Passing Strange (34 page)

But if mixed-race people in the United States in the late nineteenth century found themselves legally classed as “black,” mixed-race people in the West Indies more often found themselves classed with “whites.” In the 1855 census of Grand Cayman Island, for example, “blacks” constituted one category; “white and coloured” another. “It was found impracticable to distinguish between the white and coloured population,” explained the missionary census takers. “The greater proportion of these . . . are persons of colour, but, of course, of various shades of complexion.”
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One’s class or job or behavior could all shade a colored person toward whiteness in the eyes of his neighbors. Racial heritage—the so-called one drop of blood—did not dictate one’s social status or legal privilege or serve, as in the United States, as the sole determinant of race .
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“A mulatto is not a negro, he is as much a white man as a black,” a correspondent wrote to the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
in 1902, complaining about its characterization of the people in the Danish West Indies. “In the West Indian Islands one would be laughed at for calling a mulatto a negro.”
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In claiming a West Indian birth, James Todd thus created a plausible explanation for his light skin and racial identity. In the West Indies, there would be no stigma attached to being a “coloured” man who looked like he did, and no reason to deny an African heritage.

 

 

THE WEST INDIAN STORY also worked to King’s advantage in other ways. In 1870, the year of Todd’s alleged emigration to the United States, just 100 “colored” and 389 “white” West Indians lived in New York City.
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Thirty years later, no one would be likely to inquire about his connections to anyone among this small cohort of early island immigrants. Indeed, a West Indian birthplace would deflect the sorts of questions Ada’s friends and neighbors might ask about James Todd’s putative Maryland relations and save him from queries that might expose the fraud of his story.

A West Indian identity would also enhance Todd’s status as a black man. The island emigrants of color were, as a group, wealthier, better educated, more skilled, and lighter complected than the southern blacks who settled in New York in the late nineteenth century. And they created an elite subgroup within the city’s larger black community, with their own churches and social organizations. To even enter the United States each Caribbean immigrant had to post a $30 bond to demonstrate his financial means and have a relative or guardian guarantee financial responsibility for his care.
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The poorest islanders could not come north.

By 1900, the West Indian community in New York included about 3,800 immigrants, both white and black. Many of the “coloured” West Indians there, as elsewhere, hung on to their foreign citizenship to assert their social superiority over American-born blacks and shield themselves from some of the most virulent forms of racial discrimination.
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The writer James Weldon Johnson recalled that while traveling by train through Florida in 1903 he was asked to move to a segregated car. But when the conductor heard him speaking Spanish to his black Cuban companion, the two men received permission to remain where they were.
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The same system extended to other foreign-born blacks. A black New Yorker told the sociologist Mary White Ovington that he might not be admitted to a fashionable restaurant as a “southern darkey” but could enter as the “Prince of Abyssinia.”
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The West Indian James Todd could present himself to strangers as a man of somewhat higher social standing than the James Todd from Baltimore. And yet, by claiming to be a naturalized American citizen, he could set himself apart from most West Indian New Yorkers in 1900 and avoid a too-close association with a tight-knit community where people might pose uncomfortable questions.

In every way, then, the fiction of a West Indian birth upped the social status of a black man who had heretofore claimed to be from Maryland. And it resolved once and for all the question that might have lingered in the minds of Todd’s new acquaintances. Since an act of Parliament abolished slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833, a British West Indian of Todd’s age would have been born into freedom. By contrast, an African American born in Baltimore in 1842 might once have been a slave.

Although the earliest written record of the West Indian story appears on the census forms of 1900, James Todd might first have floated the story of a Caribbean birth when he moved his family to Flushing in 1896 or 1897. A West Indian identity would give him greater social cachet and access to a housing market that discriminated more openly against American-born blacks. Moreover, by claiming to be a colored West Indian, he could present what
looked
like an interracial family as one in which husband and wife were simply different shades of darkness, a more acceptable option in a community that still harbored segregated schools. That a white landlord should believe his story—as Ada and her friends did—suggests how readily Americans of both races embraced the idea that “one drop of blood” trumped all other markers of identity, including complexion.

