In every way, then, the fiction of a West Indian birth upped the social status of a black man who had heretofore claimed to be from Maryland. And it resolved once and for all the question that might have lingered in the minds of Todd’s new acquaintances. Since an act of Parliament abolished slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833, a British West Indian of Todd’s age would have been born into freedom. By contrast, an African American born in Baltimore in 1842 might once have been a slave.
Although the earliest written record of the West Indian story appears on the census forms of 1900, James Todd might first have floated the story of a Caribbean birth when he moved his family to Flushing in 1896 or 1897. A West Indian identity would give him greater social cachet and access to a housing market that discriminated more openly against American-born blacks. Moreover, by claiming to be a colored West Indian, he could present what looked like an interracial family as one in which husband and wife were simply different shades of darkness, a more acceptable option in a community that still harbored segregated schools. That a white landlord should believe his story—as Ada and her friends did—suggests how readily Americans of both races embraced the idea that “one drop of blood” trumped all other markers of identity, including complexion.
For all its usefulness, however, the fiction of a West Indian birth complicated Todd’s would-be life as a Pullman porter. Simply put, West Indian men would not likely hold such a job. The Pullman Company discouraged the employment of West Indians because they seemed less willing than native-born blacks to adopt a subservient role with white passengers.23 A “clerk,” Ada called her husband when they first settled in Flushing. “Steel wks—traveler,” Edward Brown, the census taker, wrote later in the summer of 1900. That particular designation clarified little, possibly because Ada herself found it hard to explain how her husband spent his time. “Traveling steel worker” could describe an unskilled worker searching for work or an itinerant strike-breaker as easily as a highly skilled laborer selling his expertise to the highest bidder. The size of the Todds’ rented home, like the size of their household staff, suggested Todd was a man of means. But more than 60 percent of workers in the American steel industry in 1900 made less than 16 cents an hour, and just over 5 percent made as much as $25 per week.24 Even at the upper end of the pay scale, a skilled worker lucky enough to find steady employment of sixty hours or more per week would be hard-pressed to support that large household on North Prince Street. The job title better explained James Todd’s long absences from home than the spacious yard or the servants who helped Ada run the house. As a geologist and mining expert, though, King knew something about metals and he had spent time around heavy equipment and the men who fixed and maintained machines. In a casual backyard conversation about the steel industry, he could probably pass muster.
A HANDFUL OF UNDATED letters from James to Ada Todd clarify nothing about the deception that lay at the heart of their relationship. But they suggest that as Ada came to feel more and more secure in her world of black mothers and children, house servants and party guests, James Todd felt increasingly anxious. His wife’s increased social visibility and confidence threatened his own precariously built life. Ada sought to move out before the public eye, but James needed to remain invisible.
“The reason I did not come to the house,” James wrote to Ada, “was because I thought there were more boarders there and it will not do to have too many people seeing us.”25 His cryptic words, presumably alluding to the boardinghouse next door at 50 North Prince Street, suggested that something might be threatened by the very sight of James and Ada, the very light-skinned man and the dark-complected woman with the four young children. It seems easy to understand why Clarence King remained fearful of being recognized in Ada’s company. Her dark complexion as well as her class background threatened Clarence King’s social and professional identity; his desire to keep their relationship secret had led to his deceptions in the first place. Yet, since Ada did not know that her husband was Clarence King, she would not understand the need for discretion on that score.
She might, though, understand that James Todd’s light skin could threaten her own social standing; not so much if people understood him to be a very light-skinned “black” man, but if they surmised he was white. To look white was good; it was more problematic to be white. The white boarders next door might harbor the common social prejudices against interracial marriage, and blacks might respond with equal discomfort. As W. E. B. DuBois observed in 1899, “For, while a Negro expects to be ostracized by the whites, and his white wife agrees to it by her marriage vow, neither of them are quite prepared for the cold reception they invariably meet with among the Negroes.”26
Ada herself seemed to accept her husband as a very light-skinned person of African descent. The confidence with which she staged that costume party and allowed herself to be written up in the black society pages suggests a comfort with her racial identity and social station. One imagines that in the color-conscious world of black society, where light skin tone conferred social privilege, she thought she had married “up.” Ada Todd would thus accept her husband’s peculiar appeal to secrecy as a project of mutual self-interest. “The more important thing to us of all others,” he wrote to her, “is that the property which will one day come to me shall not be torn away from us by some foolish, idle person talking about us and some word getting to my old aunt.”27 Those words, as much as anything, prove that James continued to deceive his wife. The perpetually broke Clarence King might entertain fantasies of a fabulous inheritance. But instead of a wealthy aunt, he had only a difficult and financially dependent mother. The false words nonetheless contain a simple truth: James Todd desperately hoped to keep his marriage to Ada a secret from his family and friends.
