Passing Strange (47 page)

King lied because he wanted to and he lied because he had to. He loved Ada Copeland, but to marry her in a public way—as the white man known as Clarence King—would have created a scandal, cost him his friends, devastated his mother, and destroyed his livelihood. It would also have created an aura of scandal around his wife and children. In some ways, his deceptions made their lives easier. James Todd could leave his wife and children at home and then, as Clarence King, find the work (or borrow the money) to give them a comfortable life. Unaware of the scope of his secrets, Ada could move confidently toward black middle-class respectability. King’s secrets protected him, but they protected her as well. Nonetheless, those secrets proved hazardous. King’s double life demanded an inventiveness, an attention to detail, and a watchfulness almost exhausting to contemplate: his breakdown in 1893 provides but a glimpse of the hidden costs.

King perhaps hoped that his deathbed confession would free him and his wife from the consequences of his deceit. But his secrets weighed heavily on his family long after his death. James Gardiner and John Hay conspired together to ensure that the world would never learn of Ada King and her children. For more than thirty years, Hay and his family paid hush money to prevent Ada from speaking about her relationship to their famous friend. And even the Hays’ generosity became the stuff of secrets, as the attorneys who represented Gardiner’s heirs and executors in the legal battles of the early 1930s fought to keep hidden the name of Ada’s mysterious benefactors.

For the King children and grandchildren, however, Clarence King’s true identity proved a less burdensome secret than Ada King’s race. They always honored Ada as the family matriarch; until her death she remained the center of the extended family world. But outside the home, in a twentieth-century America still riven by racism, the King descendants struggled with the meanings of Ada’s racial heritage. Her dark skin, more than her husband’s duplicity, became their cross to bear. Ada might have been the parent who loved them and raised them and helped them grow up feeling safe and secure, but it was Clarence who bequeathed to them the light complexions that let them reach for the privileges of whiteness in a race-conscious nation. The two King daughters concealed Ada’s race in order to marry as white women. And when Ada’s granddaughter, Thelma, married a white man, she concealed her grandmother’s race from her suburban neighbors. Fearful of the “human stain,” worried that her own racial heritage might show itself in the face of her children, she adopted two white infants. Clarence and Ada King had five children, but Thelma was their only surviving grandchild by blood. When she adopted children rather than having her own, Clarence King’s dream of creating his own mixed American race met its end.

 

 

AFTER KING’S CLANDESTINE MARRIAGE came to public light in 1933, his biographers steered away from it, and even his most recent ones have followed suit.
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Concerned more with King as an exemplar of American science than with what his life might reveal about the nation’s complicated politics of race and class, they have focused mainly on his professional career. They have asked questions about King’s contributions to the history of science, his role in the westward expansion of the late nineteenth century, his place in an elite circle of American letters. Now, however, in a historical moment when Americans find it easier to talk about race, to query the ways in which it has shaped and defined so many American lives, King’s private affairs—rather than his scientific accomplishments—seem the richer vein to mine. As we ask new questions of that private life, our research inevitably takes new turns. Only now, then, does King’s own racial passing come to light. And only now can we begin to discern the ways in which King’s extraordinary life might help us think about broader social issues in late-nineteenth-century America: the possibilities and limitations of self-fashioning, the simultaneous rigidity and porousness of racial definitions, the fluidity of urban life.

In the end, however, this is not just the story of a celebrated white explorer who passed across the color line but also a tale about his wife. Ada Copeland Todd King might seem the chief victim of King’s deceptions and of all the secrets that ensued. But she refused to play the victim. With long and steady persistence, she brought her marriage to public attention and left behind the evidence that lets us now move beyond the old questions about King’s professional life to pose a new set of queries about the larger meanings of his private actions. In that New York courtroom Ada King offered up her hints, giving brief accounts of her wedding, her children, her family homes, and her long search for legal justice. And there, she set before the world the fading love letters her husband had sent to her so many decades before. By the time Ada steps, however briefly, into the public eye, she has been widowed for more than three decades. We glimpse her as a woman in her seventies, a practical woman working through the legal system to assert her rightful name, give her children their true familial identity, and claim the trust fund she believed to be hers. She had scant time for sentiment. She expressed no bitterness toward the man who deceived her by presenting himself as a Pullman porter and who, even on his deathbed, took no legal steps to protect her and her children. She simply sought to dispel the tangle of secrets that had shaped and constricted her family life since the day she married the man called James Todd.

