Passing Strange (23 page)

Lind pursued his double life for many years, never losing his sense of fear. If he glimpsed a familiar figure as he left his home he would “cross to the other side of the street and make a feint of ringing a doorbell.”
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But invariably, his anxiety about discovery would be alleviated by “blissful intoxication,” as a train whisked him away to a distant neighborhood where he could feel more secure in his alternative identity. Only a few times did someone who knew him as one persona encounter him as the other. Counting on his clothes to serve as a reliable and definitive marker of his class identity, Lind simply denied that he was the person they imagined.
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Dress provided a powerful clue to one’s tastes and values, class and educational background; it could reveal (or disguise) one’s very identity. A rash of poseurs in late-nineteenth-century New York suggested how gullible Manhattanites could be, how apt to infer a person’s character from his clothes. A con man “dressed in the height of fashion” successfully passed himself off for a year as the son of the Chicago meatpacker Philip Armour. For three years, another con man represented himself as the New York socialite Walter B. Lawrence, cadging money on the pretense of having lost his wallet. When the real Walter B. Lawrence complained to the Charities Aid Society about this disturbing situation, he learned “it was a frequent occurrence, and that my case was similar to hundreds of others they knew about.”
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Even a policeman, the detective James K. Price, found himself victimized by a young man who assumed his identity with the help of a borrowed sheriff’s badge.
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Dress could make, or unmake, the man. Clarence King, perhaps possessed of an old Pullman porter’s coat, understood that.

 

 

KING’S FRIENDS RESIGNED THEMSELVES to his mysterious comings and goings, to the difficulties of tracking down a man who lived between hotels and club rooms. In May 1888 John Hay went off to King’s office in search of his friend only to be told he was off in California and would return “in a week or a month.” But then he went to the Brunswick and “there, in the middle of the shrimps, sat King.” He had his usual assortment of maladies, Hay wrote to Henry Adams, “but he looks well and fit.”
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Even his closest friends had no idea how or where King passed his time, or precisely how he earned his living. They accepted his mystery as a part of his charm.

King’s distracted inattentiveness seemed a consequence of caring for his mother, now living on her own in New York in a rented home at 12 East Eleventh Street, as fragile and high-strung as ever with “shattered nerves and broken spirits” as well as a “morbidly anxious mind.”
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“Poor Mother,” King wrote to Hay in August 1888. “Would that her electricly [
sic
] charged mind and consuming spirit might find some pacific quenching medicine that should lessen the fire which is burning her frail nerves to ashes.” King and his half sister, Marian, shouldered the burden of her care. “If you knew the difficulties of my situation in all its respects and phases,” he told Hay, “you would not blame me for consenting to seek a quiet drudgery from which I frankly see that I may never emerge.”
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Hay undoubtedly understood this as a reference to King’s ever-present need to earn a living in order to support his mother and his half siblings. King gave no hint that summer of 1888 that his life contained anything other than crushing work and family obligations.

His silence was, at the very least, dissembling. Even as he pursued his secret meetings with Ada in the summer of 1888 and they began, however tentatively, to consider marriage, King complained to Hay about women. No one could compare with Mrs. Hay, he wrote to his friend. “Women there are who have the best of the nineteenth century in their hearts and hands, but if there are any besides Mrs. Hay who have all that and the doric strength of nature too, I don’t know where they live . . . and have their being.”
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When a friend asked, over breakfast at the Brunswick, why King had never married, King replied, “Woman is too one-sided—like a tossed-up penny—and I want both sides or none.”
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His public dissatisfaction gave no hint of his private affairs.

Nor did his writing. In October 1888, a month after his marriage to Copeland, King published an essay in the
North American Review.
His critical examination of the recent literary characterizations of women seemed to betray his sentiments about the real thing. Nothing about the women featured in contemporary realistic fiction—with their “incredible meanness” and the “primeval monkey-scale of their average intelligence”—appealed to him. The English created only “distorted and diseased creatures,” while the French realists “flung woman naked in the ditch and left her there scorned of men, and grinning in cynical and shameless levity over her own dishonor.” The women in American literature illustrated the “sawdust stuffing of their middle-class democratic society.” So King posed a rhetorical question. “Out of it all, is there one figure for weary eyes to linger upon: one type of large and satisfying womanhood, natural in the rare and ravishing charm of a perfect body; sweet with the endowment of a warm, quick, sympathetic temperament; sound and bright in intellect; pure and spiritual with a soul... [undimmed by] the jar of modern conflict?” King found his ideal in the “Greek Venus in the Louvre, who is only perfect goddess because she is perfect woman”; a woman with a “rich femininity” and a “Doric strength,” a “calm warmth” and an “irradiating aura of love.”
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By professing his undying adoration for the unattainable perfection of a marble statue, King threw his friends off his scent. Who would suspect he had found real love with an African American nursemaid?

