Passing Strange (27 page)

That a white physician should care for Ada was not unusual. So many of the city’s African American residents preferred white doctors that in 1889 a black physician complained in New York’s African American newspaper, the
New York Age,
that the black community’s faith “in their own medical men is much like that of doubting Thomas . . . we are just as capable in diagnosing and just as skillful in treating the various diseases to which flesh is heir as our white historical brothers.”
⁶⁰

In the chaotic aftermath of the storm, it would be difficult to get word to her husband, even if Ada knew how to find him. She would not know to look for him at the Hotel Albert or think, once the wires were repaired, to send a telegram to Newport, where Clarence King had told friends he would be for a few weeks.
⁶¹
She probably imagined him off on a train somewhere and had no recourse but to wait for him to reappear.

So Ada herself gave Dr. Kidd the information he needed to fill in the formal Brooklyn Certificate of Birth: mother’s full name, Ada Todd; age, thirty; maiden name, Ada Copeland; birthplace, West Point, Georgia. She instructed Kidd to identify the father as James Todd, a forty-nine-year-old porter, born in Baltimore. And she told him what he could probably see for himself: this was her second child. With these spare words, Ada Todd entered the first account of her life into the historical record .
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The birth certificate form provided no space to designate the parents’ race. But Dr. Kidd had to indicate the race of the baby. He looked at the mother and struck out the word “white.” This was a “colored” child.
⁶³

When James Todd reappeared at the snowbound family apartment, he named the baby Grace Margaret, in honor of the infant sister Clarence King had lost in childhood. As with the names James and Leroy, he slyly honored his birth family, a gesture meaningful to no one but him.

 

 

DURING THE MONTHS FOLLOWING Grace’s birth, King frustrated even his most devoted friends. He wrote to Hay that he could not come to Washington because he had to visit his mother in Newport and could not join him in Europe because he was too worn out. He complained about his health, worried about his finances, seemed to struggle to get nowhere, all the while sinking deeper into debt. “If he would stop struggling, he would get on well enough,” Hay wrote to Adams. “He owes nobody but those who will never bother him.” Hay lectured King like a “Dutch uncle.” Still, he found him “just as good company as ever if he were not so infernally busy that you can never get him to stay more than a half a day anywhere.”
⁶⁴
Indeed. Along with the dinners at the Century Association, the trips to Newport, and the struggles to earn a living, there was, unbeknownst to his friends, that family in Brooklyn.
⁶⁵

King kept up his bluff joking about women. While traveling in Tahiti and Samoa in 1890-91, Henry Adams wrote long letters about the “old gold” girls he found there. But King took ironic comfort in knowing that neither Adams nor his traveling companion, the painter John La Farge, could appreciate them as much as he did. Indeed, Adams’s indifference to women seemed exasperating. “It is too late for him to get a rise from his solar plexus,” King joked to Hay; “the girls stir only his gray matter.”
⁶⁶
Just as well, King decided. “I love primal women so madly that I should have acted with jealousy had they discerned her.” He let himself imagine Adams’s new Kodak camera, which contained “somewhere in the sacred coil of its umbilical center . . . the faint potentiality of a face waiting to be developed by reagents more sensitive than the vision of either of our friends. A face which will touch and enchant me.”
⁶⁷
And so he danced and feinted around his friends, hinting at his feelings but hiding the ways in which he had acted on them. His pronouncements seemed safely abstract. “People are looked at in only two ways,” King wrote to Hay, “with the brain and with the heart. If you take the former method you initially classify and judge people by their
differences
with other people usually yourself. If you see them with the heart you have your conceptions on the
similarities
between them and some other people usually yourself.”
⁶⁸

 

 

