Passing Strange (28 page)

Where was King? He spent the months of January and February offering a constant stream of apologies to friends, excusing himself from engagements, demurring from prospective trips, perhaps creating a kind of cloak of invisibility around himself so he could slip away to spend time with Ada and their children. From the Century Association, he apologized to Hay for not repaying his debts. He had to keep his financial “wreck” from his mother, he explained, because she was “incapable of standing another great shock in life. She has suspected that I have been in trouble but I have been forced to keep up appearances with her and time has made her apprehension fade away.” He had spent his whole life “trying to envelope some members of my family with a neighborhood of sustaining sympathy to create a change of the moral climate which should give them cheer.” It was very hard to describe “the power of suffering” his family seemed to have, and even he was not free from the “soul-ache” which afflicted them. He was so hard up, he said, he might have to sell his geology books. But that “open advertisement of my ruin” would make it even harder to find work.
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If not complaining about his finances or his mother, King often griped about his health. Six days before his daughter Ada was born, he told Hay, with a peculiarly apt turn of phrase, that he had been in bed for two weeks with a weak heart: “A baby would whip me with one hand.” He had to stay close to home and regretted he could not come to Washington to visit. Later, he sent word that dinners at the Century were out because his doctor had forbidden him to go out in the evenings. Next he wrote that a relapse would keep him in bed for ten days.
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If nothing else, he had learned from his hypochondriacal mother that ill health could excuse almost anything. Having shaken his friends off his trail, King could disappear into the city, cross the Brooklyn Bridge, and ride the elevated train down Myrtle Street, reemerging on Skillman Street as a peripatetic railway porter named James Todd.

