Passing Strange

by Martha A. Sandweiss

  When Ada Copeland proposed that her pastor perform their marriage ceremony, King might thus have agreed not just to please her but because he himself felt drawn to the practices of African American worship. Perhaps James even presented himself to Cook, and to Ada, as a fellow member of the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church. Not a member of the New York congregation—Cook surely knew all his own parishioners—but a member somewhere else, maybe in Baltimore, the place Todd claimed as his hometown. Membership in the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church, an African American sect, would reaffirm what Todd had already implied by identifying himself as a Pullman porter: he was black. Certainly, everyone else in the church was.

  Cook likely accepted the groom’s story, whatever doubts he might have had about his appearance or the story of his past. What would Todd’s background matter in light of the prospective bride’s evident happiness? It would be a blessing to help launch his parishioner into a better life.

  IF ADA AND HER AUNT lived largely within the social confines of Manhattan’s black working-class community, the Reverend James H. Cook had a higher public profile. In the mid-1860s he helped found the Coachmen’s Union League Society in New York to provide “good-fellowship” and insurance benefits to “negro coachmen employed in public stables or by private families,” the very men who drove the fashionable carriages that King watched from the Brunswick Hotel. He donated his time to black fraternal organizations, raised funds for black refugees from the South, and anointed himself a champion of the downtrodden. In 1880 he went to the Tombs prison to pray with a soon-to-be-executed murderer named Chastain Cox. When Cook’s congregants threatened to disrupt any funeral service for the convicted criminal at their church, Cook improvised a hasty service at the undertaker’s and bought the burial plot himself.52 He was a familiar figure at political gatherings and civil rights events, and in 1890, a year after being appointed a bishop of his church with responsibility for some twenty-two congregations in the Northeast, he joined an interracial group of New York clergymen to fight corruption in Tammany Hall.53

  For much of his life as a black man, James Todd lived beyond the notice of those who shaped African American community life in New York; he could not afford much social scrutiny. But at the moment of his wedding, when he brushed up against the Reverend James H. Cook, he crossed paths with someone who might have heard of Clarence King and his well-connected friends. It would prove King’s most public moment in black city life.

  JAMES AND ADA TODD sealed their marriage with a religious ceremony but never obtained a civil marriage license. They thus had a common-law marriage, a partnership acknowledged by New York since 1809 and recognized as legally valid in most states by the late nineteenth century.54 In having a family celebration but eschewing a legal record, they made what at first seems an odd choice for a couple concerned about privacy. Those who wish to keep their partnerships secret often turn to civil licenses, which can be obtained from the municipal authorities without involving family, religious authorities, or—aside from the obligatory legal witnesses—any friends or acquaintances at all. But in this case, civil documents likely seemed more threatening to the charade than any more public religious service. James Todd likely felt uneasy about appearing in a municipal office to identify himself and wary of leaving behind a paper trail of his deceptions. In 1888 Manhattan’s official “certificate of marriage” required both bride and groom to report their names, ages, and parents’ names, and asked the groom to record his occupation. The form also requested the applicants to designate their “color.” The directions were simple: “If of other races, specify what.” No one needed to clarify the official meaning of the phrase. In the nation’s largest city, “white” remained the norm; everything else was a racial deviation from the standard. To obtain a civil marriage license, James Todd and his bride would have to not only fill out the form but find two witnesses to swear to the truth of everything—including their names and racial identities.55

  No laws prohibited King and Copeland from taking out a marriage license as a white man and a black woman. Interracial marriage was not illegal in New York in 1888, as it was throughout the South. Nonetheless, it remained uncommon. Scant data exist for 1888, but even as late as from 1908 to 1912, a mere 10.4 interracial marriages per year appear in the New York City records.56 Even accounting for common-law marriages and unofficial partnerships, the number is strikingly low. And the practice thus remained a topic of curiosity, particularly among King’s social set, with alliances between white men and black women the most curious and titillating of all. “It is almost invariably the black man and the white woman,” the Boston Herald reported in 1888, noting a supposed one hundred to two hundred interracial marriages in Boston that year. “It is very rarely that a white man marries a black woman.”57 The New York Times fed its readers’ fascination with interracial marriage with a steady diet of stories about the criminal fate of the “white groom and colored bride” in such places as Vicksburg and Galveston, Shreveport and Memphis, Baltimore and Kansas City, all aimed at emphasizing the seeming strangeness of the practice.58 Even if such marriages were legal in New York, they remained unnerving and destabilizing to the status quo.

