Passing Strange (54 page)

115
An odd short story informed by Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel appeared in the African American newspaper the
New York Age
on June 2, 1888. A young black woman named “Ramona” is reunited with the love who she wrongly thought had rebuffed her through her kindly white patron “Helen Huntington.”

116
CK to JH, 28 July 1887, Hay Collection, Brown.

117
CK to Samuel Barlow, BW box 184 (12), Barlow Collection, HEH.

118
CK to JH, 28 July 1887, Hay Collection, Brown.

119
O’Toole,
Five of Hearts,
141-75.

120
CK to JH, 4 Aug. 1887, Hay Collection, Brown.

121
Clarence King, “Artium Magister,”
North American Review
147 (Oct. 1888): 382.

122
King, “Biographers of Lincoln,” 868.

123
CK to JH, 18 July 1888, Hay Collection, Brown.

124
Wharton,
The Age of Innocence,
335.

125
The earliest record of this name appears on the 1891 birth certificate for King and Copeland’s second child, Grace Margaret Todd: Certificate of Birth, Brooklyn. 920, New York City Department of Records and Information Services, Municipal Archives.

 

CHAPTER 5: NEW BEGINNINGS

1
Burrows and Wallace,
Gotham,
1148.

2
Johnson,
Black Manhattan,
77; Sacks, “ ‘We Cry,’ ” 140-43.

3
Hay, “Clarence King,” in Hague,
Memoirs,
130.

4
Sacks, “ ‘We Cry,’ ” 140-46.

5
The earliest reference to Todd’s false identity comes from Ada’s statement to the physician who filled out her daughter Grace’s birth certificate in Jan. 1891. See below, 171-72.

6
Robin Marantz Henig, “Looking for the Lie,”
New York Times Magazine,
Feb. 5, 2006, 83.

7
Werther [pseud.],
Female-Impersonators,
175.

8
The 1890 census identifies 23,601 persons of African descent living in New York County out of a total population of 1,515,301. See the Historical Census Browser, Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, University of Virginia,
http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/php/county.php
(accessed Aug. 2, 2007).

9
See, for example, Benedict Carey, “The Secret Lives of Just About Everybody,”
New York Times,
Jan. 11, 2005, D1.

10
Carol Midgley, “Porn, an Affair, You’re Gay: What’s Your Secret?”
Sunday Times
(London), Apr. 29, 2005,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk
/article/0,,7-1589332_1,00.html (accessed May 1, 2005).

11
“1,000 Passing in Washington,”
New York Age,
Sept. 16, 1909, 1. The article quotes the work of Ralph W. Tyler, whose own racial identity is documented in the 1910 U.S. Federal Census for the District of Columbia, SD 1, ED 155, sheet 4A.

12
On Florence King Howland’s pseudonym, see CK to Whitelaw Reid, 29 Jan. [1879], reel 153, Whitelaw Reid Papers, LC. On Sophia Little’s pseudonym, see Rufus Wilmot Griswold,
Female Poets of America,
2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Purvey & McMillan, 1854), 107.

13
O’Toole,
Five of Hearts,
168-69.

14
The 1880 U.S. Federal Census (accessed on
Ancestry.com
, Dec. 20, 2004) lists seven James Todds in New York City. Subsequent city directories list others.

15
“James Edward Todd,”
History of Fremont County, Iowa
(Des Moines: Iowa Historical Company, 1881),
http://www.rootsweb.com/~iabiog/fremont/fl1881/fl1881-ross.htm
(accessed Oct. 21, 2004); “James E. Todd,” Database: American Civil War Soldiers,
Ancestry.com
(accessed Oct. 21, 2004); “James E. Todd,” Civil War Pension Index,
Ancestry.com
(accessed Oct. 21, 2004);
Biographical Record: Classes from 1868-1872 of the Yale Sheffield Scientific School
(New Haven, CT: Class Secretaries Bureau, Yale University, 1910). Todd is listed as a nongraduating student enrolled in 1870-71.

