Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

Martha A. Sandweiss

In 1888, Ada Copeland, possibly born a slave in Georgia, married Clarence King, a noted celebrity geologist, explorer, and writer from a good New England family. Only he wasn’t white Clarence King, he was James Todd, a Black Pullman porter and steelworker. Over a period of fourteen years, King led two separate lives, fathering five children with Copeland in Brooklyn and living as a bachelor man about town in Manhattan. Those two lives only connected with his failing health and death in 1901.

There is no answer in the book as to exactly how King came to live a double life, or why he chose to perpetuate it. While not ignoring the personal and particular aspects, in Sandweiss hands, King and Copeland’s life serves as an exploration of the harsh but malleable nature of America’s colour line, touching class and gender along the way.