Passing Strange (40 page)

But Ada Todd’s association with Bridgham lasted less than a year, scarcely longer than her relationship with Waring. Perhaps Bridgham, too, came to doubt the legitimacy of her case, or maybe Ada began to doubt his commitment to it. But she persisted with her claims. By February 1909, she was working with J. Douglas Wetmore, perhaps the most prominent black attorney in all of New York.
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At only a few moments in her life had Ada brushed up against prominent social and political leaders of black society—when she married with the blessing of the Reverend James H. Cook, when she worked briefly with Waring. But this would prove a more long-lasting connection. She and Wetmore worked together for the next five years.

 

 

BORN IN FLORIDA IN 1870, “Doug” Wetmore grew up in Jacksonville, a close friend—later a college roommate and a law partner—of the writer James Weldon Johnson.
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In Johnson’s memoir
Along This Way,
he appears as “D.,” a suave and self-assured young man of striking physical beauty. In contrast to himself, Johnson wrote, D. seemed “more mature and far more sophisticated” with a “racy style of speech.” Moreover, Johnson explained, “he was extremely good looking, having, in fact, a sort of Byronic beauty.... But speaking of his face as pale does not convey the full truth; for neither in color, features, nor hair could one detect that he had a single drop of Negro blood.”
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Wetmore played his racially ambiguous appearance to his advantage. In Jacksonville, where the community knew his family, he lived as a light-skinned black, and when he roomed with Johnson at Atlanta University, a historically black institution, no one doubted his identity as African American. But when Wetmore attended the University of Michigan Law School in 1896-97, his fellow students and teachers assumed him to be white, and Wetmore did not correct them. Several months went by before he realized that no one in Ann Arbor knew of his African American descent, and he let his inadvertent passing continue uncorrected.
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Returning to Jacksonville, Wetmore resumed his black identity and joined his old friend James Weldon Johnson in a law practice. In 1905 Wetmore won election to the Jacksonville city council and that same year became the lead attorney for
Florida v. Patterson,
a test case challenging streetcar segregation in Jacksonville.
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Wetmore won a stunning victory in June 1905. The Florida Supreme Court ruled in his favor, with a direct challenge to the “separate but equal” public accommodations sanctioned by the United States Supreme Court in
Plessy v. Ferguson
(1896). But the victory proved short-lived. Within the year, the state supreme court ruled differently in two similar cases—both unsuccessfully argued by Wetmore—and upheld the Jim Crow segregation laws on Florida’s streetcars.
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Nonetheless, the black papers proclaimed Wetmore a hero for “his fearless championing of the cause of his people where gross injustice and mean unfairness ran high.”
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In the spring of 1906 Wetmore moved to New York City. He purchased a half interest in the Brooklyn practice of African American attorney Rufus L. Perry, and opened a Manhattan office for the Legal Bureau of the Afro-American Council, which he served as chief counsel .
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Founded in 1898, the black civil rights organization headed by
New York Age
publisher T. Thomas Fortune was shaped largely by the conservative racial policies of his friend Booker T. Washington. The group was in its waning days by 1906, riven with dissent over the proper way to press for black rights and fading in importance beside the newly organized Niagara Movement. It survived, in name only, until 1908, and in 1909 the new National Association for the Advancement of Colored People succeeded the Niagara Movement as the nation’s preeminent black civil rights organization.
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Nonetheless, Wetmore used the Afro-American Council as a bully pulpit. In the fall of 1906 he pressed President Theodore Roosevelt to appoint a federal commission to investigate the conditions of black life in the South, now veering perilously toward “anarchy.”
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And several weeks later, he protested Roosevelt’s dishonorable discharge of the African American soldiers of the Twenty-fifth Infantry implicated in a notorious riot in Brownsville, Texas.
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“Beyond the shadow of a doubt,” Wetmore wrote to the
Evening Post,
“[Roosevelt] has deserted the colored man completely.”
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In the spring of 1907, as the Afro-American Council struggled to remain afloat, Wetmore solicited private clients by placing ads in Fortune’s paper, the
New York Age.
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His legal partner, Rufus Perry, the son of a prominent minister, already had a high public profile, and Wetmore soon brought in his own share of work.
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In 1908 he defended a black fraternal group, the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, against a charge they had usurped the corporate identity of the older and similarly named white association.
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And in 1909 he took up the cause of Ada Todd, the widow wronged by her husband’s powerful friends.

Ada might have found Wetmore through church connections or a newspaper ad, through mutual friends within Brooklyn’s black community or through her own involvement in political causes. Her association with him provides the briefest of glimpses into her life outside the confines of her home. Her name is absent during these years from the Flushing social notes published at regular intervals in the
New York Age.
No surviving records document her church membership or her political beliefs, her participation in social clubs or her other leisure activities. Her connection to Wetmore, though, hints at her sophistication about working the legal system, her familiarity with Wetmore’s political activities, and her continuing sense that the larger, more principled issues at stake in her case merited the attentions of a high-profile attorney.

Wetmore represented Ada Todd from 1909 to at least 1914, but she never abandoned her own extralegal efforts to press her case. In 1910, for example, she again called on Gardiner, who showed her the deed to her house and said he would record it in her name and turn it over to her.
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When Gardiner died in 1912, though, the deed to the house remained in his possession. Wetmore pursued other targets. He corresponded with the firm representing the King estate and visited with the head of the Legal Aid Society on Ada’s behalf.
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Something about the case of the prominent white man who passed himself off as black might have intrigued him. He knew from firsthand experience how porous the color line could be.

