Passing Strange (42 page)

 

 

IN THE DECADES FOLLOWING World War I, official records and the rare newspaper story provide the only glimpse of life inside the King household, offering little more than a brief glance at family life. The federal census agent who called on Ada’s Kalmia Street house in January 1920 recorded the family in the census as “Kings” for the very first time. The elder Ada reported that she owned her house, that she had no job, that she was a fifty-seven-year-old widow. The census agent recorded her as “mulatto,” the first and only time her race would be noted this way, whether by her own prompting, the agent’s own visual determination, or a decision based upon the examination of her fair-skinned children. All three of Ada’s surviving children lived with her; whatever had impelled her to stray so far from home had not been passed down to the next generation. The younger Ada worked as a “forelady” in a nut factory. Sidney did manual labor for a building contractor. Wallace, a pianist, picked up jobs from time to time by playing in a band. Grace’s children, Clarence and Thelma Burns, now nine and five, lived there as well. One black family lived down the street, but most of the residents of this solidly working-class block were native-born whites.
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The only evidence of difficulties within the Kalmia Street household comes from later court documents. On September 22, 1921, Ada King appeared before the supreme court of Kings County, New York, to ask that her eldest son, Sidney, age twenty-eight, be declared incompetent. The emotional instability that surfaced during his brief military career now manifested itself as schizophrenia. Ada could no longer care for him, particularly with small grandchildren around the house. The court ordered Sidney institutionalized at Kings Park State Hospital and appointed his mother as his legal guardian. She deposited a small sum of money for Sidney’s benefit and use, and every year for the next twenty-one years, the hospital accounted for the funds. Sidney would never leave the hospital. He remained there, an “inmate” as the census records called him, until his death in 1942.
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With Grace dead and Sidney institutionalized, Ada’s remaining children, Ada and Wallace, remained close to home. Indeed, they would never leave. Their own modest incomes supplemented the monthly checks that Ada continued to receive through the Legal Aid Society. Her efforts to learn the true source of that money went nowhere. After Gardiner’s death in 1912, the money came as regularly as before, and some unknown source continued to pay the taxes for her house. With this outside help, Ada King raised her grandchildren, giving them the accoutrements of a middle-class life that she could never have imagined for herself as a young girl in Reconstruction Georgia.

