Passing Strange

by Martha A. Sandweiss

  But despite his skill as a researcher, Wilkins missed one critical source of information: Ada King. During all the years he traveled around the country, digging records out of archives and tracking King’s every move, he lived and worked just a subway ride away from her. And in 1958, the year his book came out, Wilkins took a new job at Queens College, barely a mile from the Kalmia Avenue home where Ada had resided for more than half a century.95 He never met her. Thirty years later, when he revised his King biography and added a brief epilogue about the court case of 1933, Wilkins could only speculate about Ada’s last years. He explained that the King children grew to “undistinguished maturity,” that Ada King “grew enormously fat,” that the court case came about because of her “greedy” attack upon the “quiet well-wishers” who sought to protect her family. He described the outcome of the trial, noted that Ada received title to the Kalmia Avenue house, and concluded his 413-page book: “. . . and presumably she continued to live there until her death over four decades after that of Clarence King.”96 Indeed, she had.

  Had he sought her out in the 1950s as he first prepared his manuscript for publication, Wilkins would have found Ada King still living in the home bought for her through the largesse of John Hay, both she and the house links to a long-ago world of nineteenth-century America. Her son Wallace lived there, too. Like Wilkins, he was a veteran of World War II (one of a select group of Americans to serve in both world wars), and as he had for a very long time, he worked as a jazz musician, picking up jobs where he could.97 Increasingly, he looked like his father: short, a bit stout, with a receding hairline. Like that father he barely knew, he remained devoted to his mother. He spoke the “King’s English” and wrote in a neat, flowing script, his niece recalled, though he had finished just three years of high school.98 And he was a stickler for proper manners. At home, he enjoyed a good game of poker or casino, liked to do crossword puzzles, and entertained friends by reading tea leaves. Wallace’s sister Ada still lived at home, too, with her second husband, a white war veteran named William “Bill” McDonald.99 While Wallace helped with the grocery shopping and cooking, the younger Ada kept up with the housecleaning and sewing. Since Sidney King’s death at Kings Park State Hospital in 1942, Ada Copeland Todd King had kept her remaining two children very close.100

  Over the years, the house had begun to show its age. The front porch sagged; patches dotted the plaster walls; the kitchen and bathroom fixtures seemed “old fashioned.”101 But the family still got out and about: to movies and shows in Manhattan, to the local parks, occasionally on out-of-town trips to Toronto or Vermont. The Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall remained a favorite, and for a meal on the town they might head to Chinatown or to Schrafft’s. The house itself remained a gathering place for friends and neighbors. Ada liked to keep a record of it all by asking visitors to sign a lamp shade in the front room.102

  Thelma Burns, the elder Ada’s granddaughter, visited frequently, but her half brother, Clarence, an employee of the Daily News who lived more fully in an all-white world, had grown estranged from the family who had taken him in so long ago. After a brief first marriage, Thelma married John Leroy Thomas, a white air force veteran, in 1952. The snapshots of their wedding reception at Ada King’s house show a racially mixed gathering. The Kings’ friends had always included blacks and whites, and after the war Ada had taken in a German Holocaust refugee who lived with the family for a time. John Thomas understood what sort of family he had married into, but he took Thelma to live with him in an all-white world. She returned often to Kalmia Avenue to visit her grandmother and the aunt and uncle who had helped to raise her. But Ada King never visited Thelma at her suburban Long Island house; Wallace, who could pass on the street as white, came occasionally. Thelma’s husband hinted that her mixed racial heritage should remain a secret, and many of her closest friends and neighbors never learned of her dark-complected grandmother. Like her aunt and uncle, Thelma had been raised to believe that family matters were private. Anxious about what her own children might look like, Thelma adopted two white infants in the 1950s. Those two girls became Clarence King’s only great-grandchildren. A mixed marriage, Thelma told her daughter Patricia, is hard on children and not fair to them. It was part cautionary message, part reflection on what she had seen and learned growing up in her grandmother’s house.103

  On Friday afternoons Thelma would often take her girls on the long bus ride from their home in Uniondale to Flushing to spend the weekend with her grandmother Ada. They would make the trip again on Mother’s Day, on Easter, and during the Christmas holidays. Even as Ada King approached one hundred, and her daughter Ada and son Wallace neared seventy, family dinners remained formal affairs, with everyone gathering around a nicely set table. Wallace no longer had the piano he once kept in the house, but the family still had a large record collection, and they played classical music at dinnertime.

  Ada King remained active until close to her hundredth birthday, taking special pride in her home-baked pies. As she grew older, she spent more time upstairs in her bedroom, settled into a big burgundy leather chair near the window, where she could keep an eye on neighborhood comings and goings. Her great-granddaughter recalls her uncanny knack for hearing visitors approach up the front walk; Ada would shout downstairs for them to come up and visit. In a home filled with newspapers and magazines, she followed the news in the New York Times and Daily News, and kept on top of current events with Time, Life, and National Geographic. Ada also watched the television news and listened to the radio. Conversation around the dinner table sometimes focused on the latest films but often turned to politics and the nascent civil rights movement: this family could recall Reconstruction, the emergence of Jim Crow laws, the dismantling of the segregated military, and the end of “separate but equal” schools. And now, on television, they could watch the beginnings of a mass movement for equal rights in the Deep South, where Ada had been born so long ago.