16
Charles Keyes, “Glacial Work of James Edward Todd,”
Pan-American Geologist
39, no. 1 (Feb. 1925): 1-14; “Todd,”
History of Fremont County, Iowa;
“American Naturalist,”
Forest and Stream; A Journal of Outdoor Life, Travel, Nature Study, Shooting, Fishing, Yachting
11, no. 25 (Jan. 23, 1879): 514; James E. Todd, “The Missouri Couteau and Its Moraines,”
Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
33 (1884), published independently (Salem, MA, 1885);
Washington, D.C., City Directory, 1890
(Washington, DC: R. L. Polk, 1890); J. E. Todd (state geologist),
Preliminary Report on the Geology of South Dakota
(Sioux Falls: Brown & Saenger, 1894); Frank Leverett, “Memorial of James Todd,”
Bulletin of the Geological Society of America
34 (1922): 44-51. With thanks for some of these references to Brenda L. Graff, reference librarian, USGS Library, and Clifford M. Nelson, geologist and historian, USGS.

17
Ironically, the name “James Edward Todd” again came to public attention in 1968, some eighty years after King and Copeland married, when a young white sailor by that name married a young black woman named Floria Marquite Mayhorn, in Memphis, Tennessee, in what the
Washington Post
called “this Old South city’s first interracial marriage since Reconstruction” (Jan. 13, 1968, A5). Like King and Copeland, they were married by the woman’s pastor, in a ceremony held outside the church.

18
Jack London’s short story “South of the Slot” originally appeared in the
Saturday Evening Post
181 (May 1909), 3-4, 36-38.

19
Nat Love,
The Life and Adventures of Nat Love
(1907; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 139.

20
From
Railroad Commission of Texas v. Pullman Co.,
312 U.S. 496 (1941), cited in Judith Resnik, “Rereading ‘The Federal Courts’: Revising the Domain of Federal Courts Jurisprudence at the End of the Twentieth Century,” 47
Vanderbilt Law Review,
1039.

21
“St. John and the Color Line—A Talk with a Pullman Palace Car Porter,”
New York Freeman,
Mar. 7, 1885, 2.

22
Love,
Life and Adventures,
131, 134, 135.

23
Resnik, “Rereading ‘The Federal Courts,’ ” 1039.

24
Larry Tye,
Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class
(New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 33, 61.

25
Howells, “Meetings with King,” in Hague,
Memoirs,
136.

26
Study by Hornell Hart, cited in Louis Wirth and Herbert Goldhamer, “The Hybrid and the Problem of Miscegenation,”
Characteristics of the American Negro,
ed. Otto Klineberg (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944), 312-13.

27
“1,000 Passing in Washington,” 1.

28
“Married a Negro Instead of a Cuban,”
New York Times,
Sept. 28, 1888, 2.

29
Mark Twain,
Pudd ’nhead Wilson
(1894; repr., New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 26, 142-43.

30
St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton,
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
(1945; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 1:164-65. On the particular interest of early-twentieth-century social scientists in matters of racial mixing, see Joel Williamson,
New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States
(1980 ; repr., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 115-29.

31
R. Roberts, “Negro-White Intermarriage: A Study in Social Control” (master’s thesis, University of Chicago, n.d.), cited in Wirth and Goldhamer, “The Hybrid,” in Klineberg,
Characteristics of the American Negro,
303.

32
Gunnar Myrdal,
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy
(New York: Harper & Brothers [1944]), 164.

33
Walter White,
A Man Called White
(1948; repr., Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 3.

34
David H. Fowler,
Northern Attitudes Towards Interracial Marriage: Legislative and Public Opinion in the Middle Atlantic and the States of the Old Northwest
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), 360.

35
Sociologists Louis Wirth and Herbert Goldhamer later called such people “segmental passers.” Wirth and Goldhamer, “The Hybrid,” in Klineberg,
Characteristics of the American Negro,
302-3.

36
Lind [pseud.],
Autobiography of an Androgyne,
47, 61.

37
Werther [pseud.],
Female-Impersonators,
175.

38
Lind [pseud.],
Autobiography of an Androgyne,
82, 161-65.

39
M. H. Dunlop,
Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New York
(New York: William Morrow, 2000), 126-28.

40
“Detective Price’s Troubles: Life Made Miserable by a Man Who Assumed His Name,”
New York Times,
Mar. 11, 1885, 8.

41
JH to HA, 19 May 1888,
Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary
(1908; repr., New York: Gordian Press, 1969), 2:146.

