Passing Strange (37 page)

Ada opened her husband’s letter in Toronto. Perhaps James’s disclosure confirmed what she had imagined all along: her husband had a deep secret. But she might have just stared at the letter in disbelief before carefully folding it away among the treasured items to which she would hold tight over the coming years.
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For thirteen years she had been “Ada Todd,” and with that name as the tangible marker of her shifting fortunes, she had left behind the world of domestic servitude, claimed an identity as a mother, established herself as an employer, and found her own place in New York’s African American social world. The family’s name provided the most fundamental, seemingly solid, part of their identity as they moved across Brooklyn, to Queens, and then across the border to Toronto. If they were not “Todds,” who were they? And if Ada’s husband had lied about his name, how else had he deceived her? She might sometimes harbor doubts about his birthplace or the nature of his work. But to learn now that even his name was a fiction must have shaken her to the core, made her pause to wonder not only who he was but who she was herself.

The distance that now lay between her and her old New York friends perhaps made the situation easier. She would not have to stumble in confusion over what to say to the neighbors, to her friends at church, to the other mothers at school. But she would not have the deep comforts of old friendship either. She had just introduced herself to her new Toronto neighbors as “Ada Todd.” To whom would she turn now, as she pondered what to tell the children?

King wrote to Ada again in late October, trying to help her negotiate the family’s new life in Toronto, giving her hope even as he felt so despairing himself. “I cannot express to you what a relief it is to me to have you get away from that place where you have lived so long and comfortably but where so many people felt curiosity about you and me,” he wrote. Ada’s successful party and James’s claims to be a black West Indian notwithstanding, perhaps the neighbors gossiped. The well-dressed children, the dutiful servants—not even these markers of middle-class life could erase the neighbors’ curiosity about this family in which the ever-present wife and the often-absent husband looked and seemed so utterly different.
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Or perhaps it was only King who was nervous. As Ada found her own, more solid niche in the public world, he may have felt his secret threatened, worried about the possibility of being recognized with Ada on the street. In Flushing she was likely out and about more than she had been when the children were small, when she seemed to be pregnant all the time, when she had to do more of the domestic work herself. As she stepped out into the world and claimed for herself a broader public sphere, King may have felt that his would have to shrink. The world they could occupy together safely, comfortably, and without the scrutiny of family, friends, or neighbors was little bigger than the house they shared with their children.

Ada would have a fresh start in Toronto, far from the prying eyes of neighbors and the smoldering memories of the racial tensions that had racked New York the year before. But King’s own secret would also be safer there, far from accidental discovery by an acquaintance on the street, or the idle gossip of knowing servants. King coached Ada on how to explain her family situation. “Whenever anyone asks about your husband tell them that you and your husband have agreed to separate and that you do not like to discuss your family matters.” For years, King had kept his own secrets; now he asked Ada to keep secrets as well, to be wary of the easy banter with which she might spark new friendships with her Toronto neighbors or with the parents of her children’s classmates.
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Perhaps she felt more free in Toronto, far from those nosy neighbors. But not likely. As long as she was ignorant of King’s identity, or at least uncertain about who he was, she could move through the world with a certain self-confidence, slowly building up a new world of social relations in Brooklyn and then Queens. Any social uneasiness was King’s problem, not hers. But now she would have to erect a social wall between herself and her new acquaintances and hide behind the lies her husband asked her to tell.

Her husband’s newly disclosed name might reveal little to Ada about his past or his public life, his family or even his race. It would be possible to know his name but remain unaware of his government service, his heroic exploits in the field, his books, his many scientific articles and political essays. The very name “Clarence King” would not necessarily trigger any bells of recognition for her.

 

 

KING SUGGESTED TO ADA that he had been dissembling about his name in order to preserve the family inheritance he had mentioned before. “You know it is my strongest desire and intention in life that we should be legally united just as soon as we can do so without risking the loss of the little property which will come to me, and it would be very awkward for you to keep talking to people of me and my coming.”
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The allusion to a “legal” union suggests that James and Ada had discussed their common-law marriage before, perhaps in a conversation over whether secrecy would be the only way to preserve his inheritance. Ada might sense that James had hurt his family by marrying across class lines or by wedding a woman so much darker than he. She might suspect he had some reason for avoiding the formalities of a civil marriage license. Keeping up his brave front, King laid out for Ada a scenario of what could happen after he received the inheritance and they legalized their marriage. “You might want to take my name at that time and have the children’s name changed in the New York State Court at Albany so as all to have my name. I have studied it all out and consulted a good lawyer about it and my only wish before God and for you is to do the very best thing for us all and I am perfectly sure that what I have advised you is the best.”
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He likely imagined, but could not write, that this was what she should do after his death. What would his reputation matter then? Perhaps his name could help Ada or shield his mixed-race children from the worst impulses of a Jim Crow America. And even if she assumed his name, perhaps word would never get back to his mother in Newport or even his friends in New York.