Ada played by James’s rules, at times even leaving letters for him at a local mail drop. “Yesterday I went over to Brooklyn to give the rent money to Mr. Thomas to pay next Monday,” James wrote to Ada in an undated note, “and there I got your love letter. Here is a $100 order. Write me if you receive this and the $50 in bills I sent yesterday.”28 Her family’s financial security seemed to hinge on her discretion. “For the sake of our darling babies we must keep the secret of our love and our lips from the world,” James explained. “God sees and knows our love and I believe He blesses us. But this cold and prejudicial world would prevent the little ones from getting the property I want them to have.” He told Ada he loved her “all the time.” And he concluded, “P. S. Carefully burn my letters!! ”29
James’s furtive behavior might not necessarily signal to Ada any deep or abiding deception. She might believe him to be “James Todd,” a man of African heritage, whether from Baltimore or the West Indies, who did indeed earn his living on Pullman cars or in the steel industry. Such a man might still have an elderly aunt of means. And that aunt might have any number of reasons for disapproving of her nephew’s marriage to a much darker woman from the South who had been born into slavery. At the very least, however, Ada had to understand that James had secrets, and that he came from a family she would never be permitted to meet. She might suspect or even believe that having left his job as a Pullman porter, her light-skinned husband was now passing for white in the workplace. In that case, she would understand his appeal to her discretion. Their family life depended on his earnings.
And so she acceded to his wishes. “My darling,” he wrote on one of his long business trips. “It will be only four weeks before I can see your dearest face again.” He professed his love and then continued. “Write me a nice letter and have it ready by Friday, for by that time I hope the gentleman will be ready to take you some money. I don’t care for him to see the children. Always have the parlor looking nice, and when he comes put on a nice dress or a nice wrapper.”30 An intermediary might be the simplest means of delivering money to Ada in his absence. But one wonders at the instructions to hide the children. Maybe King worried that the “gentleman,” a white friend, perhaps, might understand
the idea of a consort but feel repelled by the mixed-race children (perhaps resembling their father) who offered such tangible proof of an interracial affair. Or perhaps he worried about the stories his children could tell about their father’s mysterious rich friend. Conversely, the “gentleman” might be a black acquaintance of King’s—someone like his valet, Alexander Lancaster—whom he could trust to keep his secret. A black visitor at Ada’s home might excite less curiosity from the neighbors than a white one. But why hide the children?
Whatever Ada imagined, though, whatever doubts she harbored, she felt loved. “Ah dearest,” James wrote to her, “I have lain in my bed and thought of you and felt my whole heart full of love for you. It seems to me often that no one ever loved a woman as I do you. In my heart there is no place for any other woman and never will be. My whole heart is yours forever.”31
King’s words conveyed his deep and passionate devotion to his wife. But they also hinted at the man he somehow wanted to be. Whatever he wrote, he could not give himself wholly to Ada. There was too much he had to hold back to keep his secret safe.
IN AUGUST OF 1900, while King was wrapping up his investigation of the Alaskan goldfields and Ada was home with the children, readying them for their transfer to an integrated school, the West Side of Manhattan erupted in racial violence. In his book Black Manhattan, James Weldon Johnson depicted that riot as the culmination of the “dark and discouraging days” African Americans had experienced in the late 1890s. With the promise of Reconstruction gone, lynchings rampant in the South, and Jim Crow laws everywhere denying people equal protection under the law, the Negro had lost heart, he said. And “nowhere in the country was this decline in the spirit of self-assertion of rights more marked than in New York. . . . But the riot of 1900 woke Negro New York and stirred the old fighting spirit.” It was a “brutish orgy,” he wrote, “which, if not incited by the police, was, to say the least, abetted by them.” The recent decision to integrate the public schools notwithstanding, race relations in New York had reached their nadir. 32
The trouble began on the evening of August 12, 1900, when an African American man named Arthur Harris left his sweltering tenement room on Manhattan’s West Forty-first Street to buy a cigar and grab a drink at a nearby saloon at the corner of Eighth Avenue. His wife followed later to bring him home. While she waited outside the saloon for her husband, a white plainclothes policeman named Robert Thorpe approached her and accused her of soliciting. When Harris came out to the street, he saw the white officer grabbing his wife. “I didn’t know who he was and thought he was a citizen like myself,” he later testified. Thorpe pummeled Harris and called him names. Harris took out a pocketknife, stabbed Thorpe in the stomach, and fled. The policeman died in Roosevelt Hospital the following day.33
On August 15 the neighborhood erupted with what the New York Times called “the wildest disorder that this city has witnessed in years.” A scuffle between a white man and a black man outside the house where Thorpe’s body lay exploded into a full-blown race riot. More than one hundred policemen swinging nightsticks tried to clear the streets. Scores of wounded blacks flooded Roosevelt Hospital; many more stayed home, afraid to move through the streets in search of medical help. The “police were not too active in stopping the attacks on the negroes,” the Times reported, “and even went so far as to use their clubs on colored men who had been arrested.” The police, “according to their own statements, are feeling vindictive against the colored people generally.”34
