Passing Strange

by Martha A. Sandweiss

  James Todd would not need to spell out his racial heritage for Ada Copeland. By calling himself a Pullman porter, he signaled his African American ancestry, whether or not he claimed as much in words. But it was a risky move. Pullman put the lightest-skinned African Americans to work as dining car waiters, permitting only those with the darkest skin to work as sleeping car porters .24 King must have presumed that Copeland knew about the racial identity of the porters and had some sense of their social status. But likewise, he seemed to gamble that by virtue of her southern upbringing, dark complexion, and limited financial resources, she had never been in a Pullman sleeping car herself. If she had, she would know that her friend was too light-complected for the job.

  King’s white friends read his complexion one way: King’s “blondness was affirmed rather by his blithe blue eyes and fresh tint than by the light hair which was cropped close on the head where it early grew sparser and sparser,” the writer William Dean Howells recalled.25 But Ada likely read his color differently. She probably knew people of African American descent who passed as white in New York and understood that a fair complexion could conceal a mixed racial heritage. One 1921 study estimated that during the 1890s about twenty-five thousand people a year once identified as black or mulatto passed into the white world.26 A 1909 story in New York’s black press reported that Washington, D.C., had “at least one thousand Negroes who pass for white at all times,” with another two thousand passing occasionally.27 Ada’s own dark complexion gave her no flexibility about crossing back and forth across the color line herself. But she would be acquainted with all manner of African Americans and know that their skin could shade in color from very dark to very light.

  Thus, if he put on a Pullman porter’s coat—found or purchased on one of his many cross-country trips—King might persuade Copeland he was a Pullman porter. And if he was a Pullman porter, he had to be black.

  IN LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA, skin color did not necessarily determine the way in which others perceived one’s racial heritage. Race could also be inferred by language and behavior, by dress and subtle mannerisms. Because the perception of racial heritage depended on social circumstances as well as visual cues, King might behave in ways that suggested an African American heritage, just as fair-skinned persons of African descent might somehow behave “white.” In September 1888, as King played out his own racial masquerade, the New York Times reported the tragicomic tale of the white woman in Brooklyn who had “Married a Negro Instead of a Cuban.” After five happy months of marriage to a “swarthy-visaged” Cuban, the young woman found in her husband’s coat “a tintype picture of a fullblooded negro concealed in the lining. Although of a much older man, it bore a strong resemblance to [her husband], and this discovery called to her mind the hitherto unnoticed way in which her husband often defended and upheld the colored race and some peculiarly negro expressions that he often used.” She confronted her husband, who confessed to his “true” race, and “nearly crazed with grief” she now sought a divorce.28 The news story suggested how unstable racial categories could be, how unnerving that race could not be determined by physical appearance alone. The dissembling Cuban looked white, but he betrayed his “true” race through particular “expressions.”

  Mark Twain satirized this American anxiety about the fluidity of racial boundaries in Pudd’nhead Wilson, his 1894 novel about a slave mother who swaps her own infant with her white master’s son. While the slave boy becomes a dandy and studies at Yale, the boy born to privilege grows up a slave. When the deception is revealed, the white boy finds himself “rich and free, but in a most embarrassing situation.... His gait, his attitudes, his gesture, his bearing, his laugh—all were vulgar and uncouth; his manners were the manners of a slave.” His behavior trumped his skin color. Treated like a slave, he behaved like one, and in effect became “black.” “Training is everything,” notes Pudd’nhead Wilson, the novel’s wry commentator. “The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.”29 The idea that social context—rather than heritage—might shape the perception of one’s race upset the biological determinism that lay at the core of American racial thought.

