Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE featured in St. Louis Today

'Passing Strange'


By Harper Barnes
February 19, 2009

Over the centuries, countless Americans have "passed" in one way or another. Indeed, as Martha A. Sandweiss suggests in "Passing Strange," her intriguing tale of lovers crossing racial lines in the late 19th century, the ability to become a new person is part of the promise of America. Usually, the move is to a higher social status.

What was remarkable about Clarence King was that he, in effect, "passed downward." A prominent Caucasian Ivy Leaguer from the Eastern establishment, he also pretended for 13 years to be an ordinary African-American Pullman porter, and apparently he did it for love.

It seems extraordinary in today's world of tabloid journalism and Google images that a man as prominent as King, a celebrated New York geologist, author, explorer and gadabout, could get away with the charade for so long, particularly in the same city where he dined at exclusive clubs with such celebrated friends as writer Henry Adams and statesman John Hay.

One reason, Princeton historian Sandweiss points out, is that newspapers and periodicals of the time were, on the whole, sparsely illustrated; King's relative celebrity did not extend to mass-market portraiture.

And it was a long way, in more ways than one, from Midtown Manhattan to the Outer Boroughs of New York. That is where "James Todd," the African-American identity that King assumed in order to marry slave-born nursemaid Ada Copeland, lived with his wife and their five children.

One of the book's more revealing aspects, at least for someone who has done historical research on African-Americans, is the wealth of biographical material available on King and the paucity of it for Ada Copeland. This underlines the fact that, for decades after emancipation, blacks were almost invisible to recorded American history.

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