Passing Strange
Page 2
Other Americans have crossed the color line from white to black—to join a family, to evade antimiscegenation laws, to claim some other sort of political or economic advantage. But Clarence King stands out because of his prominence as a public figure. This was a white man who dined at the White House, belonged to Manhattan’s most elite clubs, and parlayed his privileged upbringing and Ivy League education into a career as an eminent scientist, writer, and government official. American history holds no comparable tale of a high-profile white man crossing the color line. In an era in which the insidious “one drop of blood” rules consigned many phenotypically “white” Americans to live on the wrong side of the Jim Crow laws, King harnessed Americans’ most deeply held beliefs about race to pass voluntarily—if only part-time—as a “black ” man.
How, one must ask, did he pull it off? And what might we make of it?
At one level, the story of the Todds’ marriage is simply a love story about two people from opposite ends of the American social spectrum who met and married and raised a family. But it also illuminates larger stories about race and class and identity in late-nineteenth-century America, stories that lie at the very core of national thinking about the new social order emerging in the wake of emancipation. That King would want to pass in the first place—despite his position of prominence and power—reveals not just his love for Copeland but his awareness that a true interracial marriage would upset both his white world and his wife’s black one. And that he could pass across the color line—despite his own visual appearance—illuminates the extraordinary arbitrariness of racial categorization at the end of the nineteenth century. At the very moment that laws sought to make racial categories fixed and unchanging, King showed just how fluid they could be. The laws that pinned racial identities on ancestry rather than appearance paradoxically made it possible for a light-skinned American like King to claim a black identity.
King and Copeland married at a moment when many Americans could not abide a public marriage between a prominent white government scientist and a black woman born into slavery. King’s secrecy speaks to his desire to preserve his reputation. But it speaks also to the very real constraints of public opinion. American society offered no way for Clarence King to maintain both his public career and a life lived in the open with an African American wife and their mixed-race children. Even someone with his education, political savvy, and social cachet could not rise above the powerful racial stereotyping that permeated every aspect of American life. King bought into some of those stereotypes himself, even as he struggled to transcend them and fashion a life unbound by the racial assumptions of the day.
Though American society was far less tolerant of interracial marriage in the Gilded Age than it is now, it nonetheless afforded its citizens more privacy in the conduct of their personal lives. News and information circulated in different ways. King and Copeland married in an era when telegraphs were common but residential telephones were rare; radio and television did not exist; and daily newspapers were plentiful but seldom illustrated. They could carve out for themselves a zone of privacy that seems almost unimaginable today, especially for a public figure like King. The particular structure of New York City also helped them to protect the secrecy of their shared life. Then, as now, New York was a collection of neighborhoods, many defined by the residents’ class or race or national origin. Horse-drawn trolleys and elevated trains let New Yorkers move about from place to place, but in this presubway era, many city residents lived largely within the bounds of their immediate neighborhoods, rarely venturing into worlds where their social class or physical appearance might make them conspicuous. King lived his secret life for thirteen years, and no one, it seems, ever found him out.
MUCH ABOUT THIS STORY remains unknown and even unknowable. What, for example, did Ada really believe about her husband’s identity? How did Clarence justify to himself deceiving his wife and children? The paucity of historical evidence makes it difficult to track their separate lives and even harder to reconstruct the world they built together or glimpse their innermost thoughts. But most families in late-nineteenth-century New York left behind some traces in the historical records, and this family was no exception. With a careful reading of the surviving evidence and an informed historical imagination, we can at last tell the long-silenced story of Clarence King and Ada Copeland and the world they built together as James and Ada Todd.
