Passing Strange

Passing Strange: A Guilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, by Martha A. Sandweiss

From Booklist: “During America’s Gilded Age, Clarence King was a famous geologist, friend of wealthy, famous, and powerful men. He was a larger-than-life character whose intellect and wanderlust pushed him to survey far-flung regions of the western U.S. and South America and develop an abiding appreciation of non-Western culture and people. What his family and wealthy friends did not know was that for 17 years, King lived secretly as James Todd, a black Pullman porter with a black wife and mixed-race children residing in Brooklyn. Devoted to his mother and half-siblings, restless and constantly in need of money, King relied on the largesse of his wealthy friends to help him support both families, never revealing his secret until he was near death. Sandweiss relies on letters, newspaper accounts, and interviews to chronicle the extraordinary story of an influential blue-eyed white man who passed for black at a time when passing generally went the other way. An engaging portrait of a man who defied social conventions but could not face up to the potential ruin of an interracial marriage. --Vanessa Bush"

Though I did recognize several of his contemporaries mentioned in the book, I had never heard of Clarence King or his story of passing within New York City as both a well known white scientist and a very light-skinned black Pullman porter. There isn’t a lot in the historical record about his wife, Ada Copeland Todd King, so Sandweiss uses a lot of circumstantial evidence to basically guess what her life as a former slave moving to New York would have been like. Though Ada Todd seemed to not know that her husband was white, it seems unlikely that anyone who saw him would have thought that he could be hired as a Pullman porter, a position filled by only African American men with very dark skin. I listened to the audiobook so I missed out on whatever photographs and citation were included in the book.