Passing Strange (46 page)

In the early 1950s, two scholars turned their hands to full-length biographies of King. Harry Herbert Crosby, writing a dissertation on King at Stanford under Stegner’s supervision, pulled together a vast amount of published information and gathered personal memories from the daughters of King’s old friends James Hague and James Gardiner. Nearly everyone who knew King admired him without reservation, Crosby noted, largely because he embodied the ideals of the age. But ultimately, he judged King “the most lavishly overpraised man of his time.” Crosby had access to the court documents but gave only passing attention to the “colored woman who took King’s assumed name and became known as Ada Todd,” misconstrued where the family lived, and never speculated about the nature of King’s double life. He hypothesized that in Ada, King had finally found a woman as devoted to him as the black nurse of his childhood had been. Ada, he said, “lived for him alone.”
⁹¹
Concerned mainly with King as a writer and a representative man of his age, however, Crosby paid scant attention to King’s secret marriage.

Working at the same time as Crosby, Thurman Wilkins, a lecturer in English at Columbia, was turning his own dissertation into the masterful biography that remains indispensable to anyone interested in King. Wilkins proved an indefatigable researcher. He tracked down a miner who had once worked with King; interviewed the Hague daughters; gathered manuscripts, government documents, and newspaper accounts; pulled together King’s school records, the correspondence of his friends, the family genealogical material. “King ought to have written his own life,” Henry Adams told a friend shortly after King’s death, “and the world has lost a book of capital interest in losing it; but the world may go hang, for all it can get now.”
⁹²
Adams’s regret became Wilkins’s challenge.

First published in 1958, Wilkins’s book tracks King’s early education, his career as an explorer, the development of his scientific theories, and the politics of the surveys. It untangles King’s complicated financial affairs, explores his many friendships, and lays out a detailed chronology of King’s sometimes frenetic comings and goings. But in a biography of more than four hundred pages, Wilkins devotes only about five pages to Ada and the life King shared with her over a period of thirteen years. He did not uncover King’s racial masquerade.

He describes King’s meeting “Ada Todd”—imagining that to be her maiden name—and says, “She had a pleasant face, a warm dark, brown complexion, with splendid white teeth and the black kinked hair of the Negro race.” He speculates that “she was no better educated perhaps than a primitive Greek Venus” and notes that before the law her relationship with King had “no status beyond that of libertine and kept mistress.”
⁹³
He draws evidence from newspaper accounts of the trial and even quotes from the court documents, but he never mentions the trial itself. Instead, he leaves his readers to imagine that King provided for his family by leaving with Gardiner an art collection (worth more than his debts) that would help with their support. Wholly invested in his subject, like so many biographers, Wilkins found it difficult to explore those aspects of King’s life that seemed to him less than admirable.

Wilkins’s discretion struck reviewers as just about right. The biographer Louise Hall Tharp, praising Wilkins’s “absorbing” book in the
New York Times,
remarked that the author handled the “difficult matter of King’s marriage . . . with compassion and taste.”
⁹⁴

But despite his skill as a researcher, Wilkins missed one critical source of information: Ada King. During all the years he traveled around the country, digging records out of archives and tracking King’s every move, he lived and worked just a subway ride away from her. And in 1958, the year his book came out, Wilkins took a new job at Queens College, barely a mile from the Kalmia Avenue home where Ada had resided for more than half a century.
⁹⁵
He never met her. Thirty years later, when he revised his King biography and added a brief epilogue about the court case of 1933, Wilkins could only speculate about Ada’s last years. He explained that the King children grew to “undistinguished maturity,” that Ada King “grew enormously fat,” that the court case came about because of her “greedy” attack upon the “quiet well-wishers” who sought to protect her family. He described the outcome of the trial, noted that Ada received title to the Kalmia Avenue house, and concluded his 413-page book: “. . . and presumably she continued to live there until her death over four decades after that of Clarence King.”
⁹⁶
Indeed, she had.

