Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE featured in The New Yorker

Thursday, March 5, 2009; The New Yorker

By Martha A. Sandweiss
(The Penguin Press; 370 pages; $27.95)

This post-Civil War history examines the boundaries of race through the remarkable story of Clarence King, a celebrated scientist of the Gilded Age who crossed the color line in reverse. Shortly after becoming famous for surveying the Western frontier, King fell in love with a former slave named Ada Copeland. For thirteen years, until his death, in 1901, King lived a double life—as a black Pullman porter named James Todd, married to Copeland, and as a prominent society man and a mining consultant. Sandweiss is a gifted historian, but there is a dearth of reliable documentation about Copeland, and, sadly, because King destroyed all of Copeland’s letters (urging her to do the same with his), his voice weighs heavier in the retelling.