PART ONE
Clarence King and Ada Copeland
1
Becoming Clarence King
EQUALLY AT HOME IN A REMOTE DESERT FIELD CAMP AND AN elite Manhattan club, Clarence King could plot revolution with a Cuban peasant or deliver a learned lecture at Yale. He cherished his New England heritage but felt drawn to the “silken Latin and meridional temperament.”1 He clung to social niceties but loved to flout convention. “King loved paradox,” Henry Adams wrote; “he started them like rabbits, and cared for them no longer, when caught or lost.”2
Raised in a New England household of bookish women, King became the very model of a hardy western man. He headed west with a Bible, returned east “saturated with the sunshine of the Sierras.”3 He inspired confidence with his intellect and commanded obedience with his energy. “No one ever saw him lounge or loll or doze—except expressly,” wrote a friend. “His movements were rapid; his step was quick.... He was alertness incarnate.”4 Over drinks in New York drawing rooms, King loved to embellish the stories of his frontier bravery: the tale of the buffalo stampede, the Indian attack, the encounter with a grizzly bear. But this western man in Manhattan delighted in playing the eastern man in Nevada: in the rudest western field camps, he dressed for supper in formal attire. And for all his wandering, he clung to sentimental notions of home. “Repose and calmness are the avenues that lead to Heaven,” he wrote a fellow field geologist in 1873. “The stability of character which comes of settled citizenship should be yours and mine, the humanity and Christianity which ought to be the fruitage of our careers, needs the influence of home and stability.”5
“Paradox . . . enjoyed the hegemony of his mental states,” the critic William Crary Brownell wrote of King. “He had an undoubted predilection for its undoubted stimulus.”6
KING’S CONTRADICTIONS RAN DEEP. He was a young man of intense faith and poetic yearnings who devoted his life to science; a public figure with democratic instincts who harbored aristocratic aspirations; an open-handed friend who struggled under crushing debt. With a pocket never more than “indifferently lined,” one friend observed, “his was ever the generosity and often the munificence of a prince.”7 Intense bursts of manic energy alternated with bouts of paralyzing melancholia and ill health. And although he could be the most public of men, sometimes he would just disappear. “We seldom met when he had not just come from a distant region or was departing for some other point as far,” a friend recalled. “In the wise, I could not free myself from the illusion that he was a kind of visitor, of a texture differing from that of ordinary Earthdwellers.”8
The novelist William Dean Howells attributed King’s baffling doubleness to the pull between his scientific and literary interests, as if an artistic temperament could excuse quixotic behavior. “There was doubtless something in the exactness of science which formed a pull on his poetic nature strong enough to draw him to the performance from which the vagueness of aesthetic motives and impulses relaxed him.” King acted quickly enough in the scientific realm, Howells thought, but in the rest of his life “he was much controlled by what we may call the literary side of him.”9
That literary side manifested itself in King’s mesmerizing conversation, “iridescent with the imagination of the born romancer.”10 “Was there ever so good a talker?” asked William Crary Brownell.11 A fellow member of New York’s elite Century Association, the journalist Edward Cary, proclaimed King’s talk incomparable. “It was impossible to foresee at what point his tangential fancy would change its course. From the true rhythm of Creole gumbo to the verse of Theocri
tus, from the origin of the latest mot to the age of the globe, from the soar or slump of the day’s market to the method of Lippo Lippi....”12 King never expected his talk to lead to anything, another friend explained. “It was its art that attracted him. He enjoyed ‘travel, not arriving.’ ”13
King’s dazzling talk was part mental exercise, part jest, and all performance. As his close friend the diplomat John Hay recalled, “It was hard to remember that this polished trifler, this exquisite wit, who diffused over every conversation in which he was engaged an iridescent mist of epigram and persiflage, was one of the greatest savants of his time.” He seemed “so deliciously agreeable” it could be hard to take him seriously.14 Like an actor, King calculated how to enthrall his listeners. “One fancied him tingling with consciousness, so thoroughly aware of himself and what he was doing, how he was appearing, as to produce the happiest possible effect,” one friend recalled.15 And sometimes he even enchanted himself. His own stories could hold him “quite enthralled within an almost hypnotic control.”16
King deployed his verbal charm to entertain, impress, disarm. “It is but a suggestion of his rare equipment,” Edward Cary wrote of King, “to say that in his talk, as in his work, his imagination was his dominant, at moments his dominating, quality.”17 But the talents that let King wear his learning lightly as he rose through the ranks of American science and letters also allowed him to conceal his secret world. Feinting and dodging with words, he could deflect probing queries, brush off uncomfortable speculation, invent plausible explanations for his sometimes inexplicable behavior. With words he wove the stories that allowed him to live not just a life of contradictions, but a truly double life.