42
CK to Clara Hay, 7 Mar. 1888; CK to JH, 17 Apr. 1889, Hay Collection, Brown.

43
CK to JH, 12 Aug. [1888], Hay Collection, Brown.

44
Ibid.

45
Bronson,
Reminiscences,
355.

46
King, “Artium Magister,” 383.

47
Plaintiff ’s Trial Memorandum Relating to the Existence of the Trust [Mar. 1932], 2,
King v. Peabody et al.
(file no. 26821-1931; Records of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County Clerk ’s Office); “Widow Tells of Ceremony and Children,”
Amsterdam News,
Nov. 22, 1933, 2. On the convention of personalizing wedding rings in the late nineteenth century, see “Buying Wedding Rings,”
Washington Post,
Nov. 25, 1883, 7. The wedding ring has descended through the King family and now belongs to the Kings’ great-granddaughter, Patricia Chacon.

48
Eugene D. Genovese,
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
(New York: Pantheon, 1974), 375-481; Herbert G. Gutman,
The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1720-1925
(New York: Vintage, 1977), 273-77.

49
Wilkins,
King,
26-27.

50
King,
Mountaineering,
292.

51
Hague, “Memorabilia,” in Hague,
Memoirs,
408-9.

52
“Bishop James H. Cook,”
New York Times,
Aug. 12, 1899, 7; “Ball of the Coachmen’s Union League,”
New York Times,
Jan. 11, 1895, 8; “Colored Odd Fellows’ Jubilee,”
New York Times,
Apr. 27, 1893, 10; “Aid for the Arkansas Refugees,”
New York Times,
Mar. 30, 1880, 2; “His Last Day on Earth: Chastain Cox Ready to Meet His Fate,”
New York Times,
July 16, 1880, 2 ; “Cox Expatiates His Crime,”
New York Times,
July 17, 1880, 3; “The Burial of Chastain Cox,”
New York Times,
July 18, 1880, 12.

53
“Fifteenth Amendment Celebrated,”
New York Times,
Mar. 31, 1887, 5; “Clergymen in Politics,”
New York Times,
Sept. 23, 1890, 1; “Bishop James H. Cook,” 7.

54
See Ariela R. Dubler, “Note: Governing through Contract: Common Law Marriage in the Nineteenth Century,”
Yale Law Journal
(April 1998): 1885-920.

55
Certificate of Marriage [1888], Health Department of the City of New York, Sanitary Bureau, Division of Vital Statistics. Thanks to Josh Garrett-Davis for retrieving this data from the forms on file in the New York City Municipal Archives.

56
Wirth and Goldhamer, “The Hybrid,” in Klineberg,
Characteristics of the American Negro,
277.

57
“Miscegenation in Boston,” story from the
Boston Herald
reprinted in
New York Age,
Sept. 8, 1888, 2.

58
See “A White Groom and Colored Bride,”
New York Times,
Apr. 6, 1885, 5; “Arrested for Miscegenation,”
New York Times,
Oct. 4, 1885, 3; “Capt Lusk Assassinated: An Advocate of Miscegenation Riddled with Bullets,”
New York Times,
Aug. 27, 1886, 5; “Held for Miscegenation,”
New York Times,
Sept. 12, 1889, 3; “Charge of Miscegenation: Couple Arrested in Washington at Request of Maryland Authorities,”
New York Times,
Aug. 6, 1900, 1.

59
Philip S. Foner,
Frederick Douglass
(1950; repr., New York: Citadel Press, 1964), 338.

60
Bailey, “Diary of a Journey,” 99, New York Botanical Garden Library.

61
Robert Underwood Johnson,
Remembered Yesterdays
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1923), 26.

62
[Clarence King], “Style and the Monument,”
North American Review
141 (Nov. 1885): 443-44.

63
Leslie M. Harris, “From Abolitionist Amalgamators to ‘Rulers of the Five Points,’ ” in
Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History,
ed. Martha Hodes (New York: NYU Press, 1999), 191-212;
Oxford English Dictionary,
s.v. “Amalgamation” and “Amalgamate.”

64
“Testimony of Wendell Phillips from his speech at Framingham, Mass., July 4, 1863,” reprinted in
Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro,
[ed. David Croly and George Wakeman] (New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton, 1864), 66; Gary B. Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” in Hodes,
Sex, Love, Race,
22.

65
CK to JTG, 25 Mar. [1860], King Papers, HEH.