Passing Strange

I recently reviewed a book called PASSING STRANGE by Martha Sandweiss for Magills Literary Annual about a renowned explorer named Clarence King and geologist who lived a double life for 13 years, marrying a former slave and claiming to be, despite fair skin and blue eyes, Pullman porter James Todd. It was subtitled "A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line." Here is an excerpt:

An enigma of vast contradictions, Clarence Rivers King loved aristocracy’s trappings but struggled all his life, unsuccessfully for the most part, to remain financially solvent. An idealist who despised America’s “Peculiar Institution” of slavery, he nonetheless traveled to the western frontier to escape service in the Civil War. Robust and peripatetic, yet often nagged by illness and melancholia, he valued respectability but found pleasure “slumming” in Tenderloin districts of big cities, where, like many voyeurs of his day, he delighted in the exotic and the unconventional.

Born into fashionable Newport, Rhode Island, circles on January 6, 1842, King first laid eyes on his father, a China trader, at age three; the elder King died when “Clare” was six. Florence, his sickly, overprotective, financially strapped mother, was a burden to him most of his life. Until he met Ada, King reserved his love for male friends. As he reached puberty, he formed intimate bonds with adolescents Daniel Dewey and James Gardiner. In the summer of 1859 they went camping in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Three years later the lusty threesome took off on a rowing expedition into Canada with a couple of Clarence’s Yale classmates. A customs inspector detained them briefly at the border suspecting them of being draft dodgers. “Dan” was killed in battle at Irish Bend, Louisiana. “Jim” remained a lifelong friend. In a letter written while at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, Clare wrote: “My heart is taken up with you. . . . My love for you grows always and is a most absorbing passion.”

King rose to the apex of his scientific profession by making numerous contributions to the mapping of the west. The self-promoter wrote about his adventures, sometimes with embellishment, working with the California State Geological Survey in Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872). Charming and successful in obtaining funding from the frugal federal government, he was the envy of fellow geologists, including John Wesley Powell. Surveying the Fortieth Parallel was entirely his idea, and it laid the groundwork for other valuable expeditions. In 1879 President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him to be the first director of the United States Geological Survey. Eight years earlier, while in Estes Park, Colorado, he had a chance encounter with Presidential scion Henry Adams. This is how Sandweiss writes of their night together:

Riding through the park in search of his crew, King had paused for the night in a cabin with “a room and one bed for guests” when a small, frail, mustached Harvard history professor rode into camp on a mule, lost after a day of fishing. It was Henry Adams. “As with most friendships,” Adams later wrote, “it was never a matter of growth or doubt. . . . They shared the room and the bed, and talked till far towards dawn.”

“A new friend is always a miracle,” Adams recounted in the memoir The Education of Henry Adams (1907), “but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage brush was an avatar.” The normally hard-to-please Adams believed King brilliantly combined action and intellect. He, John Hay, and their wives Clover and Clara welcomed him into a ménage called the Five of Hearts (complete with stationery and tea service), a take-off on their friend’s nickname “King of Diamonds,” obtained for exposing a fraudulent mining company stock scheme. Like many bachelors, King lived mainly in hotels, such as the Brunswick and Albert in New York City. He entertained friends (his greatest talent, biographer Harry Herbert Crosby sneered; otherwise he was the “most overrated” man of his era) at such exclusive clubs as the Metropolitan, Century Association, the Tuxedo, the Union League, the Knickerbocker, and the American Geographical Society. Frequently absent on business or pleasure, he invented plausible excuses to keep his acquaintances in the dark about his double life.

From what meager evidence exists, Ada Copeland was a determined seeker of independence and security economic security, no easy task during the nineteenth century given her race and sex. She told a census taker she was born in West Point, Georgia, a hamlet straddling the Chattahoochee River that forms the state’s western border with Alabama. She emigrated north during the 1880s, perhaps first residing briefly in a Southern city before finding work as a nursemaid in lower Manhattan. Ada married the man she believed to be James Todd in September 1888, at her Aunt Annie Purnell’s residence, the esteemed Reverend James H. Cook of the Union African Methodist Episcopal Church presiding. Ada bore Clarence five offspring in nine years (the eldest, Leroy, died at age two). In 1897 the Todds moved into an 11-room single family dwelling in the Flushing section of Queens. Long absences afforded each the freedom they needed and perhaps made their hearts grow fonder. From his letters we know that Ada excited Clare sexually all his life. She told a city directory agent that her husband was originally from the West Indies and presently employed as a clerk (in one census report his profession was listed as steelworker). Her life revolved around family, and her ambition was to achieve respectability within New York City’s African-American community. Ada had two live-in servants and three others providing day help (some African Americans preferred white foreign-born servants, but Ada hired members of her own race). Her greatest social success: a masquerade party to ring in the twentieth century that received mention in the New York Age society pages. Sandweiss speculates that King attended in costume and writes, “Perhaps it was her big house, maybe just the splendor of the party. But somehow the former nursemaid who was born a slave had arrived.”