  “Any white person—including the lightest blond—can, if he wishes, pass for colored,” the sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton wrote in their study of black Chicago in 1945. Working at a moment when American social scientists took particular interest in the issue of racial mixing, they cited the white social worker in the “Black Belt” whose clients simply assumed she must be black if she worked there, and noted that the sociologist Robert Park twice passed “for a Negro in order to obtain a room in a Negro hotel.”30 Another scholar researching interracial couples in Chicago in the 1930s documented white partners in mixed marriages who concealed their racial heritage in order to live in the black world.31 Blackness could thus be inferred through circumstance, where one worked or lived, for example, or through hearsay about one’s parents or grandparents. “To cross the caste line from the white side would be a relatively easy matter,” wrote the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in 1944, “since in America a Negro is not necessarily supposed to have any Negro features at all.”32 As Walter White, a graduate of the historically black Atlanta University and for a quarter century the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wrote in his 1948 memoir A Man Called White: “I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.”33

  THESE LATER TWENTIETH-CENTURY STUDIES affirmed what had been true in King’s day as well. In the absence of any visible evidence of African American heritage, the knowledge (or the very suspicion of knowledge) that one had an African American ancestor—however remote—could relegate one to a public identity as a black person; likewise, it could be a turn of phrase, or even a porter’s uniform. In Jim Crow America, where the so-called one drop of black blood, whether visible or not, could consign one to live on the far side of the color line, everyone had a heightened and attenuated awareness of race. In Ada Copeland’s home state of Georgia, the law was clear: a single black great-grandparent made someone a “colored” person in the eyes of the law; the visible color of his or her skin mattered not at all.34

  In New York City in 1888, Clarence King’s fair complexion might, paradoxically, have been almost as persuasive an argument for his African American heritage as a Pullman porter’s coat or a made-up story about his family’s past. Even in the North, where racial divisions remained less sharply etched than in the increasingly rigid racial world of the late-nineteenth-century South, why would anyone that light skinned claim to be a Negro unless he or she truly was? In terms of political rights or social freedoms or economic opportunities, an African American heritage conferred no privileges or advantages at all. King, though, had more private reasons for passing across the color line.

  THE SUCCESSFUL DOUBLE LIFE, almost by definition, leaves no trail of visible evidence. It depends on secrecy. Hence the value of a book by King’s contemporary, the pseudonymous Earl Lind (known also as Ralph Werther or Jennie June), whose remarkable memoir details his own double life in New York during the 1890s. By day, Lind was a respectable college student and office worker; by night, a female impersonator who sought sexual partners in New York’s roughest neighborhoods. He wrote to persuade physicians that homosexuals deserved their empathy and understanding. But he inadvertently provides a rare kind of how-to manual that explains just how a man of means might disappear into the streets of New York, cross the bounds of class and social expectations, and emerge, temporarily, as someone new. “Passing,” in the fluid urban world of late-nineteenth-century America, took many forms. In its most conventional meaning it implied disguising one’s racial background, most often to move toward social privilege. But one could also “pass” across the gender line, across lines of ethnic affiliation, across the ever-present bounds of social class. Like countless African America
ns who risked exposure by passing as white in the workplace while returning home every night to their black families, King and Lind passed part-time, reluctant to give up all the pleasures and benefits of the world to which they had been born.35

  Like King, Lind found in New York’s poorest neighborhoods an unfamiliar and vibrant life that contrasted sharply with his middle-class upbringing. He moved to the city in the early 1890s to attend college but soon found his missionary work in the slums of New York more instructive than any lecture. The city itself became his stage. Using the phrase favored by contemporary guidebook writers, he notes that he set off on his first “nocturnal ramble” in search of sexual partners by donning an old suit and stuffing money in his shoe. Then, after carefully going through his clothes to be certain he carried no clue to his identity, he stealthily crept out of his “high-class boarding house,” pulled a hat down over his eyes, and carefully hid a key across the street so “that it could not be stolen and I thereby rendered unable to let myself in on my return.” At last, he writes, he was “transformed into a sort of secondary personality inhabiting the same corpus as my proper self.”36

