Two volumes of Magill’s Literary Annual arrived containing 2,000-word reviews of the best 200 books of the year, including mine on “Sweet Thunder” (a biography of boxer Sugar Ray Robinson by Wil Haygood) and “Passing Strange” (Martha Sandweiss’ opus about geologist Clarence King living a double life as a black Pullman porter). I corresponded with Sandweiss about whether she thought King’s fascination with black women sprang from his childhood memories of a devoted nursemaid; she doubted it although she noted the theory had been put forward by another biographer. I came upon interesting reviews on books about Lincoln, Darwin (the biologist and the “Great Emancipator were born on the same date, and their mutual hatred of slavery changed the world), Ted Kennedy (author of the memoir “True Compass,” who is on the cover, 1848 (year of Revolution), and the late, great John Updike’s poems in a volume called “Endgame.” Starting when he turned 70 in 2002, he’d sum up his life in sonnet form. Aging had long been one of his major themes. Writing about a harrowing plane ride, he concluded: “Age I must but/die I’d rather not.” In 2007 he penned these lines hoping his talent wouldn’t dim: “Be with me, words, a little longer/ you have given me my quitclaim in the sun.” He moved to Tuscan, played much golf, and noted seeing skeletons of dead cactuses that stand in “mute mobs” in the desert. A volume of Updike’s short stories called “My Father’s Tears” also got reviewed. Reviewer Laurence Mazzeno wrote that Updike “approached his craft with a sociologist’s understanding of middle America, a psychologist’s insights into the workings of the human mind, a theologian’s perception of humankind’s struggle with faith and morals, and a poet’s gift for language.” Concerning Updike’s tendency toward personal musings, Mazzeno quotes from his 1969 poem “Midpoint”: “Of nothing but me, me/ . . . / I sing, lacking another song.” Sort of like me. If this blog should morph into another Shavings, I’ll subtitle it “Wretched Excess.”
Thursday’s retirement reception was not just for Chancellor Bergland but also honored psychological counselor Ray Fontaine and photography professor Gary Wilk, two good men. A Sixties divinity school grad, Ray was a sex therapist before coming to IUN. Starting off with puns involving Freud and Jung, retired Sociology professor Bob Lovely quipped that he once asked Ray for advice and, emulating Cher’s reaction to Nicolas Cage saying he loves her in “Moonstruck,” he slapped him and said, “Snap out of it.” I lamented losing my favorite cafeteria lunch companion, although I said I hoped he’d follow my example and return frequently. While most faculty talk shop and grouse at the administration, Ray preferred more elevated conversations. Once, at the other end of the table from me, he heard me mention theologian Paul Tillich, got up, sat down next to me, and asked, “What was that about Tillich?” In his remarks Ray was gracious, witty, and urbane and jokingly thanked Neil Goodman for naming a Echo Garden sculpture (“Ray”) after him.
I was tempted to mention Gary Wilk’s tour of duty in Vietnam. He was a cook and out of harm’s way for 12 months so he re-upped for three more so he’d be eligible for an early discharge immediately thereafter. Then came the enemy’s Tet Offensive, and Gary found himself under fire virtually every day. His Vietnam experience convinced Gary to pursue a career in photography rather than settle for a more “practical” career path. His Fine Arts colleagues Neil Goodman and David Klamen covered most of what I would have said, specifically how patient he is with students and how great his book Steel Giants, which he did with Steve McShane, is. Gary got an email of congratulations from Paul Kern, who recalled the interesting conversations when they bumped into each other in the Tamarack Hall men’s room.
Chancellor Bruce, more composed than on Tuesday, was presented with a lamp and a rocking chair as well as the traditional clock. I told about how ten years ago when I was in the hospital he called me “Jimmy.” I said that my good friends call me Jimbo right before our phone connection went dead. He called me back, referred to me as Jimbo, and has been calling me Jimbo ever since. Executive Secretary Mary Lee mentioned how compassionate Bruce was after Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Ernest Smith’s stroke, visiting him in the hospital and keeping him on as a trusted adviser. Vernon Smith recalled how Bruce called him his first week on the job and wanted a tour of Gary. Bruce was a stickler for things starting on time, and Neil Goodman had a funny story about being late to a social function because he put his kid’s bike in the trunk of the car on his wife’s dress on the way to a sitter with such disastrous results that they had to stop and buy a new one, causing them to be 45 minutes late. Medical School director Pat Bankston talked about going to Country Lounge on Friday afternoons with Bruce and other campus bigwigs who called themselves “The Sharks.” One day longtime state representative belittled their pretensions, saying, “You should be called the guppies.” Country Lounge has long been a Region watering hole. Bangston quipped that one former chancellor picked up a liver disease there. Back 30 years ago Chancellor Danelo Orescanin put in two-hour lunches mingling with area politicians and talking up the university. Often upon returning to campus, he’d ask his secretary to decipher the phone numbers and messages on his place mat. Dan could hold his liquor and had, as one area politician put it, a “good line of bullshit.”