Ada King’s life might have begun in obscurity, in the rural cotton country of west Georgia, but in the court records and newspaper accounts of her 1933 trial she lives more vividly than her once well-known husband. Here, the trajectories of their separate lives cross, and Ada King becomes a figure more easily understood than the husband glimpsed only through memories handed down from his devoted friends. Three decades of financial support had hinged on her silence, but she would be silent no more.

 

 

THE STORY OF CLARENCE AND ADA KING is about love and longing that transcend the historical bounds of time and place. It is a story about the struggle between desire and duty, about the ways in which two people can rise above social expectations, about the ways in which both love and friendship can compel one to suspend disbelief or take crazy risks. But it is also a peculiarly American story that could take root only in a society where one’s racial identity determined one’s legal rights and social opportunities. At every turn it exposes the deep fissures of race and class that cut through the landscape of American life, cracks as deep and enduring as the geological features that the explorer Clarence King once mapped on his treks across the continent—rifts that are, in the end, even harder to explain.

THE STORY OF CLARENCE KING AND ADA COPELAND PIQUED MY curiosity many years ago when I first stumbled upon the passing reference in Thurman Wilkins’s biography of King. How could a prominent figure like King lead a double life for thirteen years without ever being detected? For years, I encouraged my students to investigate the story, but no one pursued it. It haunted me. In our own age, the fleeting indiscretions of public figures attract an almost microscopic scrutiny. What was there about the late-nineteenth-century world that allowed King to pull off his secret life? I logged on to the recently digitized census records to see whether I might be able to find any trace of King’s secret family. Within moments, I found the 1900 census records that described King, living under his pseudonym of “James Todd,” as a black man. The possibility that King might have engaged in racial passing had never occurred to me. Nor, I think, to anyone else. I decided to write this book.

I began this book during a sabbatical year in 2004-5 as the Frederick W. Beinecke Senior Fellow in Western Americana at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. There could be no better place to work, and I am particularly grateful to George Miles, the library’s curator of Western Americana, for his longtime friendship and support. My gratitude extends to the entire Beinecke staff, especially Frank Turner and Una Belau. The Beinecke Fellowship also gave me a connection at Yale to the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders, where Johnny Faragher, Jay Gitlin, and Edith Rotkopf served as my hosts, and I engaged in many useful conversations about this work with Lamar Center fellow Barbara Berglund. At Yale I also benefited from conversations with Jean-Christophe Agnew, Glenda Gilmore, Howard Lamar, Joanne Meyerowitz, David Musto, and Laura Wexler.

A research grant from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History helped jump-start my research in New York City archives, and a visiting fellow’s connection to the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale helped facilitate my access to other resources. I thank the center’s director, David Blight, for his helpful comments on several portions of this manuscript.

Everyone who teaches at Amherst College has reason to be grateful for the school’s generous support of faculty scholarship, through the acquisition of library resources as well as through more direct financial support. I am deeply indebted to the wonderful staff of the Frost Library who patiently and generously responded to my many acquisition requests and research queries, and I extend particular thanks to Susan Edwards for her help with my many questions about the federal census. Amherst also offered me financial support in the form of a senior sabbatical fellowship and a grant from the Amherst College Faculty Research Award Program, as funded by the H. Axel Schupf ’57 Fund for Intellectual Life.

A fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation provided a glorious month at the foundation’s Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, where I drafted the final portions of this manuscript. I am grateful to Pilar Palacia and Elena Ongania for facilitating my stay, and to all of my fellow residents—particularly Susan Crile, Mary Brown Bullock, Brad Leithauser, and Mary Jo Salter—for their stimulating thoughts about my project.

