Passing Strange (22 page)

Clarence King knew something about physical labor, especially mining, and probably had the roughened hands to prove it. But a mining career could not explain James Todd’s presence in New York City. And unlike London’s protagonist, Todd could not afford to be a man so down on his luck. Much as he wished to fit into Ada Copeland’s working-class world, he would want to impress her with his prospects. So he told her he was a Pullman porter.

The fiction would account for his knowledge of distant places, his relative financial well-being, his familiarity with fine things, and his frequent absences from Ada’s life. After all, a Pullman porter’s livelihood depended upon constant movement. As one porter joked, the railroad “makes it possible to have a sleigh ride with your second wife in the City of the ‘Saints’ on Sunday and pick flowers and eat oranges with your first wife in the City of the ‘Angels’ on Tuesday.”
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Since the job literally required one to disappear from home, it offered endless possibilities for deception.

In King’s case, it even let him be deceptive about his race. By claiming to be a Pullman porter, King implicitly affirmed that he was black, whatever the apparent complexion of his skin. For as everyone knew, only black men could work as porters in Mr. Pullman’s sleeping cars.

Anticipating a new market for train travel after the Civil War, George Pullman had established the Chicago-based Pullman Palace Car Company in 1867 to manufacture furnished sleeping and dining cars that he could then rent, fully staffed, to the railroads. And, from the start, he hired only African American men to work as sleeping car porters. Pullman drew many of his employees from among the southern freedmen, whom he thought to be inexpensive, pliant, and eager for work, and he counted on their dark complexions to underscore their subservience to his white passengers. By the late nineteenth century, he probably had more black employees than any other American company, and well into the twentieth century, the job of Pullman porter remained a black man’s job. As Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in 1941 in
Railroad Commission of Texas v. Pullman Co.,
a case that tested the ability of state agencies to impose discriminatory laws based on race, “As is well known, porters on Pullmans are colored.”
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A porter’s jobs could be physically and emotionally demanding. One had to behave obsequiously toward white passengers, especially in the South’s segregated railcars, and cope with long absences from home. “Out of twenty-four hours we get about four hours sleep,” one porter complained in 1885. “We are not allowed a voice in any cases of conductors vs. porters; neither are we allowed to leave the sleeper at eating stations for a warm meal.”
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But for most, the work seemed preferable to their parents’ slave labor or to the repetitive jobs performed by family and friends in fields or factories. The job provided a steady income, an opportunity to travel, and a way to observe a broad spectrum of American life. To Ada’s relatives, left behind in the fields and mills of west Georgia, the job of a Pullman porter would likely seem a ticket to fortune.

King probably settled on the Pullman porter story because it accounted for his frequent absences and affirmed his black heritage. But the romance and adventure of a porter’s life also echoed the excitement of his own earlier days in the West. Nat Love, an ex-slave and former cowboy who found city life “stale and uninteresting,” thought the variety and adventure of his job as a Pullman porter akin to “the excitement and continual action of the range.” Once he “learned the knack of pleasing the greater number of my passengers” and thus increased his earnings, he never looked back. James Todd might make $15 a month as a new porter (not much more than Ada’s salary as a nursemaid), perhaps as much as $40 as a porter in charge of his own car—not even enough to pay Clarence King’s annual club dues.
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But his job let him seem to be a responsible sort of adventurer, someone poised to climb into a black middle class. As a litigant testified more than half a century later, in the 1941 case that challenged the racially driven rules that circumscribed their work, Pullman porters were “pretty high-classed colored men.”
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James Todd would not need to spell out his racial heritage for Ada Copeland. By calling himself a Pullman porter, he signaled his African American ancestry, whether or not he claimed as much in words. But it was a risky move. Pullman put the lightest-skinned African Americans to work as dining car waiters, permitting only those with the darkest skin to work as sleeping car porters .
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King must have presumed that Copeland knew about the racial identity of the porters and had some sense of their social status. But likewise, he seemed to gamble that by virtue of her southern upbringing, dark complexion, and limited financial resources, she had never been in a Pullman sleeping car herself. If she had, she would know that her friend was too light-complected for the job.

King’s white friends read his complexion one way: King’s “blondness was affirmed rather by his blithe blue eyes and fresh tint than by the light hair which was cropped close on the head where it early grew sparser and sparser,” the writer William Dean Howells recalled.
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But Ada likely read his color differently. She probably knew people of African American descent who passed as white in New York and understood that a fair complexion could conceal a mixed racial heritage. One 1921 study estimated that during the 1890s about twenty-five thousand people a year once identified as black or mulatto passed into the white world.
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A 1909 story in New York’s black press reported that Washington, D.C., had “at least one thousand Negroes who pass for white at all times,” with another two thousand passing occasionally.
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Ada’s own dark complexion gave her no flexibility about crossing back and forth across the color line herself. But she would be acquainted with all manner of African Americans and know that their skin could shade in color from very dark to very light.

Thus, if he put on a Pullman porter’s coat—found or purchased on one of his many cross-country trips—King might persuade Copeland he
was
a Pullman porter. And if he was a Pullman porter, he had to be black.

