Passing Strange

by Martha A. Sandweiss

  Several years later, when news of the elder Ada’s marriage to Clarence King became public, the black press in New York resurrected the story of the Ancona murder. A reporter for the Amsterdam News suggested that the younger Ada “inherited her mother’s fateful lure for white men—a lure which was even intensified, some admirers believe, by the lighter complexion for which she thanked her white father.” He fashioned Ada—and by association her mother—as a temptress. The “same fascination” that drew Clarence King “to the arms of a chocolate-hued servant girl in the ’80s of the last century,” the reporter declared, “was transmitted to a daughter of the mixed marriage and lured a white father of five children, forty years later, to his death.”108

  A few months after the Ancona incident, in April 1930, a federal census agent again captured a spare portrait of the King family: Clarence King’s widow, Ada, lived in the house on Kalmia Avenue (Kalmia Street had been renamed a year or two before) with her daughter, Ada, her son Wallace, and her grandchildren, Clarence and Thelma Burns. The older Ada did not work. The younger Ada worked as a saleslady in what the census agent called an “apartment store.” Wallace played jazz piano in a band, picking up gigs in restaurants. Clarence, now nineteen, worked as a showroom clerk. Thelma, about to turn sixteen, attended school. In response to the census agent’s question, the family replied, yes, they owned a radio. But when asked whether she owned or rented the house, the elder Ada said she lived there in “trust,” implying that someone owned the house for her. In 1910 and again in 1920, she had told census agents she owned the house herself. The change seems to signal her growing awareness that something remained irregular about the title to her home. She had not, after all, ever received the deed that Gardiner had promised.109

  But the most peculiar part of the 1930 census records concerns the family’s racial designations: every member of Ada’s immediate family was classified “Negro.” The rules had changed again. In 1910 and 1920, when the official racial categories for the federal census distinguished between “Black” and “Mulatto,” the King children had been recorded as persons of mixed race. But the option to claim a mixed racial heritage disappeared in 1930, not to be regained until 2000. In 1930 any visible trace of African blood made one “Negro” or “Black.” And so, the younger Ada, who was once characterized as a mulatto and considered fair enough to marry as a white woman, became a “Negro” again in the eyes of the federal government, as did Thelma, who had three white grandparents, and Clarence, who likely had four.110 More than forty years earlier, Clarence King had exploited this particular system of racial categorization to declare himself a black man, despite his very light complexion. And now his children and grandchildren became “Negroes” in the eyes of the census taker, not necessarily because of their own appearance but because of their evident familial connection to the dark-complected Ada King.

  Only Sidney—an “inmate” in a state mental institution—acquired the racial designation his sisters had once claimed for themselves and the unmarked status his father had wished for all his children. When the census takers at the state hospital recorded the name of Sidney King, a veteran of a segregated military regiment, they carefully noted his race: “white.” Whether they actually observed him or interviewed him remains unknown. But certainly they did not see him by his mother’s side when they assigned him a race.111

  EVEN IN HER HOUSE of adult children, the elder Ada called the shots. Thelma later recalled her as a regal and demanding woman, a stickler for propriety and formal good manners. Wallace wore a hat and a tie whenever he left the house; the younger Ada never went out without a hat, a purse, and gloves. Wallace, in particular, demanded the same of his niece, insisting that Thelma, too, never leave the house without a pair of ladylike gloves and neatly done-up hair. One summer, when she was around sixteen, Thelma went to Missouri to visit her father. For several weeks she appeared as an extra in his carnival sideshow, obligingly permitting herself to be “sawed in half ” day after day, as James Burns tried to lure paying customers with a glimpse of a mysterious animal that had “killed a flock of chicken and 2 of his dogs.” But back at the Kalmia Avenue house, a stricter decorum prevailed. Thelma took ballet and tap-dancing lessons and, to improve her posture, walked around the house with a book balanced on her head.112

  At some point, Ada left the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church in which she had been married, perhaps because the small denomination had no congregation in Flushing. But she had a deep and abiding familiarity with the Bible, and family members recalled how she often cited her favorite religious injunctions: “Do unto others ...” and “The meek shall inherit the earth.” In Flushing Ada joined a Catholic church, and she raised her grandchildren as Catholics, insisting that Thelma sing in the church choir and participate in various youth activities. Thelma’s daughter would later recall that after church on Sundays the King family would sit down to a formal supper, with food that evoked Ada’s southern girlhood: fried chicken and biscuits or baked chicken with dressing. Ada raised her own chickens in the backyard and she killed them herself. Raising and butchering poultry, a familiarity with the Bible, wine-making, and an insistence on a strict regimen of home remedies—all offer tantalizing glimpses of the hidden world of Ada’s Georgia youth. In the house on Kalmia Avenue, vestiges of the rich and distinctive African American culture of southern cotton country mixed with the trappings of Ada’s upwardly mobile social aspirations and, later, with the stirrings of the new black world emerging in Harlem in northern Manhattan. Wallace learned to play the piano, and jazz and honky-tonk often resounded from the neat two-story house. And as Thelma grew older, she sometimes slipped away from her grandmother’s orderly home to ride the subways to Harlem to dance at the Cotton Club, finding in that racially mixed club and others the sort of allure that had once beckoned her grandfather Clarence King.113

