In March 1890 King turned to Hay for another loan, explaining that he had left some money behind to see his mother and half brother, George, through the winter, but needed an additional $450 by April to help George continue his painting studies in Paris.36 Alluding to the collateral he put up for previous loans, King reminded Hay that all his “bric a brac” was “yours long ago as everything else I have belongs to you.”37 Hay, ever generous, sent the money to George Howland in Paris. In May King signed a promissory note to Hay for a stunning $26,000 (nearly $611,000 in 2007 dollars), backing it up with two chattel mortgages. The debt incurred since his wedding, only one and a half years before, now totaled more than $43,000 (over $1 million now).38 “He handles vast interests,” Hay wrote of King to William Dean Howells, “but cares so little for money that he gains very little. A touch of Avarice would have made him a Vanderbilt—a touch of plodding industry would have made him anything he chose.” Hay puzzled over his talented friend: why did his brilliance and charm not bring him economic rewards? “I fear he will die without doing anything,” Hay wrote, “except to be a great scientist, a delightful writer, and the sweetest natured creature the Lord ever made.”39
As a man of liberal racial thought (and a generous one at that), Hay might have understood King’s true dilemma. Though never a radical abolitionist, Hay grew up with strong sentiments against the “defiant and ungrateful villainy” of slavery and, as Lincoln’s private secretary, watched the president struggle over the issue of freeing the slaves. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863, struck Hay as “lightning from a clear sky” that “[melted] with a flash four million shackles.” 40 Later, as an essayist and a historian—penning among other works a ten-volume history of Lincoln with coauthor John Nicolay—he continued to focus on the vexing American dilemma of race. In 1879 he helped lead a relief effort in Cleveland to support the black Exodusters fleeing the Deep South for Oklahoma and Kansas. Later, he contributed generously to a Washington, D.C., group that established a model tenement program for the urban black poor. Though his racial views hardened in the 1890s, he remained in the public eye a powerful friend of blacks. Twice, Tuskegee Institute honored his service by inviting him to speak, and in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1894, a group of citizens established in his honor the John Hay Normal and Industrial School.41
Given Hay’s deep personal friendship and his civic interest in the affairs of black Americans, why did King not share his secret? One imagines he feared disappointing the admiring friend who was bankrolling his life. But it likewise seems possible that Hay himself steered away from intimate talk, for he, too, had a secret. His wife, Clara, was the model of domestic respectability, and her family money allowed him to pursue the life of the gentleman scholar and diplomat. But since 1887 Hay had been in love with Nannie Lodge, the witty and charming wife of Massachusetts congressman Henry Cabot Lodge, a woman different in every regard from the pious Mrs. Hay. Hay’s secret affair did not cross the bounds of race or class as King’s marriage did, but it likewise threatened the stability of public reputations and professional lives. Henry Adams knew about Mrs. Lodge, and so did his own close companion, Elizabeth Cameron. But Hay confided in no one else.42 For all their camaraderie and the seeming closeness of their long relationship, Hay and King shared a friendship defined and circumscribed by secrets.
In New York, King shuddered at his “real apathy of soul, and indifference of heart to the world,” confiding to Hay that he went about his work “mechanically” and beset by loneliness.43 If his depression was real, his seeming openness was not. As always, King’s words led his friends to imagine that his life held few pleasures, that his problems were largely financial. Hay perceived that every financial struggle of King’s “gets him deeper in the mire, costs him something of life as well as money.”44 By late spring 1890, however, Ada Todd was pregnant with her second child. Of that world of physical intimacy, that part of his life where he found a comforting and affirming joy, King continued to tell his friends nothing. Hay thought it would benefit King’s “immortal soul” to just “drop everything” and sail away to the South Pacific with Henry Adams.45 But King could not go.
