Passing Strange (21 page)

Psychologists say that to be a successful liar, one needs three attributes: the ability to plan ahead, a talent for managing one’s own emotions, and the capacity to read the needs of other people.
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Whether King invented the actual
details
of his alternative identity with careful forethought, the very concept of it suggested advance planning, triggered by his awareness that a public relationship with a black, working-class woman could destroy the web of friendships, familial connections, and business relations that sustained his world. King was a risk taker. But in many respects he remained fundamentally conservative—a dutiful son, loyal friend, and responsible mining expert, reliant on his good name for his livelihood as well as his fundamental sense of self. Quite literally, he could not afford scandal. In concealing his true identity from Ada, he signaled his intention to keep his social world as invisible to her as she would remain to it.

King’s celebrated talent and bravado as a storyteller served him well in this masquerade. He could spin a convincing story for Ada, then turn around and conceal his activities from his friends behind the bluff posturing of a skilled performer. He could displace real emotions as humorous stories, transform painful experiences into entertaining anecdotes. His charm belied his deception. And while that deception served his own need for self-protection, it also suggested a capacity for empathy. Early on, King seemed to intuit what Ada wanted: not just the emotional intimacy of marriage or the financial freedom that might come from a relationship with a workingman, but the relative simplicity of a same-race relationship. Marriage to a very light-skinned person of African American descent would seem to Ada, in her color-conscious world, a step up the social ladder. Marriage to a white man might feel more like trouble.

King had told dissembling stories before, but the false name, coupled with Ada’s presence in his own backyard, made this feint more complicated than his previous cross-class flirtations in London or rural California. There, King could just say good-bye and flee for the familiar, if confining, comforts of home. But as much as he lived anywhere, King now lived in Manhattan, where residential living patterns kept people apart even as work brought them together. Wealth did not insulate one from the poor. Someone like King would have relied on domestic servants and low-wage workers to do his laundry, clean his rooms, cook his food. In the most private of domestic spaces as on the most public of city streets, the well-to-do crossed paths with the working poor. So King would have to be very careful. Once he lied to Ada about his identity, he could not risk seeing her again in the presence of her employers or any of his friends who knew him by his true name. Should they call him “Clarence” or “Clare” instead of “James” or “Jim,” Ada might suspect his deceit. By the same token, if Ada called him “James” or “Mr. Todd” within earshot of his friends, Clarence King would have some serious explaining to do.

 

 

SOMEHOW CLARENCE, AS JAMES, courted Ada, taking advantage of the anonymity of city life to talk in public spaces or to slip off to more private ones where he would not be recognized. King joked to his friends about women, but he remained silent about Ada. Nothing in his surviving correspondence or in the letters of his friends comments on this new woman who had sparked his interest. Somehow, though, the playful banter of a first encounter turned more serious, and the excitement of an initial conversation developed into a pattern of carefully plotted rendezvous. At some point, whether he recognized it or not, King crossed a line. An identity invented to facilitate an evening’s conversation or a series of afternoon walks became more fixed.

Ada’s work gave her little flexibility. But since Clarence King controlled his own time, he could rearrange his schedule, give excuses to friends, travel to a different part of town. Perhaps he ducked out of the Brunswick in the evenings, telling anyone who noticed that it was, as one contemporary memoirist wrote of his own illicit nighttime adventures, “a perambulation to obviate insomnia.”
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Since he kept no regular office hours, King could also step out between prearranged meetings at his clubs to meet Ada during the days, shedding one identity and assuming another. Ada could meet James in public places during her time off, or perhaps slip out the back door in the evenings to visit when her workday ended.

Like secret lovers in any large city, they might paradoxically find the most privacy in the busiest of public spaces. There they could feign ignorance of each other or disappear into the crowd if they spied a familiar face. In 1888 people of African descent made up less than 2 percent of the population of New York County.
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But in a dense metropolitan area, even one with ethnically segregated neighborhoods, people of all different backgrounds would be found together on the sidewalks, in the markets and the parks, on the trolleys and the elevated trains that whisked New Yorkers up and down Manhattan’s streets. Clarence and Ada could hide together in plain sight. That they should hide at all, of course, would have been King’s idea. Ada had no reason to doubt that James Todd was not the man he claimed to be. Why worry about being seen with James, the fair-complected Pullman porter? She might have invited him to visit with her at her aunt’s house or in the home of another friend. But King would have worried. He probably insisted on meeting Ada far from the neighborhood where she worked, lest gossip get back to her employers or King see people he knew, and far from his residence at the Brunswick Hotel, where Ada’s appearance would attract attention and he might be addressed by his real name. The clubs where he conducted most of his social transactions were out of the question as rendezvous sites. Even wives were not welcomed there. In King’s everyday world of upscale residential hotels and elite clubs, most black women were servants.

For a domestic servant like Ada, the meetings with James might seem to be a pleasurable break from a life defined by the tedium of work, providing a few hours a week in which to live beyond the watchful eyes of her employers and imagine a different world, even fantasize about a home of her own. Returning to her workplace after visiting with James Todd, she might tell her fellow servants all about her new gentleman friend or take the children out so that she could gossip with the other nursemaids in the neighborhood. James Todd was nearly twenty years older than she, and he likely struck her as a stable man. After all, he was a Pullman porter, a job that put him among the elite of the black working class, with the possibility of grasping a middle-class life. In Manhattan, where her own employment possibilities seemed so limited, James Todd had made quite a success of himself.