  While she raised her young grandchildren, Ada dropped her persistent efforts to press for money from her husband’s estate. She had been threatened before and understood that the stakes were high. She could not afford to lose her monthly stipends from the Legal Aid Society. But during the mid- 1920s, she again contacted an attorney to explore the possibility of mounting a case. She turned to a white man this time. Martin W. Littleton Jr. was the son of the famously conservative (and famously high-priced) attorney who had defended D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation to its New York critics and earned recognition from Time magazine as “one of the world’s richest lawyers.”114 The elder Mr. Littleton had successfully defended Harry K. Thaw, the accused killer of architect Stanford White, and Harry F. Sinclair, who was charged with bribing Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall in the Teapot Dome scandal of the mid-1920s. The New York Times deemed him “an outspoken foe of socialism, communism and radicalism in general.” 115 But his namesake was just starting his legal practice in 1924 and took on less high-profile cases. Sometime between 1924 and 1929, when he became assistant district attorney in Nassau County, Martin W. Littleton Jr. became another in Ada King’s long string of attorneys. Like all the rest, he apparently counseled her to drop her case.116

  In 1931, with her grandchildren poised to move out on their own, Ada, now close to seventy, finally found an attorney to press the claim to her husband’s estate that she had first tried to initiate almost three decades before. Her lawyer later explained why it had taken her so long. “It must be remembered,” Herman Schwartz wrote, “that the plaintiff, Ada King, was a negress and her children of half blood, and that the children were small and the needs for keeping them clothed and educated were great, and for that reason the enforcement of their claim was delayed.... After the children had reached maturity and it was possible to proceed without endangering their means of livelihood, this action was begun, especially as Ada King is getting on in years, and may not have much longer to struggle with the ingratitude that the white persons on earth show.”117

  10

  The Trial

  ON A COOL, CLEAR AFTERNOON IN LATE
FALL 1933, ADA KING finally got her day in court.1 On Monday, November 20, she sat before Justice Bernard Shientag of the New York Supreme Court and, in a quavering voice “filled with emotion,” told her story.2 She appeared nervous, a reporter noted, and the court “had to urge her to speak more slowly and distinctly.”3 But she began at the beginning: her meeting with Clarence King, their marriage in 1888, the birth of their five children (she gave a self-deprecating chuckle as she confused their birth dates). She described their happy family life in the big home on North Prince Street, where servants helped her run the household. And she related in some detail what her husband told her as he prepared to leave for Arizona in a futile attempt to recover his health. King explained that he had left $80,000 for her and the children with his close friend Mr. Gardiner. “He hoped he wouldn’t die,” Ada recalled, “because he had a great interest in his children and had an education planned for them.”4

  Ada King carefully examined the letters from her husband that had been introduced as evidence. She verified King’s handwriting in a handful of original manuscripts and scrutinized the content of the typed transcripts also submitted by the defense. And then, as one reporter put it, “a score of torrid love letters, allegedly from King to his dusky wife were read into the records.”5 The case really hinged on financial issues—King’s debts, the disposition of his estate, his verbal promises of a trust fund. But Ada had to prove that she was married to Clarence King, and she wanted to show the world that he loved her.

  The press hung on every word of King’s letters, breathlessly quoting excerpts for their readers. And the very private life of Clarence King and Ada Copeland, otherwise known as James and Ada Todd, became the stuff of public speculation. It was “a two day sensation,” wrote a reporter for the black press, a tale of sex, race, and false identity made all the more salacious for its evocation of famous names and a hint of social scandal .6

  The mainstream press focused on Ada King’s race: “Colored Woman Sues as Widow of Society Man”; “Mammy Bares Life as Wife of Scientist”; “Old Negress Suing Estate, Reveals Love.”7 A New York tabloid described her as a “huge, kinky-haired, pleasant-faced colored woman of 70 years.”8 Her race seemed to render her both an improbable plaintiff and an improbable spouse for the distinguished Clarence King. The black press played the story differently, extending its empathy to Mrs. King and painting her husband as the one whose race merited notice. Even so, the Amsterdam News evoked the stereotype of a black “mammy,” characterizing Ada as a “stoutish, grandmotherly type.” The Chicago Defender remarked that she “still bears marks of a once beautiful woman.”9 The New York Age headlined its coverage, “Court Hears Suit for $80,000 against White Man’s Estate.”10

  Clarence King’s luster had faded in the decades since his death. In 1908 the sculptor Louis Amateis cast King’s likeness in bronze for the elaborate new door at the west entrance of the U.S. Capitol that celebrated the role of the arts and sciences in the “apotheosis of America.”11 In 1921 Yale University carved King’s name in stone over an entryway in Branford Court, its new neo-Gothic “memorial quadrangle.” King was the only graduate of Sheffield to be honored in the new Yale College buildings. As an early chronicler of the project wrote, “There are few names carved upon these stones that represent so great a wealth of human genius.”12 But by 1933, when Ada finally appeared in court, the press could barely explain who he was. Reporters misidentified him as a “man who made his fortune in the Arkansas oil rush in the ’90s”; “an oil millionaire”; “the scion of an old New York family.”13 His alleged marriage seemed an odd and distant story from the so-called mauve decade, a popular term for the 1890s. Ada King’s presence in a Manhattan courtroom, however, brought his story back to light.

