Passing Strange (15 page)

A study of African American domestic workers in Philadelphia in the late 1890s found that nearly two-thirds of unmarried women boarded with their employers. Since there was a negligible difference in pay for those living in and those going home in the evenings, it made good economic sense.
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A nursemaid’s salary of $3 to $3.50 a week might seem grand in comparison to the $3 a month a young woman like Ada could make as a house servant in Georgia or the $40 to $50 a year she might make as a Georgia field hand, but it would not go very far in an urban center, especially if she sent money home to her family.
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In New York City, even the rudest room in a dark tenement rented for a minimum of $6 to $10 a month.
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So forgoing privacy, flexibility, or any real home life of her own, Ada most likely lived with the family that employed her, free like most nursemaids to go out into the city to test the boundaries of her new life just one afternoon a week, with an additional afternoon or evening every other Sunday.
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Marriage might seem a possible escape. But it would be difficult to meet men with so little free time of her own; doubly difficult because black women in New York so outnumbered black men. In 1890 there were roughly five black females in the city for every four black men.
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Nursemaids like Ada would devote long hours of work to the “washing, dressing and feeding of children” as well as the “general care of [their] health and well-being,” acquiring the skills and experience they would later put to good use with their own families. Almost 70 percent of nursemaids worked ten- to twelve-hour days, and nearly a quarter worked even longer hours, more time than was demanded from any other sort of domestic servant. But child care carried little social status. The women with “skilled” domestic positions as cooks, seamstresses, and laundresses earned more and worked less.
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Confinement and inflexibility likely ordered Copeland’s working life. Unable to entertain friends at home, control her own working hours, or hope to advance to a better-paying position, she possibly never felt free of the overbearing sense of being a menial and dependent employee in her own house. Whether she had her own room or shared it with one or more other young women, she likely had a dark and poorly ventilated living space. It might be shut off by walls from the more spacious rooms occupied by her employer’s family, but even a room of her own would not necessarily assure privacy. Her employers might enter her room at any time to ask for help or demand assistance. Domestic workers complained frequently about the monotony of their work and the brutally low pay. But “probably the chief objection of colored city domestics against service,” wrote the social worker Isabel Eaton in 1899, “is the social stigma which rightly or wrongly attaches to it. It savors to them of the degradation of their slavery days.” Those who leave domestic employment, she continued, leave “to escape social degradation first, from the desire for greater personal freedom next, and finally from the hope of higher remuneration.”
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Even the unmarried African American workingwomen who did not live with their employers faced the social stigma of domestic service. And their privacy would come not just at the expense of their pocketbook, but with a loss of comfort or even safety, in the crowded tenement boardinghouses where they could find rooms. Their domestic work began early, the sociologist Mary White Ovington wrote in 1911, “seven at the latest and lasts until the dinner is cleared away, at half-past eight or nine. Released then from further tasks, the young girl goes to her tiny inner tenement room, dons a fresh dress, and then, as chance or her training determines, walks the street, goes to the theatre, or attends the class meeting at her church.”
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The church played a critical role in the life of young African American women like Ada, providing not just a place of worship but a social gathering spot where they could relax with others who also felt displaced from the familiar rituals of their southern homes.
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The African American church provided northern blacks with a kind of family structure, the sociologist W. E. B. DuBois wrote in 1899. “Its family functions are shown by the fact that the church is a centre of social life and intercourse; acts as newspaper and intelligence bureau, is the centre of amusements.”
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As James Weldon Johnson would later write, “a Negro Church is for its members much more besides a place of worship. It is a social centre, it is a club, it is an arena for the exercise of one’s capabilities and powers, a world in which one may achieve self-realization and preferment.” A church might mean something similar to other people, he conceded, “but with the Negro all these attributes are magnified because of the fact that they are so curtailed for him in the world at large.”
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Ada Copeland turned for her own social and spiritual support to the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church, a small but lively congregation in Manhattan. This “invisible” sect of African American Methodism, based in Wilmington, Delaware, was minuscule in comparison to the much better known African Methodist Episcopal Church.
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It began in 1865 as a splinter group of the Union Church of Africans, itself formed in 1813 in protest against the racial policies of the nation’s mainstream Methodist Episcopal churches.
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By the late 1880s, the sect had only about 2,200 members, some 170 affiliated with Ada’s church, the Reverend James H. Cook ’s congregation in New York.
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The church offered worship services, classes, musical evenings, and summer excursions on chartered boats to a park outside the city that offered working congregants a rare respite from their daily labor. For 50 cents, a young woman like Ada could enjoy the boat ride, try her hand at fishing along the shore, and watch the young men of the church play baseball or cricket (a suggestion that some of the church members came from the West Indies).
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Ada almost certainly discovered the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church after she arrived in Manhattan; it had scant presence in the South. Growing up near West Point, Ada perhaps attended local prayer meetings, such as those that Easter Jackson, a former slave from Troup County, later recalled: “de prayer meetin’s, once a week, first on one plantation den a nother; when all the niggers would meet and worshup singin praises unto the Lord.”
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As a small child Ada likely attended the segregated black worship services held in the white Baptist or Methodist churches around West Point, and later, as a young woman, she might have gone to one of the new black churches sprouting up in Reconstruction Georgia.
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The Union American Methodist Episcopal Church in New York began in a building downtown, on West Fifteenth Street, not far, perhaps, from Ada’s place of employment. Maybe her aunt or some friends led her there. Or perhaps she stepped in on her own and soon found herself embraced by the community. “Each church forms its own social circle,” W. E. B. DuBois wrote of the black churches in Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century, “and not many stray beyond its bounds. Introductions into that circle come through the church, and thus the stranger becomes known.”
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The confidence and dynamism of the church leader, the Reverend James Cook—a man the
New York Times
later eulogized as “one of the most prominent negro ministers in this part of the United States”—likely felt comforting to a young woman alone in the city.
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His church might not be large or prosperous, but with a liberal doctrine that emphasized lay involvement, admitted women to the ministry, and decried racism, it would feel welcoming.
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IN FEBRUARY 1888 THE African American journalist and activist Ida B. Wells penned an essay on the model woman for New York’s black newspaper, the
New York Freeman
(later the
New York Age
). In it she wrote, “The typical girl’s only wealth, in most cases, is her character, and her first consideration is to preserve that character in spotless purity. . . . She regards all honest toil as noble, because it is ordained of God that man should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. She does not think a girl has anything of which to be proud in not knowing how to work, and esteems it among her best accomplishments that she can cook, wash, iron, sew and ‘keep house’ thoroughly and well.” A Negro girl like this, Wells wrote, might be rare, but she provided the pattern others should copy.
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In hard work, a black woman should find nothing but pride.

