Passing Strange (33 page)

“It was always pleasant there,” Henrietta Williams testified later about her time in the North Prince Street house.
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A reporter would later characterize family life in the big house as “one of well-adjusted domesticity.”
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As Ada thrived, her husband struggled. “Ever since I put that ring on your finger I have worked and prayed for you,” he wrote to Ada, “and will do so till God parts us by death.”
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But money remained a source of tension. He had to work too hard, be on the road too much. From afar, he apologized for pushing Ada to exercise greater economy. “I think you are a good housekeeper and manager,” he wrote, “and know that you don’t waste money. Our family has grown expensive and I will struggle to keep you and them up well. God bless you my own—my only one.”
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ON JANUARY 2, 1900, in the very month that Clarence King dined with the president, Ada Todd hosted a party to ring in the new century and celebrate her own increasingly secure status in a world of striving, middle-class black women. She must have beamed with pleasure and accomplishment to see mention of the event “hosted at the residence of Mrs. Ada Todd” in the Flushing society section of the
New York Age,
the weekly chronicle of the city’s African American political and social life.
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The paper’s society pages focused on the activities of the city’s black elite, members of such groups as the exclusive Society of the Sons of New York, a social group limited to native-born black New Yorkers of proven wealth.
¹¹³
Perhaps it was her big house, maybe just the splendor of the party. But somehow the former nursemaid who was born a slave had arrived. The paper had not taken note of either her wedding or the births of her children. Back then, she might not have cared or even suspected that her own family activities could be worthy of note. But now she felt confident enough to step into black society and knew how to bring her party to the attention of the
Age
’s local reporter. That she read the
New York Age
and felt she should appear in its gossip columns suggests a confidence about her own racial identity, perhaps even a sense of the advantages conferred upon her in a color-conscious world by having such a fair-skinned black man as her husband.

She would not then have noted the irony of the social notice that linked her to the larger community of black New York: “On Tuesday evening a masquerade party was given at the residence of Mrs. Ada Todd on Prince street. A goodly number gathered and many varieties of costumes were represented.”
¹¹⁴
Her guests all arrived in disguise. Her husband might have been there. But if so he, too, wore a mask.

WHEN HE KNOCKED ON THE DOOR OF 48 NORTH PRINCE STREET in Flushing, Edward V. Brown, the census man, had already had a long day. It was June 5, 1900, his second day of work, and since morning he had counted 159 people, for some recording more than twenty items of data. Brown normally worked as a clerk at a guarantee company. But he had taken a leave these first two weeks of June to become an enumerator for the twelfth United States census. Like most of the other fifty thousand foot soldiers in this “white tape army,” named for the binding of their official portfolios, he was working in his own neighborhood to help ensure that he would know his way around and have the confidence of the local residents. Nonetheless, Brown could not know everyone he interviewed, and he wore a badge to identify himself as a census official. Beyond being urged to be “friendly and polite,” he had not received much training, and it would take him eleven long days to complete his census of district 665 in the third ward of Queens. For each name on his list he would earn 2½ cents. It was not much money, but he could take pride in performing a civic duty. As a local paper noted, “A stream cannot rise above its source and the census cannot rise in accuracy above the standard established by the enumerators.”
¹

When Brown called on the Todds’ residence, someone—most likely a servant or perhaps a child—invited him in to ask his questions. There remained a few weeks in the school year, but the school day had ended before he called, and Grace, age nine; Ada, age eight; and Sidney, age six, were home with their three-year-old brother Wallace.
²
Despite their spacious home on this nearly all-white street, the children probably attended a segregated school, perhaps the recently built Washington School on Union Street, a few long blocks away. “Flushing, Jamaica and Hempstead each have large and flourishing separate schools for negro children,” the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
reported earlier that spring, all permitted under an 1894 state law that allowed communities to establish “separate schools for children of African descent.” That would change in the fall with a new law prohibiting mandated racial segregation in the state’s public schools. According to the Brooklyn paper, the end of segregation “caused more dissatisfaction in Flushing than in any other borough.”
³

Brown entered the home to speak to Ada Todd, the lady of the house. Her husband, James, was away. So Brown marked his census form to indicate he had seen seven of the home’s eight residents: Mrs. Todd, her four children, and the two servants. Phoebe Martin and Clarine Eldridge likely answered questions about their own backgrounds. Mrs. Todd, though, could have been the only source for the information about herself and her family.
⁴

Brown would not have asked anyone here about race. He could glance around the room and make that determination by sight. The Todd children had light complexions, and an observer encountering them with their father might perceive them as “white.” But Brown met them by their mother’s side. He looked at Ada Todd, the four children, the two live-in servants, and carefully recorded their race: “black.” With the same word he described the absent James Todd.

Beginning in 1850, census agents had the option of designating mixed-race persons as “mulatto.” And in 1890, an era of increasing anxiety over racial purity, they had been directed to indicate just how
much
“black ” blood people had. Were they “black,” “mulatto,” “quadroon,” “octoroon”? Brown, however, had few choices when it came to describing the Todd household. The new census regulations for 1900 specified that if his subjects were not “white,” “Chinese,” “Japanese,” or “Indian,” they could only be “black,” meaning they were either “negro or of negro descent.”
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It thus became impossible to claim a mixed racial or ethnic heritage. Any trace of African heritage trumped all trace of European ancestry. Nevertheless, the aggregate census data of 1900 made it impossible to ignore the increasing diversity of the nation itself. As Henry Gannett, official geographer of the twelfth census, said, “The average adult American is a statistical octoroon.”
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ADA TODD SPUN OUT the facts of her life for Edward Brown. She deftly subtracted two years from the age she had provided on her children’s birth certificates and said that she had been born in Georgia in December 1862. “The reluctance of the woman to tell her age is, of course, proverbial,” noted a Brooklyn reporter covering the census takers’ work, “and it is probable that the enumerators will use up more time in getting an answer to this question than any other.” Some women also hesitated to answer questions about their marital status, which, as the reporter delicately put it, “may involve the uncovering of family secrets.”
⁷
In that regard, Ada had nothing to hide. Yet she told the census agent that she married her husband, James Todd, in 1882, some six years earlier than her actual wedding date—an odd lie (if not a slip of the recorder’s pen).

