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

By Martha A. Sandweiss

Book Overview

Read Martha A. Sandweiss's posts on the Penguin Blog

The secret double life of the man who mapped the American West, and the woman he loved

Clarence King was a late nineteenth-century celebrity, a brilliant scientist and explorer once described by Secretary of State John Hay as "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-the first as the prominent white geologist and writer Clarence King, and a second as the black Pullman porter and steelworker 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. In Passing Strange, noted historian Martha A. Sandweiss tells the dramatic, distinctively American tale of a family built along the fault lines of celebrity, class, and race- a story that spans the long century from Civil War to civil rights.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 014311686X
• ISBN13: 9780143116868
• Release Date: January 2010
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.4"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Love and Deception

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

Love across boundaries

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 brought to life in a lively, real and bizarre accounting

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.