He sailed, instead, to England in June with his valet, Alexander Lancaster. Like James Marryatt, who played a similar role during the survey years, Lancaster was black. A light-skinned man of mixed racial ancestry, Lancaster was born in April 1863 in Petersburg, Virginia, a year before the town came under siege by Union troops.46 His mother, like Ada’s, was most likely a slave. The details of his early life and the circumstances of his initial meeting with King remain unclear, but he remained in King’s employ until at least 1900.47 Lancaster’s life, King told a friend, “was in his work.”48 It was either Lancaster or Marryatt, that friend later recalled, who “came to be an invaluable assistant in geological underground work, observing with great acuteness, although without scientific knowledge, indications which more learned men might have overlooked.”49
King traveled to England to testify in a trial involving ongoing troubles with the Anglo-Mexican Mining Company and to scout around for investors for another mining project in Idaho (the trip caused him to miss the ceremony at which Brown University awarded him an honorary LL.D.). He then moved on to talk to financiers in Paris, accompanied by his old New York friend Abram Hewitt, who was now retired from his public career as a congressman and short tenure as mayor of New York (1887-88).50 When Hewitt became ill, King insisted he return to England with Lancaster as his personal attendant. In the Paris train station, solicitous officials grabbed their luggage and escorted them to a special railway car, insisting that Lancaster lead the way. Only later did Hewitt and Lancaster learn that the officials had mistaken the servant for “a certain Oriental Prince, who, attended by an English companion, was expected to leave Paris for London by the same train . . . with the result that Alexander was mistaken for the expected Prince and Mr. Hewitt for his gentleman-in-waiting.” One of King’s friends later reported that “Alexander bore with becoming dignity the honors thus unwittingly thrust upon him, while, at the same time, he failed in no respect in his duties to Mr. Hewitt.”51 To King’s associates, the mix-up became an amusing story about how clueless the French could be. But Lancaster likely took it as something else. If he did not already know from close observation of King’s life how easily one could assume an alternative identity, he surely did now.
King treated Lancaster as both a companion and an employee, someone who might occasionally be taken into his confidence but who would never cross the bounds of overfamiliarity. Surely Lancaster knew more about his employer’s whereabouts at any given moment than King’s close friends did, or than Ada Todd herself could have known. If he knew his employer’s secret, however, he did not broadcast it.
IN EARLY JANUARY 1891, with Ada set to deliver her second child in just a few weeks, King traveled to Newport, with “the rather heavy heart I carry about,” for the wedding of his half sister, Marian, and Lieutenant Clarence P. Townsley, an army man.52 Like King, Townsley knew the West. But as a veteran of the Fourth Artillery’s Apache campaigns of 1881, he knew it better through the sight of a rifle than the eyepiece of a surveyor’s tool. Now, after a tour as a drawing instructor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he served at Fort Adams, the massive masonry fort that guarded the entrance to Newport Harbor.53 Marian’s formal gown, Townsley’s military dress, the fashionable crowd, all marked this as a social event vastly different from King’s own wedding in a midtown Manhattan tenement some two years before. The Congregationalist wedding took place at Mrs. Howland’s house, “in the English style, only members of the household being present.” But the New York Times pronounced the large reception that followed “quite brilliant,” as Townsley’s military associates mingled with the bride’s Newport friends and family, including her grandmother Sophia Little, now ninety-two and “widely known for her philanthropic work.”54 King might have recalled that no mother or grandmother had witnessed his w
edding; no cousins, no neighbors, no old school friends shared his celebratory cake. He returned to New York shortly after the ceremony but fretted about returning to Newport to care for his mother, who worried that Marian’s marriage to a military man promised nothing but “poverty and homeless-ness.” “The grim realities of arithmetic,” Mrs. Howland wrote, “are veiled by the rosy mists of joyful hope.”55 The marriage triggered another bout of fragile health. “My mother suffers from insomnia,” King told Hay, “all of which is due to Marian’s horrible mismarriage. It really is too heartbreaking to see a girl fling herself into the dust.”56 He clung to the high ground and consoled Mrs. Howland over Marian’s seemingly ill-chosen spouse.
