Passing Strange (61 page)

32
William G. Winne, Response to Affidavit of Herman N. Schwartz (18 Nov. 1931), 6.

33
Winne, Amended Answer to Complaint, 2-4.

34
Ibid., passim.

35
Schwartz to Jessup, 9 Dec. 1931, Reply to Answer of the Defendants.

36
Winne Response to Bill of Particulars, 5 Dec. 1931.

37
Herman N. Schwartz Affidavit, 21 Dec. 1931, 3.

38
Jessup to Schwartz, 9 Dec. 1931, Response to Request for a Bill of Particulars, 11 Dec. 1931.

39
Schwartz to Jessup, 9 Dec. 1931, Reply to the Defendants.

40
Deposition of Henry W. Jessup, 11 Jan. 1932, 1-3.

41
Motion on Behalf of the Defendants for Judgment on the Pleadings, 7.

42
Ibid., 8-9.

43
Memorandum in Opposition to Defendants’ Motion for Judgment on the Pleadings, 6, 9.

44
Ibid., 7.

45
“Millionaire’s ‘Love Wife’ Sues for Share in Huge Fortune,”
Chicago Defender,
Jan. 2, 1932, national ed., 1.

46
J. Dore, Judgment on the Pleadings, 1 Mar. 1932, Supreme Court, New York County, Special Term, Part 3.

47
“Court Grants 1st Round to Scion’s Colored Love,”
New York Daily News,
Mar. 28, 1932, 8.

48
“New York Woman May Share in $80,000 Trust Fund,”
Chicago Defender,
Apr. 9, 1932, national ed., 1.

49
“Secret ‘Union,’ ” 1-2.

50
Kenny A. Franks and Paul F. Lambert,
Early Louisiana and Arkansas Oil: A Photographic History, 1901-1946
(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1982).

51
“Secret ‘Union,’ ” 1-2 ; “Sues for Share of White Man’s Estate,”
New York Age,
Jan. 2, 1932, 1, 3.

52
“Secret ‘Union,’ ” 1-2 ; “Negress Asks $200 a Week,”
New York Times,
Mar. 15, 1928, 13; “Carleton Curtis Wins Suit,”
New York Times,
Mar. 20, 1928, 35; “Stage All Set for Sensational Separation Suit,”
Amsterdam News,
Mar. 14, 1928, 1. Despite this publicity, the King trial never received the notoriety of the Curtis trial or the sensational Rhinelander trial of 1925 (in which a wealthy white New Yorker sought to annul his recent marriage to a working-class woman whom he accused of concealing her “colored” identity) largely because King was no longer alive and in the public eye. On the Rhinelander trial, see Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone,
Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).

53
Memorandum on Motion to Compel Service of Bill of Particulars, 2, 4.

54
Brief in Opposition to Motion to Compel Defendants to Serve a Bill of Particulars, 2.

55
New York Daily News,
Nov. 21, 1933, cover, 3.

56
“New York Woman in Court Fight,” 1.

57
“Justice Bernard L. Shientag Dies of Heart Attack in His Home Here,”
New York Times,
May 24, 1952, 1.

58
Harris J. Griston,
Shaking the Dust from Shakespeare
(New York: Cosmopolis, 1924); “Harris J. Griston, Lawyer, Architect,”
New York Times,
Oct. 3, 1952, 23. Griston argued in his Shakespeare text that the prototype for Shakespeare’s Shylock was not a Jew but a figure from a medieval story who was a rich slave.

59
On the history of the firm, see
www.emmettmarvin.com
. Its name appears on the Defendants Trial Memorandum prepared in late 1933 and on the subsequent appeal documents.

60
“Mammy Bares Life,” 3; “Payne Whitney Dies Suddenly at Home,”
New York Times,
May 26, 1927, 1, 25; William G. Winne Testimony (21 Nov. 1933), 11-12, Memorandum for Defendants.

