Passing Strange

Passing Strange: A Gilded Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line is a work of non-fiction by Martha A. Sandweiss about a man named Clarence King, who was known in nineteenth-century history as a brilliant scientist, charmer, and surveyor, but who lived a secret double life as a black Pullman porter named James Todd. King passed across the color line – meaning that he was white by heritage, but passed as black to marry his wife Ada and father five biracial children. Sandweiss was the first to uncover the more secretive side of King's double life, and tells the story in this surreal biography which explores love, race, class, and what it meant to be American from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.
 
Sandweiss begins her autobiography of King with a look at his childhood. He was born into a prominent family in Newport, Rhode Island, then a haven for the wealthy elite of the Eastern Seaboard. King's father was a trader in China, and King didn't meet him until he was three years old. His mother Florence was overprotective, sickly, and had absolutely no finances to speak of, and King grew up loving the habits of the American aristocracy but struggling to remain above water financially. For most of his life, King had no female friends, and chose instead the company of male friends to keep himself occupied.
 
King's work as a white geologist, explorer, and surveyor was the talk of the late nineteenth century. He mapped the American west and studied a number of important sites in Colorado and beyond. He was a brilliant scientist and a man of great wit, and he was charming to all who met him. Despite what seemed a natural ability to fit in with the white gentiles of the East, however, King had curious tendencies. He enjoyed visiting the tenderloin districts of various cities and exploring their seedy underbellies, and he was avidly anti-slavery. King wrote frequently about a new American “race,” which would mix white and black and create a unified society.
 
But King was living a double life. While by day he worked as an explorer and geologist, he also passed as a man named James Todd, a light-skinned African American Pullman porter from meager means. Sandweiss struggles to pin down the reasons that King began his double life as James Todd, but it was during his work as a porter that he met his wife and the only woman he would ever love; a lady named Ada King.
 
Ada King was one of the last African Americans born into slavery in the United States, and though King had blue eyes and light skin, she believed him when he told her that he was also African American by heritage. Together, Ada and King had five biracial children, two daughters who married white men and two sons who passed as black and served in the black regiments of the US military. Despite King's writings about the need to embrace biracialism in America, he hid his wife and children from the white company he kept, only revealing on his wife's death bed his true identity, heritage, and the reason for his frequent travels.
 
Sandweiss goes into the contradictions of King's life with great detail, and extends the family legacy beyond the death of Ada King to Clarence King's granddaughter, who made the decision to marry a white man and adopt a white child in order to spare her descendants the troubles of growing up black in a segregated and violent America. The story speaks to the complicated and hard-to-define nature of race, particularly in the context of American history, love, family, and deception, as King reinvented himself in order to live the kind of life he always wanted.
 
Martha A. Sandweiss is a historian and professor of history at Princeton, with a focus on public history and the American West. Her books include Passing Strange, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History and a National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, as well as Print the Legend: Photography and the American West. She is the head of a Princeton project on Princeton and slavery, and has previously worked as a photography curator, among other jobs.