  When the activist Frederick Douglass wed his white secretary Helen Pitts in 1884, in the most prominent interracial marriage of the day, blacks protested along with whites, demonstrating that not even political prominence could shield one from the broad cultural antipathy toward interracial unions. Douglass showed “contempt for the women of his own race,” some African Americans charged. But Douglass, whose African American wife had died a year and a half earlier, never shied from the publicity or notoriety engendered by his act. Alluding to his own suspected heritage as the son of a slave woman and her white owner, Douglass remarked that his first wife “was the color of my mother, and the second, the color of my father.”59

  King sometimes made light of race. He once joked, for example, that the skin on one side of his body temporarily turned “a coffee color” after lightning struck him on a Nevada peak in the summer of 1867.60 The very ease with which he could jest about becoming black—whether on a mountain peak or in the African American neighborhoods of Manhattan—suggests his fundamental racial self-assurance as a white man. Unlike the dark-hued Ada Copeland, unlike Frederick Douglass whose mother was incontrovertibly black, Clarence King could choose how people perceived his racial identity. He could play at race and return to the white world whenever he chose. He could live as a black man within the embrace of Ada’s family and church, and move out into the world to earn his living as a white scientist. It would be hard to embrace blackness as a playful masquerade if you had been born into slavery or had grown up in a world where dark skin circumscribed every aspect of your life. If race might sometimes seem to King a superficial marker shed as easily as a mask, Ada likely knew it to be something with deep, abiding repercussions.

  And yet King’s ability to see race as a mutable biological or social fact, less fixed than fluid, allowed him to envision a world in which race did not matter. “Miscegenation,” King once told a friend, is “the hope of the white race.” The friend dismissed the remark as one of King’s “whimsical ideas.”61 But King meant it. He truly imagined an America without race.

  King laid out his startling racial theories three years before his marriage, in an 1885 review of the designs submitted for a new monument to the late president and Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant. Some called for a structure in a distinctively “American” style, he wrote in the North American Review, but how could there be a true national style when the American people remained so fragmented and diverse? Americans of European, African, and Asian descent, bound together by a single government, might compose a nation, but they did not constitute a truly American race. King envisioned a future “when the composite elements of American populations are melted down into one race alloy, when there are no more Irish or Germans, Negroes and English, but only Americans, belonging to one defined Amer
ican race.” Only then would Americans become conscious of their own “ideals and aspiration” and find a true and distinctive form of cultural expression.62

  In resorting to the metallurgical metaphor of “amalgamation” and employing the idea in such utopian terms, King echoed an older radical strain of thinking about racial and ethnic mixing in the United States that had all but disappeared in the wake of Reconstruction. The word first emerged in late-eighteenth-century England to denote the mixing of diverse peoples through intermarriage or cultural exchange, as with the blending of the Saxons and Normans. Similarly, in early-nineteenth-century America, the word usually referred to the admixture of immigrants of diverse ethnic origins. But by the early 1830s, it applied mainly to relationships between African Americans and Americans of European origin. Even in the North, the term provoked spirited debates among the radical abolitionists, more conservative racial thinkers, and the working-class whites who saw black laborers as a threat to their own economic interests. In May 1834 concerns over amalgamation triggered a three-day race riot in New York City, with white mobs attacking black residences and singling out for special attention the homes of radical white abolitionists and the churches of ministers rumored to have performed interracial marriages. In the aftermath of the violence, the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York publicly disavowed all support for racial intermarriage, and most white abolitionists in the city retreated from their defense of interracial social relations.63

  Over the coming decades, as the nation slipped ever closer to civil war over the issue of slavery, only a few intellectual outliers continued to use the metaphor of amalgamation to characterize positively the future of the country. Wendell Phillips, Boston’s fiery abolitionist, spoke approvingly of the “United States of the United Races” in 1853, and in an 1863 Fourth of July oration thundered that he was “an amalgamationist to the utmost extent.” He proclaimed, “I have no hope for the future . . . but in that sublime mingling of races, which is God’s own method of civilizing and elevating the world.”64

  Raised on abolitionist rhetoric by his mother and grandmother, King grew up admiring Phillips.65 But Phillips died in 1884, and when King penned his essay about the amalgamation of the American race a year later, Phillips’s particular way of thinking about racial equality had all but vanished from the intellectual landscape. Indeed, the very word “amalgamation” had been largely supplanted by “miscegenation,” a new term made popular by a pseudoscientific pamphlet of 1864, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro. The pamphlet was an elaborate hoax, purportedly written by a radical abolitionist. It called upon all good Republicans to support interracial marriage as the logical extension of the war to free the Negro and the only way to assure the continued vitality of the white race. Its anonymous authors, David Croly and George Wakeman, were, in fact, Democratic newspaper-men, who intended their extreme argument to inflict damage on the Republican Party. Since the term “amalgamation” originally referred to the union of metals, it was a “poor word” to use to describe the melding of races, they argued. They coined their own new word from the Latin miscere, to mix, and genus, race.66 The term “amalgamation” once evoked neutral or positive meanings, but “miscegenation” would be, from the start, a judgmental and pejorative term meant to evoke the intrinsic horror of interracial mixing.

  In invoking the metaphor of amalgamation and the vision of a raceless America in 1885, King harkened back to an all but vanished tradition of radical racial thought. Not even Frederick Douglass, who so admired King’s grandmother as an “excellent woman and a true abolitionist,” could imagine the racial future of the nation with King’s determined optimism.67 Writing in the North American Review in 1886, where King had published his own thoughts about racial mixing just six months before, Douglass argued that the Negro would not remain a separate and distinct race but “will be absorbed, assimilated, and will only appear finally, as the Phoenicians now appear on the shores of the Shannon, in the features of a blended race.” He neither advocated nor deprecated such racial mixing. “I am not a propagandist,” he explained, “but a prophet.”68 King, for all his reluctance to make his own mixed marriage a matter of public record as Douglass had done, voiced a more radical view. Racial mixing was not simply inevitable but desirable: it would improve the vitality of the human race and create a distinctively American people.