  By 1963, Ada rarely left her home. And so perhaps she sat in her chair—it was like a throne, her great-granddaughter recalls—watching television on August 28, as nearly a quarter of a million Americans gathered on the Mall in Washington, D.C. “I have a dream,” thundered the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he harkened back one hundred years to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation: “This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.”104 Ada Copeland Todd King, not quite 103, lived in a house bought for her by a man who had watched Lincoln draft that declaration of freedom. And she was one of the very last ex-slaves still alive to hear King’s stirring words.

  We cannot know what she thought of that speech, what memories ran through her mind as she listened to King articulate his vision of a nation where race did not matter. “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”105 In their own way, she and her husband, another King, had once dreamed of that future for their four children, too.

  Ada King died on April 14, 1964, at the age of 103. She had outlived her husband by more than sixty-two years. Her grave lies near that of their daughter Grace in Flushing Cemetery, far from her husband’s final resting place beside his mother in Newport.106

  Ada’s two surviving children, Ada and Wallace, lived together in the Kalmia Avenue house until their deaths, just months apart, in 1981.107 Their niece, Thelma, now wore the wedding band that Clarence King had long ago given to his bride, Ada Copeland. And she inherited Wallace’s scant collection of treasured papers: a copy of his military record, the deed to the house, and a handful of faded newspaper clippings from a trial a half century before, the yellowing evidence of his family’s brief brush with no
toriety, when his mother risked all to prove to the world that she was Mrs. Clarence King.

  EPILOGUE

  Secrets

  SECRETS AND SILENCES HAUNT THIS STORY: SECRETS CRAFTED to protect and to hurt; silences created by neglect and with intent. And at the root of all these unspoken words lies the ever-potent mix in American life of race and love and sex and class.

  Ada Copeland did not choose for her childhood to disappear into the dustbin of history. The institution of slavery itself rendered invisible her early years, assuring that she would have no legal records to establish her birth date or identify her parents, no surname as a young child, no old photographs with which to reconstruct the world of her youth. She likely took little with her when she moved to New York, and once there, she would have found it difficult to get news from the older, mostly illiterate, relatives she left behind. Unnourished and uncorroborated, Ada’s own memories of girlhood might fade away.

  Distance and time, coupled with the legacies of illiteracy and poverty, eventually snapped the family ties. Today, the extended clan of African American Copelands from the area around West Point, Georgia, gathers every summer for a “homecoming” in the Bethlehem Baptist Church in nearby Pine Mountain Valley. From across the state and from more distant parts of the country, Copelands return to worship and visit together in a church that sits on land deeded to two of their African American ancestors—Scott and Ishmael Copeland—by a local white family in 1883.1 Despite their deep roots here, however, they know no stories about the young woman named Ada who left home so long ago to move to New York. And in New York Ada kept alive no memory of this extended southern family for her own children and grandchildren.2

  Clarence King, by contrast, deliberately crafted the silences that make it so hard to discern the story of his private life. From the moment he met Ada Copeland, he began weaving a skein of lies too intricate to untangle even decades after his death. Acting from a complicated mix of loyalty and self-interest, reckless desire and social conservatism, he deceived his mother, his closest friends, his colleagues, and all the people who knew him in his public role. He also deceived the woman he married. If he, too, lived a married life unimaginably far from the world of his childhood, it was because he chose to live that way. And if his children never met his mother, it was because King calculated how to keep them apart. Florence King Howland died never suspecting she had four mixed-race grandchildren.

  King lied because he wanted to and he lied because he had to. He loved Ada Copeland, but to marry her in a public way—as the white man known as Clarence King—would have created a scandal, cost him his friends, devastated his mother, and destroyed his livelihood. It would also have created an aura of scandal around his wife and children. In some ways, his deceptions made their lives easier. James Todd could leave his wife and children at home and then, as Clarence King, find the work (or borrow the money) to give them a comfortable life. Unaware of the scope of his secrets, Ada could move confidently toward black middle-class respectability. King’s secrets protected him, but they protected her as well. Nonetheless, those secrets proved hazardous. King’s double life demanded an inventiveness, an attention to detail, and a watchfulness almost exhausting to contemplate: his breakdown in 1893 provides but a glimpse of the hidden costs.

  King perhaps hoped that his deathbed confession would free him and his wife from the consequences of his deceit. But his secrets weighed heavily on his family long after his death. James Gardiner and John Hay conspired together to ensure that the world would never learn of Ada King and her children. For more than thirty years, Hay and his family paid hush money to prevent Ada from speaking about her relationship to their famous friend. And even the Hays’ generosity became the stuff of secrets, as the attorneys who represented Gardiner’s heirs and executors in the legal battles of the early 1930s fought to keep hidden the name of Ada’s mysterious benefactors.

