Passing strange : a Gilded Age tale of love and deception across the color line /

A PICTURE of Clarence King is well worth a thousand words. That's because readers of Martha A. Sandweiss's scrupulously researched work about this celebrated 19th-century explorer, geologist and writer - whom Secretary of State John Hay called "the best and brightest man of his generation" - are likely to ask one question: What, exactly, did he look like? Fortunately, "Passing Strange" includes photographs. King, you see, was a white man who for 13 years passed as black. For many, that is unimaginable. Didn't pigmentation give him up? It didn't, because, as King's story reaffirms, race is not really about skin color. If it were, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Walter White, for instance, could never have identified himself as "a Negro," served as executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. or written this paradoxical sentence: "The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me." Race is the emperor's new clothes: we don't see it; we think it. So goes the unspoken mantra behind the spate of books related to racial passing that have surfaced in the past decade or so. Philip Roth's "Human Stain," Bliss Broyard's "One Drop," Brooke Kroeger's "Passing" - all suggest that passing is hardly passé; it's new and improved, embracing narratives not just of the "traditional" black-to-white variety but also of the white-to-black, gay-to-straight and female-to-male kind. Like these, Clarence King's is "a peculiarly American story." Sandweiss, a professor of history at Princeton, says it represents "the possibilities and limitations of self-fashioning, the simultaneous rigidity and porousness of racial definitions, the fluidity of urban life." "Passing Strange" meticulously sometimes too meticulously; the book can be plodding - recounts the unlikely convergence of two lives: King was born in 1842 in Newport, R.I., to parents of longstanding American stock, and Ada Copeland was born a slave in Georgia, months before Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter. Copeland, like most slaves, is woefully underdocumented; we know that she somehow became literate, migrated to New York in the 1880s and found a job in domestic service. King, by contrast, is all but overdocumented; after schooling, he went west as a surveyor, summing up 10 years of work in two books, including the 815-page "Systematic Geology," which told, one historian said, "a story only a trifle less dramatic than Genesis." The pair met sometime around 1888, somewhere in bustling New York. By telling Copeland he was "James Todd," a Pullman porter from Baltimore, King implied his race; a white man could not hold such a job. They married that year (though without obtaining a civil license), settling in Brooklyn and then, as Copeland had five children, Flushing, Queens. All the while King maintained residential club addresses in Manhattan, where colleagues knew him as an elusive man about town. Living a double life is costly, and King's Western explorations never quite delivered returns, so the Todds were always broke. With every page of "Passing Strange" - as King runs off yet again to the frontier, or to Cuba or the Bahamas, leaving his pregnant wife, Sandweiss imagines, "exhausted and grateful for her husband's visits, however short or infrequent they might be" - I liked King less. Details denote an unflattering portrait: his sport of "slumming" in places like Manhattan's Tenderloin district - as a precursor to Norman Mailer's "white Negroes" - and his passion for "primitive" women, ogled on trips to Tahiti and Hawaii. Ultimately, a lacuna lies at the heart of Sandweiss's book: she tells us that "King loved Ada, and she loved him back," but do we really know that? Even his letters to his wife - relating "the daily comfort of remembering that far away in the East there is a dear brown woman who loves me" struck me as disingenuous. Before King died of tuberculosis in 1901, he confessed his real name in a letter to Copeland. She lived to 103 - one of the few former slaves alive at the time of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech - and during the legal battle for her husband's estate she was, curiously enough, represented by an eminent black lawyer who had once passed as white. Her two daughters also passed as white; from decade to decade, the census alternately designated her children "black," "mulatto," "Negro" and "white." What's strange, then, is how very unstrange all this is: racial-passing stories are not historical oddities but strikingly familiar tales, long woven into the fabric of American life. Baz Dreisinger, an assistant professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is the author of "Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture."

