Passing Strange (2 page)

 

 

KING AND COPELAND CAME from different worlds. Because of that, and because King was almost nineteen years older, they experienced the same historical events in different ways. The Civil War, for example, directly shaped every aspect of Ada’s earliest years. It drew the local white farmers off to war, produced shortages of clothing and food, and led indirectly to ever more ruthless and restrictive slave codes. For King, the conflict unfolded as a more distant event that attracted friends and relatives to military duty. But he did not want to fight and he went west, in part, to avoid the killing fields of war. The Civil War thus disrupted their separate lives but created opportunities for the two of them in vastly different ways. The war’s end meant emancipation for Ada’s family and the start of their new life as freedpeople. For King, it meant an era of renewed government funding for science that made possible his career as a geologist-explorer. Postwar industrialization opened up yet more work opportunities for King as a mining consultant but offered Copeland few new economic opportunities in rural Georgia, where her options remained restricted by race and gender.

Race, more than anything else, played out differently for Ada Copeland and Clarence King. Copeland’s dark complexion circumscribed where she could work, how she could travel, how safe she could feel. King professed a lifelong fascination with dark-complected peoples. Their skin tone seemed to him exotic and fascinating, precisely because it hinted of worlds so different from the convention-bound society of Newport in which he was raised. Like many white Americans, he understood race as something that belonged to other people, and he romanticized dark skin color as the mark of a more natural and sensual life. Ada, however, knew race to be more than an abstract cultural idea. For her it had very real social and economic consequences.

Even the city of New York, where they made their home, meant different things to King and Copeland. Clarence saw it as a nexus of economic power and social prestige, a place where he could live on his good name and past achievements and have access to the moneymen who might bankroll his mining ventures. He could live as a celebrity in New York—people would acknowledge him there as the famed leader of the U.S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, the man who mapped the West. They would know him as the “King of Diamonds” who exposed a fraudulent gem mine; recognize him as the first director of the United States Geological Survey; laud him as the author of a popular book on mountaineering and as one of the most charming dinner guests to be found in all Manhattan. Ada, however, embraced New York less as a place that acknowledged her past than as the place that let her leave it behind. In New York no one need know about her girlhood in slavery, the soul-crushing poverty of her rural life, the limited options available to a black girl of ambition in western Georgia. The city offered her a stage upon which she could reinvent herself.

Eventually, King would reinvent himself there, too. Racial passing itself was not rare. Many Americans with an African American ancestor passed as white, seeking the greater freedom of movement and choice accorded white Americans in the late nineteenth century. They might cross over the color line for good, never looking back. Or they might cross it every day, living in a black world and working in a white one. Their passing might be an act of careful calculation or, for a lighter-skinned person, it could be inadvertent: an onlooker, not detecting any hint of African heritage in someone’s light-colored skin, might simply begin to treat him or her as white.

The practice of passing generally involves adopting a particular identity to move
toward
greater legal and social privilege. It might mean taking on a different gender, or ethnic or national identity, but it most often involves the assumption of a different racial identity. And since, in the United States, social privilege has been associated with lighter-colored skin, passing usually entails concealing one’s African American heritage to assume a white identity. The entire practice hinges on a peculiar idea. Since one’s race could be determined by heritage as well as appearance, very light-colored skin did not necessarily make one a “white” person. In the aftermath of emancipation, a host of laws sprang up throughout the Deep South clarifying just what defined a person as “black” or “Negro,” almost always for the purpose of restricting his rights. In 1896 the Supreme Court of the United States upheld these laws in the case of
Plessy v. Ferguson,
which affirmed that people with one “black” great-grandparent could, for all intents and purposes, be considered black themselves, no matter what they looked like. This peculiarly American idea came to be known as “hypodescent.” “One drop of black blood” trumped seven drops of “white.”

Clarence King took advantage of these distinctive American ideas about race to pass the other way across the color line, claiming African ancestry when he had none at all. Grasping that appearance alone did not determine his racial identity, the fair-haired, blue-eyed King presented himself as a “black” man named James Todd. Rather than moving
toward
legal and social privilege, he moved
away
from it. He glimpsed something he sought in Ada Copeland and her African American world, and he acted to seize the promise of that rich emotional life.

Other Americans have crossed the color line from white to black—to join a family, to evade antimiscegenation laws, to claim some other sort of political or economic advantage. But Clarence King stands out because of his prominence as a public figure. This was a white man who dined at the White House, belonged to Manhattan’s most elite clubs, and parlayed his privileged upbringing and Ivy League education into a career as an eminent scientist, writer, and government official. American history holds no comparable tale of a high-profile white man crossing the color line. In an era in which the insidious “one drop of blood” rules consigned many phenotypically “white” Americans to live on the wrong side of the Jim Crow laws, King harnessed Americans’ most deeply held beliefs about race to pass voluntarily—if only part-time—as a “black ” man.

How, one must ask, did he pull it off? And what might we make of it?

At one level, the story of the Todds’ marriage is simply a love story about two people from opposite ends of the American social spectrum who met and married and raised a family. But it also illuminates larger stories about race and class and identity in late-nineteenth-century America, stories that lie at the very core of national thinking about the new social order emerging in the wake of emancipation. That King would
want
to pass in the first place—despite his position of prominence and power—reveals not just his love for Copeland but his awareness that a true interracial marriage would upset both his white world and his wife’s black one. And that he
could
pass across the color line—despite his own visual appearance—illuminates the extraordinary arbitrariness of racial categorization at the end of the nineteenth century. At the very moment that laws sought to make racial categories fixed and unchanging, King showed just how fluid they could be. The laws that pinned racial identities on ancestry rather than appearance paradoxically made it possible for a light-skinned American like King to claim a black identity.