CLARENCE KING WAS BORN in Newport, Rhode Island, on January 6, 1842, to parents of old American stock. His father’s family emigrated from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637. Clarence’s great-great-grandfather Benjamin King later settled in Newport and reportedly assisted Benjamin Franklin with his early electrical experiments. Benjamin’s son, Samuel, became a notable portrait painter and an instructor of the artist Washington Allston. And Samuel’s son, Samuel Vernon King—Clarence’s grandfather—became a merchant. By 1803 Samuel Vernon King was a partner in the China trading firm of King and Talbot (later to become Olyphant, King and Company), and four of his sons followed him into the business, including Clarence’s father, James Rivers King.18 Samuel Vernon King suffered some sort of mental collapse in 1809, and his sons later acquired a reputation for being “a little queer,” less for any emotional instability than for their principled opposition to the opium trade.19 Clarence himself inherited none of the family’s business sense. But from his father and uncles he acquired an expansive view of the world and a particular sense of how families worked: while men ventured far afield to earn their livings, women stayed home to raise the children.
KING’S MOTHER, CAROLINE FLORENCE LITTLE KING, also came from a distinguished family and could trace her ancestry back to Alfred the Great and three signers of the Magna Carta. Florence, as she was known, grew up in a devout Moravian household that emphasized education and public service. Her maternal grandfather, Asher Robbins, represented Rhode Island in the United States Senate from 1825 to 1839 and helped shape the direction of the new Smithsonian Institution. Some lawmakers had called for James Smithson’s bequest to support an observatory or an improved system of common schools. But Robbins articulated a broader view of government-sponsored science, much as his great-grandson would later do, arguing that the “increase and diffusion of knowledge among men” would be better achieved through the establishment of a “scientific and literary institution,” along the lines of a research university.20 Florence’s father, William Little Jr., a talented linguist and orator, died young. But her formidable mother, Sophia Robbins Little, a social reformer and writer, lived to be ninety-four. An acquaintance of Frederick Douglass, an outspoken abolitionist, and the benefactor of prisoners and homeless girls, Mrs. Little shaped young Clarence’s view of the world with her strong antislavery views and religious pacifism. She also bequeathed to him, family members thought, her “rapid diction.”21
Florence Little married James Rivers King on September 5, 1840, the month she turned fifteen. James was six years older. He had been working in the New York office of the family’s China trading firm. But his personal interests tended more to natural science, and he gave his young bride a geology book by the British scientist and divine William Buckland, whose writings about the physical evidence for a great flood gave religious conservatives a way to reconcile the Bible with the new science of geology. He wanted “to awaken my mind to the subject,” Florence later recalled.22 But there proved scant time for philosophical conversations. Within a year of their marriage, James sailed for China to fill in for his older brother, Charles, who had become too ill to return to Canton to handle the family affairs. When sixteen-year-old Florence King gave birth to her first child, Clarence Rivers King, her husband lived half a world away. She hired domestic help to assist with the baby. King’s “nurse was a colored woman,” a close friend wrote many years later, “an old family servant, for whom he ever after cherished a life-long regard and affectionate sympathy.”23
Clarence was more than three and a half years old before he ever met his father. James returned from Canton in the fall of 1845, hoping to find work at home, now that his brother Charles had returned to China. But Charles died at sea that very fall, and in the spring of 1847 James felt compelled to return to China, despite his lack of interest in the family business. Clarence was just five. Florence, still mourning the recent death of a baby girl named Florence, was pregnant again. And she was again alone, without her husband, when in late 1847 she delivered her daughter Grace. It would take months for James to receive news of his daughter’s birth; perhaps he never did. For in 1848, as a family friend put it, came “the shock of tragedy, the pall of bereavement and the manifold burdens of a sweeping family disaster.”24 In September of that year, on her twenty-third birthday, as she mourned the recent death of baby Grace, Florence opened a letter and learned that James had died in Amoy in June.25