We know little about Ada Copeland’s day-to-day life in the years before she met Clarence King, nor can we know with any certainty what moral values she learned as a child. Later family stories depict Ada as a “queen,” a woman with regal good manners, a penchant for proper dress, and a deep sense of propriety that included Sunday morning church and formal Sunday dinners.
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We can only speculate as to whether Ada read New York’s black press. But like Wells’s exemplar of true womanhood, she worked hard, went to church, and aspired to a better life. Born to slavery, she could, in New York, dare to imagine her way into an independent working-class world, perhaps even a middle-class life, even if she could not yet see how to get there. On the eve of her first encounter with King, Ada had weathered the transition from slavery to freedom, from girlhood to adulthood, from rural southern life to life in the nation’s largest metropolis. She had made the shift from farmwork to domestic work, from an extended-family world to a more solitary and independent life, from the rhythms of the agricultural world to the rattle of the urban elevated trains. Behind her lay the restraints of the Jim Crow South, which limited where she could eat, how she could travel, what sort of work she could do, and even what kind of identity she could embrace. In place of these restrictions, she lived within those of the world of a live-in domestic, with limited free time or social independence. In all likelihood, she worked for white people. But even in New York, through her aunt and through her church, she remained tied to a black community. Her widowed aunt’s independence likely suggested to Ada that with hard work she, too, could make it in the city. And through her church, she surely knew African Americans who likewise had made a successful place for themselves in this bustling urban world. Still, even in New York, Ada’s race continued to shape how she could earn her keep, where she could live, and—in all probability—how she imagined she would spend the rest of her life.
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WHEN KING MOVED TO NEW YORK IN LATE 1873, HIS SURVEY’S fieldwork complete, he was a celebrity. The widely acclaimed author of
Mountaineering
and tough-minded hero of the diamond hoax seemed the vigorous archetype of a new American man. “He could do so easily what I could not do at all,” remarked the historian Hubert Howe Bancroft; “he was so young, with such an elastic athletic brain, trained to do his most ambitious bidding, with such a well-employed past, a proud present and a brilliant future, and withal such a modest bearing and genial kind-heartedness, that I could not but envy him.”
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Henry Adams sensed that same sort of worshipful admiration among King’s friends, but thought King too perfect to envy. “So little egoistic he was that none of his friends felt envy of his extraordinary superiority, but rather groveled before it, so that women were jealous of the power he had over men; but women were many and Kings were one.”
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King’s ebullient, self-confident presence nonetheless masked a more conflicted sense of self. King still worried about the tension between duty and desire, science and money, the pleasures of his social station and the unfading allure of other, less rarefied worlds. And for the next fifteen years, in New York and Washington, in London and Paris, while he moved among the social and political elite looking for ways to live up to his promise, he secretly tested and indulged his desire to be someone free of all the obligations that came with being a model son of Newport (and of Florence King Howland) and one of the most admired scientists in America.

King had never much liked New York. But it made sense to base the survey offices there for the next few years while he and his men finished up their reports. The city put him within reach of the resources he needed to complete his own geological volume and the investors who seemed key to his business ambitions. It stood convenient enough (though not too close) to Newport, where he resettled his mother and her children. And although the city stood far from the site of his own fieldwork, it nonetheless put King within the orbit of a larger world of science. He raked in the honors: membership in the American Philosophical Society, the Geological Society of London, and, in 1876, the National Academy of Sciences, the youngest living person ever elected.
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Science occupied King’s days. He hired a secretary named Edgar Beecher Bronson—fresh from his duties as a court reporter in the trial of Henry Ward Beecher—to take down the words of his growing treatise on geology. But talk occupied his evenings. Dinners at the Knickerbocker Club, the Round Table Club, or the fabled Century Association, which he joined in 1874, drew King into a social world of artists like John La Farge, Eastman Johnson, and Quincy Ward and literary men such as the novelist Bret Harte and Whitelaw Reid, editor of the
Tribune.
The geologist who had passed the better part of a decade dining in simple field camps (albeit in fancy dress) now spent his evenings in rarefied company with the likes of the architect Frederick Law Olmsted; E. L. Godkin, the editor of the
Nation;
and Congressman Abram S. Hewitt, later to be a crucial political ally and the mayor of New York.
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King’s talk dazzled. “The trouble with King,” one Centurion wrote, “is that his description of a sunset spoils the original.”
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