Passing Strange (35 page)

The trouble began on the evening of August 12, 1900, when an African American man named Arthur Harris left his sweltering tenement room on Manhattan’s West Forty-first Street to buy a cigar and grab a drink at a nearby saloon at the corner of Eighth Avenue. His wife followed later to bring him home. While she waited outside the saloon for her husband, a white plainclothes policeman named Robert Thorpe approached her and accused her of soliciting. When Harris came out to the street, he saw the white officer grabbing his wife. “I didn’t know who he was and thought he was a citizen like myself,” he later testified. Thorpe pummeled Harris and called him names. Harris took out a pocketknife, stabbed Thorpe in the stomach, and fled. The policeman died in Roosevelt Hospital the following day.
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On August 15 the neighborhood erupted with what the
New York Times
called “the wildest disorder that this city has witnessed in years.” A scuffle between a white man and a black man outside the house where Thorpe’s body lay exploded into a full-blown race riot. More than one hundred policemen swinging nightsticks tried to clear the streets. Scores of wounded blacks flooded Roosevelt Hospital; many more stayed home, afraid to move through the streets in search of medical help. The “police were not too active in stopping the attacks on the negroes,” the
Times
reported, “and even went so far as to use their clubs on colored men who had been arrested.” The police, “according to their own statements, are feeling vindictive against the colored people generally.”
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By late August, the street rioting abated. Two people were dead, countless numbers were wounded, and hundreds of black people had been arrested. As various black and white political groups convened to assess the future of local race relations, and a police board began to investigate allegations of police brutality, a group of black West Indians living in New York sought diplomatic protection. Some two hundred city residents prepared a petition to the British consul, alleging that they had been brutally attacked “by the mob in the recent riots, and that the police, instead of giving them protection, actually urged and incited the mob to greater fury.” Their foreign citizenship could not protect them from the racial animus of the crowd.
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Ada and James might both have read of the riots with some anxiety: Ada from her home in the largely white neighborhood of Flushing; her husband from far across the continent as he prepared to return home from the Alaska gold country. Ada undoubtedly understood racial violence in a personal, visceral way that her husband could scarcely comprehend. She might rarely talk about it, but no fond memories of her family or her childhood friends in Reconstruction Georgia could ever obliterate what she had likely heard about or seen for herself: the random beatings and attacks, the burned homes and schoolhouses, the Ku Klux Klan attacks on her black neighbors and the white people who associated with them. She would know from family stories that before the war slaves could not walk the rural roads of Troup or Harris County without passes from their owners or overseers. An ex-slave from Harris County named Rias Body recalled that “patarolers” would ride all night: “If the ‘patarolers’ caught a ‘Nigger’ without a pass, they whipped him and sent him home.”
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Ada Todd might worry that not even her nice house in Flushing could necessarily protect her and her children from the angry violence of racial hatred, its unpredictability and intensity, its deep psychological roots and harsh physical brutality. Though turn-of-the-century New York scarcely harbored the same all-pervasive racial tensions as the Deep South, the violence unfolding on the streets of Manhattan might yet stir in Ada a deep sense of unease and make her pause to question the safety she thought she had grasped in fleeing Georgia and building her new middle-class life. Clarence King might understand mob violence in an abstract way and feel grateful his children were too young to go off on their own through the streets. But he could scarcely grasp the power of the dark memories that likely haunted Ada as she waited alone, at home, for her husband to return. He knew London and San Francisco, Shakespeare and James. But there were some things that Ada knew better than he did.

King liked to imagine his light-complected, mixed-race children as the harbinger of a new, distinctively American people. But Ada knew differently. In the eyes of their neighbors, their teachers, their friends, and the law, their children were unalterably and irrevocably black.