From Washington, Secretary of State John Hay kept in touch with King’s doctors. The move from Pasadena to Phoenix seemed to help a bit. Even in his illness, King remained a charmer. His California doctor pronounced him a “rare, sweet soul”; his Phoenix physician thought him the “most delightful creature” he had ever met.
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Adams wrote from Paris to assure Hay that he would help rescue King from his ongoing financial nightmare. Frank Emmons, who had heard that King was “destitute,” tried to raise a “thousand or two” from King’s closest friends. From such a distance, what else could one do?
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Other friends worked to have Yale present King with an honorary degree. The answer from New Haven came back a polite “no.”
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As when King recuperated at the Bloomingdale Asylum, it was James Gardiner, his old boyhood friend, who stayed in closest touch, keeping King’s other friends informed. At some point King asked Gardiner to bring to him “a package of papers” stashed in a black trunk that James Hague had been storing for him.
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It was time, perhaps, to make final arrangements for his mother and for Ada and the children, to settle his debts to Hay, to make plans for the disposition of his worldly goods. When King died, however, his only will was the one he drew up in 1886, two years before his marriage to Ada. It left everything to his mother.
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By mid-December, King’s death seemed only a matter of time. “The doctors say he cannot live,” Gardiner wired to Hay; “may live for a few months.”
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King had written hopefully to his mother, telling her he would be home in April. Later she would call her failure to be with him those last months her “one bitter and inconsolable regret.”
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He discouraged visitors. “It was part of his characteristic unselfishness that he effectually discouraged all offers on the part of friends and relations to visit him,” recalled Emmons, “visits which might have cheered his last lonely days in that far distant region.”
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But one imagines it was not so much “unselfishness” as an anxiety about all the arrangements for Ada and the children that remained undone, and worry about what his friends and relations might learn if they engaged in a long talk with his doctor. Evidently, King had confided in his physician and told him about his secret family in Toronto. When the TB took its inevitable course, he wanted someone to convey the news to Ada.

King’s acquaintances knew nothing of his correspondence with Ada. King’s only concern was “his poor, old mother,” recalled one Phoenix friend, G. W. Middleton. But when death seemed imminent he did everything he could to keep her from coming west herself. He “had me to go and wire to Gardiner that he did not want any of his relatives to come,” Middleton recalled. “His love for his mother was the most beautiful thing that I ever saw.”
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Nonetheless, King’s brother-in-law, Clarence P. Townsley, rushed west by train.
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He likely felt compelled to represent the family, remembering that King had raced to his side as he hovered near death some years before. Perhaps Townsley learned of King’s secret family as he maintained his death watch. But if he did, he kept his counsel. No evidence suggests he ever contacted Ada. And no whiff of family scandal tainted his subsequent rise through the military ranks.

On December 23, 1901, Ada celebrated her forty-first birthday and helped the children get ready for a Christmas far from the family and friends with whom they had marked the holiday in the past. The weather in Toronto was gray and damp; the rain would soon turn to sleet and snow.
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Far off, under Phoenix’s winter sun, Clarence King clung to his wit, even as his strength failed. When his doctor remarked that the heroin seemed to have gone to his head, King whispered his last recorded words: “Very likely, many a heroine has gone to a better head than mine is now.”
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At 2:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve day, King died in his sleep. He was not quite sixty years old.
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Edmund Clarence Stedman, a longtime friend, provided a tribute to the
New York Tribune
a few days later. After lauding King’s humor and wit, his loyalty and charm, Stedman remarked, “In some ways Clarence King’s life seemed pathetic to those who really knew him. His devotion to his nearest kindred was beautiful, but there should have been even dearer ones to bear his name and mourn his loss.”
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King’s physician, Dr. R. W. Craig, a recent arrival from Illinois who was just setting up his medical practice in Phoenix, indicated on the death certificate that King was a married man. He sent a telegram to Ada in Toronto with news of her husband’s death. And on the death certificate, where the form asked for a description of the deceased, Craig struck out the word “color,” and typed “American.”
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Craig intended nothing ironic. He simply meant to record King as a citizen whose color seemed normal and therefore beyond notice. He was “American,” not “Indian” or “Mexican” or “Black,” the categories of “color” in Arizona Territory that confused ethnicity and heritage, citizenship and appearance. Once, King had imagined an America in which the “composite elements of American populations are melted down into one race alloy, when there are no more Irish or Germans, Negroes and English, but only Americans.”
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To the end, he must have clung to the hope that somehow his own children might live as “Americans,” unmarked by difference in the great national melting pot.

 

 

IT WAS SURELY A grim Christmas around the Todd household in Toronto. The following day, the local papers carried news of yet another race riot in New York. Two white boys stoned two black girls, and within hours armed battle had erupted on a Harlem street, with more than one hundred men fighting on each side with guns, stones, and razors.
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Ada Todd must have felt utterly alone, unsure where to go, uncertain where the money to support her family would come from now. She must also have inferred that the funeral of the man she now knew to be “Clarence King” would be planned by those family members and friends she had never been permitted to meet, and that neither she nor the children would be invited to attend.

King’s friends placed death notices in the New York papers, and Townsley accompanied his brother-in-law’s body back east.
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If he had heard about King’s secret life, he would have much to ponder, including how to protect his own reputation. Now a captain in the Artillery Corps and stationed at Fort Monroe, Virginia, he had a promising army career ahead of him.
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If he learned anything in Phoenix, he seems to have kept it to himself.

An obituary ran in the
New York Times
on Christmas Day, focusing on King’s western survey work, saying little about the last twenty years of his life. King was “an alert and fascinating thinker,” noted the reporter, “with a charm wholly his own in personal intercourse, and a heart, the kindness of which seemed to grow with each of the countless manifestations of it. He will be deeply and tenderly mourned by numerous friends, and by none more than by the humble ones whose needs he constantly sought out in modest and unfailing ministration.”
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In Washington the staff of the United States Geological Survey gathered for a memorial service and listened to King’s successor, John Wesley Powell, eulogize his old colleague.
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TO JAMES HAGUE, KING once joked, “If there were any graceful and inoffensive way of doing it, I wish it could be intimated in my life and engraved on my tombstone that I am to the last fibre aristocratic in belief, that I think the only fine thing to do with the masses, is to govern and educate them into some semblance of their social superiors.”
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