  We live in “the age of energy,” King wrote in 1892. Soon “we shall whisper around the globe” and “flight through the upper air will be a daily matter of course.” Technology seemed destined to transform the world, but what about the “new table of biological commandments” emerging from Darwinism? “We have been quick to adopt railways, but we cannot realize heredity.” He thought humans could banish incompetence, insanity, and disease through sound breeding, thus anticipating the language of eugenics, which would emerge in the early twentieth century as a science concerned with the biological improvement of humankind. But while eugenicists generally concerned themselves with the preservation of an imagined racial “purity,” King sounded a different note. He saw racial amalgamation as the path to the improvement of the white race.69

  He might sometimes have imagined his marriage to Ada Copeland as a subversive political act, one that became increasingly effective as she gave birth to each of their five children, and King—in his own secret way—helped father a new raceless nation. Yet imagining the marriage as a sly political gambit on King’s part seems as wrong-minded as dismissing it as self-absorbed hedonism. King loved Ada, and she loved him back. Their relationship rested on devotion and passion, even if it was grounded in deceit.

  King held sentimental ideas about marriage. “To religion and marriage we may ever turn as to final expressions of the inner nature of man,” he wrote in 1875. “His attitude toward the God whose unseen presence he can but feel, and his treatment of the mother of his children, at once fix his place in the scale of manhood and nobility.”70 For thirteen years he would remain devoted to Ada and their children, at no small cost to his own financial and emotional well-being. By virtue of his class and his race, his wealth and his social connections, King held all the cards of social privilege, and like others of his station he might simply have asked Copeland to become his mistress. But one imagines Ada resisting that idea; she sought a respectable life. And for all he did to keep his marriage a secret, King likewise seemed to value the stability of a real home. So James Todd consented to a religious wedding and he gave his wife his family name. If it was not quite his true, legal name, it was nonetheless a name that, at least in her world, would link them together as family.

  WHEN JAMES TODD MARRIED, he crossed the color line. From now on, his private assurances to Ada served as his warrant that he belonged in her world. If she believed him to be a person of African descent, it would be as a black man that he moved through her world of churchgoing friends, curious urban neighbors, and Georgia relations. And as that identity became fixed, it would become increasingly difficult for him ever to confess or untangle the deceptions he spun out for her when he first encountered her on the streets of Manhattan. From now on, Clarence King would be a part-time black man.

  King’s journey as a black man would take him away from his familiar haunts and diminish his ability to move freely and openly in the world. At the same time, however, it would allow him to have an intimate connection to the woman he loved and to create for himself a real home. Clarence King could travel anywhere in New York. The black railroad porter James Todd could not: even as he built a rich emotional life, he would have to live within the more restrictive confines of a black working-class and middle-class world. And yet, if for James Todd New York seemed a newly diminished place, for his new bride it likely seemed magnificently enlarged and full of possibilities. By marrying James Todd, Ada grasped a kind of security her own slave parents never had. Her marriage asserted her place in the world, her independence, her ability to make her own choices. It m
arked her passage out of a life of domestic service and into a world where she could be a wife, a mother, and the mistress of her own home, and for a while even have servants of her own. In the world that Clarence King and Ada Copeland created as Mr. and Mrs. James Todd, he moved away from social privilege, she moved toward it, and together they created a family.

  6

  Family Lives

  ADA TODD’S NEW LIFE CENTERED ON HER HOME. SOON AFTER her marriage, she settled into an apartment on Hudson Avenue in Brooklyn, a cobblestoned road lined with two- and three-story buildings that stretched from the East River down along the edge of the Brooklyn Navy Yards toward the busy intersection of Fulton and Flatbush avenues.1 It was an old street, its Belgian-block paving rutted by the grooves of long-abandoned stage car tracks and “full of pitfalls for the truckman as well as the family carriage.”2 As one inspector of Brooklyn’s streets complained, “A ride over the cobblestones is equal to a month in the penitentiary and a walk on the sidewalk on a windy day to a term in purgatory.”3 Ada’s two-story building, at number 291, stood catty-corner from a blacksmith’s shop.4 Just a few blocks away, almost equidistant, lay Washington Park (later Fort Greene Park), with winding footpaths laid out by King’s old friend Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, and the more forbidding grounds of the Navy Yards. The shipbuilding facility stood hidden away behind a high brick wall that concealed the huge storehouses, covered sheds, dry docks, and ironworks sprawled out along the East River’s Wallabout Bay. Ada’s immediate neighborhood, then as now known as Vinegar Hill, contained a mix of residential buildings and small businesses, chiefly bars and stores, as well as factories and slaughterhouses. In 1890 Brooklyn’s population was just 1.3 percent black. This particular neighborhood, however, had been largely African American ever since the Civil War.5