Had he sought her out in the 1950s as he first prepared his manuscript for publication, Wilkins would have found Ada King still living in the home bought for her through the largesse of John Hay, both she and the house links to a long-ago world of nineteenth-century America. Her son Wallace lived there, too. Like Wilkins, he was a veteran of World War II (one of a select group of Americans to serve in both world wars), and as he had for a very long time, he worked as a jazz musician, picking up jobs where he could.
⁹⁷
Increasingly, he looked like his father: short, a bit stout, with a receding hairline. Like that father he barely knew, he remained devoted to his mother. He spoke the “King’s English” and wrote in a neat, flowing script, his niece recalled, though he had finished just three years of high school.
⁹⁸
And he was a stickler for proper manners. At home, he enjoyed a good game of poker or casino, liked to do crossword puzzles, and entertained friends by reading tea leaves. Wallace’s sister Ada still lived at home, too, with her second husband, a white war veteran named William “Bill” McDonald.
⁹⁹
While Wallace helped with the grocery shopping and cooking, the younger Ada kept up with the housecleaning and sewing. Since Sidney King’s death at Kings Park State Hospital in 1942, Ada Copeland Todd King had kept her remaining two children very close.
¹⁰⁰

Over the years, the house had begun to show its age. The front porch sagged; patches dotted the plaster walls; the kitchen and bathroom fixtures seemed “old fashioned.”
¹⁰¹
But the family still got out and about: to movies and shows in Manhattan, to the local parks, occasionally on out-of-town trips to Toronto or Vermont. The Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall remained a favorite, and for a meal on the town they might head to Chinatown or to Schrafft’s. The house itself remained a gathering place for friends and neighbors. Ada liked to keep a record of it all by asking visitors to sign a lamp shade in the front room.
¹⁰²

Thelma Burns, the elder Ada’s granddaughter, visited frequently, but her half brother, Clarence, an employee of the
Daily News
who lived more fully in an all-white world, had grown estranged from the family who had taken him in so long ago. After a brief first marriage, Thelma married John Leroy Thomas, a white air force veteran, in 1952. The snapshots of their wedding reception at Ada King’s house show a racially mixed gathering. The Kings’ friends had always included blacks and whites, and after the war Ada had taken in a German Holocaust refugee who lived with the family for a time. John Thomas understood what sort of family he had married into, but he took Thelma to live with him in an all-white world. She returned often to Kalmia Avenue to visit her grandmother and the aunt and uncle who had helped to raise her. But Ada King never visited Thelma at her suburban Long Island house; Wallace, who could pass on the street as white, came occasionally. Thelma’s husband hinted that her mixed racial heritage should remain a secret, and many of her closest friends and neighbors never learned of her dark-complected grandmother. Like her aunt and uncle, Thelma had been raised to believe that family matters were private. Anxious about what her own children might look like, Thelma adopted two white infants in the 1950s. Those two girls became Clarence King’s only great-grandchildren. A mixed marriage, Thelma told her daughter Patricia, is hard on children and not fair to them. It was part cautionary message, part reflection on what she had seen and learned growing up in her grandmother’s house.
¹⁰³

On Friday afternoons Thelma would often take her girls on the long bus ride from their home in Uniondale to Flushing to spend the weekend with her grandmother Ada. They would make the trip again on Mother’s Day, on Easter, and during the Christmas holidays. Even as Ada King approached one hundred, and her daughter Ada and son Wallace neared seventy, family dinners remained formal affairs, with everyone gathering around a nicely set table. Wallace no longer had the piano he once kept in the house, but the family still had a large record collection, and they played classical music at dinnertime.