By late August, the street rioting abated. Two people were dead, countless numbers were wounded, and hundreds of black people had been arrested. As various black and white political groups convened to assess the future of local race relations, and a police board began to investigate allegations of police brutality, a group of black West Indians living in New York sought diplomatic protection. Some two hundred city residents prepared a petition to the British consul, alleging that they had been brutally attacked “by the mob in the recent riots, and that the police, instead of giving them protection, actually urged and incited the mob to greater fury.” Their foreign citizenship could not protect them from the racial animus of the crowd.35
Ada and James might both have read of the riots with some anxiety: Ada from her home in the largely white neighborhood of Flushing; her husband from far across the continent as he prepared to return home from the Alaska gold country. Ada undoubtedly understood racial violence in a personal, visceral way that her husband could scarcely comprehend. She might rarely talk about it, but no fond memories of her family or her childhood friends in Reconstruction Georgia could ever obliterate what she had likely heard about or seen for herself: the random beatings and attacks, the burned homes and schoolhouses, the Ku Klux Klan attacks on her black neighbors and the white people who associated with them. She would know from family stories that before the war slaves could not walk the rural roads of Troup or Harris County without passes from their owners or overseers. An ex-slave from Harris County named Rias Body recalled that “patarolers” would ride all night: “If the ‘patarolers’ caught a ‘Nigger’ without a pass, they whipped him and sent him home.”36
Ada Todd might worry that not even her nice house in Flushing could necessarily protect her and her children from the angry violence of racial hatred, its unpredictability and intensity, its deep psychological roots and harsh physical brutality. Though turn-of-the-century New York scarcely harbored the same all-pervasive racial tensions as the Deep South, the violence unfolding on the streets of Manhattan might yet stir in Ada a deep sense of unease and make her pause to question the safety she thought she had grasped in fleeing Georgia and building her new middle-class life. Clarence King might understand mob violence in an abstract way and feel grateful his children were too young to go off on their own through the streets. But he could scarcely grasp the power of the dark memories that likely haunted Ada as she waited alone, at home, for her husband to return. He knew London and San Francisco, Shakespeare and James. But there were some things that Ada knew better than he did.
King liked to imagine his light-complected, mixed-race children as the harbinger of a new, distinctively American people. But Ada knew differently. In the eyes of their neighbors, their teachers, their friends, and the law, their children were unalterably and irrevocably black.
KING RETURNED EAST IN August 1900 while racial tensions still gripped New York. He stopped to visit Hay at his summerhouse in New Hampshire around Labor Day; then, presumably, James Todd came home to Flushing. 37 One imagines the tempo of the household picking up with his arrival: the children clamoring for the gifts he always had in his pockets, the servants eager to please, Ada basking in his presence and in the satisfaction of having kept the family on such an even keel during his long absence. But one also imagines the summer’s violence casting a shadow over the household—the parents talking in hushed tones late into the night about the tense racial situation in Manhattan, the children’s prospects in their new racially integrated school, how their “West Indian” family could navigate the tricky shoals of racial politics. The children may have begged their father for stories of his summer adventures. The eldest were old enough to talk to neighbors and share family stories with friends. So James could tell only those stories that might safely get around the neighborhood. Perhaps even Ada did not know he had been in Alaska. A traveling “steelworker” would have spent his summer indoors, in the fierce heat and noise of a factory.
By late in the fall, though, James Todd was gone again, and the household resumed its usual rhythms. King traveled to Arizona to investigate some copper mines near Prescott. He fell ill there with whooping cough. Around Christmastime, he saw a doctor in Chicago, who discovered a “thumbnail”-sized spot of tuberculosis on King’s lung. But pressed for funds and with a grim sense of duty, King continued on to Missouri, stopping in St. Louis before heading on to a mine in Flat River. “I have been desperately ill for ten days trying not to have pneumonia,” he wrote a friend just bef
ore the new year, “and am generally used up and worn out.” He fantasized about giving up the job and heading “to the South, which is always home to me, and try to heal up.” But he went to the mine instead. Ten days of work stretched into thirty, and by the time the job was done, King’s tubercular infection was the size of a hand. That robust good health he had had in Alaska just a few months before was gone.38
Back east in February 1901, King probably stopped briefly in Flushing before heading south, pausing in Washington to see Henry Adams, then continuing on to Florida and the Bahamas. On his way back north in late April, he again called on Adams, who pronounced him “fairly gay even in paroxysms of coughing.” King tried “to bid good-bye, cheerily and simply telling how his doctors had condemned him to Arizona for his lungs.” But Adams sensed the seriousness of the illness. King’s tuberculosis seemed “pronounced” and no longer confined to his lungs. “He must go to Arizona at once, and ought to have gone there three months ago.” Adams wrote that he, Hay, and King all knew “that they were nearing the end, and that if it were not the one it would be the other.” From Washington, King headed north to see his mother and to visit with Ada and the children. By early May, he was back in the West. John Hay was there, too, making an official trip as secretary of state through the territories of New Mexico and Arizona, where at every stop crowds called for statehood.39
Passing Strange Page 26