ADA TODD’S WORLD MUST have felt more cramped than her husband’s, with two small children keeping her all but housebound. Leroy, newly weaned, would be learning to walk during the winter and early spring of 1891, and baby Grace would demand her mother’s constant attention. By late spring, Ada was pregnant again, for the third time in as many years. One imagines her exhausted and grateful for her husband’s visits, however short or infrequent they might be. He might bring groceries or money and provide her with some fleeting moments of respite from the unending care for the children. Sometime during 1891, James Todd helped Ada and the children move to a quieter, more residential neighborhood farther east in the northwestern part of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the area then home to the large majority of Brooklyn’s black residents.
⁶⁹
During the 1890s, housing conditions for Brooklyn’s black residents, previously regarded as more “healthful” than those in Manhattan, began to deteriorate.
⁷⁰
But for Ada, this move represented another step up in the world. For her husband, it meant more strain.

In the spring of 1891, King borrowed another $1,800 from the ever-generous John Hay.
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King seemed “far from well,” Hay remarked.
⁷²
“Here
all
is shadows,” King confessed that summer to Mrs. Hay. Looking in on his family in Newport he found his grandmother infirm and irritable, his mother full of worrisome symptoms, and his half brother, George, on the verge of consumption. It all pointed to “a dreary present and sad enough outlook.”
⁷³

The Todd family’s new apartment at 72 Skillman Street was in a narrow, attached three-story building a block from the brewery and the gutta-percha factory that stood down the street near the intersection with Flushing Avenue.
⁷⁴
The air hung heavy with smells on hot summer days, but the malt and burning-rubber-like odors likely seemed an improvement over the stench of the Hudson Avenue slaughterhouses. Moreover, this block had a more residential feel. The neighbors in the Todds’ building included workingmen—a trimmer, a ship joiner, a porter—and several widows.
⁷⁵
St. Mary’s Episcopal Chapel stood catty-corner across the street. Some southern blacks found New York a cold place that lacked the neighborly conviviality of small-town southern life. James Weldon Johnson, a native Floridian, counted himself fortunate to feel an instant connection to the city from the moment of his first visit to his Brooklyn relatives in 1884. But, he wrote, “if among other requirements for happiness, one needs neighbors; that is, feels that he must be on friendly terms with the people who live next door, and in addition know all about them; if one must be able to talk across from front porches and chat over back fences; if one is possessed by a zeal to regulate the conduct of people who are neither neighbors nor friends—he is not born for a New Yorker.”
⁷⁶
Though occupied by her children, Ada had always been a resourceful and generous woman. One imagines her in that new apartment on Skillman Street, reaching out to the neighbors who could provide help and companionship as she made a home for her family, despite her husband’s frequent absences. A Pullman porter might make a good living, but she had known from the start that he would never provide a conventional domestic life.

 

 

DURING THE LAST WEEK of August 1891, perhaps about the time that Ada was settling into the new apartment, King traveled to the nation’s capital to attend the Fifth International Congress of Geologists. Some 250 scientists from around the globe convened in the halls of Columbian University (later George Washington University) to listen to formal papers about how to establish a uniform international system of geological nomenclature, classification, and cartography. One can imagine the gatherings: the reunions of old friends and colleagues, the sighting of old classmates, the excited introductions to scientists one knew only through publications. In the evenings, the talk would spill over into receptions and the restaurants and hotels of downtown Washington. Through the cacophony of English, French, and German, one might catch snatches of familiar gossip about the United States Geological Survey or arguments about the newest theories emerging from Europe, the latest buzz about new mineral deposits in the West, or complaints about government support for science. A kind of éminence grise of the gathering, King would feel at home here, surrounded by old and new colleagues and much sought after by the younger participants who knew of his writings and his central role in establishing the western American surveys. As the founding spirit and first director of the USGS, he had established the agency for which so many of them worked.

One of the younger geologists in the crowd might have caught King’s attention. The “real” James Todd was there, fresh from a summer of fieldwork for the USGS near Vermillion, South Dakota. One can only wonder whether he walked over to introduce himself to King, the man who had preceded him at Yale and the USGS and left behind such legions of admirers.
⁷⁷
Such an imagined meeting would surely unnerve King. If he had known of Todd before, by name and reputation, he could now meet him in the flesh: his ghostly doppelgänger come to life.