She turned, for comfort, to her six-year-old son, their already tight bond now intensified by shared grief. As a friend later recalled, she became at “the outset, as she remained always, his sympathetic and competent intellectual companion.”26 They were “then and always a devoted pair,” recalled another.27 Florence herself thought Clarence not just “a devoted child, but the closest and tenderest friend. ... He came to me so early in life that I can say like Goethe’s mother, ‘We were young together.’ ”28
Clarence King retained faint memory of the father with whom he lived for only a year and a half, and seldom spoke of him. But the loss haunted him. In the back of a journal he kept as a seventeen-year-old he wrote his father’s name out next to his mother’s and his own in his clear neat hand.29 He held on to his father’s Chinese phrase book and treasured the Chinese antiques in his aunt Catherine King’s house.30 Later, as an adult, he collected Chinese textiles and antiquities himself—“kakemonos, screens, porcelains, remarkable palace and sanctuary embroideries”—and kept them locked away in a storage room, faint echoes of that secret world of his father’s out on the Pacific and in the hongs of Canton.31
KING THUS GREW UP an only child in a world of women. His widowed grandmother, Sophia Little, looked outward to the world and never rested, as a friend recalled, “till such of the needy as she was able to help had been provided for, and such of the suffering as she could reach had been consoled.” 32 But his widowed mother, Florence, left nervous and melancholic by the loss of two children and a husband before she was twenty-three, became “completely centred in her son.”33 She held up before him the example of her own scholarly father and grandfather.34 And she threw herself into his education, “learning with an inherited facility both classical and modern languages that she might teach them in turn to him.”35
In 1848 Florence took her six-year-old son to Pom
fret, Connecticut, sixty miles northwest of Newport, to enroll him in Christ Church Hall, an academy run by the Reverend Dr. Roswell Park. A former professor of natural philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, Park held liberal views about the relationship between science and religion and had a keen interest in geology, already a favorite subject of the young King.36 Florence kept close watch over her son’s education. To save the expense of keeping house, she lived with him in a crowded Pomfret boardinghouse, packed with native-born students and Irish-born laborers.37 Later she recalled the bitter winter day Clarence took her on a mile-long walk through the snow to examine a fossil he had found. Unable to answer his questions, she sent away for a copy of Edward Hitchcock’s Geology. And from that time on, she said, their rooms “became a veritable museum where all kinds of specimens were studied with enthusiasm.”38 As King’s secretary later noted, Florence’s single-minded devotion to her son’s interests meant that “almost from his very childhood every step of his studies was a tangential advance upon a certain goal.”39
Florence’s ambitions for her son kept them on the move. Sometime around 1852, she took Clarence to study at a Latin School near Boston, with the intention of preparing him for Harvard.40 But they soon moved on to New Haven, where her younger brother, Robbins Little, taught Greek at Yale. As a youth, Little suffered from a vague nervous malady, and he had sailed to Hong Kong on one of the King company’s clipper ships in search of a cure. He returned healthy, graduated from Yale in 1851, and stayed on to teach. Later he became a lawyer and then superintendent and trustee of New York’s Astor Library, the forerunner of the city’s great public library that would be founded in 1895.41 Florence rented rooms on Church Street, opposite the house of the university president, and there, in the shadow of Yale, she resumed her devoted instruction of her son.42 “He was absolutely obedient to her,” one friend wrote, “and she governed him with a firm will and a gentle hand. I never saw a mother with a keener sense of [the] quality and characteristics of a boy or with greater wisdom or power to develop the best possible.”43 Daniel Coit Gilman, later the Yale University librarian and president of Johns Hopkins University, remembered that the young Clarence “had the same bright face, winning smile, agile movement, that we knew in later life.”44