There are few traces of the King family in the historical records until November 13, 1929, when the younger Ada King found herself swept up in a murder dubbed a “petter’s shooting” by the local tabloid. She was in a parked sedan in a deserted section of Bayside, Queens, with a married used-car dealer named John Ancona, when several men drove by and “without warning fired a fusillade of shots.” Seriously wounded in the abdomen, Ancona kept his nerve and told Ada to “beat it and keep out of trouble.” For a day, he lingered, insisting to authorities that he had been alone in his car. But after the police found Ada and took her to the dying man’s bedside, Ancona confessed that they had been together. The police questioned their families, and while they detained Ada as a material witness to the shooting on $10,000 bail, they sought her former husband, Virgil Hite, for questioning. She had not seen him in four years, Ada insisted. In a photograph that appeared in the
New York Daily News,
Ada looked more like a proper middle-class matron than a woman caught up in a sordid nighttime shooting. Stylishly dressed in a knee-length dress, dark pumps, and a fur-trimmed coat, she sits erect in a chair, legs together, hands folded neatly on her lap. She appears to have a fair complexion, and her wavy shoulder-length hair lends her a youthful look. Through dark round-rimmed glasses she looks calmly at her unseen interlocutor. The police released Ada; the murder remained unsolved.
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Several years later, when news of the elder Ada’s marriage to Clarence King became public, the black press in New York resurrected the story of the Ancona murder. A reporter for the
Amsterdam News
suggested that the younger Ada “inherited her mother’s fateful lure for white men—a lure which was even intensified, some admirers believe, by the lighter complexion for which she thanked her white father.” He fashioned Ada—and by association her mother—as a temptress. The “same fascination” that drew Clarence King “to the arms of a chocolate-hued servant girl in the ’80s of the last century,” the reporter declared, “was transmitted to a daughter of the mixed marriage and lured a white father of five children, forty years later, to his death.”
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A few months after the Ancona incident, in April 1930, a federal census agent again captured a spare portrait of the King family: Clarence King’s widow, Ada, lived in the house on Kalmia Avenue (Kalmia Street had been renamed a year or two before) with her daughter, Ada, her son Wallace, and her grandchildren, Clarence and Thelma Burns. The older Ada did not work. The younger Ada worked as a saleslady in what the census agent called an “apartment store.” Wallace played jazz piano in a band, picking up gigs in restaurants. Clarence, now nineteen, worked as a showroom clerk. Thelma, about to turn sixteen, attended school. In response to the census agent’s question, the family replied, yes, they owned a radio. But when asked whether she owned or rented the house, the elder Ada said she lived there in “trust,” implying that someone owned the house
for
her. In 1910 and again in 1920, she had told census agents she owned the house herself. The change seems to signal her growing awareness that something remained irregular about the title to her home. She had not, after all, ever received the deed that Gardiner had promised.
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But the most peculiar part of the 1930 census records concerns the family’s racial designations: every member of Ada’s immediate family was classified “Negro.” The rules had changed again. In 1910 and 1920, when the official racial categories for the federal census distinguished between “Black” and “Mulatto,” the King children had been recorded as persons of mixed race. But the option to claim a mixed racial heritage disappeared in 1930, not to be regained until 2000. In 1930 any visible trace of African blood made one “Negro” or “Black.” And so, the younger Ada, who was once characterized as a mulatto and considered fair enough to marry as a white woman, became a “Negro” again in the eyes of the federal government, as did Thelma, who had three white grandparents, and Clarence, who likely had four.
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More than forty years earlier, Clarence King had exploited this particular system of racial categorization to declare himself a black man, despite his very light complexion. And now his children and grandchildren became “Negroes” in the eyes of the census taker, not necessarily because of their own appearance but because of their evident familial connection to the dark-complected Ada King.