 

 

THE SITUATION IN NEWPORT worsened in late summer, and from Washington King raced to his mother’s home. Mrs. Howland was ill, his grandmother was failing, and an invalid cousin helped round out a household that, as he wrote to Hay, seemed conceived in the “pigments of sorrow and trials.” The three servants had just left, and it fell to King to care for the ailing women until he could “break in” new domestic help. But temporary help arrived in the guise of a “grandly barbaric Congo woman” named Augusta—“seventy years old, black as ink, erect as a palm”—who brought in her “tribe” of female relations to run the household until King could hire a permanent staff. “Accordingly,” he wrote, “wherever one goes a dark figure of the tribe flits past one. They are all very black and very silent, all have teeth like glistening ivory, all pass on in a broad smile.” To the “grim calvinistic scotch propriety” of his mother’s house, they brought a world of mysterious spices, “songs of the Guinea Coast,” a “soft native Congo slur,” and an open gaiety of expression. King’s spirits improved and even his mother felt amused. “Civilization so narrows the gamut!” King wrote to Hay. “Respectability lets the human pendulum swing over such a pitiful little arc. That it’s worth it now and again to see human beings when feelings have no inflexible bar of metal restraining their swing to the limits set by civilized experience and moral law.”
⁷⁸

Even in his mother’s house (or perhaps
especially
there), King pushed back against propriety and convention, and longed for other worlds.

 

 

THERE IS NO KNOWING precisely where King was when his son Leroy became ill sometime in 1891. Recently weaned so that his mother could nurse the new baby, Leroy would be especially vulnerable to food- and milk-borne bacteria, a particular concern in an era without a safe supply of unadulterated milk. He would also be subject to diseases transmitted by insects and to the so-called “weanling diarrhea,” a leading cause of death for the young of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. In 1890 New York, more than 40 percent of all deaths occurred among children under five, a disproportionate number of them black.
⁷⁹
A decade later, despite improved street sanitation and a safer food supply, black babies in the city still died at more than twice the rate of white infants, with two out of every seven black children dying before the age of one.
⁸⁰

Whatever the source of his illness, Leroy died around his second birthday. No death certificate survives to record the details. No letters document his parents’ grief. For Ada, that grief would be made more intense by her isolation. She probably did not know how to find her husband or get word to him to rush home to see their sick toddler. For James Todd, grief might be compounded by guilt. In all likelihood, he was gone during Leroy’s illness, and without old friends who knew of his loss, he could share his despondency with no one but his wife and whomever she had summoned for support. To the growing list of things about which he could not speak to his mother or his closest friends, he now added the death of his son, whose name slyly carried on the King family name. Knowing nothing of his friend’s tragedy, Hay attributed King’s despondency to his ongoing financial troubles and confided in Adams that King “
patauges
in the mire as if his life depended on his getting out—and gets deeper in all the time.” Hay felt “despair about him. I cannot make him do what he ought, even though I offer to stand the racket.”
⁸¹

Ada delivered a baby girl at home on January 31, 1892. Dr. Kidd again attended her and noted on the birth certificate that this was Ada Copeland Todd’s second child, not her third. In this age of high infant mortality, the number of live births mattered less than the number of living children. With a stroke of the doctor’s pen, Leroy disappeared from the historical record. Kidd recorded the facts as Ada related them, much as she had just fifty-three weeks earlier, when Grace was born. She was Ada Todd, born Ada Copeland in Georgia thirty-one years ago. The baby’s father was James Todd, a “Porter on Pulman Car,” born in Maryland fifty years earlier. No evidence documents his presence at this birth. Ada seemingly took it upon herself to name her daughter, invoking an old southern tradition of naming girls. The baby would be called Ada, after her.
⁸²