While a man of King’s stature assuming an African-American identity was virtually unprecedented, “passing” was not uncommon during an age when one was considered “Negro” not by skin color but if a single great-grandparent were African American. When posing as James Todd, King did not have to explain his fair pigmentation, as many equally light folks were classified as “Negroes” (although Pullman porters were almost always dark-skinned). Many so-called mulattos, quadroons, and octoroons (one-eighth “Negro”) “passed” to take advantage of the opportunities that the white world afforded them. Women sometimes posed as men either for the economic opportunities or to live with female lovers. While New York, unlike some states, recognized “mixed marriages,” such a union would have jeopardized King’s social standing, threatened his professional career, and ended friendships with those who frowned on what they considered miscegenation. On the other hand, in his musings to Adams and Hay King imagined a future raceless world, but sadly he was too timid to be an open trailblazer in that regard.

Suffering from myriad financial, physical and mental problems no doubt exacerbated by the strains of living a double life, with all the lies and subterfuges that entailed, King finally revealed his true identity to Ada in a letter written from his deathbed in a sanitarium in Phoenix, Arizona. Dying of tuberculosis, he may finally have also confided to James Gardiner that he wanted Ada provided for after he passed away. He indicated to his wife that a trust fund would provide for her well-being. The will, however, left his meager assets to his mother, who never totally lost her grip on him. In the wake of race riots in New York King had persuaded Ada to move to Toronto, Canada (not as racially tolerant a climate as expected), and hoped she’d be content there. She moved back to New York, however, and made contact with Gardiner, who with Hay’s help provided her with $65 a month and a house rent free. In 1906 she hired the first of a half-dozen attorneys in a dogged effort to recover the money she believed her husband had left her. In retaliation, her benefactors threatened to revoke the monthly payments. As a result, Ada waited until her children reached adulthood and then resumed her legal efforts. In 1933 when the litigation culminated in a public trial, the tabloid press had a field day with the “torrid” love letters, treating the revelation as a scandal. One headline proclaimed: “Mammy Bares Life as Wife of Scientist.” Another reported: “Old Negress Suing Estate, Reveals Love.” The New York Daily News portrayed Ada as a “huge, kinky-haired, pleasant-faced colored woman of 70 years.” Defended by a Russian-born attorney named Morris Bell, she lost her case. The funds she thought came from a trust fund were actually charitable payments from Hay and his descendents. She lived another 31 years in relative obscurity (King’s first two biographers made no effort to look her up), passing away in 1964 at approximately 103 years of age. Her two daughters married white men and effectively “passed.”

A thorough researcher, Sandweiss is on solid ground speculating about many aspects pertaining to this unique couple, but she shies away from their sex life, either separately or together. Outwardly repressive, the Victorian Age resembled a glacier in sexual matters, with most delights happening below the surface and remaining hush hush. Nobody has captured the essence of this netherworld as insightfully as novelist Gore Vidal in 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), and Empire (1987). When secretary to the “Great Emancipator,” King’s bosom buddy Hay enjoyed passionate sex with mixed-race prostitutes in brothels located within sight of the White House and later seduced the comely wife of Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge. One can imagine the lusty King, exemplar of a western swashbuckler, “sowing his wild oats” in this manner. How, one wonders, did he satisfy his sex drive during protracted geological expeditions? Consorting with dark-skinned prostitutes? Seeking male companionship, perhaps with his handsome mulatto personal assistant? Did he pleasure himself while imagining being in the company of a Polynesian or West Indian beauty? His fantasy was to retire on the island of Dominica, located in the Lesser Antilles. King had absolutely no passion for well-bred white women. One eligible contemporary he found “shrunken [and] of sharp visage, in which were prominent two cold eyes and a positively poisonous mouth; her hair, the color of faded hay, tangled in a jungle around her head.” (65) Rejecting Hay’s efforts to pair him with a young socialite, King quipped, “To see her walk across the room, you would think someone had tilted up a coffin and propelled the corpse spasmodically forward.” His fascination was with more “natural” or “primal” females. Henry Adams wrote that “King had no faith in the American woman; he loved types more robust.” And devoted to him, like his Black childhood nursemaid, one biographer hypothesized (Sandweiss demurs from such a conclusion).

On the book’s dust jacket is a designer’s visualization of a nattily dressed gentleman (King was a dandy even out in the wild) crossing a bridge and a voluptuous, dusky African-American approaching him from the other direction. One can only imagine the rush King felt upon first spotting Ada, starting up a conversation, and arranging a future rendezvous. In the end Ada Copeland emerges as the more compelling of the two protagonists. As historian David W. Blight asserts, thanks to the author’s “remarkable detective work,” she “steals the show.” Tragically, as Booklist reviewer Vanessa Bush points out, Ada’s husband “defied social conventions” but “could not face up to the potential ruin of an interracial marriage.” He went to his grave negligent toward loved ones and with too little faith in his closest friends’ capacity for compassion."

In the most recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine there's mention of a Spike Lee movie called Passing Strange, but it is not about a nineteenth-century geologist but rather a white guy who wanted to fit into the Black music scene. Evidently it is based on a very successful broadway play. Wonder who came up with the title first. It is similar to someone using my Gary book title "City of the Century" for a book about Chicago. I'll have to ask Martha, whom I emailed back and forth a few times (first seeking her year of birth for the review) and who is the sister of the editor of Indiana Magazine of History.