King and Copeland married at a moment when many Americans could not abide a public marriage between a prominent white government scientist and a black woman born into slavery. King’s secrecy speaks to his desire to preserve his reputation. But it speaks also to the very real constraints of public opinion. American society offered no way for Clarence King to maintain both his public career and a life lived in the open with an African American wife and their mixed-race children. Even someone with his education, political savvy, and social cachet could not rise above the powerful racial stereotyping that permeated every aspect of American life. King bought into some of those stereotypes himself, even as he struggled to transcend them and fashion a life unbound by the racial assumptions of the day.

Though American society was far less tolerant of interracial marriage in the Gilded Age than it is now, it nonetheless afforded its citizens more privacy in the conduct of their personal lives. News and information circulated in different ways. King and Copeland married in an era when telegraphs were common but residential telephones were rare; radio and television did not exist; and daily newspapers were plentiful but seldom illustrated. They could carve out for themselves a zone of privacy that seems almost unimaginable today, especially for a public figure like King. The particular structure of New York City also helped them to protect the secrecy of their shared life. Then, as now, New York was a collection of neighborhoods, many defined by the residents’ class or race or national origin. Horse-drawn trolleys and elevated trains let New Yorkers move about from place to place, but in this presubway era, many city residents lived largely within the bounds of their immediate neighborhoods, rarely venturing into worlds where their social class or physical appearance might make them conspicuous. King lived his secret life for thirteen years, and no one, it seems, ever found him out.

 

 

MUCH ABOUT THIS STORY remains unknown and even unknowable. What, for example, did Ada really believe about her husband’s identity? How did Clarence justify to himself deceiving his wife and children? The paucity of historical evidence makes it difficult to track their separate lives and even harder to reconstruct the world they built together or glimpse their innermost thoughts. But most families in late-nineteenth-century New York left behind some traces in the historical records, and this family was no exception. With a careful reading of the surviving evidence and an informed historical imagination, we can at last tell the long-silenced story of Clarence King and Ada Copeland and the world they built together as James and Ada Todd.

PART ONE

Clarence King
and
Ada Copeland

EQUALLY AT HOME IN A REMOTE DESERT FIELD CAMP AND AN elite Manhattan club, Clarence King could plot revolution with a Cuban peasant or deliver a learned lecture at Yale. He cherished his New England heritage but felt drawn to the “silken Latin and meridional temperament.”
¹
He clung to social niceties but loved to flout convention. “King loved paradox,” Henry Adams wrote; “he started them like rabbits, and cared for them no longer, when caught or lost.”
²

Raised in a New England household of bookish women, King became the very model of a hardy western man. He headed west with a Bible, returned east “saturated with the sunshine of the Sierras.”
³
He inspired confidence with his intellect and commanded obedience with his energy. “No one ever saw him lounge or loll or doze—except expressly,” wrote a friend. “His movements were rapid; his step was quick.... He was alertness incarnate.”
⁴
Over drinks in New York drawing rooms, King loved to embellish the stories of his frontier bravery: the tale of the buffalo stampede, the Indian attack, the encounter with a grizzly bear. But this western man in Manhattan delighted in playing the eastern man in Nevada: in the rudest western field camps, he dressed for supper in formal attire. And for all his wandering, he clung to sentimental notions of home. “Repose and calmness are the avenues that lead to Heaven,” he wrote a fellow field geologist in 1873. “The stability of character which comes of settled citizenship should be yours and mine, the humanity and Christianity which ought to be the fruitage of our careers, needs the influence of home and stability.”
⁵

“Paradox . . . enjoyed the hegemony of his mental states,” the critic William Crary Brownell wrote of King. “He had an undoubted predilection for its undoubted stimulus.”
⁶

 

 

KING’S CONTRADICTIONS RAN DEEP. He was a young man of intense faith and poetic yearnings who devoted his life to science; a public figure with democratic instincts who harbored aristocratic aspirations; an open-handed friend who struggled under crushing debt. With a pocket never more than “indifferently lined,” one friend observed, “his was ever the generosity and often the munificence of a prince.”
⁷
Intense bursts of manic energy alternated with bouts of paralyzing melancholia and ill health. And although he could be the most public of men, sometimes he would just disappear. “We seldom met when he had not just come from a distant region or was departing for some other point as far,” a friend recalled. “In the wise, I could not free myself from the illusion that he was a kind of visitor, of a texture differing from that of ordinary Earthdwellers.”
⁸

The novelist William Dean Howells attributed King’s baffling doubleness to the pull between his scientific and literary interests, as if an artistic temperament could excuse quixotic behavior. “There was doubtless something in the exactness of science which formed a pull on his poetic nature strong enough to draw him to the performance from which the vagueness of aesthetic motives and impulses relaxed him.” King acted quickly enough in the scientific realm, Howells thought, but in the rest of his life “he was much controlled by what we may call the literary side of him.”
⁹

That literary side manifested itself in King’s mesmerizing conversation, “iridescent with the imagination of the born romancer.”
¹⁰
“Was there ever so good a talker?” asked William Crary Brownell.
¹¹
A fellow member of New York’s elite Century Association, the journalist Edward Cary, proclaimed King’s talk incomparable. “It was impossible to foresee at what point his tangential fancy would change its course. From the true rhythm of Creole gumbo to the verse of Theocritus, from the origin of the latest
mot
to the age of the globe, from the soar or slump of the day’s market to the method of Lippo Lippi....”
¹²
King never expected his talk to lead to anything, another friend explained. “It was its art that attracted him. He enjoyed ‘travel, not arriving.’ ”
¹³