Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

After reading this book, I don't know what was stranger, a famous person's shadow double-life or society's hostile attitude on mixed marriage. Either way, the title `Passing Strange', is appropriate; it means `SURpassing strange', an old phrase enjoying a comeback these days. In a nutshell, an internationally known and respected white scientist, Clarence King, a close personal friend of the US Secretary of State, posed as a black porter so he could marry the girl of his dreams, a black lady from NYC named Ada. To do this, King consistently lied to both his white friends and family and his black (or mixed) family for years, and went on extended work trips passing between cultures to make enough money to pull it off. He couldn't reveal to anyone on either side of the color line what he was doing or his world would have fallen apart. It was hard to relate to this since today not even an eye is batted at a mixed marriage. So the shadow life and the racial attitudes are what this story is about, and the fall-out of a mixed marriage that played out for generations later. Mixed marriages were simply not socially acceptable in those days (late 1800's and early 1900's). Hard to imagine today when even the US President is of mixed origins. So, King must have been an exceptionally good liar to pull it off. Also, he was an extremely engaging type, one who had a `genius for friendship' as one of his friends put it. His friends faithfully loved him though it often cost them lots of money he borrowed from them and could not pay back. This stunt wouldn't have worked in this era of Youtube and 24-hour news. But then the societies of black and white were so segregated and the news reporting so limited that even a famous person could disappear and appear at will. I found myself wishing that King had had the courage to make his marriage public. But that would have probably ruined his life and many others. If he had been open about it, he would have been a real hero instead of a shadow figure. And it would not have taken over a hundred years to hear about him.

Historians, and history itself, have not treated Clarence King kindly. King was at one time one of the most famous and admired people in the United States but, if you are like me, you likely have never heard of the man. Born into a wealthy family in 1842, King became famous as the geologist responsible for surveying and mapping diverse regions of the western United States. Always the self-promoter, he published a book about his adventures, "Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada," that became a best seller of its day and made him into a national figure. Two of his closest friends were author Henry Adams and career politician John Hay, former secretary to President Abraham Lincoln. King traveled in the highest circles of society, even dining in the White House on at least once occasion. All of which makes even more astonishing the fact that Clarence King lived a secret life that even his closest confidants knew nothing of until King was near death or had actually passed. King's friends were well aware that King, the sole support of his elderly mother and an extended family, was hard pressed to meet his financial obligations. His financial difficulties were so serious, in fact, that King was only able to maintain his standard of living by accepting repeated loans from John Hay and others of his friends, often offering items from his personal art collection as collateral for the money loaned to him. What King's benefactors and admirers did not know was that, for some thirteen years, King was living two lives: one as the famous explorer of the American West and another as the husband of a woman who, in 1861, had been born into slavery in Georgia. King represented himself to ex-slave Ada Copeland as James Todd, an extremely light-skinned black man from Baltimore whose work as a Pullman porter required him to be away from home for months at a time. In a day in which a single drop of black blood was deemed to distinguish a black man from a white one, his story was believable enough for King to be accepted into the community in which Ada bore him five children. Clarence King loved Ada Copeland but he lied about their relationship because he feared the scandal that would result from his marriage to a black woman. He knew that by publicly acknowledging his black wife and mixed-race children he would lose his friends and any chance of earning the income necessary to support either of his families. Although Ada may have suspected that her husband had something to hide, even she did not know the extent of her husband's secrets until his confessional deathbed letter. Clarence King's story is a fascinating one and Martha Sandweiss tells it well. Almost as fascinating is what happened to Ada and her children after King's death. Ada, who lived to be 103 years old, did not die until 1964, outliving her husband by sixty-two years. "Passing Strange" includes an account of her determined effort during the 1930s to be recognized as King's rightful heir

When Clarence King died in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1901, he was eulogized by friends like John Hay, private secretary to Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State under McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, and historian and memoirist Henry Adams. He was remembered as the first director of the United States Geological Survey, the man who exposed a diamond hoax that threatened the economy of the United States, a devoted son and confirmed bachelor. He was all those things, except the last. The man who, in 1880, said that he had lost the only woman he had ever wanted to marry through too much attention to duty, in 1888 married a woman so far outside his social circle and standing that he did so under a false name, a false occupation, a false identity and a false race. For Clarence King, son of a prosperous China trader, interlocutor of Ruskin and Turner, guest at the White House, had fallen in love with Ada Copeland, an African-American woman born into slavery. He courted her under the name "James Todd", and told her he was a Pullman porter, a job which must mean that he, too, was African-American. How this blond, blue-eyed man passed as black is more than a story of love and deception. It is the story of how this nation has interpreted race and how social and cultural assumptions translate into racial "certainties". It was interesting to compare how King used those assumptions to pass as black with way in which Belle da Costa Green used them to live as white (see An Illuminated Life: Bella da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege). Although in some parts of the world distinctions were and are drawn between "white", "black" and mixed race ("colored", "mulatto" "mestizo"), in the world of Clarence King/James Todd any black ancestor made you black, no matter how you looked. At the same time, people took their cues about someone's race from their surroundings. So King could be perceived as "black" simply because he was met in an African-American neighborhood, visited an African-American church, and claimed to be a Pullman porter, a job for which only African-Americans were hired. (Curiously, though, he was in fact a bit too light-skinned for that to be entirely credible, as light-skinned blacks were more likely to be dining-car attendants.) A census-taker would look at the "white"-appearing children of Ada and Clarence (James) and mark then as "black" upon seeing their mother. (In fact, their two daughters would eventually marry white men and list their race as "white" on the marriage license applications.) When King was dying in Arizona, away from his wife and family in New York, he finally revealed his secret to her, via letter, and to certain of his friends. Because he had kept Ada in the dark as to who he was and what his real life was, because, in order to keep his secret, he had left no documentation of their relationship other than his letters to her (obviously, though, not under his real name), she had no idea of his true financ

American history is much more complex and richer than traditional history books have portrayed. "Passing Strange" untangles some of the history of America's "gilded age" through an amazing story of Clarence King and Ada Copeland. The book does not claim to be anything but a history book - and its a very lively and engaging one. It is neither a love story nor a novel (although at times it reads as both), but a multi-faceted real life story that demonstrates in an achingly real and bizarre way, how constricting both racial constructs and high society were at the end of the 19th century. As the end of the book demonstrates, these historic themes played well into the 20th century, and frame current day discussions of racial identity in America. This is an amazing story and a fabulously interesting and provocative way to learn about themes in American history.