61
Memorandum for Defendants, 7.

62
William G. Winne Testimony (21 Nov. 1933), passim.

63
Plaintiff’s Trial Memorandum, 116.

64
Ibid., 117-18.

65
Ibid., 118.

66
Although a newspaper account reported that Ada King identified twenty letters as King’s, the trial memoranda refer to only about seven letters. See “Justice Stays Ruling in King Trust Estate,”
New York American,
Nov. 22, 1933, 3. Characterization of the old letters comes from “Scientist’s Letters Reveal His Love for Colored Wife,” 3.

67
Plaintiff’s Trial Memorandum, 169-72. The letters introduced at the trial no longer exist, and their content is known only through newspaper accounts and various legal summaries written in conjunction with the trial.

68
See, for example, “Negro Claiming Fund as Wife of King, Geologist,”
New York Herald Tribune,
Nov. 22, 1933, 7.

69
“Mammy Bares Life,” 4.

70
Plaintiff’s Trial Memorandum, 179. “She testified... that she and Ada King had been in Gardiner’s office on a number of occasions, between 1903 and 1911.”

71
“Widow Tells of Ceremony and Children,” 1-2.

72
Plaintiff’s Trial Memorandum, 182-83.

73
“ ‘Bloods’ Hid Scion’s Love,” 3.

74
“Negro Claiming Fund as Wife of King,” 7.

75
Ada King’s testimony is reconstructed through news accounts. See “Negro Woman Sues,” 2; “Negro Claiming Fund as Wife of King,” 7; “Mammy Bares Life,” 3-4; “Widow Tells of Ceremony and Children,” 1, 2.

76
Memorandum for Defendants, 36-37.

77
Plaintiff’s Trial Memorandum, 185-87.

78
Memorandum for Defendants, passim.

79
Hon. Bernard L. Shientag, Judgment ( Jan. 1934); Scheintag, Opinion (22 Jan. 1934).

80
“Claim on King Art Fails,”
New York Times,
Jan. 24, 1934, 14.

81
“Negro Woman Loses Suit for Clarence King Trust,”
New York Herald Tribune,
Jan. 24, 1934, 16.

82
Petition of Morris B. Bell (30 Jan. 1934).

83
See Order to Dismiss Appeal,
King v. Peabody et al.,
25 Sept. 1934, Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, First Judicial Department, State of New York.

84
“Widow Keeps Hope Burning,” 2.

85
Patricia Chacon, interview with author, Wilmington, NC, June 19, 2006.

86
King,
Mountaineering,
11-20.

87
King, “The Helmet of Mambrino,” with an introduction by Francis P. Farquhar (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1938), x.

88
Dennett,
John Hay,
157.

89
Bernard DeVoto,
The Year of Decision: 1846
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), 348.

90
Stegner,
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,
344-45.

91
Crosby, “So Deep a Trail,” v, 467, 355, 357.

92
HA to S. F. Emmons, 17 Mar. [190?], cited in Wilkins,
King,
vii.

93
Wilkins,
King,
317, 320, 322.

94
Louise Hall Tharp, “Great Men Called Him Their Ideal,”
New York Times,
Aug. 3, 1958, book review, 1.

95
“Thurman Wilkins,”
Contemporary Authors Online
(2006).

96
Wilkins,
King,
412-413.

97
Wallace A. King, U.S. World War II Army Enlistment Records, 1938-1946 Record, accessed on
Ancestry.com
; Wallace A. King, NA Form 13164, obtained from the National Archives under the Freedom of Information Act. King’s army enlistment record notes his occupation as a musician and states that he was sixty-three inches tall and weighed 141 pounds. On Wilkins, see “Thurman Wilkins,”
Contemporary Authors Online.