IN THE VERY EARLY morning of January 24, 1891, Ada gave birth to a baby girl at her Hudson Avenue home. Hours later, a tremendous blizzard hit New York, snapping virtually all of the city’s electrical poles, plunging the metropolis into “impenetrable darkness” and leaving the streets an impassable mess of broken wood and tangled wires.57 Manhattan had begun to bury the forest of poles that had sprung up along its streets over the past decade, hiding in underground conduits the thicket of wires put up by competing electrical firms, the nascent telephone and telegraph companies, and the city’s police, fire, and burglar alarm services. But in Brooklyn, the process moved more slowly.58 Toppled electrical wires made Ada’s street perilous and left her apartment cold and dark. Inside, with Leroy and her newborn daughter, she would have only a gas lamp and candles for heat and light. When the white Canadian-born physician P. E. Kidd filed the formal birth certificate two days later, he left blank the space recording the child’s first name. Her father, perhaps delayed by the winter storm, had not yet been to see her or helped to pick her name.59 Like other fathers, he might even have chosen to stay away during the birth, leaving Ada’s care to kindly neighbors, female relatives, a midwife, or a Brooklyn physician like Kidd who could be paid in advance to attend the delivery.
That a white physician should care for Ada was not unusual. So many of the city’s African American residents preferred white doctors that in 1889 a black physician complained in New York’s African American newspaper, the New York Age, that the black community’s faith “in their own medical men is much like that of doubting Thomas . . . we are just as capable in diagnosing and just as skillful in treating the various diseases to which flesh is heir as our white historical brothers.”60
In the chaotic aftermath of the storm, it would be difficult to get word to her husband, even if Ada knew how to find him. She would not know to look for him at the Hotel Albert or think, once the wires were repaired, to send a telegram to Newport, where Clarence King had told friends he would be for a few weeks.61 She probably imagined him off on a train somewhere and had no recourse but to wait for him to reappear.
So Ada herself gave Dr. Kidd the information he needed to fill in the formal Brooklyn Certificate of Birth: mother’s full name, Ada Todd; age, thirty; maiden name, Ada Copeland; birthplace, West Point, Georgia. She instructed Kidd to identify the father as James Todd, a forty-nine-year-old porter, born in Baltimore. And she told him what he could probably see for himself: this was her second child. With these spare words, Ada Todd entered the first account of her life into the historical record .62
The birth certificate form provided no space to designate the parents’ race. But Dr. Kidd had to indicate the race of the baby. He looked at the mother and struck out the word “white.” This was a “colored” child.63
When James Todd reappeared at the snowbound family apartment, he named the baby Grace Margaret, in honor of the infant sister Clarence King had lost in childhood. As with the names James and Leroy, he slyly honored his birth family, a gesture meaningful to no one but him.
DURING THE MONTHS FOLLOWING Grace’s birth, King frustrated even his most devoted friends. He wrote to Hay that he could not come to Washington because he had to visit his mother in Newport and could not join him in Europe because he was too worn out. He complained about his health, worried about his finances, seemed to struggle to get nowhere, all the while sinking deeper into debt. “If he would stop struggling, he would get on well enough,” Hay wrote to Adams. “He owes nobody but those who will never bother him.” Hay lectured King like a “Dutch uncle.” Still, he found him “just as good company as ever if he were not so infernally busy that you can never get him to stay more than a half a day anywhere.”64 Indeed. Along with the dinners at the Century Association, the trips to Newport, and the struggles to earn a living, there was, unbeknownst to his friends, that family in Brooklyn.65
King kept up his bluff joking about women. While traveling in Tahiti and Samoa in 1890-91, Henry Adams wrote long letters about the “old gold” girls he found there. But King took ironic comfort in knowing that neither Adams nor his traveling companion, the painter John La Farge, could appreciate them as much as he did. Indeed, Adams’s indifference to women seemed exasperating. “It is too late for him to get a rise from his solar plexus,” King joked to Hay; “the girls stir only his gray matter.”66 Just as well, King decided. “I love primal women so madly that I should have acted with jealousy had they discerned her.” He let himself imagine Adams’s new Kodak camera, which contained “somewhere in the sacred coil of its umbilical center . . . the faint potentiality of a face waiting to be developed by reagents more sensitive than the vision of either of our friends. A face which will touch and enchant me.”67 And so he danced and feinted around his friends, hinting at his feelings but hiding the ways in which he had acted on them. His pronouncements seemed safely abstract. “People are looked at in only two ways,” King wrote to Hay, “with the brain and with the heart. If you take the former method you initially classify and judge people by their differences with other people usually yourself. If you see them with the heart you have your conceptions on the similarities between them and some other people usually yourself.”68
ADA TODD’S WORLD MUST have felt more cramped than her husband’s, with two small children keeping her all but housebound. Leroy, newly weaned, would be learning to walk during the winter and early spring of 1891, and baby Grace would demand her mother’s constant attention. By late spring, Ada was pregnant again, for the third time in as many years. One imagines her exhausted and grateful for her husband’s visits, however short or infrequent they might be. He might bring groceries or money and provide her with some fleeting moments of respite from the unending care for the children. Sometime during 1891, James Todd helped Ada and the children move to a quieter, more residential neighborhood farther east in the northwestern part of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the area then home to the large majority of Brooklyn’s black residents.69 During the 1890s, housing conditions for Brooklyn’s black residents, previously regarded as more “healthful” than those in Manhattan, began to deteriorate.70 But for Ada, this move represented another step up in the world. For her husband, it meant more strain.