No evidence survives to describe life inside the Todds’ Skillman Street apartment or to suggest how Ada and her little girls fit into their new community. But a letter from King to his old California survey colleague William Brewer (now a professor at Yale) suggests that Ada might have extended to her southern relations the sort of assistance in New York that her aunt Annie Purnell once provided for her. In May 1892 King wrote to Brewer in New Haven to ask a favor. Would Brewer help him “carry out a piece of charity” for a “poor Alabama black boy”? Since Ada herself was born within a few miles of the Alabama border, the boy might have been her relative, perhaps a younger brother or nephew come north to New York. Mourning her son and struggling to take care of her two baby girls, Ada might find a teenage boarder difficult. For all he could help by running errands, picking up food, or tending to small details around the apartment, he would be expensive to clothe and feed. Hard to supervise, he could already have fallen into bad company on the streets. In 1886 a local African American newspaper had observed that only three hundred black children attended school while five thousand were “playing and loafing” in the street.
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“New York is a bad distracting town” for such a boy, King told Brewer. He explained that the boy was illiterate, having “worked from the cradle up.”lay So he asked Brewer to inquire what it would cost for a local African American family in New Haven to care for the boy “and give him a good room where he can study and where he can have a stove in winter and include his washing, also what it would cost to get someone to give him instruction in reading and writing.” King hoped the lady of the house could teach the boy enough that he could then go on to night school. He felt reluctant to give a lump sum of money to the boy, and like a benevolent uncle (which perhaps he was) King asked whether he might give Brewer a sum of money to dole out monthly for expenses. “I would not ask so much of you,” he concluded, “did I not know that you share my pity for these poor blacks.”
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King’s peculiar situation blinded him to the true racial views of his friends and made it hard for him to see what he did not wish to know. Brewer might have some empathy for “poor blacks,” but he considered the “mongrel crowd” that resulted from mixed-race marriages to be as “repulsive as the mongrel dogs which are apt to be their companions.” Quoting the African explorer David Livingstone, Brewer told an academic gathering that “God made the white man and God made the Black man, but the Devil made the half caste.”
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To such a colleague, King seemed willing to entrust the fate of the young black boy he hoped to rescue from the streets of New York. No record survives of Brewer’s response.
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But, as ever, King’s beneficent impulses had painful consequences. Before leaving a few weeks later for Florida to investigate a phosphate mine, King wrote to John Hay to ask for another $2,000 in loans.
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Everyone seemed to need King’s help that summer of 1892. Early in the summer he rushed to Atlanta to help his half sister, Marian, and her own newborn child while her husband, Lieutenant Townsley, hovered near death with typhoid fever.
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He had to go, he explained to Hay. The consequences of staying away might prove “very grave and lasting.” Should Townsley die, King wrote, Marian’s life “from a mere economic point of view would have been a life long burden to me.” King could imagine his friend chastising him for turning his attention from business to family. “You sometimes blame [me] for over anxiety and over devotion to my family,” he wrote, “but it has been a peculiar and very unfortunate family with abundant sorrows and reverses that I had no hand in, beside which my mother is of exagerated [
sic
] nervous organization with the keenest power of suffering and I am the only one on earth who have [
sic
] never hurt her (I mean within the family) and the only one who has the power of softening the pain of wounds that never heal.” The burden of it all had “taken the charm I once had away from me,” King acknowledged, and his life might seem “fruitless.” But he really had no choice.
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In October he asked Hay for yet another $2,000 loan.
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In the autumn of 1892 Ada Todd became pregnant again, for the fourth time in as many years. Beyond such physical evidence of her intimacy with her husband, virtually nothing survives to chart her feelings toward him. But the surviving fragments of King’s letters reveal him to be a man deeply in love.
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When he was apart from Ada, he dreamed of her. “My darling, tell me all about yourself,” James Todd begged from one of his many trips. “I can see your dear face every night when I lay my head on the pillow and my prayers go up to Heaven for you and the little ones. I feel most lonely and miss you most when I put out the light at night and turn away from the work of the day. Then I sit by my window in the starlight and look up at the dark night sky and think of you. Lonely seems my bed! Lonely is my pillow! I think of you and dream of you and my first waking thought is of your dear face and your loving heart.”
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He waited anxiously for the letters Ada wrote in return. “My dearest,” her husband wrote from the road, “I cannot tell you how delighted I was to see your handwriting again. To see something you had touched was almost like feeling the warmth of your hand.”
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Ada addressed her mail to “James Todd,” presumably in care of an intermediary or to the general delivery post offices or hotels where her railroading husband said he would stop.
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Since she had not traveled west herself, she would not know which hotels were frequented by black Pullman porters and which by prominent white scientists. And surely, the charming and beguiling Clarence King could persuade a hotel clerk to let him have the mail addressed to James Todd, no matter how he had registered. The trains whisked King across the country to pursue his business ventures far from Ada’s knowing eyes. But they also carried the correspondence that kept them close. For all he waxed rhapsodic about “primitive” women, King had reason to be grateful that Ada could read and write.

Early in their marriage, Ada and James Todd took on the domestic roles that would govern their family life. To Ada fell the care of the children, the management of the household, the day-to-day details of life in Brooklyn. Often alone during her husband’s frequent business trips, she might turn for support to the small network of relations and Manhattan church friends that she had developed before her marriage or to her new neighbors. But her husband brought no new friends or relatives or even work colleagues into her world. When he returned home, he almost surely came alone, falling back into Ada’s world, never asking her out to join his.

James, by contrast, assumed the responsibilities for the financial support of his family. Traveling across the nation as Clarence King, the geologist and mining consultant, he had a network of colleagues and friends, old connections and new associates that to Ada would have seemed inconceivably broad. And yet, he kept coming home to her. She and the children provided the still point in his increasingly unsettled world.

