Passing Strange (41 page)

Frederick Bachner, the census agent who called on the Todds at their Kalmia Street house on April 25, 1910, recorded Ada as a “black” woman and designated her children “mulatto.” The rules for racial categorization had shifted again. Although the 1900 census did not allow for the designation of mixed-race persons, the government now directed census enumerators to designate as “black” all persons “who are evidently fullblooded negroes” and to categorize as “mulatto” those “having some proportion or perceptible trace of negro blood.”
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Since the census form included no questions about the race of the children’s deceased father, Bachner would have made his racial categorizations on the basis of visual examination or, perhaps, what he learned from Ada. For the first time, the children appeared in an official record as people of mixed racial ancestry.
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OVER THE NEXT FEW years, the Todds gradually became Kings in the official records that marked their public lives. But the racial identities of the children remained fluid. With their light-colored skin, they had a kind of social flexibility that Ada did not. They could sometimes let others
imagine
their racial identity and—like their father—sometimes assert what they wished it to be.

On March 17, 1913, Clarence and Ada’s youngest daughter, Ada, age twenty-one, wed Virgil H. Hite in a municipal ceremony at City Hall in Manhattan. Their official wedding certificate is a skein of untruths. Hite described himself as a twenty-two-year-old white man, born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, now living at 42 Eighth Avenue, Whitestone, Queens, and working as a clerk. The age was a lie; Hite was only nineteen. The twenty-one-year-old bride gave her name as Ada N. King, the first time she used that surname for a public record, and the only place her middle initial ever appears. She gave her address as 942 Third Avenue in Manhattan, the place where her family had found temporary shelter over a decade earlier when they returned to New York from Toronto after Clarence King’s death. But nothing suggests Ada actually lived there. In 1910 she lived with her mother and siblings in Flushing, and in later life she always stuck close to home. Moreover, between 1900 and 1910 the apartment building on Third Avenue had lost its black residents and become entirely white. A clerk recorded her father’s name as “Clarence Archie” King. That untruth possibly has a longer backstory. King might not have revealed his true middle name, Rivers, to his wife. “Archie” evokes Wallace’s middle name, Archer (and perhaps even reflects the recording clerk’s error). Perhaps James Todd told his wife that Archer was his own middle name, and that he wanted to pass it along to his son. But even if young Ada made an honest mistake in relating her father’s name, she deliberately lied about her address. Perhaps Ada did not wish to be tied to her mother’s address, or even to her mother, in such an official document. For with this marriage certificate, she staked out a new identity of her own, and not simply that of Virgil Hite’s new spouse. Young Ada swore to the alderman who performed her civil ceremony that she was white. Her sister, Grace, and Grace’s fiancé, James A. Burns, witnessed the ceremony and testified that the information on the marriage certificate was “correct, to the best of [their] knowledge and belief.”
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In a formal studio portrait made sometime after her marriage, Ada indeed looks like someone viewers might assume to be white. Seated on an ornate bench, turning slightly to face the photographer, she has her mother’s round face, full cheeks, and slightly bemused expression. But the hair pulled back in a bun looks fine and wavy, and her light skin, set off by a dark flower-print dress with a wide lace collar, gives no hint of her mother’s racial classification.

A few months after Ada’s wedding, on September 3, 1913, Grace King and James Burns returned to City Hall in Manhattan for their own civil marriage ceremony. Burns, a twenty-two-year-old soldier from Coldwater, Michigan, gave his address as Fort Totten, the old Civil War-era military base in Whitestone, Queens, near the juncture of the East River and Long Island Sound. Grace provided dissembling information, much as her sister had done. She identified her father as “Clarence King” and her mother (as the clerk recorded it) as “Ada Coapun.” She, too, said she lived at 942 Third Avenue, in the building she had occupied briefly as a child. And she claimed to be white, just like the groom. Her sister, Ada Hite, witnessed the wedding and testified to the truth of the racial claim.
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Clarence King and Ada Todd had never obtained a civil marriage license, probably because King felt reluctant to commit his lie to paper. But if a civil license seemed potentially threatening to King’s secret, his daughters found it the easiest way to preserve their own. Each swore to the whiteness of the other.