In September 1888 James Todd and Ada Copeland exchanged marriage vows in a small ceremony at the home of Ada’s aunt, Annie Purnell. Ada’s pastor, the Reverend James H. Cook of the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church on East Eighty-fifth Street, conducted the wedding service before a handful of witnesses. One, then a young girl, later recalled the organ in the apartment that day, as well as “a big wedding cake, all kinds of candy, chocolates, bon bons, nuts and different kinds of food.” If the event offered evidence of King’s financial resources, it also testified to Copeland’s social ambitions. The groom—possibly wearing a suit once seen in the Century Association dining room, or perhaps an old Pullman porter’s coat—placed a ring on the bride’s finger. The gold and silver overlay on the ornately patterned gold band symbolically intertwined as one and reaffirmed that the groom was a man of means. But no identifying names or dates personalized the wedding ring. King took care not to mark it as a personal memento of a particular day.
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Perhaps Clarence King noted to himself how modest the ceremony seemed, how different from the large church services and elaborate receptions he had attended in Newport and New York. But Ada likely viewed the festivities differently, less a diminished version of something more grand than a joyful embrace of all that her own parents and grandparents had been denied. Slave wedding rituals came in all forms, from the traditional “broom-stick wedding,” in which couples jumped over a broom handle, to informal religious services involving clergymen and elaborate ceremonies in the “big house” arranged by the planter. But few weddings took place without an owner’s approval. And for all their importance within the slave community as rare celebrations of individual desire and will, they almost always reinforced the slaveholders’ power and control. Slaves noted that the white preachers who presided over their weddings never said “till death do you part.” One white minister expressed the reality: “Until death or distance do you part.” Slave masters retained the ultimate threat: anyone who misbehaved could be separated from his or her spouse. And in truth, not even good behavior necessarily assured the stability of a marital relationship. The mere desire for financial gain might compel a slaveholder to separate a married couple.
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For the Copeland-Todd wedding ceremony to take place in a home instead of a church was not unusual. But the guests might have wondered why the groom—without family or friends—should be so alone.

 

 

KING GREW UP WITHIN his mother’s United Congregationalist faith. His religion, he once quipped, was like his teeth: both were inherited and both were sound. But the intense piety of his youth, so evident in the long, searching letters about faith he exchanged with his friend Jim Gardiner, waned as he grew older.
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He invoked a more pantheistic notion of a deity—of a “God, who is also Nature”—at the conclusion of
Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada,
and as an adult turned toward a faith less stern than that of his boyhood, even flirting with the more emotional spiritualism of African American Christianity.
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James Hague recalled that while investigating a north Georgia gold mine, King once “attended a religious meeting of a colored congregation, assembled in a large barn-like and frigid meeting-house, without any heating facilities whatever, except the large hot stones and bowlders which many of the old women brought with them.” King addressed the meeting and, notwithstanding the bitter cold, “much enjoyed the fervent spirit of the prayers and the hymns and soul-saving exhortations.” He promised to buy the congregants a large stove, and so he did. Returning to the area a few years later, he asked a white driver whether the church was still doing well. “I should say so!” the driver replied. “There ain’t a fence-rail left in this neighborhood within two mile of that meetin’-house.” Hague dismissed King’s generosity as an amusing gesture.
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But the anecdote hints at King’s fascination with the African American church and suggests how he could use stories to deflect his friends from any probing queries about his innermost feelings or beliefs.

When Ada Copeland proposed that her pastor perform their marriage ceremony, King might thus have agreed not just to please her but because he himself felt drawn to the practices of African American worship. Perhaps James even presented himself to Cook, and to Ada, as a fellow member of the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church. Not a member of the New York congregation—Cook surely knew all his own parishioners—but a member somewhere else, maybe in Baltimore, the place Todd claimed as his hometown. Membership in the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church, an African American sect, would reaffirm what Todd had already implied by identifying himself as a Pullman porter: he was black. Certainly, everyone else in the church was.

Cook likely accepted the groom’s story, whatever doubts he might have had about his appearance or the story of his past. What would Todd’s background matter in light of the prospective bride’s evident happiness? It would be a blessing to help launch his parishioner into a better life.

 

 

IF ADA AND HER AUNT lived largely within the social confines of Manhattan’s black working-class community, the Reverend James H. Cook had a higher public profile. In the mid-1860s he helped found the Coachmen’s Union League Society in New York to provide “good-fellowship” and insurance benefits to “negro coachmen employed in public stables or by private families,” the very men who drove the fashionable carriages that King watched from the Brunswick Hotel. He donated his time to black fraternal organizations, raised funds for black refugees from the South, and anointed himself a champion of the downtrodden. In 1880 he went to the Tombs prison to pray with a soon-to-be-executed murderer named Chastain Cox. When Cook’s congregants threatened to disrupt any funeral service for the convicted criminal at their church, Cook improvised a hasty service at the undertaker’s and bought the burial plot himself.
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He was a familiar figure at political gatherings and civil rights events, and in 1890, a year after being appointed a bishop of his church with responsibility for some twenty-two congregations in the Northeast, he joined an interracial group of New York clergymen to fight corruption in Tammany Hall.
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For much of his life as a black man, James Todd lived beyond the notice of those who shaped African American community life in New York; he could not afford much social scrutiny. But at the moment of his wedding, when he brushed up against the Reverend James H. Cook, he crossed paths with someone who might have heard of Clarence King and his well-connected friends. It would prove King’s most public moment in black city life.

 

 

JAMES AND ADA TODD sealed their marriage with a religious ceremony but never obtained a civil marriage license. They thus had a common-law marriage, a partnership acknowledged by New York since 1809 and recognized as legally valid in most states by the late nineteenth century.
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In having a family celebration but eschewing a legal record, they made what at first seems an odd choice for a couple concerned about privacy. Those who wish to keep their partnerships secret often turn to civil licenses, which can be obtained from the municipal authorities without involving family, religious authorities, or—aside from the obligatory legal witnesses—any friends or acquaintances at all. But in this case, civil documents likely seemed more threatening to the charade than any more public religious service. James Todd likely felt uneasy about appearing in a municipal office to identify himself and wary of leaving behind a paper trail of his deceptions. In 1888 Manhattan’s official “certificate of marriage” required both bride and groom to report their names, ages, and parents’ names, and asked the groom to record his occupation. The form also requested the applicants to designate their “color.” The directions were simple: “If of other races, specify what.” No one needed to clarify the official meaning of the phrase. In the nation’s largest city, “white” remained the norm; everything else was a racial deviation from the standard. To obtain a civil marriage license, James Todd and his bride would have to not only fill out the form but find two witnesses to swear to the truth of everything—including their names and racial identities.
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