James Todd likely found the meetings a bit more fraught, even dangerous. It was not just the anxiety of running into an acquaintance or surprising a close friend. He also had to worry about Ada’s learning of his deceit. Even the simplest conversation with her would carry its hazards of disclosure, causing Ada to wonder just who he truly was. As James Todd, King would have to conceal his worldliness, account for his past without mentioning his family, dissemble about his friends, his politics, his cultural tastes. Merely accounting for his daily whereabouts would require a constant exercise of the imagination. He would have to lie about his day at work, lie about where he ate, finesse the truth about what he had seen, whom he had talked to, where he had been since Ada saw him last. The little lies would build on one another, the untruths slowly taking on a recognizable shape of their own.

Having a secret can be fundamental to a healthy sense of self, a way to distinguish oneself from others while crafting an independent identity.
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King’s secrets, however, went well beyond the run-of-the-mill sort that might protect a friend or conceal an embarrassment. They went to the very core of who he was. While Ada might have raced home to talk to her girl-friends, he probably returned to his clubs in silence, burying deep the pleasures of the intimate emotional world he and Ada were building together. Psychologists describe the type of person best equipped to pull off a double life as an intelligent, highly personable high achiever: a person much like Clarence King. Skilled in the psychological tools of “repression,” such a person can block out the demands and complications of one life while pursuing another.
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Certainly, as King moved with increasing frequency between his two different worlds, he had to police and enforce the rigid boundaries that separated one life from the other. His friends might shrug off his fling with an Indian woman in the high meadows of California as a kind of romantic lark. But his relationship with Ada would seem more unsettling because of her race, her class, and her residence in New York.

A segmented life is not inherently disruptive or destabilizing. The ability to juggle different roles at home and work, for example, generally signals a healthy adaptation to the demands of distinctive social environments. But a
secret
double life is different. Ralph W. Tyler, a U.S. Navy auditor and self-described mulatto, wrote in 1909 about the anxiety that shaped the lives of the “colored” people he knew who passed as white. “At all times fear,—the fear of detection, haunts one. No thief hugging his ill-gotten gains; no murderer, fleeing from city to city, like a deer chased by the hounds, passing night after night in but fitful slumbers, ever was haunted more by fear of discovery, or lived in greater suspense.”
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When the disclosure of one facet of a person’s identity threatens to destroy another—when, for example, the discovery of an ethnic or racial heritage endangers one’s family, livelihood, or personal safety—the creative satisfaction and thrill of a double life can be tempered by fear.

 

 

KING’S INVENTED IDENTITY AS James Todd, the black Pullman porter, hinged not just on one lie but on a cluster of related, duplicitous assertions. First, a name. Pseudonyms seemed to run in the family. King’s grandmother Sophia Little published her earliest poetry as “Rowena”; his mother later disguised her name and gender by publishing poems as “Ellery Boyd.”
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And King had been in on the secret that the “Frances Snow Compton” who wrote the novel
Esther
(1884) was really his dear friend Henry Adams.
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He understood that names could mask the connections between public and private selves.

It is difficult to know, however, whether King selected his pseudonym in the excited rush of the moment as he approached Ada Copeland, or whether he had used it before, when out slumming in the urban night. “James” might spring to mind as his father’s name, and a sly way to honor his parent while shedding his surname. It would also pay secret tribute to some of his closest companions: his boyhood friend James Gardiner, his colleague James Hague, and James Marryatt, his Jamaican-born servant of the survey years. The names “James” and “Jim” would feel familiar to him. And because a good number of Todds lived in New York, the first and last names would together seem unremarkable, unlikely to attract special scrutiny or unwanted attention.
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And yet the name bespeaks a certain calculation, or perhaps an unconscious choice, to preserve a link to his real identity. Because for all the James Todds King never met, there was one he likely knew.

In 1888, when Clarence King became “James Todd,” Professor James Edward Todd was teaching natural history at Tabor College in Iowa and working for the United States Geological Survey during the summers as a seasonal field employee. A graduate of Oberlin College with a keen interest in the relationship between science and religion, Todd had studied at King’s alma mater, Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, in 1870-71. There Todd likely got an earful about the architect of the Fortieth Parallel survey. Less than a decade out of school himself, King was already among the school’s most distinguished alumni, the very model of the scientist the students hoped to be.
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By 1888, King surely knew of Todd as well, through conversations with his former Yale professors or less directly through the twenty articles Todd had published in leading scientific journals such as the
American Naturalist
and the
Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
King’s old Washington colleagues had probably mentioned Todd, too; the young geologist had worked for the USGS for seven years, doing summer fieldwork chiefly in the Dakotas, virtually from the moment King left the agency.
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In calling himself James Todd, King seemingly borrowed the identity of a junior colleague whose career, from earnest student to ambitious government geologist, shadowed his own.
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King might feel exhilarated by the possibility of self-reinvention, but for his new identity he took the name of someone whose past he knew well enough to wear like a comfortable old coat.

 

 

A NEW NAME ALONE, though, would not constitute a new identity. King’s masquerade required more than a simple pseudonym. A Yale-educated government geologist could not slip easily into Ada Copeland’s world, and James Todd would need to account for his work, his background, his class: all the little details and stories and habits of character that add up to the picture of a full human life. Some years later, in “South of the Slot” (1909), the writer Jack London tried to imagine how a University of California sociologist could pass as a worker in the “great labour-ghetto” of San Francisco in order to gather information for a book. It could be “monstrously difficult to get along among the working people,” he thought. His protagonist “was not used to their ways, and they certainly were not used to his. They were suspicious. He had no antecedents. He could talk of no previous jobs. His hands were soft. His extraordinary politeness was ominous.” To account for his presence, London’s character offers himself up as a man who has seen better days.
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