Posted: Fri 06 Feb 2009 04:22 Post subject: Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception
Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
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The secret double life of the man who mapped the American West, and the woman he loved
Clarence King is a hero of nineteenth century western history; a brilliant scientist and witty conversationalist, best-selling author and architect of the great surveys that mapped the West after the Civil War. Secretary of State John Hay named King “the best and brightest of his generation.” But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for thirteen years he lived a double life—as the celebrated white explorer, geologist and writer Clarence King and as a black Pullman porter and steel worker named James Todd. The fair blue-eyed son of a wealthy China trader passed across the color line, revealing his secret to his black common- law wife, Ada Copeland, only on his deathbed.
King lied because he wanted to and he lied because he had to. To marry his wife in a public way – as the white man known as Clarence King – would have created a scandal and destroyed his career. At a moment when many mixed-race Americans concealed their African heritage to seize the privileges of white America, King falsely presented himself as a black man in order to marry the woman he loved.
Noted historian of the American West Martha Sandweiss is the first writer to uncover the life that King tried so hard to conceal from the public eye. She reveals the complexity of a man who while publicly espousing a personal dream of a uniquely American “race,” an amalgam of white and black, hid his love for his wife, Ada, and their five biracial children. Passing Strange tells the dramatic tale of a family built along the fault lines of celebrity, class, and race—from the “Todd’s” wedding in 1888, to the 1964 death of Ada King, one of the last surviving Americans born into slavery.
“Passing Strange” tells an astounding true story that would beggar most novelists’ imaginations. It exposes the bizarre secret life of a well-known historical figure, but that secret is its least sensational aspect. The secret was hidden in plain sight until Martha A. Sandweiss, the deductive historian who pieced together this narrative, happened to notice it. Her great accomplishment is to have explored not only how the 19th-century explorer and scientist Clarence King reinvented himself but also why that reinvention was so singularly American. Best of all are Ms. Sandweiss’s insights into what King’s deception and its consequences really mean.
Sage Sohier
Martha A. Sandweiss
PASSING STRANGE
A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
By Martha A. Sandweiss
Illustrated. 370 pages. The Penguin Press. $27.95.
Related
First Chapter: ‘Passing Strange’ (February 5, 2009)
Fernando Ariza/The New York Times
Clarence King has often been written about by historians, but mostly in academic books about the mapping and geological exploration of the American West. He also turns up in biographies and literary histories, since he moved in glittering circles and was once widely held in high regard. He was called “the best and the brightest man of his generation” by one close friend, Secretary of State John Hay.
Hay went even further: “This polished trifler, this exquisite wit, who diffused over every conversation in which he was engaged an iridescent mist of epigram and persiflage, was one of the greatest savants of his time.” Another admirer put it this way: “The trouble with King is that his description of the sunset spoils the original.”
King was a blond blueblood from Newport who distinguished himself at an early age. He traveled West in the 1860s, found work with the California State Geological Survey, helped to map the Sierras and became geologist in charge of the United States Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel in 1867, when he was 25. He then became a familiar luminary in both New York and Washington. But his early years of roaming were just a prelude to what seems to have been a permanently rootless state.
Or so it seemed to his friends, who became used to his unexpected absences and thought of him as a perennial bachelor. Their impressions of him went no further. What they did not know was that when King was not living in various clubs and hotels, he was married and the father of five children. He was deeply devoted to his wife, Ada, a black woman 19 years his junior. This blue-eyed man, descended from signers of the Magna Carta, had successfully cultivated the impression that he was black too.
The existence of Ada and their children became publicly known only in 1933, at a trial in which Ada tried to recover the trust fund she had been promised by Clarence. He had been dead for more than 30 years, so the shock waves generated by the trial were considerable. Most dramatic, in Ms. Sandweiss’s account, is the way that revisionists demoted Clarence from hero to “tragic hero,” not to mention “the most lavishly overpraised man of his time,” upon discovering the he had been married to a former slave. This was typical of the sickening headlines surrounding the trial: “Mammy Bares Life as Wife of Scientist.”
All of this has long been a matter of record. It took Ms. Sandweiss to pinpoint and explore the fact that Clarence went further than merely marrying Ada and concealing her existence from his friends. He also adopted the name Clarence Todd, under which he married Ada, and claimed to be a Pullman porter, a job held exclusively by black workers. Employment on a train helped explain to Ada why he was so well traveled and so frequently absent from home. (Later he would claim to be a clerk and a steelworker too.)
Ms. Sandweiss constructs the life of the heretofore unknown young Ada, extrapolating from very scant evidence to create a remarkably solid portrait. Ada came from Georgia, was born pre-Emancipation and traveled to New York City to live as a domestic and children’s nursemaid. In other words, she went from one set of strictures to another, and only with Clarence did she achieve some kind of autonomy in a middle-class household.
She was literate and apparently a stickler for manners, at least on the evidence of her children’s upbringing. Ms. Sandweiss finds it much easier to understand what she and Clarence said publicly about their marriage than what kind of reassurances he offered her in private.