  For the King children and grandchildren, however, Clarence King’s true identity proved a less burdensome secret than Ada King’s race. They always honored Ada as the family matriarch; until her death she remained the center of the extended family world. But outside the home, in a twentieth-century America still riven by racism, the King descendants struggled with the meanings of Ada’s racial heritage. Her dark skin, more than her husband’s duplicity, became their cross to bear. Ada might have been the parent who loved them and raised them and helped them grow up feeling safe and secure, but it was Clarence who bequeathed to them the light complexions that let them reach for the privileges of whiteness in a race-conscious nation. The two King daughters concealed Ada’s race in order to marry as white women. And when Ada’s granddaughter, Thelma, married a white man, she concealed her grandmother’s race from her suburban neighbors. Fearful of the “human stain,” worried that her own racial heritage might show itself in the face of her children, she adopted two white infants. Clarence and Ada King had five children, but Thelma was their only surviving grandchild by blood. When she adopted children rather than having her own, Clarence King’s dream of creating his own mixed American race met its end.

  AFTER KING’S CLANDESTINE MARRIAGE came to public light in 1933, his biographers steered away from it, and even his most recent ones have followed suit.3 Concerned more with King as an exemplar of American science than with what his life might reveal about the nation’s complicated politics of race and class, they have focused mainly on his professional career. They have asked questions about King’s contributions to the history of science, his role in the westward expansion of the late nineteenth century, his place in an elite circle of American letters. Now, however, in a historical moment when Americans find it easier to talk about race, to query the ways in which it has shaped and defined so many American lives, King’s private affairs—rather than his scientific accomplishments—seem the richer vein to mine. As we ask new questions of that private life, our research inevitably takes new turns. Only now, then, does King’s own racial passing come to light. And only now can we begin to discern the ways in which King’s extraordinary life might help us think about broader social issues in late-nineteenth-century America: the possibilities and limitations of self-fashioning, the simultaneous rigidity and porousness of racial definitions, the fluidity of urban life.

  In the end, however, this is not just the story of a celebrated white explorer who passed across the color line but also a tale about his wife. Ada Copeland Todd King might seem the chief victim of King’s deceptions and of all the secrets that ensued. But she refused to play the victim. With long and steady persistence, she brought her marriage to public attention and left behind the evidence that lets us now move beyond the old questions about King’s professional life to pose a new set of queries about the larger meanings of his private actions. In that New York courtroom Ada King offered up her hints, giving brief accounts of her wedding, her children, her family homes, and her long search for legal justice. And there, she set before the world the fading love letters her husband had sent to her so many decades before. By the time Ada steps, however briefly, into the public eye, she has been widowed for more than three decades. We glimpse her as a woman in her seventies, a practical woman working through the legal system to assert her rightful name, give her children their true familial identity, and claim the trust fund she believed to be hers. She had scant time for sentiment. She expressed no bitterness toward the man who deceived her by presenting himself as a Pullman porter and who, even on his deathbed, took no legal steps to protect her and her children. She simply sought to dispel the tangle of secrets that had shaped and constricted her family life since the day she married the man called James Todd.

  Ada King’s life might have begun in obscurity, in the rural cotton country of west Georgia, but in the court records and newspaper accounts of her 1933 trial she lives more vividly than her once well-known husband. Here, the trajectories of their separate lives cross, and Ada King becomes a figure more easily understood than the husband glimpsed only through memor
ies handed down from his devoted friends. Three decades of financial support had hinged on her silence, but she would be silent no more.

  THE STORY OF CLARENCE AND ADA KING is about love and longing that transcend the historical bounds of time and place. It is a story about the struggle between desire and duty, about the ways in which two people can rise above social expectations, about the ways in which both love and friendship can compel one to suspend disbelief or take crazy risks. But it is also a peculiarly American story that could take root only in a society where one’s racial identity determined one’s legal rights and social opportunities. At every turn it exposes the deep fissures of race and class that cut through the landscape of American life, cracks as deep and enduring as the geological features that the explorer Clarence King once mapped on his treks across the continent—rifts that are, in the end, even harder to explain.

  Acknowledgments

  THE STORY OF CLARENCE KING AND ADA COPELAND PIQUED MY curiosity many years ago when I first stumbled upon the passing reference in Thurman Wilkins’s biography of King. How could a prominent figure like King lead a double life for thirteen years without ever being detected? For years, I encouraged my students to investigate the story, but no one pursued it. It haunted me. In our own age, the fleeting indiscretions of public figures attract an almost microscopic scrutiny. What was there about the late-nineteenth-century world that allowed King to pull off his secret life? I logged on to the recently digitized census records to see whether I might be able to find any trace of King’s secret family. Within moments, I found the 1900 census records that described King, living under his pseudonym of “James Todd,” as a black man. The possibility that King might have engaged in racial passing had never occurred to me. Nor, I think, to anyone else. I decided to write this book.