For all its usefulness, however, the fiction of a West Indian birth complicated Todd’s would-be life as a Pullman porter. Simply put, West Indian men would not likely hold such a job. The Pullman Company discouraged the employment of West Indians because they seemed less willing than native-born blacks to adopt a subservient role with white passengers.
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A “clerk,” Ada called her husband when they first settled in Flushing. “Steel wks—traveler,” Edward Brown, the census taker, wrote later in the summer of 1900. That particular designation clarified little, possibly because Ada herself found it hard to explain how her husband spent his time. “Traveling steel worker” could describe an unskilled worker searching for work or an itinerant strike-breaker as easily as a highly skilled laborer selling his expertise to the highest bidder. The size of the Todds’ rented home, like the size of their household staff, suggested Todd was a man of means. But more than 60 percent of workers in the American steel industry in 1900 made less than 16 cents an hour, and just over 5 percent made as much as $25 per week.
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Even at the upper end of the pay scale, a skilled worker lucky enough to find steady employment of sixty hours or more per week would be hard-pressed to support that large household on North Prince Street. The job title better explained James Todd’s long absences from home than the spacious yard or the servants who helped Ada run the house. As a geologist and mining expert, though, King knew something about metals and he had spent time around heavy equipment and the men who fixed and maintained machines. In a casual backyard conversation about the steel industry, he could probably pass muster.

 

 

A HANDFUL OF UNDATED letters from James to Ada Todd clarify nothing about the deception that lay at the heart of their relationship. But they suggest that as Ada came to feel more and more secure in her world of black mothers and children, house servants and party guests, James Todd felt increasingly anxious. His wife’s increased social visibility and confidence threatened his own precariously built life. Ada sought to move out before the public eye, but James needed to remain invisible.

“The reason I did not come to the house,” James wrote to Ada, “was because I thought there were more boarders there and it will not do to have too many people seeing us.”
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His cryptic words, presumably alluding to the boardinghouse next door at 50 North Prince Street, suggested that something might be threatened by the very
sight
of James and Ada, the very light-skinned man and the dark-complected woman with the four young children. It seems easy to understand why Clarence King remained fearful of being recognized in Ada’s company. Her dark complexion as well as her class background threatened Clarence King’s social and professional identity; his desire to keep their relationship secret had led to his deceptions in the first place. Yet, since Ada did not know that her husband
was
Clarence King, she would not understand the need for discretion on that score.

She might, though, understand that James Todd’s light skin could threaten her own social standing; not so much if people understood him to be a very light-skinned “black” man, but if they surmised he was white. To
look
white was good; it was more problematic to
be
white. The white boarders next door might harbor the common social prejudices against interracial marriage, and blacks might respond with equal discomfort. As W. E. B. DuBois observed in 1899, “For, while a Negro expects to be ostracized by the whites, and his white wife agrees to it by her marriage vow, neither of them are quite prepared for the cold reception they invariably meet with among the Negroes.”
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Ada herself seemed to accept her husband as a very light-skinned person of African descent. The confidence with which she staged that costume party and allowed herself to be written up in the black society pages suggests a comfort with her racial identity and social station. One imagines that in the color-conscious world of black society, where light skin tone conferred social privilege, she thought she had married “up.” Ada Todd would thus accept her husband’s peculiar appeal to secrecy as a project of mutual self-interest. “The more important thing to us of all others,” he wrote to her, “is that the property which will one day come to me shall not be torn away from us by some foolish, idle person talking about us and some word getting to my old aunt.”
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Those words, as much as anything, prove that James continued to deceive his wife. The perpetually broke Clarence King might entertain fantasies of a fabulous inheritance. But instead of a wealthy aunt, he had only a difficult and financially dependent mother. The false words nonetheless contain a simple truth: James Todd desperately hoped to keep his marriage to Ada a secret from his family and friends.