No photographs of Grace survive.
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Apparently, neither her appearance nor that of her sister raised any serious concerns on the part of the city officials who certified their marriage licenses. But their ploy had a cost. Neither could marry with her mother by her side. To pass as white in City Hall, they would have to leave their dark-complected mother at home. Her physical appearance would threaten their claims to a new racial identity.

If the King girls’ new husbands knew about their family background, each might go along in order to conceal his wife’s racial heritage from his own family or to live with greater ease in a white community. James Burns, who served in a segregated all-white military unit, might have found it particularly difficult to introduce a black wife to his friends.
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A state senator from Brooklyn, William Carswell, had recently introduced a bill in the legislature to forbid interracial marriage in New York, making it a misdemeanor punishable by a $500 fine with a possible one-year prison term.
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The bill went nowhere, but it sparked a renewed public debate about race. And so the burdens of a family secret continued into a new generation. One thing is certain: if either Burns or Hite ever met his mother-in-law, Ada Copeland Todd King, he would know that his wife possessed a mixed racial heritage. In any case, neither man remained part of the King family for long.

Burns swore on his marriage certificate that he had never been married before, but he had a three-year-old son named Clarence. The name likely provoked ironic smiles around Ada King’s household when Grace brought the boy home to live at her mother’s house while her new husband returned to his military quarters. Clarence King now had a namesake, a small white child, no blood relation to him or his wife, who would be raised within the embrace of his family.
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Ada King now had two white sons-in-law, a white grandchild, and two daughters who sometimes, if not always, passed as white. If she had denied the racial complexity of her family before, as she embraced the myth of her husband’s African American heritage, there was no denying it now.

Despite her marriage, Grace continued to live in the family home. In April 1914, seven months after her wedding, she gave birth to her daughter Thelma in Ada’s Kalmia Street house. Fifteen months later, on July 16, 1915, she delivered there her second daughter, Grace Margaret. The attending physician identified the baby as her mother’s third child, apparently imagining young Clarence to be her natural child as well. He noted that the father was “white,” the mother “colored.” He did not designate the “color” of the baby. But there could be no doubt. The child of a “colored” woman would share her mother’s racial classification.
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Just after Christmas that year, both the elder Grace and her infant daughter contracted pneumonia. On January 5, 1916, baby Grace died, and her mother, Grace King Burns, died less than forty-eight hours later, a few weeks shy of her twenty-fifth birthday. On their death certificates, their Flushing physician—the same man who had attended Grace in childbirth—again had to describe their race. This time, he pronounced them both “black ” rather than “colored,” an expression of just how fluid and arbitrary the racial categories could be.
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Grace had asked her mother and siblings to watch over her children, and the elder Ada now found herself the guardian of Clarence and Thelma Burns, her two small grandchildren—one by marriage, one by blood. Their father, James Burns, effectively disappeared. After leaving the military, he became a policeman for the Long Island Rail Road. He soon drifted back to the Midwest, where he picked up work as an itinerant carny in small two-bit sideshows.
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Ada provided the family stability and her home became the focal point of family life. After her divorce in 1916, Ada Hite moved back to her mother’s house and resumed using the name “Ada King.”
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“Marry in haste, repent in leisure,” the elder Ada told her children.
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Her daughter’s ex-husband, Virgil Hite, headed back to Arkansas to look for work and eventually joined the military.
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WHILE THE KING GIRLS claimed white identities to pass, however briefly, across the color line, the federal government categorized their brothers as “colored.” The Brooklyn clerks who registered Sidney King (now using his father’s true surname) for the World War I draft in June 1917 described him in words as a stout man of medium height. But they indicated his race without resorting to language. Military rules directed the officials to prepare draft registration cards in a particular way: “If person is of African descent, cut off this corner.” The military clerks looked at Sidney and quietly snipped off the lower left corner of the form. No photographs of him survive; if he resembled his sisters he might have passed as white. But King told the officials that since March he had served in the Fifteenth Regiment of the National Guard, New York’s celebrated segregated unit, later renamed the 369th Infantry and popularly known as the Harlem Hellfighters. Sidney presented himself to the military as a man some two years younger than he really was, born in 1895 rather than 1893. It made little difference. The military accepted Sidney as a private and assigned him to the Fifteenth Regiment’s Company H, an all-black unit.