I got a thank you card from Lisa Hartlund for my Gary book. Her dad grew up on Tyler Street and enjoyed the references to his old neighborhood. I also sent a copy to Anne Balay, who wanted to read my account of “Women of Steel” who fought against sexist practices in the mill after women were hired in large numbers following the 1974 Consent Decree.
Fred Chary gave me on videotape a documentary about the Philadelphia Flyers teams of the Seventies, the co-called “Broad Street Bullies.” It brought back memories of enforcer Dave “Dutch” Schultz and “Golden Boy” Bobby Clarke. I fell asleep before the conclusion of the NBA Finals game seven. I didn’t care whether Los Angeles or Boston won. The first half was sloppy and low scoring, with both teams shooting poorly. I found out from all-night SCORE jock Les Grobstein (“the Grobber”) that L.A. prevailed, giving Kobe Bryant his fifth ring (one more than Shaq, he exulted) and Coach Phil Jackson his eleventh. Good news: the Cubs, White Sox and Phillies all won.
David and Angie held a joint birthday party for James (10) and Rebecca (8) at Lisa’s Gymnastics. Seventeen kids had fun playing with the equipment. Afterwards I attended a retirement party at Ray Fontaine’s snazzy place in LaPorte. I gave him volume 1 of Magill’s Annual (my two pieces are in volume 2). I talked with several of his golfing buddies, as well as faculty members Neil Goodman, Vinod K. Vinodogopal, Michele Stokely, Iztok and Stela Hozo. Stela was wearing a black Purdue t-shirt that her daughter gave her; I had on an IU Northwest shirt I got for working the university booth at the Porter County Fair. Former colleague Roberta Wollons was a surprise guest, flying in from Boston. Chuck Gallmeier recalled how in a Faculty Org meeting I warned the chancellor that if he tried to ram through a 12-hour faculty teaching load he’d have a revolt on his hands. I heard through the grapevine that Bruce later mocked my remarks, saying to lackeys, “Ooh, I’m really scared.” He didn’t pursue the 12-hour load for everyone, however.
We’ve been without electricity since a storm came through on Friday. Ron Cohen is in the same boat. Bummer! We spent all day Sunday at Dave and Angie’s. Son Phil and granddaughter Victoria had come in for the birthday party, and we played board games and watched the U.S. Open. Dave’s former band mate Hans Rees stopped by with his two kids, one of whom is named Graham, and mentioned that thanks to me he became a Graham Parker fan and recently got to meet the British singer (“Passion is no Ordinary Word” is the best song ever) at a concert. Toni and I saw him at Chicago’s Vic Theater with Terry and Kim Hunt, and he ended with a smokin’ Sam Cooke medley. Tiger really sucked and still finished only four strokes back. Ditto for Mickelson. Irishman Graeme McDowell was the first non-American to win since 1970. Toni stayed the night, but I went home, lit a couple candles, and went to bed at nightfall.
Monday A.M.: still no electricity and I had to drive through another storm to take Becca to dance class. I called the National Lakeshore and the secretary to the superintendent assured me they had contacted NIPSCO about our not having power. Before picking Becca up Angie brought Victoria to the Archives. Tori loved my 27-inch computer screen and showed me how I could have things on YouTube fill up the entire screen. She played the musical video “Boom Boom Pow” by Black Eyed Peas and “Fireflies” by Owl City. Sheriff Dominquez brought interesting photos in for us to scan, and then I just got to the cafeteria before closing for a hot dog before running off to Best Buy to pick up a computer that Toni bought yesterday. George Bodmer was at the cafeteria and mentioned that his father-in-law was over for Father’s Day, saw one of Toni’s drawings called “Four Seasons,” and thought it was great. George is teaching a drawing class once a week to homeless people.
Monday P.M.: Toni and I took the computer and two TVs to the condo. Before going to Angie’s for tacos I drove home and came upon four utility company trucks working along County Line Road. I arrived home to find a light on. Yes! The stove clock indicated that the power had come back on less than five minutes before.
Showing posts with label Martha Sandweiss. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martha Sandweiss. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Monday, August 24, 2009
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.
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.
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