Ada played by James’s rules, at times even leaving letters for him at a local mail drop. “Yesterday I went over to Brooklyn to give the rent money to Mr. Thomas to pay next Monday,” James wrote to Ada in an undated note, “and there I got your love letter. Here is a $100 order. Write me if you receive this and the $50 in bills I sent yesterday.”
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Her family’s financial security seemed to hinge on her discretion. “For the sake of our darling babies we must keep the secret of our love and our lips from the world,” James explained. “God sees and knows our love and I believe He blesses us. But this cold and prejudicial world would prevent the little ones from getting the property I want them to have.” He told Ada he loved her “all the time.” And he concluded, “P. S. Carefully burn my letters!! ”
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James’s furtive behavior might not necessarily signal to Ada any deep or abiding deception. She might believe him to be “James Todd,” a man of African heritage, whether from Baltimore or the West Indies, who did indeed earn his living on Pullman cars or in the steel industry. Such a man might still have an elderly aunt of means. And that aunt might have any number of reasons for disapproving of her nephew’s marriage to a much darker woman from the South who had been born into slavery. At the very least, however, Ada had to understand that James had secrets, and that he came from a family she would never be permitted to meet. She might suspect or even believe that having left his job as a Pullman porter, her light-skinned husband was now passing for white in the workplace. In that case, she would understand his appeal to her discretion. Their family life depended on his earnings.

And so she acceded to his wishes. “My darling,” he wrote on one of his long business trips. “It will be only four weeks before I can see your dearest face again.” He professed his love and then continued. “Write me a nice letter and have it ready by Friday, for by that time I hope the gentleman will be ready to take you some money. I don’t care for him to see the children. Always have the parlor looking nice, and when he comes put on a nice dress or a nice wrapper.”
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An intermediary might be the simplest means of delivering money to Ada in his absence. But one wonders at the instructions to hide the children. Maybe King worried that the “gentleman,” a white friend, perhaps, might understand the idea of a consort but feel repelled by the mixed-race children (perhaps resembling their father) who offered such tangible proof of an interracial affair. Or perhaps he worried about the stories his children could tell about their father’s mysterious rich friend. Conversely, the “gentleman” might be a black acquaintance of King’s—someone like his valet, Alexander Lancaster—whom he could trust to keep his secret. A black visitor at Ada’s home might excite less curiosity from the neighbors than a white one. But why hide the children?

Whatever Ada imagined, though, whatever doubts she harbored, she felt loved. “Ah dearest,” James wrote to her, “I have lain in my bed and thought of you and felt my whole heart full of love for you. It seems to me often that no one ever loved a woman as I do you. In my heart there is no place for any other woman and never will be. My whole heart is yours forever.”
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King’s words conveyed his deep and passionate devotion to his wife. But they also hinted at the man he somehow
wanted
to be. Whatever he wrote, he could not give himself wholly to Ada. There was too much he had to hold back to keep his secret safe.

 

 

IN AUGUST OF 1900, while King was wrapping up his investigation of the Alaskan goldfields and Ada was home with the children, readying them for their transfer to an integrated school, the West Side of Manhattan erupted in racial violence. In his book
Black Manhattan,
James Weldon Johnson depicted that riot as the culmination of the “dark and discouraging days” African Americans had experienced in the late 1890s. With the promise of Reconstruction gone, lynchings rampant in the South, and Jim Crow laws everywhere denying people equal protection under the law, the Negro had lost heart, he said. And “nowhere in the country was this decline in the spirit of self-assertion of rights more marked than in New York. . . . But the riot of 1900 woke Negro New York and stirred the old fighting spirit.” It was a “brutish orgy,” he wrote, “which, if not incited by the police, was, to say the least, abetted by them.” The recent decision to integrate the public schools notwithstanding, race relations in New York had reached their nadir.
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