Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail

A Different Sort of Romeo, Sandweiss's Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

By Nicholas DeRenzo
March 8, 2009; Brooklyn Rail

Clarence King (1842-1901) was a well-to-do, Newport-born, Yale-educated geologist famous for mapping the Western United States after the Civil War. He drank tea with Queen Victoria, collected fine art, and counted the novelist Henry James as a close personal friend. But these worldly details function as a mere backdrop for Martha A. Sandweiss’s engrossing biography Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, which follows King’s extreme measures to attain true happiness.

For thirteen years, King led a double life as James Todd, a black Pullman porter. Under this assumed identity, he married a former slave from Georgia named Ada Copeland, avoiding the stigma of interracial marriage by inventing a life that placed husband and wife on the same side of the racial divide. And strangely enough, despite his blue eyes and fair complexion, his secret life was left undiscovered by everyone, including Ada, until his death-bed confession. It is a classic Romeo and Juliet tale of love overcoming all obstacles and bridging all divides—that is, if Romeo forgot to tell Juliet he was actually born a Montague.

The logistics of such deception are mind-blowing. The fact that King appeared unambiguously white only exacerbates an already labyrinthine tale of racial politics. How could a man with blue eyes and fair skin convince his wife that he was actually African American? As Sandweiss explains, the “one drop rule”—which stated that even one black great-grandparent defined someone as black—meant that the color line was surprisingly porous. By simply identifying himself as a Pullman porter, which was then an all-black career, “James Todd” could lead others to believe he was black without ever saying so directly. Though Passing Strange is essentially the legend of a world-class con-man, Sandweiss imbues the tale with so much pathos that we forgive King’s indiscretions. He is forced into the lie not for his own gain or self-interest but to avoid scorn for himself and the woman he loved.

For the full review, click here.