 

 

IN LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA, skin color did not necessarily determine the way in which others perceived one’s racial heritage. Race could also be inferred by language and behavior, by dress and subtle mannerisms. Because the perception of racial heritage depended on social circumstances as well as visual cues, King might behave in ways that suggested an African American heritage, just as fair-skinned persons of African descent might somehow behave “white.” In September 1888, as King played out his own racial masquerade, the
New York Times
reported the tragicomic tale of the white woman in Brooklyn who had “Married a Negro Instead of a Cuban.” After five happy months of marriage to a “swarthy-visaged” Cuban, the young woman found in her husband’s coat “a tintype picture of a fullblooded negro concealed in the lining. Although of a much older man, it bore a strong resemblance to [her husband], and this discovery called to her mind the hitherto unnoticed way in which her husband often defended and upheld the colored race and some peculiarly negro expressions that he often used.” She confronted her husband, who confessed to his “true” race, and “nearly crazed with grief” she now sought a divorce.
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The news story suggested how unstable racial categories could be, how unnerving that race could not be determined by physical appearance alone. The dissembling Cuban
looked
white, but he betrayed his “true” race through particular “expressions.”

Mark Twain satirized this American anxiety about the fluidity of racial boundaries in
Pudd’nhead Wilson,
his 1894 novel about a slave mother who swaps her own infant with her white master’s son. While the slave boy becomes a dandy and studies at Yale, the boy born to privilege grows up a slave. When the deception is revealed, the white boy finds himself “rich and free, but in a most embarrassing situation.... His gait, his attitudes, his gesture, his bearing, his laugh—all were vulgar and uncouth; his manners were the manners of a slave.” His behavior trumped his skin color. Treated like a slave, he behaved like one, and in effect became “black.” “Training is everything,” notes Pudd’nhead Wilson, the novel’s wry commentator. “The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.”
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The idea that social context—rather than heritage—might shape the perception of one’s race upset the biological determinism that lay at the core of American racial thought.

“Any white person—including the lightest blond—can, if he wishes, pass for colored,” the sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton wrote in their study of black Chicago in 1945. Working at a moment when American social scientists took particular interest in the issue of racial mixing, they cited the white social worker in the “Black Belt” whose clients simply assumed she must be black if she worked there, and noted that the sociologist Robert Park twice passed “for a Negro in order to obtain a room in a Negro hotel.”
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Another scholar researching interracial couples in Chicago in the 1930s documented white partners in mixed marriages who concealed their racial heritage in order to live in the black world.
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Blackness could thus be inferred through circumstance, where one worked or lived, for example, or through hearsay about one’s parents or grandparents. “To cross the caste line from the white side would be a relatively easy matter,” wrote the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in 1944, “since in America a Negro is not necessarily supposed to have any Negro features at all.”
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As Walter White, a graduate of the historically black Atlanta University and for a quarter century the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wrote in his 1948 memoir
A Man Called White:
“I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.”
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THESE LATER TWENTIETH-CENTURY STUDIES affirmed what had been true in King’s day as well. In the absence of any
visible
evidence of African American heritage, the
knowledge
(or the very suspicion of knowledge) that one had an African American ancestor—however remote—could relegate one to a public identity as a black person; likewise, it could be a turn of phrase, or even a porter’s uniform. In Jim Crow America, where the so-called one drop of black blood, whether visible or not, could consign one to live on the far side of the color line, everyone had a heightened and attenuated awareness of race. In Ada Copeland’s home state of Georgia, the law was clear: a single black great-grandparent made someone a “colored” person in the eyes of the law; the visible color of his or her skin mattered not at all.
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In New York City in 1888, Clarence King’s fair complexion might, paradoxically, have been almost as persuasive an argument for his African American heritage as a Pullman porter’s coat or a made-up story about his family’s past. Even in the North, where racial divisions remained less sharply etched than in the increasingly rigid racial world of the late-nineteenth-century South, why would anyone that light skinned claim to be a Negro unless he or she truly was? In terms of political rights or social freedoms or economic opportunities, an African American heritage conferred no privileges or advantages at all. King, though, had more private reasons for passing across the color line.

 

 

THE SUCCESSFUL DOUBLE LIFE, almost by definition, leaves no trail of visible evidence. It depends on secrecy. Hence the value of a book by King’s contemporary, the pseudonymous Earl Lind (known also as Ralph Werther or Jennie June), whose remarkable memoir details his own double life in New York during the 1890s. By day, Lind was a respectable college student and office worker; by night, a female impersonator who sought sexual partners in New York’s roughest neighborhoods. He wrote to persuade physicians that homosexuals deserved their empathy and understanding. But he inadvertently provides a rare kind of how-to manual that explains just how a man of means might disappear into the streets of New York, cross the bounds of class and social expectations, and emerge, temporarily, as someone new. “Passing,” in the fluid urban world of late-nineteenth-century America, took many forms. In its most conventional meaning it implied disguising one’s racial background, most often to move toward social privilege. But one could also “pass” across the gender line, across lines of ethnic affiliation, across the ever-present bounds of social class. Like countless African Americans who risked exposure by passing as white in the workplace while returning home every night to their black families, King and Lind passed part-time, reluctant to give up all the pleasures and benefits of the world to which they had been born.
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Like King, Lind found in New York’s poorest neighborhoods an unfamiliar and vibrant life that contrasted sharply with his middle-class upbringing. He moved to the city in the early 1890s to attend college but soon found his missionary work in the slums of New York more instructive than any lecture. The city itself became his stage. Using the phrase favored by contemporary guidebook writers, he notes that he set off on his first “nocturnal ramble” in search of sexual partners by donning an old suit and stuffing money in his shoe. Then, after carefully going through his clothes to be certain he carried no clue to his identity, he stealthily crept out of his “high-class boarding house,” pulled a hat down over his eyes, and carefully hid a key across the street so “that it could not be stolen and I thereby rendered unable to let myself in on my return.” At last, he writes, he was “transformed into a sort of secondary personality inhabiting the same corpus as my proper self.”
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