 

 

KING RETURNED EAST IN August 1900 while racial tensions still gripped New York. He stopped to visit Hay at his summerhouse in New Hampshire around Labor Day; then, presumably, James Todd came home to Flushing.
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One imagines the tempo of the household picking up with his arrival: the children clamoring for the gifts he always had in his pockets, the servants eager to please, Ada basking in his presence and in the satisfaction of having kept the family on such an even keel during his long absence. But one also imagines the summer’s violence casting a shadow over the household—the parents talking in hushed tones late into the night about the tense racial situation in Manhattan, the children’s prospects in their new racially integrated school, how their “West Indian” family could navigate the tricky shoals of racial politics. The children may have begged their father for stories of his summer adventures. The eldest were old enough to talk to neighbors and share family stories with friends. So James could tell only those stories that might safely get around the neighborhood. Perhaps even Ada did not know he had been in Alaska. A traveling “steelworker” would have spent his summer indoors, in the fierce heat and noise of a factory.

By late in the fall, though, James Todd was gone again, and the household resumed its usual rhythms. King traveled to Arizona to investigate some copper mines near Prescott. He fell ill there with whooping cough. Around Christmastime, he saw a doctor in Chicago, who discovered a “thumbnail”-sized spot of tuberculosis on King’s lung. But pressed for funds and with a grim sense of duty, King continued on to Missouri, stopping in St. Louis before heading on to a mine in Flat River. “I have been desperately ill for ten days trying not to have pneumonia,” he wrote a friend just before the new year, “and am generally used up and worn out.” He fantasized about giving up the job and heading “to the South, which is always home to me, and try to heal up.” But he went to the mine instead. Ten days of work stretched into thirty, and by the time the job was done, King’s tubercular infection was the size of a hand. That robust good health he had had in Alaska just a few months before was gone.
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Back east in February 1901, King probably stopped briefly in Flushing before heading south, pausing in Washington to see Henry Adams, then continuing on to Florida and the Bahamas. On his way back north in late April, he again called on Adams, who pronounced him “fairly gay even in paroxysms of coughing.” King tried “to bid good-bye, cheerily and simply telling how his doctors had condemned him to Arizona for his lungs.” But Adams sensed the seriousness of the illness. King’s tuberculosis seemed “pronounced” and no longer confined to his lungs. “He must go to Arizona at once, and ought to have gone there three months ago.” Adams wrote that he, Hay, and King all knew “that they were nearing the end, and that if it were not the one it would be the other.” From Washington, King headed north to see his mother and to visit with Ada and the children. By early May, he was back in the West. John Hay was there, too, making an official trip as secretary of state through the territories of New Mexico and Arizona, where at every stop crowds called for statehood.
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Many years later, Henrietta Williams, the Todd family nursemaid, recalled that Mr. Todd was home in Flushing the night before he left for Arizona and assured Ada he had given money to “Mr. Gardiner,” who would take care of her and the children .
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Thirty years after the fact, subsequent events had burnished her memory. Perhaps King had taken Gardiner into his confidence by now. But it is not clear.

King went west “to die,” as Ada later recalled .
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The eldest children likely sensed something different about this leave-taking, no matter how much their parents tried to shield them. James and Ada both knew it might be the last.