Only Sidney—an “inmate” in a state mental institution—acquired the racial designation his sisters had once claimed for themselves and the unmarked status his father had wished for all his children. When the census takers at the state hospital recorded the name of Sidney King, a veteran of a segregated military regiment, they carefully noted his race: “white.” Whether they actually observed him or interviewed him remains unknown. But certainly they did not see him by his mother’s side when they assigned him a race.
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EVEN IN HER HOUSE of adult children, the elder Ada called the shots. Thelma later recalled her as a regal and demanding woman, a stickler for propriety and formal good manners. Wallace wore a hat and a tie whenever he left the house; the younger Ada never went out without a hat, a purse, and gloves. Wallace, in particular, demanded the same of his niece, insisting that Thelma, too, never leave the house without a pair of ladylike gloves and neatly done-up hair. One summer, when she was around sixteen, Thelma went to Missouri to visit her father. For several weeks she appeared as an extra in his carnival sideshow, obligingly permitting herself to be “sawed in half ” day after day, as James Burns tried to lure paying customers with a glimpse of a mysterious animal that had “killed a flock of chicken and 2 of his dogs.” But back at the Kalmia Avenue house, a stricter decorum prevailed. Thelma took ballet and tap-dancing lessons and, to improve her posture, walked around the house with a book balanced on her head.
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At some point, Ada left the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church in which she had been married, perhaps because the small denomination had no congregation in Flushing. But she had a deep and abiding familiarity with the Bible, and family members recalled how she often cited her favorite religious injunctions: “Do unto others ...” and “The meek shall inherit the earth.” In Flushing Ada joined a Catholic church, and she raised her grandchildren as Catholics, insisting that Thelma sing in the church choir and participate in various youth activities. Thelma’s daughter would later recall that after church on Sundays the King family would sit down to a formal supper, with food that evoked Ada’s southern girlhood: fried chicken and biscuits or baked chicken with dressing. Ada raised her own chickens in the backyard and she killed them herself. Raising and butchering poultry, a familiarity with the Bible, wine-making, and an insistence on a strict regimen of home remedies—all offer tantalizing glimpses of the hidden world of Ada’s Georgia youth. In the house on Kalmia Avenue, vestiges of the rich and distinctive African American culture of southern cotton country mixed with the trappings of Ada’s upwardly mobile social aspirations and, later, with the stirrings of the new black world emerging in Harlem in northern Manhattan. Wallace learned to play the piano, and jazz and honky-tonk often resounded from the neat two-story house. And as Thelma grew older, she sometimes slipped away from her grandmother’s orderly home to ride the subways to Harlem to dance at the Cotton Club, finding in that racially mixed club and others the sort of allure that had once beckoned her grandfather Clarence King.
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While she raised her young grandchildren, Ada dropped her persistent efforts to press for money from her husband’s estate. She had been threatened before and understood that the stakes were high. She could not afford to lose her monthly stipends from the Legal Aid Society. But during the mid- 1920s, she again contacted an attorney to explore the possibility of mounting a case. She turned to a white man this time. Martin W. Littleton Jr. was the son of the famously conservative (and famously high-priced) attorney who had defended D. W. Griffith’s
Birth of a Nation
to its New York critics and earned recognition from
Time
magazine as “one of the world’s richest lawyers.”
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The elder Mr. Littleton had successfully defended Harry K. Thaw, the accused killer of architect Stanford White, and Harry F. Sinclair, who was charged with bribing Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall in the Teapot Dome scandal of the mid-1920s. The
New York Times
deemed him “an outspoken foe of socialism, communism and radicalism in general.”
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But his namesake was just starting his legal practice in 1924 and took on less high-profile cases. Sometime between 1924 and 1929, when he became assistant district attorney in Nassau County, Martin W. Littleton Jr. became another in Ada King’s long string of attorneys. Like all the rest, he apparently counseled her to drop her case.
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In 1931, with her grandchildren poised to move out on their own, Ada, now close to seventy, finally found an attorney to press the claim to her husband’s estate that she had first tried to initiate almost three decades before. Her lawyer later explained why it had taken her so long. “It must be remembered,” Herman Schwartz wrote, “that the plaintiff, Ada King, was a negress and her children of half blood, and that the children were small and the needs for keeping them clothed and educated were great, and for that reason the enforcement of their claim was delayed.... After the children had reached maturity and it was possible to proceed without endangering their means of livelihood, this action was begun, especially as Ada King is getting on in years, and may not have much longer to struggle with the ingratitude that the white persons on earth show.”
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ON A COOL, CLEAR AFTERNOON IN LATE FALL 1933, ADA KING finally got her day in court.
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On Monday, November 20, she sat before Justice Bernard Shientag of the New York Supreme Court and, in a quavering voice “filled with emotion,” told her story.
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She appeared nervous, a reporter noted, and the court “had to urge her to speak more slowly and distinctly.”
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But she began at the beginning: her meeting with Clarence King, their marriage in 1888, the birth of their five children (she gave a self-deprecating chuckle as she confused their birth dates). She described their happy family life in the big home on North Prince Street, where servants helped her run the household. And she related in some detail what her husband told her as he prepared to leave for Arizona in a futile attempt to recover his health. King explained that he had left $80,000 for her and the children with his close friend Mr. Gardiner. “He hoped he wouldn’t die,” Ada recalled, “because he had a great interest in his children and had an education planned for them.”
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Ada King carefully examined the letters from her husband that had been introduced as evidence. She verified King’s handwriting in a handful of original manuscripts and scrutinized the content of the typed transcripts also submitted by the defense. And then, as one reporter put it, “a score of torrid love letters, allegedly from King to his dusky wife were read into the records.”
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The case really hinged on financial issues—King’s debts, the disposition of his estate, his verbal promises of a trust fund. But Ada had to prove that she was married to Clarence King, and she wanted to show the world that he loved her.