  Lind pursued his double life for many years, never losing his sense of fear. If he glimpsed a familiar figure as he left his home he would “cross to the other side of the street and make a feint of ringing a doorbell.”37 But invariably, his anxiety about discovery would be alleviated by “blissful intoxication,” as a train whisked him away to a distant neighborhood where he could feel more secure in his alternative identity. Only a few times did someone who knew him as one persona encounter him as the other. Counting on his clothes to serve as a reliable and definitive marker of his class identity, Lind simply denied that he was the person they imagined.38

  Dress provided a powerful clue to one’s tastes and values, class and educational background; it could reveal (or disguise) one’s very identity. A rash of poseurs in late-nineteenth-century New York suggested how gullible Manhattanites could be, how apt to infer a person’s character from his clothes. A con man “dressed in the height of fashion” successfully passed himself off for a year as the son of the Chicago meatpacker Philip Armour. For three years, another con man represented himself as the New York socialite Walter B. Lawrence, cadging money on the pretense of having lost his wallet. When the real Walter B. Lawrence complained to the Charities Aid Society about this disturbing situation, he learned “it was a frequent occurrence, and that my case was similar to hundreds of others they knew about.”39 Even a policeman, the detective James K. Price, found himself victimized by a young man who assumed his identity with the help of a borrowed sheriff’s badge.40 Dress could make, or unmake, the man. Clarence King, perhaps possessed of an old Pullman porter’s coat, understood that.

  KING’S FRIENDS RESIGNED THEMSELVES to his mysterious comings and goings, to the difficulties of tracking down a man who lived between hotels and club rooms. In May 1888 John Hay went off to King’s office in search of his friend only to be told he was off in California and would return “in a week or a month.” But then he went to the Brunswick and “there, in the middle of the shrimps, sat King.” He had his usual assortment of maladies, Hay wrote to Henry Adams, “but he looks well and fit.”41 Even his closest friends had no idea how or where King passed his time, or precisely how he earned his living. They accepted his mystery as a part of his charm.

  King’s distracted inattentiveness seemed a consequence of caring for his mother, now living on her own in New York in a rented home at 12 East Eleventh Street, as fragile and high-strung as ever with “shattered nerves and broken spirits” as well as a “morbidly anxious mind.”42 “Poor Mother,” King wrote to Hay in August 1888. “Would that her electricly [sic] charged mind and consuming spirit might find some pacific quenching medicine that should lessen the fire which is burning her frail nerves to ashes.” King and his half sister, Marian, shouldered the burden of her care. “If you knew the difficulties of my situation in all its respects and phases,” he told Hay, “you would not blame me for consenting to seek a quiet drudgery from which I frankly see that I may never emerge.”43 Hay undoubtedly understood this as a reference to King’s ever-present need to earn a living in order to support his mother and his half siblings. King gave no hint that summer of 1888 that his life contained anything other than crushing work and family obligations.

  His silence was, at the very least, dissembling. Even as he pursued his secret meetings with Ada in the summer of 1888 and they began, however tentatively, to consider marriage, King complained to Hay about women. No one could compare with Mrs. Hay, he wrote to his friend. “Women there are who have the best of the nineteenth century in their hearts and hands, but if there are any besides Mrs. Hay who have all that and the doric strength of nature too, I don’t know where they live . . . and have their being.”44 When a friend asked, over breakfast at the Brunswick, why King had never married, King replied, “Woman is too one-sided—like a tossed-up penny—and I want both sides or none.”45 His public dissatisfaction gave no hint of his private affairs.

  Nor did his writing. In October 1888, a month after his marriage to Copeland, King published an essay in the North American Review. His critical examination of the recent literary characterizations of women seemed to betray his sentiments about the real thing. Nothing about the women featured in contemporary realistic fiction—with their “incredible meanness” and the “primeval monkey-scale of their average intelligence”—appealed to him. The English created only “distorted and diseased creatures,” while the French realists “flung woman naked in the ditch and left her there scorned of men, and grinning in cynical and shameless levity over her own dishonor.” The women in American literature illustrated the “sawdust stuffing of their middle-class democratic society.” So King posed a rhetorical question. “Out of it all, is there one figure for weary eyes to linger upon: one type of large and satisfying womanhood, natural in the rare and ravishing charm of a perfect body; sweet with the endowment of a warm, quick, sympathetic temperament; sound and bright in intellect; pure and spiritual with a soul... [undimmed by] the jar of modern conflict?” King found his ideal in the “Greek Venus in the Louvre, who is only perfect goddess because she is perfect woman”; a woman with a “rich femininity” and a “Doric strength,” a “calm warmth” and an “irradiating aura of love.”46 By professing his undying adoration for the unattainable perfection of a marble statue, King threw his friends off his scent. Who would suspect he had found real love with an African American nursemaid?

