Passing Strange (20 page)

“Man in the process of transit from his Archaic state to his very best forms of culture tires me,” King wrote to Hay. “I like him at the start and at the finish. Woman, I am ashamed to say, I like best in the primitive state. Paradise, for me, is still a garden and a primaeval woman.” Had he been in Eden, he wrote, he would never have eaten the forbidden fruit. He would have picked up his sword to defend his garden paradise. And in California he had come close enough. Luciana, he told Hay, “is herself as near Eve as can be.”
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“I escaped from her by a miracle of self-control,” he wrote. “I had cock fights in the most classic style of the art and I rode with Luciana alone in the mountains among the straying families of cattle. The world was all flowers and Luciana’s face the most tender and grave image of Indian womanhood within human conception. I had an almost overpowering attack of—well, Locksley Hall.”
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King could count on Hay to know that Tennyson poem about the man who dreams of fleeing the industrialized world for a tropical paradise: “There the passions cramp’d no longer shall have scope and breathing-space; / I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.”
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In California, King’s fantasy seemed within reach. He and Luciana “came upon a spring high up in the mountains,” he wrote to Hay, “where the oaks were dewy with sea fog and the orange poppies all aflame in the grass; and there we dismounted and looked out on the silver sea, and I came as near it as I ever shall.”
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Years before, in a little pocket journal he carried west, King mused about the relations between the sexes. He sketched a little diagram: his ideal partnership of mutual trust, respect, and strength rested on a woman’s patience and repose, and a man’s action and support. “Man’s is the larger nature,” he wrote, “woman’s the most perceptive.” Men were “analytical,” women “deductive.” But he thought the sexes could be “equally logical, [equally] critical, equally appreciative and equally creative.” He fantasized about a woman capable enough to sometimes take care of him. “It is a failing,” he wrote, “to suppose woman all tender and man all strength.”
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His ideal mate would not be as dependent as his ever-needy mother.

Indeed, King seemed most attracted to those women whose race and class and educational background rendered them most unlike the devoted Florence Howland. In King’s own peculiar brand of romantic racialism, people of color possessed innate qualities that marked them as different from Anglo-Saxons like himself. But these differences did not, as in the minds of scientific racists, consign them to a lower rung on a hierarchical ladder of racial superiority. King’s “primaeval” archetypes—whom he almost always imagined as women—possessed attractive qualities that his Anglo-Saxon peers lacked: a powerful intuitive side, an emotional openness, a calm and accepting nature that stood in stark contrast to the frenzied worry and competitive striving of the men and women he knew in New York. “Whoever has strolled at dusk where palm groves lean to the shore,” King wrote in a book review some years earlier, “and watched the Indian women sauntering in the cool of evening with a gait in which a ripple of grace undulates—whoever has seen their soft, dark eyes, and read the expression of tenderness and pathos which is habitual on their faces, can but feel that here simple nature has done all she can for woman.”
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King idealized those women who operated with feeling rather than intellect. For all his education, all his accomplishments as a geologist and an explorer, King sometimes yearned to be a person of action rather than thought, passion rather than calculus.

Basking in the glow of his romance with Luciana, King likely gave little thought to the ending of Jackson’s novel about interracial love, letting feeling prevail over literary analysis. But a closer look at the book might have given him pause. The saintly Ramona, a kind of Indian counterpart to the tragic mulatto figure of so many nineteenth-century novels about African Americans, is herself of mixed European and Indian blood. Grief-stricken after the racially motivated murder of her Indian husband, she can find no peace in California. The once orderly Spanish paradise has become fatally American, overrun by selfish, violent, and money-grubbing settlers. She decides to flee this place of racial intolerance for Mexico, a dimly imagined racial Eden, where “she would spare her daughter the burden she had gladly, heroically borne herself, in the bond of race.” And at the novel’s conclusion, with her new pure-blood Spanish husband, she sails south to begin her new life. “It was indeed a new world,” writes Jackson. “Ramona might well doubt her own identity.”
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King might not want to embrace the novel’s message about American racial intolerance any more than he wished to take to heart the moral of his grandmother’s Underground Railroad novel: in neither book did interracial marriage have any real future in the United States.
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King returned from California to New York via New Orleans, where he “found a lodgment in the heart of several middle aged females, who consecrate hours to gumboes for me.”
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And while there, he wrote a friend, he “had a woman thrust on me whose character and history form one of those strange, dark lines of Southern history which every friend of southern men in ante bellum days knows all about.” The woman was an “old quadroon” linked by birth or marriage, he hinted mysteriously, to a distinguished white political figure. An old associate of King’s had been her legal adviser but was now in failing health, and it fell to King to find someone to help her with her legal affairs. He sought someone who had “outgrown idle curiosity” about interracial affairs of the heart, some “fine old character among the French Creole lawyers,” perhaps. The complications of interracial sex were not solely the stuff of novels.
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Back alone in New York he felt “unfit” and began to think that he might rent a house in Washington with his mother, sister, and ailing grandmother so that he might be closer to his friends Hay and Adams.
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The Hays and Adamses had purchased land together in Washington in 1883 and commissioned the eminent architect H. H. Richardson to build adjacent houses for them on their lots on H and Sixteenth streets, on Lafayette Square, opposite the White House. But they had barely moved in when, in December 1885, Clover Adams swallowed a fatal dose of potassium cyanide. A long bout of mental depression, made worse by her father’s recent death, had driven her to suicide. Her death diminished the Hearts by one, and gradually the others dropped all references to their quintet. Henry Adams stayed on alone in his big empty house, piecing together a new life, destroying the diaries that documented his old one. And John Hay, now absorbed in the writing of a monumental biography of Lincoln with his colleague John Nicolay, remained next door with his wife, Clara, and his children, including a young son named Clarence, after his childless friend.
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King dreamed of having his friends nearby. He went up to New Hampshire later that summer to look at some property on Lake Sunapee he contemplated buying with Hay. But Luciana haunted him. The women of his own social set seemed repellent. He explained to Hay, “You know the type—caramels, matinees, and E. P. Rice’s novels, the last slang, a good dress and a bad hat—fine eyes and unDarwinized mouth.” And then there was “Sarah,” a local woman who greeted him with a kiss. “It was a revelation,” King wrote to Hay, “so thin and cold, so dreary and colorless.” He would walk up to the “cannon’s mouth,” he wrote, “but I refuse to ever again march up to the mouth of a New Hampshire woman.” At least, he continued, “till I forget the goodbye of Luciana with its oceanic fullness of blood and warmth.” His fantasies about Luciana refused to stay put. “I have tried and prayed,” he explained, “to adjust [her] into a mere literary figure, a lay woman draped with rich emotions and posed as a model for my book, but she will not down.” So he tried to turn his misery into a joke and cautioned Hay not to worry. “Business troubles I am told have a way of grinding off the fairest pictures from the soul, and I have always enough of them on hand to erode the bloom off any thing.”
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King fancied himself a peculiar sort of realist. He did not much like the new contemporary fiction of “the detective camera period, the day of little snap-shots and instantaneous pictures of the petty realities of common social life.”
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He valued a different sort of literary realist, “not . . . one who is contented with the visible actualities of men and nature, but who has imagination and poetic vision enough to truthfully discern those equally active motives and tendencies which constitute the whole hidden framework of society.”
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Likewise, he told Hay, when it came to art he preferred the classical statue of the Venus de Milo “to that plaster knee of the little french slut we saw in a studio with all the droll realism of the gooseflesh and the adhering hairs.” In an armless marble statue of a half-clad Greek goddess, King found his unattainable ideal. “You can learn as much about woman from the Milo as you can from all the distorted creatures who crowd the pages and canvases of modern art put together.”
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KING’S DREAMS OF HOUSES in Washington or New Hampshire came to naught. Back in New York, haunted by fantasies of Luciana and scornful of the women in his own social circles, King plunged back into the streets. And somewhere in the city, in late 1887 or early 1888, he met an African American nursemaid who caught his eye. For all his adventuresomeness, he remained a creature of what Edith Wharton called “the old New York way... the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage.”
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And so King did not reveal his true identity to Ada Copeland. His name, he told her, was “James Todd.”
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PART TWO