Ada King remained active until close to her hundredth birthday, taking special pride in her home-baked pies. As she grew older, she spent more time upstairs in her bedroom, settled into a big burgundy leather chair near the window, where she could keep an eye on neighborhood comings and goings. Her great-granddaughter recalls her uncanny knack for hearing visitors approach up the front walk; Ada would shout downstairs for them to come up and visit. In a home filled with newspapers and magazines, she followed the news in the
New York Times
and
Daily News,
and kept on top of current events with
Time, Life,
and
National Geographic.
Ada also watched the television news and listened to the radio. Conversation around the dinner table sometimes focused on the latest films but often turned to politics and the nascent civil rights movement: this family could recall Reconstruction, the emergence of Jim Crow laws, the dismantling of the segregated military, and the end of “separate but equal” schools. And now, on television, they could watch the beginnings of a mass movement for equal rights in the Deep South, where Ada had been born so long ago.

By 1963, Ada rarely left her home. And so perhaps she sat in her chair—it was like a throne, her great-granddaughter recalls—watching television on August 28, as nearly a quarter of a million Americans gathered on the Mall in Washington, D.C. “I have a dream,” thundered the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he harkened back one hundred years to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation: “This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.”
¹⁰⁴
Ada Copeland Todd King, not quite 103, lived in a house bought for her by a man who had watched Lincoln draft that declaration of freedom. And she was one of the very last ex-slaves still alive to hear King’s stirring words.

We cannot know what she thought of that speech, what memories ran through her mind as she listened to King articulate his vision of a nation where race did not matter. “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
¹⁰⁵
In their own way, she and her husband, another King, had once dreamed of that future for their four children, too.

Ada King died on April 14, 1964, at the age of 103. She had outlived her husband by more than sixty-two years. Her grave lies near that of their daughter Grace in Flushing Cemetery, far from her husband’s final resting place beside his mother in Newport.
¹⁰⁶

Ada’s two surviving children, Ada and Wallace, lived together in the Kalmia Avenue house until their deaths, just months apart, in 1981.
¹⁰⁷
Their niece, Thelma, now wore the wedding band that Clarence King had long ago given to his bride, Ada Copeland. And she inherited Wallace’s scant collection of treasured papers: a copy of his military record, the deed to the house, and a handful of faded newspaper clippings from a trial a half century before, the yellowing evidence of his family’s brief brush with notoriety, when his mother risked all to prove to the world that she was Mrs. Clarence King.

EPILOGUE

Secrets

SECRETS AND SILENCES HAUNT THIS STORY: SECRETS CRAFTED to protect and to hurt; silences created by neglect and with intent. And at the root of all these unspoken words lies the ever-potent mix in American life of race and love and sex and class.

Ada Copeland did not
choose
for her childhood to disappear into the dustbin of history. The institution of slavery itself rendered invisible her early years, assuring that she would have no legal records to establish her birth date or identify her parents, no surname as a young child, no old photographs with which to reconstruct the world of her youth. She likely took little with her when she moved to New York, and once there, she would have found it difficult to get news from the older, mostly illiterate, relatives she left behind. Unnourished and uncorroborated, Ada’s own memories of girlhood might fade away.

Distance and time, coupled with the legacies of illiteracy and poverty, eventually snapped the family ties. Today, the extended clan of African American Copelands from the area around West Point, Georgia, gathers every summer for a “homecoming” in the Bethlehem Baptist Church in nearby Pine Mountain Valley. From across the state and from more distant parts of the country, Copelands return to worship and visit together in a church that sits on land deeded to two of their African American ancestors—Scott and Ishmael Copeland—by a local white family in 1883.
¹
Despite their deep roots here, however, they know no stories about the young woman named Ada who left home so long ago to move to New York. And in New York Ada kept alive no memory of this extended southern family for her own children and grandchildren.
²

Clarence King, by contrast, deliberately crafted the silences that make it so hard to discern the story of his private life. From the moment he met Ada Copeland, he began weaving a skein of lies too intricate to untangle even decades after his death. Acting from a complicated mix of loyalty and self-interest, reckless desire and social conservatism, he deceived his mother, his closest friends, his colleagues, and all the people who knew him in his public role. He also deceived the woman he married. If he, too, lived a married life unimaginably far from the world of his childhood, it was because he chose to live that way. And if his children never met his mother, it was because King calculated how to keep them apart. Florence King Howland died never suspecting she had four mixed-race grandchildren.