Passing Strange

by Martha A. Sandweiss

  In 1885 a municipal health survey pronounced the condition of Hudson Avenue “bad.” “Garbage and refuse choke the gutters and decaying animal and vegetable matter lies till it rots to nothing.”6 On some days the smoke from the iron foundry down the block hung thick in the air. And the stench of the nearby stock pen, the slaughterhouse, the tallow-rendering facility, and the skin-salting plant could become almost unbearable. “At certain periods of each week,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “when the proprietors are boiling offal or rendering fat the odor that fills the air is so bad that it prevents those working in neighboring factories from continuing their labor, and a good deal of the unusually large amount of sickness in the neighboring tenements can be traced . . . to conditions produced by the slaughter houses.” The people in the neighborhood “say that they cannot eat their meals with any relish and cannot sleep at night because of the odor.”7 But a woman like Ada Todd, newly freed from the necessity of work and living in her own home for the very first time, might find that the space and privacy outweighed the stench of the street.

  Ada now had an independence and privacy she could only have dreamed of as a boarder in her aunt’s tenement apartment or as a live-in domestic. On this dusty, smelly, sometimes rowdy street, she could eat whenever she wanted to, invite friends into her home, step out to walk any time of day. She might not live in the heart of Brooklyn’s black society, among the older families with fortunes derived from successful careers as caterers or dress-makers whom James Weldon Johnson described as “positively rich.” But down the street there lived a few African American families whose birthday parties drew attention from the society pages of New York’s black newspapers. 8 From her own apartment on Hudson Avenue, Ada might glimpse the possibilities of such a life. She, too, might become a person of note in her community, the sort of woman others might read about in the society pages or acknowledge on the streets.

  She lived surrounded by an urban landscape of sounds as well as smells: the clip-clop of horses on the cobblestones, the more distant sounds of steam-powered trains, the cries of street vendors hawking food or selling old clothes. Brooklyn began electrifying its trains in 1890, even as Manhattanites continued to travel in horse-drawn cars and steam-powered trains. Ada’s neighborhood soon rattled with the noise of an elevated train that rumbled by less than two blocks away. The new electric trains could hurtle through the streets at thirty miles an hour, roughly six times faster than the horse-drawn trolleys. But with their speed came danger. Though they had “the weight and power of locomotives,” write two New York historians, “their brakes were still those of a horsecar.”9

  Near the elevated tracks of Ada’s neighborhood stood the bars and pool-rooms where African American residents sometimes gathered in the evenings. A group of neighbors petitioned the mayor in the summer of 1891 to complain about the late-night singing, dancing, and conversation “of a very vile character” by “a lot of lazy disreputable, blasphemous negroes of the male and female sex” that disrupted the local peace. But the police found the small restaurant at the center of the complaints to be quiet and orderly. “Hudson avenue stands vindicated,” reported the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The police “do not pretend that Hudson avenue is a second garden of Eden, a perpetual paradise, a community of celestial virtue. They do not assert that its inhabitants are eminently fitted, without preliminary preparation to join the angelic choir. What they contend is that the picture of drunkenness and disorder... is overcolored.” The complainants lived in the “improved tenement flats” recently built in the middle of the block, “right in the midst of a dense colored population, mostly of the lowest order, who occupy buildings which are old and dilapidated.” The police dismissed their complaints and defended the rights of the residents of the old tenements to sit out on their stoops on hot summer nights.10