  Even for a generation of Americans unfamiliar with Clarence King, the trial provided the prurient fascination of a social scandal made all the more engaging because it played out against a backdrop of intractable worries about money and race. The Depression left all Americans in 1933 uncertain about their economic fortunes, easy prey for stories of poor women being swept off their feet by wealthy men or penniless girls rising to middle-class comfort. And the news from abroad, as well as home, underscored the continuing social potency of race. In Hitler’s Germany, the plan “to multiply and ‘purify’ ” the German race seemed to be gaining steam, and the very week Ada appeared in court Nazi leaders expressed delight at the rising German marriage rate.14 Closer to home, President Franklin Roosevelt entertained pleas to intervene in the case of the so-called Scottsboro Boys, a group of black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in the racially tense world of Jim Crow Alabama.15 These more prominent unfolding stories served as background for the King trial, priming newspaper readers to see Ada’s story in terms of the broader themes of class and race. But at its core, this remained a deeply human tale. As one reporter remarked, “Love knows no race, creed or color.”16

  THE FINAL CHAPTER OF Ada King’s thirty-year effort to gain control of the money her husband left her opened on March 30, 1931—more than a year and a half before Ada finally appeared in court—when she and her children Wallace and Ada filed a formal complaint in the New York Supreme Court. Since Sidney’s mental illness rendered him legally “incompetent,” his mother represented him, too. The complaint targeted a large group of defendants associated with Clarence King’s long-dead friend James Gardiner and focused on a straightforward question: where was the money Clarence King left for his family?17

  The Kings’ attorney, now a thirty-three-year-old Russian immigrant named Morris Bell, laid out Ada’s case.18 As the lawful wife of Clarence King, she was entitled to the trust fund he had created for her. Bell contended that before King died in 1901 he transferred to Gardiner money and property totaling around $80,000. Gardiner accepted it with the “express agreement” that he would hold it in trust until King’s death, use it for the benefit of Ada and her children, and eventually transfer the money to her.19

  Gardiner had confirmed the trust’s existence to Ada, Bell said, and provided her with monthly checks, “which monthly installments in lesser amounts, she still receives from a source unknown to plaintiffs.”20 Since Gardiner’s death in 1912, Ada no longer had any idea who controlled her money or even where the stipends came from.

  Her complaint targeted Gardiner’s executors, heirs, and former secretaries—everyone who might know the details of his financial affairs or have a continuing interest in his estate. Ada long suspected that one of Gardiner’s secretaries, either Howard Dutcher or William Winne, controlled her trust. But they would never tell her a thing. She could not even describe for the sake of her lawsuit the precise nature of the property held in trust.

  The Kings’ questions, if not their demands, seemed straightforward: where was the money, how much was there, how had it been disbursed, who controlled it? But the defendants maneuvered to delay the case, hoping that Ada and her attorneys would give up in frustration. They flat-out refused to say where the money came from. An “unnamed benefactor,” they insisted.21 For two and a half years, the case slowly wound its way through the discovery phase of the proceedings.

  BOTH SIDES HAD MUCH they wanted to know. The seven Gardiner heirs named in Ada’s complaint claimed absolute ignorance of the legal situation and urged the judge to dismiss the case.22 The three trustees of Gardiner’s estate likewise expressed legitimate bewilderment. Who was Ada King?

  Attorney Henry W. Jessup, who represented the three trustees of Gardiner’s estate and most of the family members named in the complaint, derided Ada’s assertions as baseless and without legal merit, especially after so many years. Why had she made no claims before? Jessup’s life mirrored those of his well-heeled clients. Born in Syria to American missionary parents, he was a Princeton graduate who now lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with his wife, a grown son, and a black West Indian-born servant. Like Clarence King, he belonged to the Century Association. And he was something of a polymath: an authority on est
ate law, a novelist, a legal writer, and a frequent contributor to the letters column of the New York Times, sounding off on everything from college football to the “regretted paucity of white horses in the modern scene.”23 His clients likely viewed him as a man of discretion who could keep their names out of the paper. After all, they contended, they had no idea what this case was about.

  The contrast between Jessup’s life and that of the Kings’ lawyer, Morris Bell, echoed the social divides that separated Ada from her husband’s associates. Bell lived with his in-laws on a polyglot street in the Bronx. His father-in-law ran a grocery store; his wife worked as a secretary. He harbored doubts about Ada’s case but took it on after “constant and determined pressure from the plaintiffs.” Although the Kings could not afford his fees, they promised a percentage of the money they recovered.24