 

 

IN LATE 1892 KING spent some time with Ada and the children in Brooklyn, then traveled to Chicago to talk to investors about his phosphate interests in Florida.
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“Everywhere was slack-water,” Henry Adams wrote of that dull fall. Even the presidential contest between Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison stirred little interest. King, predictably, favored Harrison, the Republican candidate, out of a steadfast loyalty to the party of Lincoln. “With King,” explained Adams, “the feeling was chiefly love of archaic races; sympathy with the negro and Indian and corresponding dislike of their enemies.”
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America seemed tired that fall, Adams wrote, wearied not just by the lackluster election but by the stirrings of a global economic crisis that “helped to dull the vibration of society.” The nation seemed caught up in the reckless pursuit of money, bereft of values, dangerously ignorant of its own past. “Thus, in 1892,” he wrote, “neither Hay, King, nor Adams knew whether they had attained success, or how to estimate it, or what to call it; and the American people seemed to have no clearer idea than they.” Clarence King’s case seemed particularly puzzling. “King had played the ambitious course. He had played for many millions. He had more than once come close to a great success, but the result was still in doubt, and meanwhile he was passing the best years of his life underground.” Adams’s characterization of King’s life was more apt than he could have known. “For companionship,” Adams wrote of King, “he was mostly lost.”
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That dispiriting fall was the prelude to an economic collapse and a financial depression that, as Adams wrote, caused a “massacre of my friends who are being cleaned out and broken down by dozens.”
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Banks collapsed, speculative investments disappeared, the stability of family fortunes teetered. Following months of economic uncertainty and anxiety over the nation’s diminishing reserves of gold, the stock market fell sharply in May 1893. Mines, smelters, and factories began to close, and the railroads that carried the raw and finished products also began to fail. By August, one million people were out of work. At year’s end the unemployment figures stood at three million. All told, during that dark year, some fifteen thousand businesses and more than six hundred banks failed.
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“We live uncontestably above our means,” Junius Henri Browne wrote in
Harper’s Monthly
in December 1893, “because our means seem insufficient, and we cannot adjust them to our ever-growing wants.”
¹⁰²

The year 1893 began for King with a familiar sort of juggling: the society parties, an essay on the age of the earth published in the
American Journal of Science,
trips back to Newport to visit his mother.
¹⁰³
But over the summer, while suffering from a recurrence of his excruciating spinal pain, he learned of the failure of the National Bank of El Paso, which he had organized in 1886. As the principal stockholder, he was brought close to ruin by the friend he had installed as president of the bank. “I have lost everything,” King confessed.
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In the midst of all this, on July 19, Ada delivered a son in the Skillman Street apartment. Dr. Samuel E. Stiles, a white physician with a private practice in Brooklyn, attended the birth, and Ada told him what she had told her previous doctor. The baby’s father was a Pullman car porter named James Todd, who had been born in Maryland. He was now fifty-one, and she was thirty-two. Her maiden name was Ada Copeland (or “Copleyen” as the physician misspelled it), and she was from Georgia.
¹⁰⁵
Although she later claimed to be a year or two younger, the information she provided on her children’s birth certificates consistently established her own birth date as late in 1860. Dr. Stiles noted for the record that her infant son, later to be named Sidney C. (for Clarence or, perhaps, Copeland), was “colored.” A glimpse of the mother sufficed to make a determination of the baby’s race .
¹⁰⁶

Within a month of Sidney’s birth, Clarence King was off visiting his mother during the height of the Newport social season. Before leaving New York, he had gone to see his physician. He felt anxious. Due to his worries over the El Paso bank failure, he said, he had scarcely been able to sleep for weeks.
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But in the early fall of 1893 he headed west to investigate a mine in British Columbia.
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King wrote to Ada, “My first duty in these hard times is to make enough for your expenses and on that I will use all my strength.”
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Back home in late October, after a month in Canada, King caught word of the engagement of Arnold Hague, his old Yale classmate and a member of the Fortieth Parallel survey. Remarking on the surprising news to Frank Emmons, King mused that he would soon “be left alone on the chill ocean of bachelorhood.”
¹¹⁰
And to Hay he let slip an inadvertent double negative that hinted at the truth: “It always takes years for me to realize that I have not yet to marry a woman.”
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