  The block that lay at the very center of Ada Todd’s world lay at the periphery of her husband’s. To reach Hudson Avenue, in downtown Brooklyn, King would slip out of his midtown clubs and head down to the ferry docks at the southern tip of Manhattan to board a boat across the East River, immersing himself in what one traveler called “the rushing crowds, the stamping teams and yelling teamsters, the tooting whistles, the rattling windlasses and clanging chains.”11 Or he might catch a crowded train to make the six-minute trip across the Brooklyn Bridge, that engineering marvel that spanned the East River, arching high over the ferries and freighters, schooners and steamboats that crowded New York’s great harbor. Finally, said one of the speakers at the dedication of the bridge in 1883, the “ ‘silver streak’ which has so long divided this city [Brooklyn] from the continent is now conquered, henceforth, by the silver band stretching above it, careless of wind and tide, of ice and fog, of current and calm.”12 By the spring of 1888, 487 cable railway trains a day made the crossing from Manhattan to Brooklyn, leaving as often as every minute and a half and depositing riders at a train terminal at Fulton and Sand streets, just eleven blocks from Ada’s apartment.13 King would walk from there to the apartment, transforming himself, somewhere along the familiar route, into James Todd, the black Pullman porter.

  The Brooklyn Bridge knit together Manhattan and the independent city of Brooklyn, making it possible to imagine a truly unified metropolis, which was made real on January 1, 1898, when Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, Brooklyn, and the Bronx joined together to form Greater New York, a single city of some three million souls. Railroads and bridges, telegraphs and telephones: such marvels annihilated space and distance, bringing the distant near. But a man like Clarence King, who sought to keep his two lives at a safe divide, might view these technological innovations with mixed feelings. He probably settled his wife in Brooklyn for a reason. With each subsequent move, he relocated her farther from his own midtown Manhattan haunts.

  One imagines that as King traveled from Manhattan to Brooklyn, then walked to Hudson Avenue, he would prepare mentally, calculating how to drop the burdens and pleasures of one life to assume the guise of another. He might subtly alter his appearance or modify his behavior. Maybe he changed his clothes, stuffing his jacket into his bag and pulling out a Pullman porter’s coat. Perhaps he adopted more colloquial speech to conceal his Newport and Ivy League antecedents, or took care to leave his business papers behind at his club or in his residential hotel rooms. By 1891, more than a million people commuted into and out of Manhattan every day.14 In the anonymity of that crowd King could slip into character, perhaps talking to strangers on the train or the boat, spinning stories about his life as a porter, or just chatting about his neighborhood in Brooklyn. Perhaps, though, he just became silent, steeling himself to walk through the busy streets of Brooklyn as James Todd, bracing himself to leap into the newness of an invented life.

  ABOUT THE TIME HE set up the new household with Ada in Brooklyn, King secured a new place to live in Manhattan. He could not wholly abandon his other, more public life; nor did he wish to. He valued his friends and family too much to risk their disapproval, and he relied for his livelihood on his reputation as an eminent geologist. To be James Todd, he needed to earn his living as Clarence King. So even if he continued to use his midtown clubs as a place to receive his mail, entertain his friends, and conduct informal business, he still needed a residential foothold in the city in order to maintain his public and professional life. Soon after his wedding, he moved from the Brunswick Hotel to the Hotel Albert, farther downtown at the corner of University Place and East Eleventh Street.15 Its location reflected the complicated calculus of his new life. It stood just a few doors away from his mother’s temporary residence on East Eleventh Street, and at the same time put him closer to Brooklyn. He could probably expect more privacy here. The residents and employees of the Brunswick, who had known him for years, would be more likely to note his comings and goings.

  The Albert advertised itself as an “ideal fire-proof building” with “suites of two to six rooms; elegantly furnished; cuisine and service unsurpassed,” and it attracted a literary
and artistic clientele. Among his new neighbors, King could count two art dealers, a college treasurer, a journalist for the New York Tribune, and the enterprising “Miss Minnie Swayze, teacher, reader and lecturer,” who offered elocution lessons in her rooms. His neighbors included a few more-troubled souls as well, like forty-seven-year-old Miss Frances Rhind, who leapt to her death from her parents’ fourth-floor window, and George North Dalrymple, the flamboyant Englishman and would-be writer who drank his way through his family funds and went to jail for dodging his hotel bills. King’s new residence lacked the social cachet of his last one, attracting midwestern retail merchants rather than the fashionable members of the “coaching set.”16 It had the advantage, however, of cheaper rents.17