  In September 1888 James Todd and Ada Copeland exchanged marriage vows in a small ceremony at the home of Ada’s aunt, Annie Purnell. Ada’s pastor, the Reverend James H. Cook of the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church on East Eighty-fifth Street, conducted the wedding service before a handful of witnesses. One, then a young girl, later recalled the organ in the apartment that day, as well as “a big wedding cake, all kinds of candy, chocolates, bon bons, nuts and different kinds of food.” If the event offered evidence of King’s financial resources, it also testified to Copeland’s social ambitions. The groom—possibly wearing a suit once seen in the Century Association dining room, or perhaps an old Pullman porter’s coat—placed a ring on the bride’s finger. The gold and silver overlay on the ornately patterned gold band symbolically intertwined as one and reaffirmed that the groom was a man of means. But no identifying names or dates personalized the wedding ring. King took care not to mark it as a personal memento of a particular day.47

  Perhaps Clarence King noted to himself how modest the ceremony seemed, how different from the large church services and elaborate receptions he had attended in Newport and New York. But Ada likely viewed the festivities differently, less a diminished version of something more grand than a joyful embrace of all that her own parents and grandparents had been denied. Slave wedding rituals came in all forms, from the traditional “broom-stick wedding,” in which couples jumped over a broom handle, to informal religious services involving clergymen and el
aborate ceremonies in the “big house” arranged by the planter. But few weddings took place without an owner’s approval. And for all their importance within the slave community as rare celebrations of individual desire and will, they almost always reinforced the slaveholders’ power and control. Slaves noted that the white preachers who presided over their weddings never said “till death do you part.” One white minister expressed the reality: “Until death or distance do you part.” Slave masters retained the ultimate threat: anyone who misbehaved could be separated from his or her spouse. And in truth, not even good behavior necessarily assured the stability of a marital relationship. The mere desire for financial gain might compel a slaveholder to separate a married couple.48

  For the Copeland-Todd wedding ceremony to take place in a home instead of a church was not unusual. But the guests might have wondered why the groom—without family or friends—should be so alone.

  KING GREW UP WITHIN his mother’s United Congregationalist faith. His religion, he once quipped, was like his teeth: both were inherited and both were sound. But the intense piety of his youth, so evident in the long, searching letters about faith he exchanged with his friend Jim Gardiner, waned as he grew older.49 He invoked a more pantheistic notion of a deity—of a “God, who is also Nature”—at the conclusion of Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, and as an adult turned toward a faith less stern than that of his boyhood, even flirting with the more emotional spiritualism of African American Christianity. 50 James Hague recalled that while investigating a north Georgia gold mine, King once “attended a religious meeting of a colored congregation, assembled in a large barn-like and frigid meeting-house, without any heating facilities whatever, except the large hot stones and bowlders which many of the old women brought with them.” King addressed the meeting and, notwithstanding the bitter cold, “much enjoyed the fervent spirit of the prayers and the hymns and soul-saving exhortations.” He promised to buy the congregants a large stove, and so he did. Returning to the area a few years later, he asked a white driver whether the church was still doing well. “I should say so!” the driver replied. “There ain’t a fence-rail left in this neighborhood within two mile of that meetin’-house.” Hague dismissed King’s generosity as an amusing gesture. 51 But the anecdote hints at King’s fascination with the African American church and suggests how he could use stories to deflect his friends from any probing queries about his innermost feelings or beliefs.