“Passing Strange” offers ample evidence of the way Clarence fetishized dark-skinned women as the warm, exotic alternative to the white women he met in polite society. He loathed those white women. (“To see her walk across a room, you would think someone had tilted up a coffin on end and propelled the corpse spasmodically forward,” he said about one.) This book also implies a prurient aspect to his furtiveness, given the enthusiasm with which he went “slumming” in black neighborhoods. He once traveled gleefully through Spain wearing a green velvet suit with knickers. He had a serious mental breakdown in the lion house at the Central Park Zoo.
But if race had clear, stereotypical meaning for this one odd man, it worked in entirely different ways for his wife and children. At the heart of “Passing Strange” is the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that the existence of one black great-grandparent defined an American as black. Not only did this ruling entitle Clarence to his claim as a black man; it also left the racial classification of Ada and her children to the whims of census takers who freely made assumptions about the people they questioned. Over time Todd family members were variously designated “white,” “negro” or “mulatto,” based not on evidence but on context. Ada and Clarence’s sons were deemed black when seen with their dark-skinned mother. But their two daughters married white men and effectively turned themselves into white women.
“Civilization so narrows the gamut!” King once wrote to Hay. “Respectability lets the human pendulum swing over such a pitiful little arc.” But in rebelling against that notion of respectability, King created an arc wider than anything he might have imagined and lived a more profound lie than dissemblers about race or gender usually can. Ms. Sandweiss offers a fine, mesmerizing account of how one extremely secretive man, “acting from a complicated mix of loyalty and self-interest, reckless desire and social conservatism,” could encapsulate his country’s shifting ideas about race in the course of one family’s anything but black-and-white history.
Posted: Sat 07 Feb 2009 17:04 Post subject: "Passing Strange"
I'm reading this book now. One thing that bothers me about the author and reviewers is that they continually claim that Clarence King posed as a "black" man (which sounds physically impossible to the average reader). It would be accurate to say that King was a man of unchallenged white status (with no known black ancestry) who pretended to be a caucasian of partial black ancestry. The claim of recent mulatto ancestry made him seem like an acceptable (even prized) mate to Ada Copeland.
Posted: Sun 15 Feb 2009 18:39 Post subject: Passing Strange
I definitely plan to read this book. The late-South historical context of the color line reminds me so much of the Knight multiracial community in southeastern Mississippi. In 1880, Newt Knight and his wife Serena, a couple of undisputed white ancestry, to borrow Powell's phrase, lived among their children, who married across the color line. Newt also had an interracial relationship (with former slave Rachel) at the same time. All the members of this community were identified by the census taker as either white or mulatto, no matter who they lived with or had married. In 1900, however, after passage of Plessy vs Ferguson (1896), the same inhabitants of this community were all listed as "black," (no more half-way measurements!) except for Newt and Serena's son, Joseph Sullivan, listed as white presumably because he had married a woman of undisputed white ancestry. Two other sons who lived outside the multiracial community were also granted white identities by the census taker. By 1910, Newt and Serena's white identities had been restored by the census taker, although their daughter, Martha Ann, who was married to the mulatto son of Rachel, was yet again designated mulatto.
On a related issue, in my women's history class last week the subject turned to mixed-race women. I asked the students what the term "passing" meant, and immediately got the predictable response that it meant a "black" person was denying their true identity. I didn't let that remark pass (pun intended), however, and a dynamic discussion of the historical construction of race, as well as the cultural dynamics of self-identification followed. The students seemed intrigued by the turn in the discussion, which was stimulated as much from what I have gained from visiting this website as from my own research.
How did the students come to accept the "black passing for white" idea? Did they learn it from their parents? From blacks? From "Imitation of Life" and other movies or TV shows? Did they learn it from the media via reviews of The Human Stain or denunciations of the late Anatole Broyard?
Were the students mostly white, Mexican-American, black-identified? I'm betting that they don't even know that anti-miscegenation laws frequently forbade whites to marry Asians and sometimes even American Indians. I'm sure they don't know that racial classification trials were not limited to "black blood," but covered Asians and American Indians as well. Do Texas students know about the efforts of Mexican-Americans to be declared "white" during the period of Jim Crow segregation?
I would also ask, "If you suspect that a person who identifies as white has "black blood," what do you do? Does it matter whether the person is Anglo, Hispanic, Arab?
The only descendants of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson who have passed a DNA test are all Caucasian and white-identified. They have been "white" since the early 19th century. They make no secret of this. If there is a "one drop" rule in the U.S., how can this be? If you're white or Mexican and discovered "black blood" in your family, what would you do?
Posted: Mon 16 Feb 2009 07:34 Post subject: Passing strange
What I described in my previous post was not about a lecture on the color line in all its permutations, but about a moment, an opportunity to launch a discussion, which, as every experienced teacher knows, is where minds are opened and real learning begins. This was a women's history survey class that was examining images of African-American women from CRISIS Magazine. So, no, I did not in the limited time I had begin inundating the students with facts about the laws of race, although of course we discussed the relevance of slavery and racial segregation. We also discussed the issue of Mexican Americans and their long struggle (in Texas) to win legal status as whites. What I wanted to convey in my post was the fact that a good number of students seemed hungry for the opportunity to think about race as a social and legal construction rather than according to the essentialist dogma that surrounds us. And that's an important breakthrough for many.
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