By letter, written before or after he left for Arizona, King instructed Ada to leave New York.
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He wanted her to move the children to Toronto, using the money he had received from two friends to buy a house, taking care to find something desirable and reasonable. And on May 9, 1901, Ada took her children north. It would have been no small undertaking to close up the big house, discharge the servants, pack up the children’s belongings, and get all four of them ready to leave behind a familiar world. Grace, her oldest child, was ten; Wallace, the youngest, not quite four. Ada might know more about the world than she did as a young woman leaving rural Georgia to move to New York and have more money in her purse. She might let herself imagine that Canada would be a kind of racial Eden, unmarked by the stark fault lines that defined racial life in the United States. But it would feel daunting to be responsible for the children in a new place where she probably knew not a soul. King had a vague knowledge of Toronto from his involvement with a local mining company, and he directed Ada to enroll the children in the Logan School, which he understood to be the best school in the city. It proved useless advice. Sir William Logan had founded the Geological Survey of Canada in 1842, but no Toronto schools bore his name, and it remains unclear just what Ada arranged for the children’s education.
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Ada crossed into Canada at a moment when race relations had dipped to a new nadir. Canadians took pride in providing a legal refuge for runaway slaves, particularly in the years following the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, as the United States lurched toward civil war. But legal safety had never been equivalent to social equality. Canada, too, had established segregated schools, seen cities erupt in racial violence, and tolerated the rise of a scientific racism that deemed people of African descent particularly ill suited to the cold Canadian climate. In the years following the Civil War, many of the American blacks who had fled to Canada returned south across the border, and in the final decades of the century, the population of African Canadians actually declined as a more virulent form of cultural racism took hold in Canadian culture. In the entire Dominion of Canada in 1901 there lived only 17,437 reported “Negroes,” just over half in the combined regions of Upper Canada, Canada West, and Ontario, the province that included Toronto. Some citizens, both within and outside the government, began to articulate the idea of closing the borders to those who could not “assimilate.” Toronto town councilman William P. Hubbard, the light-skinned son of freeborn parents, thought his city was the least racially prejudiced one in Canada. But Ada’s new neighbors would not necessarily be any more welcoming than those among whom she had lived in Flushing.
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Perhaps she imagined this sojourn as a brief respite from the ugliness in New York. Perhaps, though, she sometimes wondered if her husband had sent her off into exile, compelling her to leave the neighbors, the mothers, the gay masked partygoers who had become her friends.

 

 

KING TRAVELED WEST. HE failed to improve in Prescott. He nearly died of heart failure there, he wrote to Hay. He moved on to Pasadena, where he hoped another doctor might help. But by August, he had lost about forty pounds and suffered days on end from fevers that kept his head “swimming and throbbing.” Still, he could muster the old spirit to write to Hay with heartbreaking “grace and tenderness” about the tragic death of Hay’s son, Del, a rising young light in the McKinley administration who fell to his death from a window while attending his third class reunion at Yale. “What would I give to be well and with you,” wrote King, “to take my share of the passing shadow and the coming light. But I am a poor, sick, old fellow, uncertain yet of life or of death, suffering more than my lot, and simply waiting till nature and the foe have done their struggle.”
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Half lost in his own sorrow and “savage, unreasoning grief,” Hay still saw the tragedy of King’s situation. “There you have it in the face!” he wrote to Adams. “The best and brightest man of his generation, who with talents immeasurably beyond any of his contemporaries, with industry that has often sickened me to witness it, with everything in his favor but blind luck, hounded by disaster from his cradle, with none of the joy of life to which he was entitled, dying at last, with nameless suffering, alone and uncared for in a California tavern.”
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King had a bushel of mail but no strength to open the letters. For seven weeks he did not write even to his mother. By late August he still felt weak, but could drop her a line now and then and get off some notes of sympathy to Hay and his wife.
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Still, he said nothing about Ada and the children to either Adams or Hay.

In other matters, though, Hay became King’s confidant, drawn newly close through the shared bonds of suffering and intimations of human mortality. Now they could forgo all talk of politics, all bluff talk about their travels, all sharp jokes about their mutual friends. They were just two aging men, each face-to-face with a future utterly beyond his powers to control. Forgive “my sad ramble of dull talk,” King wrote to his old friend in late August, “but I have no one else to say it to.”
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Thanking Hay for his “superhuman” kindness and generosity over the years, King acknowledged receipt of yet another check, just arrived at his Pasadena sickroom. Then he took up the question that Hay and Adams had discussed between themselves. How could it be that such a prodigiously talented man, “the best and brightest” as Hay put it, should be dying alone and broke? “I have been trying to understand,” King wrote, “why a man as well endowed with intelligence as I, should have made such a failure of many matters as I have.”
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