the first page. She was one of my dad’s very first clients, and he represented her for decades while she and her husband bought property, sold property, loaned money, and helped people buy land because they believed in them.
Somewhere along the way, she stopped being simply a client and became part of our lives. We would run into her at Walmart or the Piggly Wiggly, but we also showed up for her family’s funerals and stood beside her through the losses that came with all those years. She buried her husband, fought cancer, and then lost her mother only a few months later. You can look at Blanche and tell life has put its hands on her more than once, but it never managed to take the humor out of her.
She looks exactly like the kind of woman people underestimate. She is a sweet elderly lady with bright blue eyes, a slight pull on one side of her face from whatever she has survived physically, and the sort of soft grandmother appearance that makes people assume she is harmless. The larger personalities in the land business around here, several of whom I know personally, would look straight past her while they were busy measuring each other. Meanwhile, Blanche is quietly putting together a land deal underneath their noses, helping a young couple buy property, and financing it herself because she believes in them. They see a little old woman.
She sees people who are too impressed with themselves to notice what she is doing, and I suspect that arrangement suits her just fine.
She came into my office to work through that deal, and while we were discussing how she wanted everything structured, she told me the name she wanted to use for the company. I cannot repeat the name because it would identify her, but I asked why she had chosen it.
Blanche looked me dead in the eye and said, “Because I’m a brassy-ass broad,” then kept talking about the transaction as though she had just explained why she preferred one bank over another. She knew exactly what she had said, and she knew exactly what it was doing to me.
Her face stayed mostly still, but those blue eyes sparkled and the corners of her mouth started to move because she enjoys watching people catch up to her.
Somewhere in the middle of the loan discussion, Blanche changed subjects and told me she had never told my dad very much about her family because she was ashamed of them. I was still trying to figure out whether we were discussing a title problem, a family dispute, or some old piece of land that had gone bad when she said, “I’ve got two sisters. One’s a prostitute, and one’s a whore.” Before I could decide whether she was drawing a legal distinction or a moral one, she explained that the prostitute had once gotten onto the whore and said, “What the hell is wrong with you?
You’re sitting on a goldmine and not charging for it.”
I laughed and told her, “Well, at least the prostitute has some financial sense.” Blanche’s eyes lit up, her grin spread across her face, and she said, “Exactly. That’s my point. That’s why I always got along better with the prostitute, because she had some business sense. You caught the point right off the bat, which is why I know I like talking to you.” I do not know what it says about me that one of the strongest compliments I have received lately came from an elderly woman who was pleased that I immediately recognized the better business model between her two sisters, but I accepted it.
Blanche then moved directly into the fact that she had spent years believing she had been switched at birth because she could not accept that those two women were actually her sisters.
She admitted there were problems with the theory. She had been born on an island, and her own grandmother had delivered her, so there was not exactly a nursery full of babies available for a mix-up. Blanche knew all of that and still decided the only reasonable explanation was that she had somehow been switched, not once but through whatever series of events would have been necessary to place her in the wrong family twice over.
When disbelief alone failed to prove her theory, she started collecting DNA.
The adults were not always cooperative, so Blanche went around them. She told me that she would hand one of their children a cup and say, “Spit.” They did not ask questions, argue, or demand an explanation. They looked down and spit because they knew Blanche and understood that refusing was not really one of the available choices. She gathered DNA for years until the results finally came back and proved that the women were, in fact, her sisters. Blanche shook her head and said, “Lord have mercy,” with the disappointment of someone who had done all that work only to learn that reality was exactly as bad as she had suspected.
The investigation did produce one unexpected result. Blanche asked whether I knew one of her nephews, and I told her I did. She said, “Well, I did find out his daddy wasn’t really his daddy,” in the same tone she had used to discuss the loan documents. There was no dramatic pause, no whispered family secret, and no concern that she had accidentally detonated somebody’s entire understanding of his parentage while trying to prove she had been switched at birth. It was simply another fact Blanche had uncovered and filed away.
That is what a meeting with Blanche is like. You start out discussing a perfectly ordinary land transaction being quietly arranged underneath the noses of people who would never suspect the little old woman across the table, and before the paperwork is finished, you have been given a lesson in the economics of prostitution, informed that your client spent years running an unauthorized family DNA operation, and casually advised that one man has the wrong father.
Blanche never hurries the story or laughs before you do. She looks you dead in the eye, lets those blue eyes sparkle, and waits for you to realize she has been the funniest person in the room the entire time.
Judith L. Hampton
Attorney At Law
Hampton Law Firm
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