  Even so, to maintain two households took more than King had. In October 1888, a month after he married, King turned to John Hay for a $6,000 loan (more than $135,000 in 2007 dollars). It would prove the first of at least six loans King requested from Hay over the next three years. From the start, he sustained his secret life with crushing debt.18

  Ada later claimed that she accompanied her husband to Washington, Newport, and Boston.19 But it seems improbable that King could protect his secret if James and Ada Todd traveled together on the trains or ships that Clarence normally used for his trips along the Northeast coast. The potential social awkwardness of running into an old acquaintance would be too great, threatening to unravel his deceptions on both ends. Perhaps his friends would believe that Ada was a family servant or a relative of King’s black valet, Alexander Lancaster, who began working for him at about this time. But lying to them in Ada’s presence or even responding to the name they called him would expose his deceptions to his wife. A casual greeting from a passerby—“Clare!” or “King! ”—could call everything into question.

  King kept his friends uncertain about his whereabouts in the fall of 1888, during the first month or two of his marriage. He turned down a chance to travel to Fiji then with Henry Adams, though Adams jokingly promised that they could drink blood from empty skulls. “He does not seem to know,” King wrote to Hay, “that enemies are impossible to me among archaic peoples, and that if a sudden mad thirst for blood drinking should ever overtake me I should as a matter of choice begin with the Americans.”20 He breathed not a word of his marriage, even to his closest friends, and remained maddeningly elusive. Finally, in November, he made his whereabouts known to John Hay. From Altoona, Pennsylvania, King wrote that he was on his way to the therapeutic spas at Hot Springs, Arkansas, and had “told no one except Mother” about his travels.21 His back pain—variously described as “gouty rheumatism” or “deep muscular rheumatism”—seemed unbearable.22

  King’s friends knew of his back troubles, even if they never quite understood their source, and they tended to view the pain as a stimulant to King’s astonishing physical vigor. King “has been very ill this winter,” Hay wrote to a friend in the spring of 1887, “but there seems to be great recuperative forces somewhere about him always, and he gets out of bed for a ramble of five thousand miles and thinks nothing of it.”23 In the summer of 1887, however, King underwent some sort of operation. Henry Adams knew of it, though he remained vague on the details. “The ruffian seems well and bright,” he reported to Hay that August. “[King] says that his operation worked like a charm, and that he has been very well since, but it will have to be repeated.”24 By the end of the year, though, King was confined to bed with an illness he deemed “the most serious of my life.” He contemplated “the giving up of everything for a struggle to get well.”25 Whether King’s trouble stemmed from an old injury, the painful inflammations of gout, or arthritis, he usually just called it rheumatism, a nonspecific term for a variety of medical disorders involving chronic, often intermittent pain.26 The combination of hot bath treatments and repeated minor surgeries also suggests the possibility of a pilonidal cyst, a painful abscess at the base of the tailbone.27 While he courted Ada Copeland, the pain had seemed tolerable. But now it was not.

  Ada likely stayed behind when King left her, just two months after their marriage, to travel south—part of the way on segregated railway cars—in search of relief for his back pain. Presumably, she had quit her job when she married the railroad porter. With her newfound time, independence, and money, she could settle into her new house and begin to find her way around Brooklyn. In Hot Springs, meanwhile, King registered at the fashionable Arlington Hotel and protected his privacy in the rambling three-story frame hotel by securing a special room with a private entrance to the baths and arranging for his meals to be brought to his room. He might have an endless curiosity about the exotic peoples he met in his travels, but he had scant patience with the social set, whether in Manhattan or at a hot springs resort. King grumbled to Hay that the doctors’ prescription for his pain involved an unbearably long sixty-day regimen of thirty baths on alternate days. He wrote nothing of Ada, but she seemed to preoccupy him. As never before, his letters focus on race. Arkansas seemed “the most barbarous and terrible place” he had ever been in. He told Hay that he was “interviewing a lot of Negroes about the recent notices to leave in various parts of Arkansas” and expressed shocked indignation at the governor’s refusal to protect them. The entire South seemed a mockery of American civilization, led by “lying Jesuitical Brigadiers” and great bodies of ignorant people. Thankfully, the blacks were “rising as fast as the laws of Evolution will permit.” King cut short his visit to return to New York, ostensibly to tend to business, perhaps to be with Ada. It was “lonesome” in Arkansas, he told Hay. He returned feeling better, but in a peculiar reference to his complexion, remarked that he was “nigger gray.”28