98
Wallace King’s high school attendance is recorded on his World War II enlistment form.

99
Patricia Chacon, interview with author, June 19, 2006; Ada McDonald, Certificate of Death, City of New York, 156-81-409001, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

100
Sidney C. King, New York State Department of Health Certificate of Death, 42437.

101
Estate of Ada King, Surrogates Court, Queens County, index no. 3507-1966.

102
Patricia Chacon, interview with author, June 19, 2006.

103
Ibid. Chacon is the source for the subsequent descriptions of the King household.

104
Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream” (speech, Aug. 28, 1963), “Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Projects Speeches: Address at March on Washington,”
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications
/speeches /
address_at_march_on_washington.pdf
.

105
Ibid.

106
Ada King, Certificate of Death, City of New York, 156-64-404943, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

107
Wallace A. King, Certificate of Death, City of New York, 156-81-413685, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; Ada McDonald, Certificate of Death, City of New York, 156-81-409001, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

EPILOGUE : SECRETS

1. Harris Co., GA, DV M:205, 19 Feb. 1883/24 Feb. 1883, Harris County Courthouse, Hamilton, GA; citation courtesy of Lea Dowd.

2. I attended the Copeland Family Homecoming in Pine Mountain Valley, GA, on Aug. 7, 2005. None of the approximately 120 gathered family members knew of Ada or had heard stories about a family member who had gone north to New York in the 1880s.

3. The important exception is Patricia O’Toole, who uncovered new evidence about King’s secret marriage—including Ada’s maiden name—while doing research for her group biography,
The Five of Hearts.
The marriage, though, was not the focus of her book, and she devotes only about eleven pages to a discussion of the relationship between Clarence King and Ada Copeland. More recently, there have been two new biographies of King. Robert Wilson’s
The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax—Clarence King in the Old West
(New York: Scribner, 2006) relies largely on secondary sources to narrate King’s western survey work up through his involvement in the diamond hoax of 1872, with only a passing reference to his later professional career and barely a mention of his private life. James Gregory Moore’s
King of the 40th Parallel: Discovery in the American West
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006) provides a lively account of King’s western survey work that, as befits a book written by a former geologist for the United States Geological Survey, conveys a vivid sense of how King worked in the field. Focusing on King’s career as an explorer, the author gives scant attention to King’s life after his departure from the USGS in 1881 and mentions Ada only in passing. Aaron Sachs, in
The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism
(New York: Viking, 2006), speculates briefly about the precise nature of King’s relationship to Ada, seeing it as “a characteristic attempt to seek connection in a way that was guaranteed to fail” (261). Zeese Papanikolas, in
American Silences
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), reimagines the lives of a broad range of American cultural figures from Henry Adams to Jackson Pollock, and likewise gives fleeting attention to Ada King. But alone among these writers, he imagines her as central to King’s life, speculating that with his marriage “King’s life was cut in two” (47).

Adaline (slave)

Adams, Clover

Adams, Henry

Hay’s correspondence with

historical writings of

on King as ideal American

and King’s Caribbean trip

King’s friendship with

and King’s ill health

and King’s love of paradox

on King’s nervous breakdown

on King’s restlessness

and wife’s suicide

African Americans:

civil rights of

discrimination against

economic progress of

education of

as freed people

health care for

as lawyers

military service of

neighborhoods of

newspapers of

northern emigration of

“passing” by

racial identity of

religious affiliations of

in slavery

violence against

African Methodist Episcopal Church

Afro-American Council

Agassiz, Louis

Age of Innocence, The
(Wharton)

Allston, Washington

Along This Way
(Johnson)

“amalgamation”

Amateis, Louis

American Anti-Slavery Society

American Art Association

American Geographical Society

American Historical Association

American Institute of Mining Engineers

American Philosophical Society

American Silences
(Papanikolas)

Ancona, John

Anglo-Mexican Mining Co.

Antietam, Battle of

Armour, Philip

Army Corps of Engineers, U.S.

Augusta (black servant)

Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, The
(Johnson) -52
n

 

Bachner, Frederick

Bancroft, Hubert Howe

Base of the Rocky Mountains, Laramie Peak
(Bierstadt)

Beale, Emily

Beard, George Miller

Becker, Alexander