James
and
Ada Todd

CLARENCE KING AND ADA COPELAND MET SOMEWHERE IN Manhattan in 1887 or early 1888. No documents survive, however, to tell us precisely where the geologist met the nursemaid, how they struck up a conversation, what they talked about.

They could have met in a public space. Strolling out from his rooms at the Brunswick Hotel in search of evening amusement, perhaps King spied Copeland as she walked with friends or sat on a stoop to relax after work. He might have struck up a conversation or sat down to talk. Or perhaps he caught up with her on a sidewalk one afternoon as he strode through midtown or sat beside her on a public trolley. The conventions of race and gender would dictate that he, not she, initiate any conversation. He might offer to carry a package, guide her across the street, help her find an unfamiliar address.

Or, if not on the street, maybe they met in a restaurant or place of amusement, such as the so-called Black and Tan clubs in the emerging “black Bohemia” of the Tenderloin district on Manhattan’s West Side, where Ada’s aunt Annie Purnell lived. “Satan’s Circus,” some clergymen called the neighborhood, where gambling houses and bordellos stood alongside more legitimate music clubs and the homes of working-class African Americans.
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“Almost every night one or two parties of white people, men and women, who were out sight-seeing, or slumming” would come to the black clubs, James Weldon Johnson later wrote. “They generally came in cabs; some of them would stay only for a few minutes, while others sometimes stayed until morning.”
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King’s own musical tastes ran from Beethoven to the latest ragtime, so he might have dropped by the clubs to hear some music or catch a variety act.
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But Ada likely had neither the time nor the money, and she would probably feel wary of these clubs. Urban reformers targeted them as sites of vice, where interracial socializing inevitably led to illicit, interracial sex.
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For a churchgoing, working girl like Ada, the clubs might threaten the sort of respectable urban life she sought to create for herself.

We might thus consider whether they met at the home where Ada worked. If she worked for one of King’s acquaintances, the house would be the one domestic space where King and Copeland might plausibly find themselves together. But a home seems an improbable stage for King’s masquerade. He would enter the house as Clarence King, a dapper friend of the family, and even from the nursery, where she might remain with the children, Ada would know he had come in through the front door—an invited guest, not a service worker. She might hear him called “Clare” or, affectionately, “King.” He might step into the back of the house to chat with the servants, but he could not pretend to be someone else there, in his friends’ home. His deceptions would need more anonymous spaces in which to unfold.

If by chance Clarence glimpsed Ada at the home before she ever saw him, he could have returned another day to find her alone, or waited outside to catch her on the street while she walked with the children. Wherever he met her, he laid the foundation for his alternative identity from the start. With an accent or an expression, a familiarity with southern culture or a knowing wink at the foibles of Ada’s employers, he could imply that he was a workingman, maybe a fellow southerner. Such playful and seductive banter would feel familiar to him, akin to the verbal games he had played with women in Hawaii or London or California. But this time there would be no walking away from the persona he invented with his charming words and beguiling smile. On a street or in a bar, in a kitchen or on a trolley, King told Ada the story of his life. He was from Baltimore. He was a Pullman porter. And his name, he said, was “James Todd.”
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From the circumstances of his life, if not through a clear declaration or the obvious physical appearance of his skin, he let Ada believe he was black.