  King’s surviving correspondence with his friends catalogs his continuing spinal pain, his struggles with depression, his worries about his mother, and the vicissitudes of his work life. But still not a word about his married life. By asking his friends’ indulgence for his various health and financial worries, he suggested a source for his distracted inattentiveness and frequent absences and deflected probing questions about his personal affairs. His friends knew that he moved his mother back to Newport so that he could go down to Mexico during the summer of 1889 to tend to a mine, but then he disappeared from their lives for a while. He resurfaced in New York in the fall, elusive as ever, canceling dates at the last moment, pleading the necessity to be elsewhere, compelling his friends to write to business managers to figure out where he was. “I have drudged away here, sometimes worn down to the quick of my nerves,” he wrote to Hay from New York in October 1889, “and then coming up again all right.” He felt “low” in spirit, he explained, and missed Hay’s companionship. He again dreamed of moving to Washington with his mother and half sister, Marian, because, he wrote to Hay, “I would rather have you than all New York.” King did seem in the “depths of low spirits,” Henry Adams reported to a friend, and very “low in mind.” Adams surmised the problem must be money.29

  It was, in part. But it was also more complicated than that. King threw out hidden clues to his friends. In October 1889, after Adams completed the first volume of his massive History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, King made light of his own inability to sit down and write any of the “vast historical works” he always had in mind.30 Writing to Hay about the depression that descended upon Adams when he finished his book, King said, “It’s evidently a horrible thing to finish one’s magnum opus. I who will never begin mine may always have the gentle tonic of perpetual gestation, the soft genial pride of an important bellyful, with none of the throes of printing and none of the ghastly hollowness of collapsing sides. Can a man have a second magnum opus? Is the intellectual womb capable of a second fecundation?” 31 The teasing metaphor of the pregnant man hinted at King’s powerful secret: James Todd had become a father.

  Ada Todd gave birth to a son sometime in 1889; no surviving documents record the precise date.32 Clarence named him Leroy, a variation of le roi,
French for “the king,” an inside joke that only King could appreciate. Just as the pseudonymous James Todd honored his true father by becoming a “James,” his son honored them both by becoming a “King.” The echo of names proved prescient: Clarence King disappeared from young Leroy’s life just as his own China-trader father had disappeared from his: in a dutiful search for money.

  “NOW IN MIDDLE AGE, I am poor,” the forty-seven-year-old King complained to Adams in September 1889, “and what is worse, so absorbed in the hand to mouth struggle for income that I see the effective literary and scientific years drifting by empty and blank, when I am painfully conscious of the power to do something had I the chance.”33 In November he borrowed another $11,000 from Hay (nearly $255,000 in 2007 dollars).34 Later that year, he went west to check out a mining project in Colorado. He returned to New York early in the new year, expecting to set off for Florida and Cuba, but turned west again to investigate some mining prospects in California, where the memories of his earlier ventures left him feeling “rheumatic and gray and dull.” From California during the bleak winter of 1890, King came close to unburdening himself of his secrets, half-begging Hay to press him to reveal what weighed so heavily on his spirit. “When can I be with you long enough to open up my soul to you,” he wrote, “for there grows over me a dread but you should forget what sort of fellow there still is under all the load of hard things which cover me up and hide me. . . . I wish I could write as I feel but that no longer seems possible.”35