About the time he took on Ada Todd’s case, Wetmore began experimenting again with his own racial identity. He dissolved his partnership with Rufus Perry and set up a downtown Manhattan practice where, according to James Weldon Johnson, “his clientele was almost entirely white.” In Manhattan social circles, Wetmore began to pass as white with his new white girlfriend. “She knew that he was colored,” Johnson wrote, “but her family did not.”
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And increasingly, as he let people make their own assumptions about his racial heritage, Wetmore augmented his practice of civil rights law—a profession in which his race might be known or assumed by his clients—with a career in real estate.
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He floated between New York ’s racial communities, much as Clarence King had done, suggesting his racial affiliation by his actions, letting people assume whatever they wished. He married his white girlfriend, divorced her, and around 1920 married another white woman from the Deep South. Johnson observed that southern white women possessed a “strange and strong attraction” for Wetmore. “A situation which combines the forbidden and the unknown close at hand could not do less than create a magnified lure.... Dame Nature never kicks up her heels in such ecstatic abandon as when she has succeeded in bringing a fair woman and a dark man together; and vice versa.”
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Even as he moved in white circles, however, Wetmore kept up his connections in the black community. Johnson proclaimed him “the only man I have known to ‘pass’—and I have known numbers of them—without feeling it was necessary to ‘pass up’ his colored friends.”
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After Wetmore’s suicide in the summer of 1930, the
New York Age
likewise commented on his ability to move seamlessly across the city’s racial landscape: “Native of Florida, He Came to New York and Built Up Large Law Practice, Mostly with White Clientele, but Kept Race Contacts.” The paper also noted that both of his wives were Jewish, as if Jews constituted a separate racial category within a binary world of black and white.
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It did not note that when the census taker had knocked on his door a few months earlier, Wetmore reported his race as white. According to official records, the only “Negro” person at his residence was the family maid.
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From Wetmore’s perspective, Ada Todd might seem an interesting client, a woman precluded by her race from getting fair treatment from her husband’s powerful friends, and a client who could understand how racial perceptions shaped social realities. But eventually, just as his predecessors had, he dropped the case.

While Wetmore served as attorney to Ada Todd, he served as muse to James Weldon Johnson, becoming the model for the protagonist in
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
(1912), Johnson’s great novel about racial passing in American life. Written in the first person and published anonymously, the book purports to be the confessional memoir of a man who repudiated his mother’s race to pass as a white man, like his father. But the book was not a true autobiography. It was a work of social fiction deeply informed by personal experience and Johnson’s own familiarity with Wetmore, his light-skinned friend who journeyed across the color line. Unwittingly, Ada stood between two of the most compelling racial passing stories of the day: that of her husband, the privileged white scientist who passed as a part-time black man, and that of her lawyer, the prototype for Johnson’s “ex-colored man” who hid his black heritage to pass as white.

When the fair-skinned protagonist of Johnson’s book moves to New York to begin a new chapter of his life, he lets others determine his race, just as Wetmore had done. “I finally made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race,” he explains, “but that I would change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would; that it was not necessary for me to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead.”
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He lets others perceive him as white, marries a white woman, expresses relief that neither of their two children betrays his racial heritage. “There is nothing I would not suffer to keep the ‘brand’ from being placed upon them,” the “ex-colored man” remarks as he resigns himself to his future in the white world. And yet he remains a man haunted, left to feel “small and selfish” beside the “gallant band of colored men who are publicly fighting the cause of their race.” Tortured by his deceptions, beset by feelings of racial betrayal and moral cowardice, Johnson’s “ex-colored man” confides his secret in a private manuscript that never discloses his name. Ruefully he muses, “I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage.”
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Like Clarence King, he feels trapped. The public disclosure of his deceptions would hurt the people he loves the most; the cost of psychological freedom from his lies feels almost too high to bear.

 

 

AS HER LEGAL EFFORTS to claim King’s estate foundered, Ada Todd quietly asserted her connection to Clarence King in another, more personal way. Without staging a public announcement, filing legal papers, or making any scandal-provoking claims, she simply claimed his name. She needed no legal help. All her life, her name had changed without benefit of official sanctions. In this age before driver’s licenses and Social Security cards, few native-born Americans had official identity papers. Foreign-born residents might have immigration records or naturalization papers, veterans might have military records, and Americans seeking to travel abroad might possess a passport. But as Clarence King understood, most of the nation’s citizens asserted their identity by simply speaking their name. No piece of legal paper had recorded the moment an enslaved child called Ada became a free person called Ada Copeland; no legal document marked the moment Ada Copeland became Ada Todd. Now, no official record would mark her transformation into Ada King. She would do that herself, slowly, and in fits and starts.
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For some years after she moved to the Kalmia Street house, Ada listed herself in the Queens residential directory as “Todd, Ada, wid. James.”
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But in 1908, after years of trying to prove her married identity through legal channels, she gave a different name to the man gathering information for the directory: Ada King, widow of Clarence.
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Clarence King’s old Manhattan world remained so far from Ada’s life in Flushing that this public use of his name stirred no interest at all.

Ada’s new identity seemed tentative, easier to test out in a street directory than in an official federal record. In the federal census of 1910 she reverted to her old name, again calling herself Ada Todd. The census taker described her as a widowed woman living in a household with her four children and a black boarder named Henrietta Evens, who worked as a “notions peddler.” Neither of Ada’s daughters, nineteen-year-old Grace or eighteen-year-old Ada, had a job. Sixteen-year-old Sidney peddled vegetables. Wallace, almost thirteen, still attended school. But even as she clung to the family name “Todd,” Ada subtly altered the children’s identities. She told the census taker her children’s father was born in Rhode Island—not Baltimore, as she reported on their birth certificates, or the West Indies, as she told Edward Brown in 1900. Bit by bit, she claimed for her children a new heritage. She might not be ready to give them a new surname (or to change the name by which she had been known for twenty-two years), but she could share with them what she now knew of their father’s history.
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