Endless "We can't know..." and then pages of speculation. ( )

“To see her walk across a room, you would think someone had tilted up a coffin on end and propelled the corpse spasmodically forward.”

So not his type then. As it turns out, Clarence King would take a Cockney barmaid at a pinch, but he preferred Black women. And who can blame him? What we have here is a double biography of King, geologist and generally famous white man, and Ada Copeland, his secret African American wife, whom he deceived during their entire marriage into thinking he was a black man called James Todd.

King was an unusual and interesting man and his life is well documented in his own words, those of his friends and the media of the time. In telling his story, Sandweiss opens a window onto the history of the Wild West and growing industrialisation. With Copeland the situation is almost entirely reversed. Nothing survives of her personal voice beyond a few official documents and to infer something of her early life, Sandweiss has to tell the story of the end of slavery and the fall-out from it.

The story of their life (or half-life) together is interesting enough, but what makes this book really fascinating is the light it sheds on American conceptions of race and the fundamental societal dysfunction that results from such confusions. This is not always a happy book. It brought home to me just how close close slavery is in historical terms. Here we are in a world where an African American man can step out of his house to buy tobacco and be murdered in the street by the sheriff’s posse over a matter of twenty dollars. And when you consider that Copeland died in 1963, it is possible to speak to someone today who spoke to a woman who was born a slave in the American south. ( )

Clarence King, the founder of the US Geological Service and a best-selling author, was the literally fair-haired child (also blue-eyed) of an impoverished but impeccably socially credentialed New York family. Yale-educated, he was widely considered by his set—which included people like Henry Adams—to be the brightest, most charming person they knew. He was also, in his later life, posing as James Todd, a Pullman porter, in order to be married to Ada Copeland, a black woman with whom he had several children. His few surviving letters to her speak of great love, while his writings through his life show a fetishization of nonwhite women as more authentic and natural; the book suggests that both could have been accurate. The book has to do a lot of imagining—there are almost no records of Copeland because of racism and sexism, and almost no records of King’s life as Todd because he deliberately hid that life from his white friends, and he was able to do so because he was a white man who could move freely throughout the US and between rich white New York and the socially and geographically distinct African-American middle class New York. Racism enabled a blond, blue-eyed man to be black if he said he was (and if he was married to a more phenotypically common “black” woman), because who would say he was if he wasn’t? (Though interestingly, Pullman porters were required to be very dark-skinned to give the proper image of deference, so his claim about his profession wouldn’t have been persuasive to African-Americans who knew more about Pullman.) Sexism and racism meant that King’s first biographer didn’t bother to interview Copeland Todd, who was alive when he wrote, because he didn’t think she was important to King’s real story. So now we’ll never know a lot about how they thought about what they did; we know only this much because Copeland Todd ultimately sued to get the benefits of a trust she believed King had set up from her (he revealed the truth to her in a letter he sent shortly before his death). ( )

A fascinating story. Recommended for those interested in race relations and American history. The book is a bit longer than it should be; the tale could have been told more straightforwardly. But recommended nonetheless. ( )

From the book description, “Clarence King is a hero of nineteenth century western history; a brilliant scientist and witty conversationalist, best-selling author and architect of the great surveys that mapped the West after the Civil War. Secretary of State John Hay named King “the best and brightest of his generation.” But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for thirteen years he lived a double life—as the celebrated white explorer, geologist and writer Clarence King and as a black Pullman porter and steel worker named James Todd. The fair blue-eyed son of a wealthy China trader passed across the color line, revealing his secret to his black common- law wife, Ada Copeland, only on his deathbed.”

I had never heard of Clarence King. I came across his story and it sounded so intriguing that I felt I had to read this book. I am very glad I did. The story of his accomplishments was interesting enough, but the entire story of his double life was truly fascinating. The author obviously researched this book very well and the history she gives us with regards Ada Copeland was eye-opening.
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