In the spring of 1891, King borrowed another $1,800 from the ever-generous John Hay.71 King seemed “far from well,” Hay remarked.72 “Here all is shadows,” King confessed that summer to Mrs. Hay. Looking in on his family in Newport he found his grandmother infirm and irritable, his mother full of worrisome symptoms, and his half brother, George, on the verge of consumption. It all pointed to “a dreary present and sad enough outlook.”73
The Todd family’s new apartment at 72 Skillman Street was in a narrow, attached three-story building a block from the brewery and the gutta-percha factory that stood down the street near the intersection with Flushing Avenue.74 The air hung heavy with smells on hot summer days, but the malt and burning-rubber-like odors likely seemed an improvement over the stench of the Hudson Avenue slaughterhouses. Moreover, this block had a more residential feel. The neighbors in the Todds’ building included workingmen—a trimmer, a ship joiner, a porter—and several widows.75 St. Mary’s Episcopal Chapel stood catty-corner across the street. Some southern blacks found New York a cold place that lacked the neighborly conviviality of small-town
southern life. James Weldon Johnson, a native Floridian, counted himself fortunate to feel an instant connection to the city from the moment of his first visit to his Brooklyn relatives in 1884. But, he wrote, “if among other requirements for happiness, one needs neighbors; that is, feels that he must be on friendly terms with the people who live next door, and in addition know all about them; if one must be able to talk across from front porches and chat over back fences; if one is possessed by a zeal to regulate the conduct of people who are neither neighbors nor friends—he is not born for a New Yorker.”76 Though occupied by her children, Ada had always been a resourceful and generous woman. One imagines her in that new apartment on Skillman Street, reaching out to the neighbors who could provide help and companionship as she made a home for her family, despite her husband’s frequent absences. A Pullman porter might make a good living, but she had known from the start that he would never provide a conventional domestic life.
DURING THE LAST WEEK of August 1891, perhaps about the time that Ada was settling into the new apartment, King traveled to the nation’s capital to attend the Fifth International Congress of Geologists. Some 250 scientists from around the globe convened in the halls of Columbian University (later George Washington University) to listen to formal papers about how to establish a uniform international system of geological nomenclature, classification, and cartography. One can imagine the gatherings: the reunions of old friends and colleagues, the sighting of old classmates, the excited introductions to scientists one knew only through publications. In the evenings, the talk would spill over into receptions and the restaurants and hotels of downtown Washington. Through the cacophony of English, French, and German, one might catch snatches of familiar gossip about the United States Geological Survey or arguments about the newest theories emerging from Europe, the latest buzz about new mineral deposits in the West, or complaints about government support for science. A kind of éminence grise of the gathering, King would feel at home here, surrounded by old and new colleagues and much sought after by the younger participants who knew of his writings and his central role in establishing the western American surveys. As the founding spirit and first director of the USGS, he had established the agency for which so many of them worked.
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