The New York troops faced their first battles in their own country. “I am sorry to learn that the Fifteenth Regiment has been ordered here,” commented Spartanburg, South Carolina, mayor J. F. Floyd upon learning that the troops would train nearby, “for with their northern ideas about race equality, they will probably expect to be treated like white men. I can say right here they will not be treated as anything but negroes.”
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But the troops ultimately distinguished themselves overseas, earning honors for their heroic service in France, where they served alongside French soldiers and withstood shell fire for 191 days. Denied a place in the farewell parade when they left for Europe, the soldiers of the 369th demanded a victory parade upon their return. And in February 1919, New Yorkers crowded the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue to watch the veterans march by. Those hoping to hear the regiment’s celebrated band play jazz were sorely disappointed; this was the solemn march of proud men who had withstood the horrors of war.

Sidney King, however, did not march with them. When the Fifteenth shipped out for France on November 12, 1917, King stayed behind in New York. Five days later, he received an honorable discharge from the military. A hearing board of officers found him unfit for duty under the terms of U.S. Army Regulation 148½, which provided for discharge “when an enlisted man is inapt, or does not possess the required degree of adaptability for the military service, or gives evidence of habits or traits of character which serve to render his retention in the service undesirable, or is disqualified for service, physically or in character, through his own misconduct.” King family lore explained Sidney’s disability as shell shock. It was not; he never saw combat. Sidney seemed to have inherited the King family disposition toward melancholy and emotional instability.
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Sidney’s younger brother, Wallace, registered for the draft on June 5, 1918, having turned twenty-one since the previous year’s sign-up. The local draft board officer described him as a builder’s clerk of medium build, with dark brown eyes and black hair. And then, taking note of his complexion, he clipped off the lower left corner of Wallace’s registration card.
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The King sisters had entered briefly into a white social world by virtue of their marriage certificates, but their brothers’ military registration records consigned them to a black world circumscribed by the rules of a Jim Crow military. In late August 1918 Wallace joined Company A of the Sixty-third Pioneer Infantry; relegated, like most African American soldiers during World War I, to a supporting role in construction. Due to lingering fears about the capabilities of black troops, only about 11 percent of the 404,308 African Americans in the army received assignments to combat positions.
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Wallace earned a promotion to corporal in November and left the military with an honorable discharge in December 1918, a few weeks after the armistice that marked the war’s end.
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Some African Americans criticized the Jim Crow military, but most concurred with W. E. B. DuBois, who in 1918 argued, “
first
your Country,
then
your Rights.” Writing in
The Crisis,
the official organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, DuBois contended that a look back at Negro military service throughout the nation’s history proved “we have gained [our rights] rapidly and effectively by our loyalty in time of trial.”
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Whether Wallace and Sidney King registered for the military draft out of a sense of patriotism, obligation, or political expediency, it was certainly not from any sense of family tradition. Their father had done all he could to avoid military duty.

Their extended family, though, boasted a proud military tradition. While King’s two nephews, of whom he may or may not have been aware, served their country as second-class soldiers, King’s brother-in-law, Clarence Townsley, the husband of his half sister, Marian, continued his rise through the military ranks. In August 1912 President Taft appointed Colonel Townsley superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point. In 1916, now a brigadier general, Townsley left West Point to serve overseas; in late 1917 he returned to North America to assume command of American interests in the Canal Zone.
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While the men in Sidney’s and Wallace’s segregated units fought literally and figuratively to assert their full citizenship, Marian Townsley—the King boys’ aunt—fulfilled her own supporting role by sewing and knitting for her country under the auspices of the Hudson River War Relief Committee, alongside women named Roosevelt, Vanderbilt, and Astor.
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