Finally, Ada answered Brown’s queries about her husband. She said he was a traveling steelworker, a black man born in the West Indies in January 1842 to two West Indian parents. She explained that he emigrated to the United States in 1870 and later became a naturalized citizen. With that, James Todd, the erstwhile Pullman porter and clerk from Baltimore, had a new identity.
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And our understanding of Ada’s involvement in the family charade gets a bit more complicated.

James Todd’s new profession seems plausible enough. A Pullman porter might retire from traveling to become a clerk and later a steelworker. But the shifting story about James’s birthplace was something else: the Baltimore story and the West Indian tale could not both be true. Ada consistently spoke of Baltimore to the doctors who filled out the children’s birth certificates, and now she told the census taker her husband was foreign born. Perhaps she had learned something new about her husband. In that case, she must realize he had misled her before. Or was she somehow complicit in a false story about his birthplace?

Public documents record the story that James and Ada Todd told the world, but they do not reveal what they said to each other. More than any other bit of evidence, the story Ada told the census taker in 1900 raises the fundamental question: what did Ada know about James’s true identity, and when did she know it?

Ada’s life centered on her home and her children and her effort to construct for herself a solid and respectable life. She valued the approbation of the friends who had gathered at her home only a few months earlier to celebrate the beginning of the new century. And she was not a fool. She had made the rare leap from rural Georgia to New York, found a job, married, run a household full of children with scant help from her husband, and worked her way up from penniless servant to middle-class matron. Nonetheless, it seems possible she believed her husband’s stories. James Todd might travel a lot, but he provided for the family. She had every reason to trust him and not ask too many questions about his work. Even if she harbored some doubts, she would want to believe. And so when her husband revised his story to clarify that although he had once lived in Baltimore he was actually born in the West Indies, she might just take it on faith.

Nonetheless, Ada’s report to the census taker compels one to wonder whether she might have been a partner of sorts in the family charade, at least in this piece of it. If her husband explained that it would be easier for them to rent the North Prince Street house and fit into this white neighborhood if he pretended to be West Indian, then she would tell that story to the world.

Later events would prove that Ada did not know her husband’s real name or professional identity. But by changing her story about his birthplace, she suggested that she had some sense that all might not be as it seemed.

 

 

KING COULD HAVE HAD several reasons for inventing the West Indian story, some romantic, others practical.

He had entertained licentious fantasies about the tropics ever since his trip to the Hawaiian Islands in 1872, where he danced in that “merry Kalakauan fête” and “came perilously near falling in love with the Princess.”
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His Cuban sojourn of 1894 rekindled his imagination, and to traveling companion Henry Adams, King confided in 1895 that he dreamed of spending his declining years—“if I have any left over from my ridiculous trials and absurd tribulations”—in Dominica.
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It was now a British island where the descendants of African slaves, whose French patois reflected a complicated colonial past, lived alongside descendants of the indigenous Caribs, who had spotted Columbus’s ships some four hundred years before. King knew little about the place. Its tropical warmth and racially mixed population offered lure enough. Like the idealized Mexico of novelist Helen Hunt Jackson’s
Ramona,
the West Indies promised a place free of the racial rules and assumptions that circumscribed life in the United States. On an island like Dominica, one could freely love across the color line. King’s increasingly complicated life made a
future
in the West Indies highly improbable. But with an invented story, he could grab a Caribbean
past.

James Todd—who once told stories about his railroading adventures—probably knew enough to pass as an island man, as long as no one asked too many questions about his life there thirty years before. A gifted linguist, talented mimic, and captivating storyteller, King could no doubt talk about the Caribbean if he needed to, perhaps in a Caribbean-inflected lilt. A handful of “black” West Indians lived in the Newport of King’s youth, working as servants, painters, or barbers, and among Newport’s seafaring community there no doubt circulated more stories of island adventures.
¹¹
One of King’s own grandfathers, many generations back, had even been a resident merchant in the West Indies.
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As an adult, King picked up stories about the islands from Jim Marryatt, his Jamaican-born valet of the survey years, and gathered experiences of his own on his extended trip with Henry Adams.

But if the fiction of a West Indian birth fed into King’s tropical fantasies, it also lent greater plausibility to his efforts to pass as a black man. In the Caribbean the determination of racial identity focused less on ancestry—as in the United States—than on complexion and class. Appearance and behavior mattered more than heritage.

As the directions to the census takers of 1900 suggest, the hardening edge of American racial thought at the end of the century had effectively erased the possibility of a category of mixed-race “mulattoes” with an intermediate status between black and white. If such people had once held a special status that set them apart from “blacks,” new state laws obliterated the distinction between peoples with different degrees of African heritage.
¹³
Some states designated as legally “black” all people with one-eighth Negro blood; other states set the hurdle at one-sixteenth. A person with a single great-grandparent or great-great-grandparent of African stock—no matter what his own appearance or experience—could be “black” in the eyes of the law. The Supreme Court affirmed this in 1896 in the infamous case of
Plessy v. Ferguson,
ruling that Homer Plessy, a man with only one African American great-grandparent, could be compelled to ride in a segregated railcar set aside for blacks. In a decision that held sway for more than half a century, the Court thus declared that “separate but equal” accommodations did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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