I have also benefited from the comments of colleagues who offered feedback on earlier presentations of this work at the Gilder Lehrman Center brown-bag lunch series and the Lamar Center lecture program at Yale, the American History Workshop at New York University, and the City Seminar program at Columbia University, where Ken Cobb offered particularly useful suggestions. Colleagues also offered helpful advice in an Amherst College faculty work-in-progress seminar, and there I thank Martha Umphrey, Marisa Parham, and Rhonda Cobham-Sander. To my fellow seminar participants Hilary Moss, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, and Martha Saxton, each of whom read and offered comments on additional parts of this manuscript, I extend particular thanks for their friendship and advice. Several others have read and commented on portions of this book, and for their generosity and thought-provoking questions I extend thanks to Carol Clark, Sage Sohier, Jim Grossman, and Karen Merrill. Along the way, I also benefited from exchanges with other colleagues at Amherst and elsewhere, including Marcy Sacks, Laura Lovett, Margaret Hunt, Bill Taubman, Kim Townsend, Rich Halgin, Nancy McWilliams, Clyde Milner, Carol O’Connor, Natalie Dykstra, James Gregory Moore, and Eric Paddock.

Ann Fabian, Maria Montoya, and Virginia Scharff—wonderful friends and smart colleagues all—more than once helped me think through many of the pieces of this story, and I am grateful for their generous readings. A few brave souls actually tackled this entire manuscript and provided extensive feedback that much improved the book. Clifford M. Nelson, of the United States Geological Survey, patiently read my entire draft, gently setting me straight on matters relating to King’s professional career. Hugh Hawkins, Dan Koffsky, Daniel Giat, and Martha Hodes also read the entire manuscript, and each took time to give me a careful critique of the work. My readers have all served as reminders that writing is not really the solitary task it so often seems. I have felt buoyed by my team in countless ways.

Several students provided me with useful research assistance. Caitlin Crowell offered valuable help at Yale, and at Amherst I received assistance from Katie Hudson, Mirza Ali Khan, and especially Mahesha Subbaraman. For additional research help, I am grateful to Adam Sandweiss Horowitz, Isabelle Smeall, James L. Gehrlich, Shawn Alexander, Alan Swedlund, Lewis Baldwin, Ed Townsley, Rodger Andrew, Neilson Abeel, Judith Schiff, Peter Blodgett, Ken Thomas, and Randall Burkett. A special word of thanks goes to Kaye Lanning Minchew and Forrest Clark Johnson III of the Troup County Archives in La Grange, Georgia, for assisting me on a research trip and responding to many subsequent queries.

My Santa Fe friends have offered moral support, useful feedback, and occasional lodging as I’ve worked on this project, and I send my thanks to David Margolis, Jeannie Moss, Charlene Cerny, Joe Chipman, Carol Mothner, Daniel Morper, Joan Maynard, and Jerry Richardson. A special word of gratitude goes to David Anderson and Phoebe Girard, who provided me with a wonderful writing hideaway as I completed this book.

My literary agent, Wendy Strothman, has been a good friend and supportive reader since first we met, and I am grateful to her and her associate, Dan O’Connell, for their ongoing help. At The Penguin Press, I received valuable editorial advice from Emily Loose and Scott Moyers, and give special thanks to my editor, Vanessa Mobley, and her assistant, Nicole Hughes, who helped shape this manuscript for publication.

Fortunate, indeed, is the historian lucky enough to find anyone else equally excited about hunting down the elusive clue. Josh Garrett-Davis, my former student at Amherst College, caught the bug early on and quickly proved an invaluable partner in this project, helping me trace the King family’s movements across the changing landscape of Brooklyn and Queens. While Josh helped me in New York, Lea Dowd and her granddaughter Sarah welcomed me into their Georgia home and became my guides to the landscape of Ada Copeland’s childhood. I thank Lea, too, for taking me with her to a Copeland family homecoming in the summer of 2004; it was a memorable experience for me, and I am grateful to the assembled family members who so patiently indulged this interloper’s requests for stories.