During America's Gilded Age, Clarence King was a famous geologist, friend of wealthy, famous, and powerful men. He was a larger-than-life character whose intellect and wanderlust pushed him to survey far-flung regions of the western U.S. and South America and develop an abiding appreciation of non-Western culture and people. What his family and wealthy friends did not know was that for 17 years, King lived secretly as James Todd, a black Pullman porter with a black wife and mixed-race children residing in Brooklyn. Devoted to his mother and half-siblings, restless and constantly in need of money, King relied on the largesse of his wealthy friends to help him support both families, never revealing his secret until he was near death. Sandweiss relies on letters, newspaper accounts, and interviews to chronicle the extraordinary story of an influential blue-eyed white man who passed for black at a time when passing generally went the other way. An engaging portrait of a man who defied social conventions but could not face up to the potential ruin of an interracial marriage.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2009 Booklist

Sandweiss (Print the Legend) serves a delicious brew of public accomplishment and domestic intrigue in this dual biography of the geologist-explorer Clarence King (1842-1901) and Ada Copeland (c. 1861-1964), a "black, working-class woman" who was "born a slave." Rendered as fiction, this true tale, would seem quite implausible-"a model son of Newport and one of the most admired scientists in America," Clarence kept secret for 13 years his marriage to Ada and their apparently contented domestic life. He kept his patrician past and celebrated present concealed as well from his wife, who believed herself the wife of James Todd, a black Pullman porter. Sandweiss provides a fascinating account of King's "extraordinary double life as an eminent white scientist and a black workingman"; Ada's struggle "through the legal system to assert her rightful name, give her children their true familial history, and [unsuccessfully] claim the trust fund she believed to be hers"; and rich insights into the "distinctive American ideas about race" that allowed King to "pass the other way across the color line, claiming African ancestry when he had none at all." (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

American West historian Sandweiss (American studies & history, Amherst Coll.; Print the Legend) utilizes archival, newspaper, and a panoply of digitized resources to analyze the personal and social complexity of the life of noted surveyor and geologist Clarence King (1842-1901). King, the scion of a storied white New England family, passed as the purported Pullman porter James Todd in order to espouse his African American common-law wife, Ada Copeland Todd King. Unlike previous King biographers (e.g., Robert Wilson, The Explorer King), Sandweiss treats in detail the challenges and dilemmas that King confronted in post-Civil War America, even in relatively tolerant New York City. Balancing scholarly exploration with readability, she focuses on King's 13-year secret (until he was on his deathbed, King kept the fact of his actual race from his wife), which produced acute psychological strains. History learned of it with a legal claim for his trust fund in 1933. Sandweiss demonstrates just how racial identity and inequality circumscribes behavior, adding both general background and individual perspectives on the conundrum of race in America. Her literary references add to a historical narrative that should catch the attention of both specialists and the reading public. A welcome choice for both academic and public libraries.-Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

One of the best-known men of his time crosses the racial dividein reverse. Well-born traveler, scientist, explorer and writer Clarence King enjoyed great privilege. In the words of Western historian Sandweiss (American Studies/Amherst Coll.; Print the Legen: Photography and the American West, 2002, etc.), he went through life "tempted by risk and attracted to the exotic but fearful of losing the social prerogatives that defined his place in the world." When King returned from his globetrotting expeditions and settled down in New York to enjoy his fame as the bestselling author of Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, he embarked on a romance with an African-American woman named Ada Copeland. A young nursemaid who moved north from Georgia in the mid-1880s, she apparently met King sometime in 1887 or early 1888 while he was out "slumming." That word, the author explains, denoted a class-crossing "fashionable amusement," according to the Saturday Evening Post. King was serious about his courtship of Copeland, but it was fraught with peril for all concerned, presenting threatening possibilities for blackmail on the one hand and abandonment on the other. He decided to present himself to her as a Pullman porter named James Todd, an invented identity that "hinged not just on one lie but a cluster of related, duplicitous assertions." As Sandweiss notes in this sturdy work, which blends elements of social and intellectual history with biography, thousands of light-skinned blacks in that era tried to pass for white, but the number of those who did the opposite must have been tiny. Yet King married Copeland and gave up his cherished social privileges. She had borne him five children, and he was on his deathbed in 1901, when he finally told her the truth. An intriguing look at long-held secrets, Jim Crow, bad faithand also, as Sandweiss observes, "love and longing that transcends the historical bounds of time and place." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.